The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire

By Katherine D. Moran

Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, The Imperial Church undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful reference for Americans narrating US settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. Katherine D. Moran traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the US colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors.

Moran shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. She demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries: the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in the Midwest, the Franciscan Junípero Serra in Southern California, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of US national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire.

The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501748820

Book preview

The Imperial Church

Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire

Katherine D. Moran

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For

Anita, Anson, and Lissa

and

Dirk and Greta

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Terminology

Introduction

PART I. Jacques Marquette in the Upper Midwest

1. Making a Founding Father out of a French Jesuit

2. Imagining Peaceful Conquest

PART II. Franciscans in Southern California

3. Making Parallel Histories out of Spanish Missions

4. Embodying Hospitality and Paternalism

PART III. Friars in the Philippines

5. Revising and Rejecting Antifriarism

6. Envisioning Catholic Colonial Order

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

One of the great pleasures of finishing this book is the opportunity to thank the many people and institutions who have been a part of its creation.

This book began at Johns Hopkins University, and I am grateful to Dorothy Ross for her uncompromising rigor and unflagging support. The work also benefited immensely from Ron Walters’s good advice and wide-ranging knowledge, Jane Dailey’s incisive critique, and Nathan D. B. Connolly’s generous and generative final comments. I have also learned a great deal—about historical scholarship and so much else—from the friends and fellow scholars I was lucky to meet during graduate school, especially Amy Feng-Parker, Amanda Herbert, Cameron Logan, Clare Monagle, Catherine Molineux, Jessica Roney, Yael Sternhell, Molly Warsh, and the late Andre Young. Catherine, in particular, has commented on more drafts over the years than I can count—and always with sparkling insight. Elizabeth and Len Liptak, friends from well before this book was conceived, opened their Sierra Madre home to me for a semester-long research trip, and remain my models for easy, welcoming hospitality. I am also grateful to the undergraduate professors who convinced me, by word and example, that humanistic scholarship is good work and worth doing: especially Virginia Anderson, Greg Johnson, and Mark Pittenger.

The bulk of this book was conceptualized and written while I was employed at two different universities and during a year I spent as a Fulbright fellow in Germany. It was a privilege to be a part of the history department at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. For their wise guidance and joyful company, I am especially indebted to Valerie Barske, Tobias Barske, Rob Harper, Nancy LoPatin-Lummis, and the late Sally Kent.

At the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik at the Universität Osnabrück, I am grateful to friends and colleagues for warm welcomes, engaged scholarly communities, and daily lessons in the multiple ways U.S. History has been made abroad. Thanks in particular to Hans Anders, Frauke Brammer, Andreas Etges, Gudrun Löhrer, Ethan Miller, Simone Müller-Pohl, Ulrike Stedtnitz, and Olaf Stieglitz in Berlin, and to Sabine Meyer, Peter Schneck, and Jatin Wagle in Osnabrück. Dirk and Anne Kiso helped make Osnabrück home. I was also lucky to encounter Julia Nitz at the Center for United States Studies, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, and Heike Bungert at the Department of History, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Muenster.

The department of American studies at Saint Louis University has been a rich and rewarding intellectual home. For their collegiality, encouragement, inspiration, and friendship, I am grateful to the fellow faculty and staff (current and emeritus) in my department: Heidi Ardizzone, Terri Foster, Benjamin Looker, Emily Lutenski, and Matt Mancini. Outside of my department, I have been fortunate to benefit from the advice and ideas of a number of colleagues, in particular Hal Bush, Mary Gould, Torrie Hester, Mark Ruff, and Silvana Siddali. For many comments on drafts, as well as for embodying scholarly generosity and interdisciplinary creativity, I am grateful to the Cultures of American Religion working group, especially to regular members (past and present): Isaac Arten, Colten Biro, Megan Brueske, Joel Cerimele, Molly Daily, Jeff Dorr, Idolina Hernandez, Amanda Izzo, Mark Koschmann, Rachel McBride Lindsey, Jack McLinden, Susan Nichols, Adam Park, Carlos Ruiz, Anna Schmidt, and Karen Skinner. For their hard work and probing questions, I thank the graduate assistants I have been lucky to work with: Aretha Butler, Victoria Cannon, Manuela Engstler, Melissa Ford, Mary Maxfield, Rebecca Preiss Odom, Ugur Ozturk, Kendyl Schmidt, and Anna Sweemer.

This book would not be possible without the expert work of curators, librarians, and archivists. I am grateful to those working at a number of repositories across the United States and in the Philippines. In California: Kevin Feeney at the Archival Center of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles; Anna Liza Posas and Kim Walters at the Autry Museum of the American West; Peter Blodgett, Juan Gomez, Kate Henningsen, Olga Tsapina, and Jenny Watts at the Huntington Library; Karen Raines and Steve Spiller at the Mission Inn Museum Archives; Kevin Hallaran at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum; and Ruth McCormick at the Riverside Public Library. In Colorado: Amy Brooks and Jessy Randall at the Tutt Library at Colorado College. In Illinois: Linda Evans at the Chicago History Museum; Kathy Young at the Loyola University Archives; and Keelin Burke, Will Hansen, and D. Bradford Hunt at the Newberry Library. In Wisconsin: Katie Blank, Amy Cooper Cary, and Susan Stawicki-Vrobel at the Marquette University Archives. And, finally, for research assistance and truly generous hospitality, in the Philippines: Mercy Servida at the Lopez Museum; and Joshua Amancio and Engracia Santos at the Rizal Library at the Ateneo de Manila University.

I would not have been able to conduct the research necessary for this project without generous financial assistance from a number of institutions. I am thankful for the support of the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, and Saint Louis University, as well as the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, the Fulbright Program, the Huntington Library, the Historical Society of Southern California, and the Newberry Library.

The participants at a number of conferences have helped me hone my ideas: I am grateful for the comments and questions I received at annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the American Catholic Historical Association, the American Historical Association, the American Literature Association, the American Studies Association, the Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians, the Organization of American Historians, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. I have been honored to be invited to present work in progress at a number of seminars and colloquia, and thank those who made this possible and who offered comments and critique at: the Center for United States Studies, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg; the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame; the Department of American Studies at the Universität Osnabrück; the Department of History at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster; the Interdisciplinary Seminar at Hillsborough College in Tampa, Florida; the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, St. Louis; the Research Colloquium at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin; and the Vanderbilt History Seminar at Vanderbilt University.

At Cornell University Press, Michael McGandy saw the potential of this book early on and has remained a source of good advice and calm reassurance. I am very grateful for his ongoing faith in the project. Paul Kramer has been for years a model of rigorous scholarship and lucid prose: the time and insight he has given to this project as one of its series editors has been a true gift.

This book, and its author, would be nowhere without the community of friends and scholars who have given their time and critical vision to this work. In addition to those named above, I would like to thank my Young Scholars in American Religion cohort—Kate Bowler, Heath Carter, Joshua Guthman, Brett Hendrickson, Kathryn Gin Lum, Lerone Martin, Angela Tarango, Stephen Taysom, T. J. Tomlin, David Walker, and Grace Yukich—and our mentors, Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Douglas Winiarski—for being a rigorous and creative community of inquiry, and good friends besides. Moving to St. Louis just as Laurie did was a great piece of luck, and I am deeply thankful for her inspiring example, leavening friendship, and good counsel. To her and to the rest of our St. Louis writing group—Fannie Bialek, John Inazu, Mark Valeri, and Abram Van Engen—thank you for your penetrating critiques and enlivening camaraderie, invaluable in equal measure. As the book was nearing completion, both Clare Monagle and John McGreevy generously offered comments on the entire manuscript: I am grateful for their insights and ideas, which have made the book substantially better. In the final stages, Torrie Hester’s keen editorial eye was a welcome gift.

And finally I would like to thank my family. To the Pompas, O’Neills, Cunicellis and Schugstas, and especially to the late Mary and Leonard Pompa, thank you for (among so much else) food, furniture, humor, and an East Coast home during graduate school. Thank you to the Ryans and Thomsons for always asking thoughtful questions about the book, and only rarely asking when it would be finished. Thank you to Elke and the late Gerhard Bönker for love and support, built with grace and generosity across distance and language. Thank you to Anita and Anson Moran, and to Lissa Moran, Kevin Smeds, and Zoe and Owen Moran, for being and building a family that remains a true home and a north star. And to Dirk Bönker and Greta Moran: one of you has brought to the making of this book more than I can ever repay; the other has most gleefully not. Both of you have transformed its author, and graced her days. It is yours.

A Note on Terminology

I use Protestant and Catholic throughout this book much as my subjects used them: as broad categories whose meaning emerges, in part, in opposition to one another. Throughout the book, men and women from a variety of denominations and embracing different forms and levels of religious commitment identify themselves as Protestant when talking about the value of celebrating Catholic missionaries. Similarly, both Catholics and Protestants identify figures such as Junípero Serra or Jacques Marquette as Catholic when talking about the importance of a cross-confessional commemorative culture.

These broad categories mattered to the subjects of this book, but they also obscure as much as they reveal. American Protestantism is characterized by vast denominational diversity and wide ranges of religious devotion and commitment. The people featured in this book tend to fall into two groups: those who would claim a Protestant background but who were not actively religious, and those who were actively religious and more theologically liberal than conservative, often explicitly committed to ecumenism. Where I can find evidence of a subject’s denominational identity I include it: it is clear that the people featured in this study vary considerably in denomination, though Unitarians are particularly heavily represented.

Similarly, the term Catholicism or Catholic pasts can obscure the specificity of what was being celebrated. In broad terms, I follow the subjects of this book in using Catholic as a shorthand for Roman Catholic, even though, in Julie Byrne’s succinct phrasing, not all Catholics are Roman Catholics.¹ Furthermore, as the ensuing chapters show, in celebrating Marquette, Serra, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines, U.S. Catholics and Protestants were idealizing Jesuits, Franciscans, and other men in religious orders—not laypeople, not women religious, and not (most of the time) parish priests. Indeed, these celebrations were embedded in a series of longer discursive traditions about friars, Jesuits, and Franciscans in particular.

This book attempts to acknowledge those particular differences when they arise, but also to reflect the fact that—especially given the prevalence of anti-Catholicism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era United States—the broad categories of Protestant and Catholic were themselves significant. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an Episcopalian missionary in the Philippines, a defrocked Methodist minister in California, and a Unitarian president would all identify themselves as Protestant in contradistinction to a Catholic other.² And, when they came together with Catholic laypeople, priests, and prelates to celebrate the history of a Jesuit or a Franciscan, all of them often described what they were doing as celebrating Catholic people and history. My use of Protestant and Catholic is intended to reflect this binary, while simultaneously remaining attentive to its ideological work and historical elisions.

Introduction

Thinking with Catholicism, Empire, and History

If anyone could be expected to celebrate the New England past as central to American greatness, it would probably be George Everett Adams. The Republican congressman was born in New Hampshire in 1840 and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard. Adams was the son of a man named Benjamin Franklin Adams, whose ancestors could be traced back to mid-seventeenth-century Massachusetts: one might expect him to locate the roots of the nation close to home, entwined with those of his own family tree.

But Adams’s family moved to Chicago when he was a young man, and that made all the difference. Like many Americans of his generation, George Adams’s Atlantic-facing pedigree was matched by a continent-spanning vision of the future, and that vision changed the way he saw the U.S. past and purpose. We do not fully appreciate, he told a Republican political club in Chicago in 1894, the labors of the religious teachers who aided in the exploration and civilization of this continent. We who are New England born or bred learned from our school books to regard our own pilgrim fathers as the representatives of the religious life in the early history of America. We are coming to take a larger view, embracing America to the north of us and America to the south of us.¹

America to the north of us and America to the south of us meant, for the Unitarian Adams, the lands colonized by Roman Catholic missionaries from Spain and France. Unlike their parents’ generation, he assured his listeners, we have come to appreciate the Spanish missionaries for being gentle, loving teachers and ministers, scholars and writers and the French missionaries for their lives and characters of courage and devotion.

But what, exactly, was Adams doing when he told this story of Catholic exploration and civilization of this continent to a group of fellow Protestants? Adams was certainly not urging conversion to Catholicism. And he never made reference to the Catholic immigrants arriving daily in his city. Rather, his focus was on empire, past and future. In the second half of his speech, Adams pivoted from Catholic missionaries in general to the French missionary history of the Midwest in particular. He noted that the area around the current city of Chicago was a site of great traffic among Native Americans, whom the French sought to convert. It was a center of empire then, he argued, and was becoming a center of empire again: Here was destined to be the greatest meeting point of the highways of commerce that the world has seen, he declared. The Catholic missionary past was, for Adams, a precursor and harbinger of what he called—and what the Chicago Daily Tribune chose to report in bold and title caps—Chicago’s Imperial Commercial Position.²

Adams was not the only Protestant at the turn of the twentieth century to invoke the imperial Catholic history of the United States. Fifteen years later, the president of the United States would do the same thing. In 1909, President William Howard Taft gave a speech in Southern California on the history of Spanish missions there. In words that echo Adams’s, Taft declared, We who come from the Eastern States are accustomed to take much smug satisfaction in making reference to our ancestors and I think it is at least calculated to reduce the swelling of our heads to bear in mind for a while that there were others besides the English who were fighting the battles of progress during the sixteenth century.… [I]t is hard for us to believe that such important and unselfish work was being done at this time by those who were not our ancestors.³ Taft’s audience was already prepared to celebrate the Catholic history of California: Taft stood before a predominantly Protestant audience, after being asked to dedicate a monument to Junípero Serra, the eighteenth-century Franciscan founder of California’s Catholic mission system.

Like Adams’s speech in Chicago, Taft’s in California also moved easily from the Catholic empire of the past to the U.S. empire of the present. He spoke at the invitation of boosters and railroad barons who were building and shoring up new Anglo-American power in the region, barely half a century after U.S. conquest. When Taft rose to give his speech about the Franciscan missionaries in Southern California—about whom he knew little—he invoked his own experience with Spanish Catholic empire: before becoming president, Taft had served as civil governor of the U.S. colonial Philippines. He prefaced his remarks in Riverside by referring to this experience and what it had taught him about Spanish Catholic empire. In the Philippines, he declared, "I have seen the great work done, not only by the Franciscans, but by the Jesuits, Rigolettos [sic] and the Augustines; I have had ample evidence of heroic work done by the Spanish Christians in the Pacific Islands."⁴ Taft had made similar statements throughout his career in the Philippines, not only praising the history of Spanish friars in the archipelago for their heroic work but also carefully negotiating with contemporary Spanish friars, some of whom remained in the Philippines during the American colonial period. For Taft as for Adams, talking about regional histories of European Catholic empire was also a way of talking about the recent past and projected future of U.S. empire.

Public pronouncements by prominent politicians, these speeches are hardly buried in the historical record. But to a reader today they nonetheless feel anomalous. Students of American religious history know a great deal about the anti-Catholic rhetoric and organizations of the nineteenth century: about antipopery discourse in the early Republic, anti-Catholic gothic convent captivity narratives in the antebellum period, and the rise of the nativist, anti-Catholic American Protective Association at the end of the nineteenth century, for example. Less attention has been paid, however, to examples of Protestant admiration for or attraction to Catholicism. Historians do not, in other words, know quite what to make of prominent Protestants arguing for the inclusion of Roman Catholic forefathers in the pantheon of American founding heroes.

This book argues that Adams’s and Taft’s speeches were, in fact, part of a much larger pattern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alongside and against ongoing currents of anti-Catholicism in U.S. culture, many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with nostalgia and admiration about the figures and institutions of Roman Catholic exploration and evangelization. As the United States grew into a global power, these women and men celebrated idealized versions of Catholic imperial pasts and, through those celebrations, addressed themselves to the history and future of U.S. empire.

This new language was part of a broader commemorative spirit in the late nineteenth century. In the years after the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction, Americans engaged in a frenzy of nationalist historical commemoration: erecting monuments, coming together in historical associations, organizing community events, and writing pageants, plays, and poems that declared national unity and defined national greatness.⁵ In the wake of sectional warfare and in the face of growing class conflict and increasing immigration from southern and eastern Europe and East Asia, white, middle-class Americans in particular attempted to knit the multifarious pieces of the nation together with the imaginative threads of historical narrative. Unsurprisingly, they invoked the Puritans and the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers and the revolutionary generation. But they also looked beyond Massachusetts Bay and Bunker Hill to the booming Midwest, the Pacific coast, and, eventually, to overseas colonies. There they found histories of Catholic missionaries and explorers: Jesuits, Franciscans, and others who had left France and Spain in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in the name of God and crown. Alongside the familiar Protestant origin stories, they built Catholic ones.

As American Protestants wrote, performed, and read these stories, they did so alongside and encouraged by a growing number of American Catholics. By the end of the Civil War, there were more Catholics in the United States than adherents to any single Protestant denomination.⁶ The presence of a large Catholic electorate encouraged Protestant politicians to respond to calls to commemorate Catholic historical figures, and the existence of Catholic elites in the boardrooms and club rooms of Gilded Age and Progressive Era America made cross-confessional camaraderie and commemorative planning possible. Some Catholic priests and prelates also participated in celebrations of founding Catholic missionaries, convinced that one way to combat anti-Catholicism was to show non-Catholic America, in word and ceremony, that Catholicism and patriotism could exist side by side. Taft and Adams gave their speeches as Protestants, but they did so in a country that was increasingly home to a large and growing Catholic minority.

And they did so in a country looking outward in multiple directions. Bruce Cumings has encouraged scholars to take a Pacificist approach to modern U.S. history, one attuned to the shifting geographical imagination of many Americans, past and present. Ever since denizens of the United States first began to think about the global commercial and maritime opportunities presented by continent-wide settler-colonial expansion, they linked the places commonly called the American West, on the one hand, and the transpacific East, on the other. By the late nineteenth century, not only had the United States acquired its own Pacific coastline (and Pacific overseas territories, for that matter), but that coastline had come to represent not so much the distant end point of westward continental expansion but rather a key node of the developing imperial nation-state and an embarkation point for future engagement with Asia. What had once been a dense collection of former British colonies on the continental rim of broader Euro-Atlantic worlds had now become a multicentered, continent-spanning, two-ocean nation, one that faced toward not only Europe but also decidedly west, across the continent, and well beyond its North American domain.⁷

That expanse of land and ocean contained opportunities for territory, resources, and trade; it also contained Catholics. For the Protestant clergymen and writers Lyman Beecher and Josiah Strong, the American Midwest and West (terms that bled into one another in the nineteenth century) were places of astonishing resources and potential for economic and population growth, the soil out of which the future of the nation would grow. But, as Beecher noted in his widely read 1835 sermon A Plea for the West, and as Strong reiterated in his even more popular 1885 book, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, these spaces of national hope and possibility were also home to increasing numbers of Catholic immigrants. Citing Catholics’ supranational allegiances to Rome and their purportedly unthinking reliance on clerical authority, Beecher and Strong feared that the very site of America’s future would also contain the seeds of democracy’s demise, and advocated a renewed commitment to Protestant missionary work.⁸ Later debates about U.S. colonies in the Pacific echoed this concern, if tuned to a different key: Protestant missionaries to the majority-Catholic Philippines, for example, clamored for more government support, arguing that assimilation to American norms and values required Protestant religious transformation.⁹ For many Protestants, the view across the continent and into the Pacific was a complicated mix of patriotic optimism and anti-Catholic anxiety.

But for others—for many of the people who populate this book—a right reading of history could calm that anti-Catholic anxiety. In explicit rejection of anti-Catholicism, they reminded their fellow Americans of the history and legacy of French and Spanish Catholic missionaries in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. They argued that Catholicism could not corrupt the U.S. project in the Midwest, West, and Pacific because Catholicism—and Catholics—had been there all along.

They also argued that this Catholic history was a vital imaginative resource. They cast historical Catholic missionaries as the heroes of new origin stories about the expanded U.S. nation and empire, as founding fathers who stood tall in the history of the imperial nation and whose examples were available to guide its future. Just as one might read lessons for the future in other American origin stories—in the plight of the Pilgrims or the purpose of the Puritans—so too might Catholic origin stories light the way forward, helping Americans understand not only their lands’ imperial pasts but also their nation’s imperial future.

This book tracks these stories as they emerged in three different sites and circumstances: the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the U.S. colonial Philippines. These diverse sites were all U.S. territories with histories of European Catholic empire. French Jesuits had explored and evangelized the upper Midwest in the seventeenth century. Spanish Franciscans had created a chain of missions stretching from San Diego to Sonoma in California, from 1769 to 1823. And the Spanish empire—administered in large part by Catholic friars—had ruled the Philippines since the late sixteenth century.

In each of these places, by the turn of the twentieth century, the history of Catholic empire began to matter to large, cross-confessional groups of Americans. Beginning in the 1870s, white Protestants joined white Catholics in the Midwest in celebrating the history of the seventeenth-century French Jesuit missionary and explorer Jacques Marquette. Beginning in the 1880s, a predominantly Protestant group of newly arrived boosters—who would identify themselves as Anglos—collaborated with the Catholic hierarchy in Southern California to celebrate the Spanish Franciscan Junípero Serra and the mission system he and his brethren founded. And, after the end of the Spanish-Cuban-American War in 1898, many U.S. soldiers, officials, teachers, journalists, and travelers in the Philippines turned to the archipelago’s history of rule by Spanish friars as a colonial model.

The commemorations and conversations that arose in each place were shaped by the particular histories and exigencies of each place but were not limited to that place. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Midwest was growing into a global center of manufacturing and commerce; Southern California was slowly, often violently, transforming from a ranching economy dominated by Mexican landowning elites to an agricultural and urban economy dominated by newly arrived Anglos; and the Philippines was the site of an anticolonial, anti-Spanish revolution (aided by the United States) that was quickly followed by a war between U.S. and Filipino nationalist forces for control of the archipelago, and an overlapping and subsequent process of colonial state building. The diverse ways that Catholic imperial pasts were invoked in each place were highly situational and contingent, emerging from these distinct histories and struggles. They referenced different rhetorical contexts: Euro-American traditions of anti-Jesuit rhetoric, a new transatlantic admiration for St. Francis of Assisi, and a long history of Filipino critiques of Spanish friars, to name only a few. The histories of Catholic empire were different in each place; so too were the contexts in which each history became a useable past.

Yet the local was not parochial. From the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the Philippines, new language about Catholicism echoed across the United States. In the burgeoning world of national print culture, in an era of rapidly expanding transportation and communication technologies, many Americans in Boston or Baltimore not only traveled to Chicago, Los Angeles, or Manila but also read about these places and mused on what they meant for the nation.

Much of the material I have analyzed for this study, therefore, is produced in each place but widely distributed beyond it. I have followed language about the history and current resonance of Catholic imperial pasts as it emerged in the form of political speeches, government reports, poetry, novels, plays, travel narratives, pamphlets, advertisements, and more. I have traced it among people who were self-consciously crafting historical narratives as amateur and professional historians, boosters, or monument builders, and among others who picked up this language as common sense, adopting and adapting it to their own ends.

This book is, in one sense, a reclamation project: it re-creates a rhetorical world that was common and widespread and that historians have lost sight of. In doing so, it helps explain speeches like those made by Adams or Taft. It takes statements and actions that until now have been written off as exceptions, as the result of individual peculiarities, and places them in their proper context as part of a vibrant, multifaceted national conversation about Catholicism and empire. But this book is also more. To take seriously the fact that many American Protestants at the turn of the twentieth century integrated Catholic missionaries and explorers into their efforts to commemorate a meaningful past, and that doing so involved talking and thinking about a fast-developing U.S. empire, requires that historians reconsider some of their key operating assumptions about the histories of U.S. empire and American religion.

Empire

The study of U.S. imperial history has taken a religious turn, but the majority of this scholarship is focused on Protestantism. It takes as a starting point the dominance of Protestant evangelical impulses and providential visions of the United States, subjects of long-standing interest. Important scholarship has elaborated on the role of Manifest Destiny, the work of Protestant missionaries, and the influence of social Christianity—to name just a few themes—in the advancement of U.S. global power.¹⁰ Histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular, have revolved around what the historian Andrew Preston has neatly summarized as that familiar rhetoric in the history of American exceptionalism: the stuff of providence, manifest destiny, a New Jerusalem, and a shining city upon a hill.¹¹ In contrast, this book argues that another rhetoric was at work during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: one less Protestant and less exceptionalist. Reaching back to histories of Catholic empire, it was a language of cross-confessional civilizing work and interimperial influence and inheritance.

With its focus on Catholic pasts, this book brings new actors, stories, and ideas into the conversation about U.S. empire. It also helps move scholarship on U.S. empire in three important directions. First, it helps bring diverse sites and types of Gilded Age and Progressive Era U.S. empire together in one analytical frame. Second, it illuminates a historical moment of antiexceptionalism in American imperial thought by demonstrating that claims to a cross-confessional civilizing mission involved self-conscious comparisons to, and borrowings from, earlier European empires. And, third, it contributes to the historiographical de-exceptionalizing of U.S. empire by examining a moment when, in both the United States and Europe, imperial contexts inspired Protestant reevaluations of the place and nature of Catholicism in the body politic.

Empire, of course, can mean many things. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, these included the process of settler colonialism known in most U.S. history textbooks as westward expansion, the United States’ acquisition of a large overseas colonial empire in 1898–99, and the commercial and industrial growth that fueled what historians call, in various iterations, the United States’ market empire or empire of production: the nation’s rise to global industrial preeminence.¹²

One might expect that each of these versions of empire corresponded, in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, to a different site in this book: Southern California with westward expansion, the Philippines with colonial empire, and Chicago and its environs with the creation of commercial, economic empire. To some extent this is true, but too firm an attention to these distinctions can blind historians to the flow and flux among them. Gilded Age and Progressive Era debates about such topics as race, gender, assimilation, and economic growth cut across these different places and forms of empire—as did conversations about Catholic pasts. Following the subjects of this book in thinking about these different sites and forms of empire together allows diverse circumstances and processes—histories that are not often told in relation to one another—to be captured in one frame.¹³ Speeches like Adams’s and Taft’s demonstrate that the Midwest, the Far West, and the Philippines could all be conceived in relation to one another. And they were related, as both Adams and Taft insist, by the acts of European missionaries who, from different places and in different centuries, were nonetheless understood to be engaging in a similar, racialized task: the spread of civilization.

The notion that one could spread civilization itself has a long history in the United States and elsewhere. As it emerged out of the Enlightenment, it was based on the idea that peoples progress in a linear way from states of savagism to barbarism to civilization. Because, crucially, not all peoples and places were imagined to do so at the same time, it was up to the more civilized people to help the less civilized advance. Over the years, levels of any person’s or group’s civilization were measured according to a bewildering variety of metrics, ranging from gender roles and styles of dress, to language and literacy, to food and technology, to racial formations and geography, almost always including some version of Christianity and economic development. For many Americans in the years between the Civil War and the First World War, the mission of bringing civilization—assimilation to middle-class American Christian modes of faith and life, and access to foreign investment and capitalist development—cast territorial expansion and colonial acquisition as just and humane.¹⁴

This conviction was hardly universal. Particularly after the United States acquired overseas territories and colonies, some people who identified as anti-imperialists roundly rejected colonialism’s civilizing pretentions. Mark Twain, for example, acidly referred to American imperialists as members of a Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, arranged, like other trusts in the Gilded Age, primarily for the profit of its members.¹⁵ Others rejected overseas colonialism as part of their own white supremacist convictions: they feared that the eventual incorporation of colonial subjects through the extension of the republic would threaten American racial homogeneity.

But outside of anti-colonial circles, late nineteenth-century discourse on civilizing empire flowed naturally from earlier ideas about Manifest Destiny. The idea of Manifest Destiny had become popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, in particular in the context of the U.S. acquisition of much of northern Mexico in the late 1840s. Proponents argued that the spread of U.S. sovereignty across the continent was the fulfillment of a special God-given destiny, a providential mission for a chosen nation. Ideas about the United States as a civilizing global empire that emerged later in the century replicated Manifest Destiny’s claim that the expansion of U.S. territorial authority was a right and righteous goal, not merely a grasping for material wealth and power but a chance to remake the world in better form.

However, as Anders Stephanson has pointed out, the idea of the United States as a civilizing empire was neither as nationally exceptionalist nor as exclusively Protestant as were mid-nineteenth-century notions of Manifest Destiny. To think about U.S. empire in civilizational terms meant that the United States was doing something—spreading civilization—that European empires had been doing and were continuing to do as well. Many Americans argued that their country was doing it best, to be sure, and that the United States represented the most advanced form of civilization. But, in Stephanson’s words, that argument still connected the United States up with Europe and the world in lines of continuity, thus replacing absolute distinction.¹⁶ When Gilded Age and Progressive Era Americans such as Adams and Taft talked about the spread of civilization, they were placing U.S. civilizing projects within a longer European lineage and including (Euro-American) Catholics within that lineage.

In doing so they were engaging in a form of interimperial comparison, understanding themselves in relation to, and learning from the example of, other imperial powers. Scholars of U.S. empire have given the process of interimperial comparison and borrowing close attention. They have demonstrated, for example, how in the years before the First World War, German and U.S. naval elites pursued paths to global sea power characterized by national competition and transnational exchange, and how, in the interwar years, anticolonial discourse in Vietnam drew on and transformed images of the United States and its history.¹⁷ The subjects of this book, too, situated their own nation’s empire within a global context and saw themselves as drawing from and related to other empires. But this book adds a twist to existing scholarship, focusing on interimperial comparison that did not reach across space but only across time. Oriented toward the European Catholic imperial pasts in lands now fallen under U.S. dominion, American Protestants brought the figures and features of those local pasts to bear on their own present-day problems and ambitions.¹⁸

Beyond the interimperial comparisons made, self-consciously, by the people in this book, scholars might also note similarities between this book’s history of Catholicism and U.S. empire and the histories of Catholicism and other, European empires. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans were not the only people to reassess the place of Roman Catholicism in the modern imperial nation. Indeed, the language examined in this book is part of a larger pattern of empire-based challenges to anti-Catholicism and anticlericalism.

To begin with, the history of nineteenth-century U.S. anti-Catholicism—which will be discussed in greater detail below—can be understood as part of larger transatlantic currents. In Europe, the nineteenth century had also seen an increase in anti-Catholicism and anticlericalism. As exemplified by the Italian Risorgimento and the German Kulturkampf, European states consolidated power by passing laws limiting the authority of the Catholic Church: closing or regulating monasteries and schools, appropriating church land and wealth, and even assuming authority over ecclesiastical appointments.¹⁹ Throughout Europe, increased state-sponsored attacks on the Catholic Church were accompanied by an explosion of anti-Catholic, anticlerical, antimonastic, and anti-Jesuit literature, much of which traveled a transnational and transatlantic circuit.²⁰ The French historian Jules Michelet’s anticlerical Du Prêtre, de la femme, et de la famille, for example, was published in the United States in 1845 as Spiritual Direction and Auricular Confession, likely a pirated reprint of a British version. The anticonvent memoir of the Italian ex-nun Enrichetta Caracciolo was translated into both French and English (the latter by a U.S. consul) and went through multiple editions in both France and the United States.²¹ In much of Europe as in the United States, in ways politically distinct but often rhetorically connected, anti-Catholicism and anticlericalism were powerful forces in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Then—in Europe as well as in the United States—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a reassessment of the relationship between Catholics and the state, in and through colonial contexts. As the newly created German empire acquired colonies in Africa, China, and the Pacific, the letters and publications produced by missionaries—including Catholic missionaries—were a principal source of popular information about the overseas empire and succeeded in inspiring commitment to the idea of a civilizing mission. In politics, the Catholic Center Party, though sometimes critical of German colonialism, expressed support for the idea of uplifting colonial subjects and hoped that their support might improve the position of Catholics in state and society in the wake of the Kulturkampf. While the Catholic role in German colonial politics inspired some anti-Catholic mobilization in Germany, in general the pursuit of German Weltpolitik and colonial empire, as the site of a nationalizing discourse of Germans as a global imperial people, opened up spaces for the incorporation of Catholics in the imagined German nation.²²

In France, the 1880s marked the beginning of an intense period of French overseas colonialism, which involved the labor of thousands of Catholic missionaries.²³ The result was, at least initially and on paper, a divide between the domestic and the colonial: Anti-clericalism, the anticlerical statesman Léon Gambetta would famously announce, was not an item for export.²⁴ The conviction behind Gambetta’s grand statement never reached all the way through the colonial bureaucracy and was undermined in the first decade of the twentieth century by the revival of anticlericalism in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. Nonetheless, the colonies remained a site of French republican negotiation with French Catholic missionaries. In some places, the missionaries themselves responded to rising anticlericalism