In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

AMBIVALENT ANTI-CATHOLICISM: BUFFALO'S AMERICAN PROTESTANT ELITE FACES THE CHALLENGE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, 1850-1860 David A. Gerber Two well-known works in American history—Barbara Miller Solomon 's Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (1956) and Jackson Lears's No Pfoce of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981)—have briefly called attention to a surprising complexity of attitudes toward Catholicism found among higher status American Protestants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These Americans are portrayed as hardly the bigoted nativists we might have anticipated, and they are found to be deeply ambivalent toward the Catholic Church— at once attracted to and repelled by various aspects of Catholic dogma, culture, and polity. Neither book unfortunately attempts to develop systematically an analysis of this ambivalent combination of attraction and repulsion, and thus far, to the best of this author's knowledge, no one else has attempted such an extended analysis.1 I have discovered that the same ambivalence was given public expression much earlier, in the 1850s. That we lack such an extended analysis of the complexity of attitudes toward Catholicism and the Catholic church in the critical 1850s is especially unfortunate, for it was during that decade that for the first, and last, time a mass movement with a national political party of its own existed among American Protestants of all classes to challenge the very presence of the Church in the United States. The historical literature we do have is excellent, to be sure, but limited in this and in other respects. Ray Allen Billington's pathbreaking The Protestant Crusade (1938) laid out a basic narrative structure for the history of antebellum nativism which is still useful today . But the book is greatly in need of reconsideration in light of new ' Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 6, 10, 12, 48-49, 53, 91, 97, 124-25, 132, 144, 174, 184-85, 205-7, 232; Jackson Lears, JVo Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 147, 151 52, 159-62, 184-216, 241-42, 251. BUFFALO'S PROTESTANT ELITE121 understandings achieved by historians in the last two decades, of class, ethnicity, ethnocultural conflict, and the social functions of prejudice.2 For example, David Brion Davis and Michael Holt have seen anti-Catholicism as a symptomatic of a fear, particularly among affluent, educated antebellum Protestants, of sinister sectional and sectarian conspiracies against republican institutions. To varying degrees, both Holt and Davis have tied this fear to deeper anxieties concerning the capacity of later generations to safeguard the republican experiment of the Founding Fathers amidst the social and political crises of the antebellum decades. These suggestive insights take us much beyond BiIlington , to be sure, but they themselves do not consider the ambiguity present in the body of public pronouncements which express both positive and negative assessments of the Church and its organization, works, and beliefs. Moreover, like other political historians, Holt views nativism less as a cultural phenomenon than as a political one. In this guise nativism logically presents itself as a transitory, partisan affiliation , which in effect fulfilled its brief historical mission by providing former Whigs of American Protestant background, whose party lay in ruins in the mid-1850s, with a conservative, nationalist political identity while they were on their way to eventual incorporation in the new Republican party. This perspective carries with it a significant conceptual difficulty: it judges an aspect of the past (nativism) too heavily by the outcomes of separate, if indirectly, related developments (i.e., sectional conflict, partisan realignment, and electoral shifts). Moreover, it obscures the abundance of anti-Catholicism in Protestant historical tradition and the vast realm of daily Catholic-Protestant social relations, both of which give attitudes toward the Church a profound reality beyond partisan politics. Under any circumstances, the intense, organized, political anti-Catholicism of the 1850s may well have had a brief public life not because it served transitory political functions, but instead because large and important segments of Protestant opinion remained divided against themselves on the utility of...

pdf

Share