Leaving Medieval: Uses and Abuses of History in American Nativism

Students of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are familiar with its history of anti-Catholic nativism, from its place in the jingoism of the late 1890s to its revival around fears of radical subversions in the 1910s; from the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan to the 1928 Presidential campaign. Classic works by John Higham and David Brion Davis have analyzed the anti-Catholic imaginaries of nativists who, jealous of their freedoms and liberty, saw themselves besieged by popish plots and Jesuit schemes. These conspiracies are typically analyzed alongside other prejudicial fantasies: antisemitism, anti-Blackness, anti-Mormonism, anti-Masonry, and anti-radicalism, among others. Doing so has allowed historians, most famously Richard Hofstadter in his exposition of the “paranoid style,” to distill the essence of conspiracist thinking. However, such an approach has also smoothed over what makes different forms of prejudice distinct; indeed, they seem interchangeable.

This paper investigates the anti-Catholic imaginary of the early twentieth century through the analysis of recurring tropes and themes unique to anti-Catholic literature; in particular, the repetition of the idea of the “medieval” as a pejorative. Looking at nativist newspapers, pamphlets, cartoons, sermons, and books reveals that anti-Catholic conspiracies reflected a particular fear about the return of the “medieval” as a means of robbing Americans of their hard-won liberties—a return to a ”dark ages” of feudal serfdom under the thrall of the Pope. The Vatican, through his Roman agents (typically immigrants) operating in the United States, plotted to turn back the clock and return Americans to a subjugated state under the despotic rule of the Pope. Though typically viewed as backward and reactionary conservatives, nativists juxtaposition of America with the “medieval” Catholic Church was a means of claiming modernity for progressive Protestantism.