Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

By William S. Cossen

In Making Catholic America, William S. Cossen shows how Catholic men and women worked to prove themselves to be model American citizens in the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Far from being outsiders in American history, Catholics took command of public life in the early twentieth century, claiming leadership in the growing American nation. They produced their own version of American history and claimed the power to remake the nation in their own image, arguing that they were the country's most faithful supporters of freedom and liberty and that their church had birthed American independence. Making Catholic America offers a new interpretation of American life in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, demonstrating the surprising success of an often-embattled religious group in securing for itself a place in the national community and in profoundly altering what it meant to be an American in the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501771019

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Cover: Making Catholic America, RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM IN THE GILDED AGE AND PROGRESSIVE ERA by William S. Cossen

MAKING CATHOLIC AMERICA

RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM IN THE GILDED AGE AND PROGRESSIVE ERA

WILLIAM S. COSSEN

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Kristina, Catherine Elise, and William—it’s all for you

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Reconstructing the Catholic West

2. Catholics in the White City

3. American Catholicism and Philippine Colonization

4. Catholic Gatekeepers

5. Toward Tri-Faith America

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Whenever I read a monograph for the first time, I flip immediately to the acknowledgments section. I enjoy learning about an author’s intellectual influences, and I also enjoy seeing the myth of the solitary scholar undermined by the personal and professional networks that sustain the years of research and writing that go into the creation of an academic book. So without further ado, I am tremendously excited to finally have a chance to enter the hallowed halls of monographic acknowledgment authorship.

Breaking with the academic tradition of first recounting one’s intellectual debts, I would like to highlight those individuals who played the largest role in the successful completion of the book you have in your hands: my family. They have given unceasingly of their time and energy to support me in the now decade-long process of writing this book. The biggest thank-you of all goes to my wife, Kristina, and my children, Catherine Elise and William. Their patience and love have sustained me in every way imaginable. I love you all more than words can describe.

I would next like to offer a tremendous thank-you to the editorial staff at Cornell University Press for shepherding this book through the long publication process, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions, which helped me improve my work and turn it into something far better than it ever could have been without their valuable engagement with my research. Thank you as well to Kate Mertes for her exceptional indexing.

My sincerest thanks and deepest respect also go to my graduate school advisors, Amy S. Greenberg and Philip Jenkins, who are model historians and people in every way. They continue to set standards of impeccable scholarship to which I can still only hope to aspire. My thanks also go to the other two members of my doctoral committee, Daniel Letwin and Roger Finke, whose dedicated support and feedback were invaluable.

Thank you as well to the administration of the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology for their ongoing support of my research and writing. It has been an immense privilege to work alongside my tremendously talented colleagues in the Social Studies Department, which continues to provide a wonderfully supportive place for me to grow as a teacher and scholar.

None of the research that serves as the foundation of this book could have been completed without generous financial assistance from several institutions and organizations. Research funding came from the American Catholic Historical Association, the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at the Catholic University of America, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, the Filson Historical Society, the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, and the Pennsylvania State University’s Department of History. Many archivists and librarians also provided their time, advice, and assistance. I would like to offer particular thanks to the following: Maria Mazzenga and William John Shepherd at the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at the Catholic University of America; Shawn Weldon at the Catholic History Research Center of the Archdiocese of Pennsylvania; Kathy Shoemaker at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; Jennie Cole, Jim Holmberg, Aaron Rosenblum, and LeeAnn Whites at the Filson Historical Society; J. Leon Hooper, S.J., and Scott Taylor at the Georgetown University Library Booth Family Center for Special Collections; Craig Wright at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum; and Peter Lysy and Joseph Smith at the University of Notre Dame Archives. Thanks also go to the interlibrary loan staff of the Penn State University Libraries, whose members tracked down numerous obscure items for me. Grateful acknowledgment goes to the Catholic University of America Press and the journal U.S. Catholic Historian for permission to include material from a previous article of mine, Catholic Gatekeepers: The Church and Immigration Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, U.S. Catholic Historian 34, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 1–23, in this book’s fourth chapter.

The Penn State Department of History provided me with a wonderful home as a graduate student, and even though I graduated several years ago, I still miss its friendly halls and have tremendous respect for its faculty, both present and former, who made me the historian and educator I am today. David G. Atwill, Kathlene Baldanza, William A. Blair, Tobias Brinkmann, Solsiree Del Moral, Alan Derickson, Sophie De Schaepdrijver, Greg Eghigian, Lori D. Ginzberg, the late Anthony E. Kaye, Michael Kulikowski, Joan B. Landes, Thomas Christopher Lawrence, Daniel Letwin, Kate Merkel-Hess, Michael Milligan, Catherine Wanner, and Nan Woodruff: I am proud to be a historian and teacher because of you.

I also have the honor of offering my gratitude to many other colleagues and friends, past and present, who have all contributed in varied ways, both known and unknown, to the creation of this book: Gabe Andrews, Erin Bartram, Taleisha Bowen, Mary Bryan, Will Bryan, Michael Burbine, Peter Cajka, Laurent Cases, Joy Ciofi, Brian Clites, Mary Beth Fraser Connolly, Renee Covin, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Spencer Delbridge, Jack Downey, Katie Falvo, Michelle Fowler, Elfi Funk, Andrea Gatzke, Lauren Golder, Ben Gulley, Chris Hayashida-Knight, David Hensley, Seth Hersch, Phil Hnatkovich, Jeff Horton, Antwain Hunter, Jobie Johnson, Kelly Knight, Susan Kohanek, Kevin Lowe, Rebekah Martin, Paul Matzko, Bill McAuliffe, Gráinne McEvoy, Monica Mercado, Rachel Moran, Chad Morgan, Catherine Osborne, Stephen Paul, Andrew Prymak, Lesley Rains, Patrick Rasico, Carden Rice, J. Adam Rogers, Evan Rothera, Thomas Rzeznik, Adam Schultz, Emily Seitz, John Seitz, Rob Shafer, Hannah Sharpe, Michael Skaggs, Tyler Sperrazza, Anslie Spitler, Chris Staysniak, Jason Strandquist, Charles Strauss, Lisa Tilley, Sean Trainor, Peter Van Lidth de Jeude, Alfred Wallace, and Eric Welch.

I would finally like to extend my gratitude to three individuals who made a special mark on my scholarship and career. The first is Carolyn Hellams, whose high school history classes encouraged me to pursue a history major as an undergraduate. Next is Walter L. Adamson, whose undergraduate history seminars taught me how to write clearly and analytically. Finally, my thanks go to Mark D. Jordan, who, when I was in my final undergraduate semester, introduced me to the field of Catholic studies. His seminar in modern Catholicism completely changed my academic and professional trajectory. None of this would have been possible without Dr. Jordan providing me with the initial spark of interest in the field and the encouragement to pursue graduate studies.

Introduction

The Catholic Work of Nation Building

When Charles J. Guiteau approached James A. Garfield in a Washington, DC, train station on July 2, 1881, drawing his revolver and firing two shots at the president, the assassin was sure that he was saving his country from a corrupt administration. When questioned by police after he had committed his foul, evil deed, Guiteau proclaimed that he was a stalwart among the stalwarts and that General William Sherman and Vice President Chester A. Arthur were at that moment on their way to rescue him from his captors and restore order to the nation.¹ What he did not tell detectives after his arrest was that he was also fulfilling the destiny of a long line of reformers reaching back to Martin Luther. The murder of Garfield functioned, then, as the ninety-sixth thesis nailed to the modern church of Wittenberg.

This is clearly a fantastic account. If true, it would revise historians’ understanding of the Garfield assassination and the Gilded Age and would revolutionize several centuries’ worth of scholarship on the Protestant Reformation. This notion of Guiteau as a legatee of Luther, however, was not pulled from thin air. Isaac Hecker, one of American Catholicism’s most notable converts, proposed it. As Hecker noted in 1887, [When] Guiteau was condemned by an American judge and jury as a murderer, and this verdict to all appearance was ratified by the American people, then and there the standpoint of Protestantism was also condemned.… And now a bronze statue is about to be erected, or is already erected, in honor of Martin Luther, in the very city which hanged as a criminal, upon an infamous gallows, his logical child!² Hecker granted that church reform was a regrettable necessity in Luther’s day, placing the German priest in the pantheon of true reformers, which included Hildebrand, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Charles Borromeo. He would go no further, however, instead arguing that the moment Luther rebelled against the authority of the Catholic hierarchy was the moment of his effective damnation, and the author made a dizzying leap to the late nineteenth century by connecting what he called the free-individualism of Protestantism to a host of other social ills of his day, including presidential assassination, child murder, Unitarianism, and spiritism. The latter, Hecker argued, leads directly to the entire emancipation of the flesh, resulting in free-lovism, and sometimes ending in diabolism. Spiritism is Satan’s master-stroke, in which he obtains from his victims the denial of his own existence. These are some of the bitter fruits of the separation from Catholic unity. According to Hecker, Protestantism was the root of all evil in American society, and its dogmas [were] foreign to republicanism and [led] to a theocracy in politics. By contrast, that society’s ideological and spiritual parent and necessary savior was Catholicism.³ Hecker made these comments at a time when Catholics were becoming a force in American politics, culture, and public life and at a moment when Catholic leaders were demarcating church boundaries, reworking the meaning of Americanism, and redefining Catholicity on the eve of the twentieth century.

Although scholars have analyzed Catholics as outsiders in American history, historians have devoted far less space to the inverse questions of how Catholics claimed the mantle of Americanism and how they worked to achieve mainstream status. Making Catholic America describes how Catholics worked in the years following the Civil War to entrench their claim to belonging in the American nation. They did so by demonstrating the integral roles they played in a variety of connected imperial, political, and public reform projects and by engaging in a rhetoric of anti-Protestantism against Protestants, who frequently regarded themselves as the model Americans.

The postbellum era was a period of immense cultural, economic, political, and social change. It was also a time of significant transformations in the country’s religious life. Catholics, whose church became the country’s largest by 1890, reconceived of their own places in the American nation between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Catholics in this period argued that their church was the country’s most faithful supporter of freedom and constitutional liberty and that Catholicism had birthed American independence. They attacked the loyalty of Protestants to highlight their own and spoke of their leadership of the American nation as self-evidently apparent and appropriate. As one Catholic author wrote in 1875, American history testifies with gratitude to the names of Rochambeau, De Grasse, De Kalb, Pulaski, Lafayette, and many more; all Catholic heroes, who nobly led on their gallant troops in our cause, and obtained speedy triumph, even at a time when the odds were against us. This author, who went by the name of A Resident, asked rhetorically of these Catholic Revolutionary War figures, Were they enemies of liberty? Were our Catholic forefathers cowards, who stood bravely in the fight and fought with their noble leader De Kalb, while the Protestant lines of Virginia and North Carolina, with Gen. Gates at their head, fled from the field of Camden? A Resident answered, History will testify that Catholic citizens fought when others fled, and argued that Catholics continued to demonstrate their devotion to the Union and to the newly consolidating nation through their service in the Civil War.⁴

Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul told his fellow Catholics in 1889, the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the American church’s first diocese, that they should stand proud as members of a powerful religious community. We number ten millions, Ireland reminded them. He described American Catholics on the eve of a new century as a powerful army ready to convert the nation and take their place as leaders of an enlightened society.⁵ Converting the nation to Catholicism was an avowed goal of Ireland and other similar Catholic leaders of the period. Ireland and his fellow bishop, John J. Keane, argued in an 1886 memorandum to the Vatican’s Propaganda Fide, its Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, that the conversion of American Protestants was a vital matter for our religion. The Church will never be strong in America; she will never be sure of keeping within her fold the descendants of immigrants, Irish as well as others, until she has gained a decided ascendancy among the Americans themselves.⁶ Laypeople also expressed this confidence in the conversion of the nation to Catholicism. James L. Meagher of Cazenovia, Minnesota, wrote in 1892 to Archbishop Ireland, The time is coming when the English-speaking people will enter the church in crowds. Meagher praised James Cardinal Gibbons, Ireland, and Keane—leaders of the liberal wing of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US church—for advanc[ing] the Cause of Catholicity in a remarkable manner within a few years last past, and if it continues in the same proportion, we may look for a breaking away from the other churches, and a wave of conversions sweeping over the English speaking peoples.⁷ Such confidence in the making of a newly Catholicized American nation was building through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and would serve as the foundation for further Catholic empowerment in the twentieth-century American political mainstream.

In a recent work, one historian argues that post–Civil War Catholics worked to create a separate American Catholic subculture in the United States and that their general attitude can be described as an instinctive defensiveness born out of their encounter with antebellum nativism.⁸ It may be true that some Catholics retreated to defensive ghettos in the late nineteenth century, but such a perspective silences the numerous stories of antebellum and postbellum Catholics who routinely went on the offensive against non-Catholics and the forces of nativism. By assuming that these Catholics viewed themselves as outsiders, scholars may be in danger of tacitly accepting the view of Protestants as the normative Americans, which Catholics of this period did not accept. Instead of privileging Catholic difference and separateness over Catholic similarity and inclusion, Making Catholic America brings more balance to the picture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US Catholicism as an empowered and influential political and cultural force, despite its members’ linguistic and devotional practices, which may have differed from those of many other Americans.

Instead of assuming that Catholics sought acceptance, this book suggests that such a perspective is based on faulty assumptions. Perhaps Catholics sought no acceptance at all because they felt it would be illogical to assimilate into a nation of which they believed they were already a part and which they considered an outgrowth and creation of their own religious community. The Civil War career of Catholic chaplain Peter Paul Cooney provides an instructive example. In his wartime diary, Cooney portrayed Protestant chaplains as being poor at their jobs and as questionable Christians. He characterized them as unmanly cowards who shrank from their patriotic and religious duties in the face of battlefield horrors and described their faith as empty.⁹ Cooney defended a deathbed baptism of a Methodist soldier who supposedly requested the sacrament and claimed that the soldier asked him with more than ordinary energy, ‘Where then is our ministers—where is their words of consolation for the poor departing soul. I see them nowhere in the hospital.’ Cooney blamed the entire war on one of the bedrocks of Protestant theology: Private Judgment. He extended his critique of Civil War–era Protestantism to the competitive, American religious marketplace, blaming private judgment for the United States becoming the prolific mother of sects, from Free Love to Mormonism up to the ribald & flexible creed of Episcopalianism & down again through the ravings of Miller & his Snow oil theory, to the irrational principle of Presbyterianism that some men are born to be damned. This led to a spirit of disobedience to both Divine & Civil laws. Private Judgment, Cooney argued, is the fatal apple of the human race—the production of a corrupt tree nurtured by the corruption of human Nature—its end is death.¹⁰ Protestantism, then, was the wellspring of disunion and disaster, whereas Catholicism was the source of united, national power and order.¹¹

In the view of many Catholics of the nineteenth century, the American nation was made by and for Catholics, as evidenced by Cooney’s contrasting of the faithful, patriotic Catholic priest with the faithless, disloyal Protestant minister. As Catholic priest Patrick Cronin of Buffalo, New York, exclaimed in his speech, The Church and the Republic, given at the Columbian Catholic Congress in 1893, This land, discovered by Catholic genius, explored by Catholic missionary zeal, baptized in the blood of the Catholic revolutionary heroes, and preserved in unified glory by the prowess of Catholic arms on many a gory field—is it any marvel that the Church should have phenomenally grown and flourished here?¹² Catholics had invented the nation; it was their proper inheritance; and it should thus not seem remarkable that the Catholic Church would have grown so substantially by the turn of the twentieth century.

The subjects that make up this book’s narrative core—western expansion and US Indigenous policy; turn-of-the-twentieth-century world’s fairs; extraterritorial imperialism; immigration reform, regulation, and restriction; and judicial and political battles over the public role of religion in the Progressive Era—served as essential components of the postbellum nation-building project. They functioned as the nexus in which Catholicism, Protestantism, and the state vied for influence and power in defining the physical extent, ideological character, and demographic composition of the nation. Underlying them all was an ever-present critique on the part of nationalist Catholics, which held that the nation was far more dynamic an entity than was described by the Protestants of their imaginations. This critique also argued that Catholics should play an integral role in spreading Christian civilization across the American frontier, extending it beyond the western hemisphere, and then advancing the civilizing project within their own ranks to prove to non-Catholics that Catholicism was a quintessentially American community worthy of taking its place alongside Protestantism in the administration of the country’s civil religion.

Through their conflicts with Protestants over religious liberty and control of Indigenous agencies and reservations in the US West, Catholic missionaries, bishops, and laypeople active in the western missions sought to leverage power over federal bureaus and over Native Americans, who were frequently their Catholic coreligionists. Through this activity, Catholics assisted in shaping national borders during Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age. In the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, Catholics continued their battles with Protestants over schools and missions in the islands and once again portrayed themselves as the true defenders of the Constitution and American values, in contrast with Protestants, who sought allegedly to subvert public order. They built on their imperial training on the western reservations to colonize the Philippines, and they played central roles, alongside federal officials and the Protestants they sought to supplant, in projecting national power across the Pacific. These nationalist Catholics also harnessed their church to prevailing ideas of white racial superiority and immigration regulation and directed them inward. Their national belonging, then, was dependent in part on delimiting the American nation within Catholicism. Finally, Catholics in the first three decades of the twentieth century kept alive their religious nationalist project through their continued contributions to western missions, extraterritorial imperialism, and immigration policy. They worked successfully through the judiciary and the political process to continue demonstrating their belonging in the national community. These venues of debate and public policy—Native missions, Philippine colonization, immigration regulation, and the anti-Catholic revival and Catholic backlash in the Progressive Era—were connected by the common theme of the enduring Catholic challenge to Protestant power. They played a collective role in Catholic participation in the reconstruction of the postbellum American nation through the related projects of border formation, power projection, and defining of national membership, and Catholics redefined the national mainstream as essentially Catholic.¹³

In this revised narrative of American Catholic nation building, many Catholic leaders of the postbellum United States were comfortable putting a distinctively Catholic spin on imperialism and colonization, scientific racial theories, immigration regulation, and national boundary formation. Historians have typically regarded the ideas of whiteness and race, religious nationalism, and Manifest Destiny as the sole domain of middle- and upper-class Protestants. This book, on the other hand, argues that the provenance of these concepts must be broadened to include the Catholics who played an appreciable role in formulating them. The Catholics at the heart of this book—many of whom were part of the church’s Gilded-Age and Progressive-Era liberal wing—were those individuals, both lay and clerical, historian Thomas T. McAvoy argues, who supported the adaptation of Catholic practices to the American milieu … whether they were of American, Irish, French, or German birth. These included leading clerical figures, McAvoy explains, such as Bishop John Lancaster Spalding, Father [Isaac] Hecker, Bishops [John] Ireland and [John J.] Keane and [James] Cardinal Gibbons, who were making determined efforts in speeches and articles … to show the American people that American Catholics were united with them in their efforts to improve the civic and social welfare of the country. In several of their forays into public and political life, they were opposed by conservatives, including prelates such as Archbishop [Michael] Corrigan, Bishop [Bernard John] McQuaid, and Bishop Ignatius Horstmann, who felt that these adaptations were heretical. This battle between conservatives and liberals was a theological and political power struggle with an extensive reach in the United States, which also crossed the Atlantic Ocean to share in larger transnational disputes then raging across Catholic Europe.¹⁴

Numbers on either side, especially when taking into account the mass of Catholic laypeople, for which no systematic public opinion polling exists, are difficult to determine. What this book argues, though, is that numbers are not as important as real-world impact. The liberal Catholics, though perhaps smaller in number than their conservative, neutral, and ambivalent counterparts on the political battlefield, had an outsized effect on shaping public policy and influencing a broader, popular perception of supposedly outsider Catholicism as an inside creator of American nationalism from Reconstruction through the Progressive Era. Significantly, conservative figures in the church often replicated liberals’ assumptions about the nature of the American nation, indicating a pervasive power of the Catholic nationalist position, even when those expressing it were unaware of or perhaps even opposed to its origins. Diverse Catholic figures, despite their significant ideological differences, could still find themselves on the same side in certain instances. It was not impossible for a theological conservative of the period to argue, for instance, that ethnic groups remain distinct and separate as Catholic Americans while still holding that Catholicism was the fountain and most perfect expression of Americanism (see chapter 4 for further elaboration of this theme). Furthermore, even after the old-guard liberals had passed away or faded from the scene of national Catholic leadership, their ideas on Catholic American nationalism lived on into the late Progressive Era and into the Cold War period’s forging of a religiously pluralistic, democratic culture.

While McAvoy views this conservative-progressive power struggle within late nineteenth-century American Catholicism as primarily a theological and clerical one, Making Catholic America instead demonstrates that laypeople—figures such as Katherine E. Conway, Mary Theresa Elder, William James Onahan, Rachel Ewing Sherman, Al Smith, and Alice Timmons Toomy—were also leading players in the defining of public Catholicism. They did not simply react to the decisions of their bishops and priests, but instead played proactive roles in creating a new sense of American Catholic nationalism. This book argues, then, directly against McAvoy’s contention that Catholics of this period took their dogmas and moral code on the authority of their pastors and particularly from the infallible Pope and did not quarrel with their teachers.¹⁵ This is a contention, furthermore, that can have the unintended consequence of reinforcing the long-standing anti-Catholic position that Catholics were unquestioning followers of a despotic, clerical hierarchy. This was also not a story that began around 1890 and ended shortly after the papal condemnation of the heresy known as Americanism at the end of that decade, as McAvoy and other scholars commonly assess it. Historian Philip Gleason, for example, notes, It began in the mid-1880s and came to an abrupt end in 1899 when Pope Leo XIII condemned certain ideas that, as he put it, ‘some comprise under the head of Americanism.’ … As a distinctive religious idea or pastoral strategy, ‘Americanism’ had been stopped cold and nothing further was heard of it until it became an object of scholarly curiosity two generations later.¹⁶ This story is rather one with roots formed out of the Civil War and postbellum Reconstruction policy, which played a defining role in the making of a more pluralist American religious realm after World War II. Finally, as opposed to McAvoy’s focus on the East, the present book expands the scope of American Catholic nationalist activity westward, even beyond the country’s borders, to encompass the spread of the American empire in the twentieth century. This allows for the introduction into this historical narrative of Catholic Americanization of figures such as Dennis Cardinal Dougherty and Charles B. Ewing—individuals just as responsible for the fusion of Catholicism and Americanism in their own time as were Gibbons, Hecker, and Ireland in theirs.

Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Catholics built on a decades-long intellectual foundation. This intellectual tradition portrayed Catholicism as an eminently American denomination and Protestantism as a promoter of religious intolerance. Benedict Joseph Fenwick, an antebellum bishop of Boston, described Maryland’s colonial Catholics as the progenitors of religious liberty and of equal protection of the law in the future United States. These Catholics tolerated differences of religious belief and practice, Fenwick argued, noting, With a nobleness of soul and a generosity unparalleled, the utmost freedom was allowed in religion to Christians of all denominations.… Sufferers of every persuasion were alike protected by the laws. Fenwick contrasted Maryland Catholics with Massachusetts Puritans and Virginia Episcopalians who, rather than being the intellectual ancestors of the US Constitution’s First Amendment free exercise and disestablishment clauses, he described as religious persecutors.¹⁷ Rev. John McCaffrey, the president of Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmittsburg, Maryland, went further than Fenwick, labeling his state’s Catholic founders the Pilgrims of Maryland and sanctifying the memory of their ships, the Ark and the Dove, in much the same way that descendants of the Puritans memorialized the Mayflower. According to McCaffrey, who was speaking at his college in 1842, the Maryland