Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

In the late nineteenth century, political cartoonist Thomas Nast regularly lambasted Irish Catholic immigrants as drunkards and barbarians unfit for citizenship; signs that read, “No Irish Need Apply,” lined shop windows in Boston and New York and dotted the classified pages in many of the country’s leading papers; statesmen warned about the dangers of admitting Catholics from Southern and Eastern Europe onto American shores, for fear that they were something less than civilized (and less than white). It wasn’t unusual for respectable politicians to wonder aloud whether Catholics could be loyal to their adoptive country and to the Pope.

What a difference a few decades can make. Today, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these Catholic immigrants occupy the halls of Congress, governors’ mansions and state legislatures. One of them currently resides in the Naval Observatory. And when the head of the Catholic Church comes to visit, he will be warmly welcomed and hailed by politicians of all parties and all faiths.


Indeed, America has traveled a long road since the days when many native-born Americans regarded Catholic immigrants as an ideological and racial threat.

But it’s also a fitting time to recall how things once were. Pope Francis arrives amid a political season rife with violent rhetoric directed at millions of Catholic immigrants and their American-born children. Much like an earlier generation of newcomers who faced a toxic blend of racial and nativist backlash, today’s Catholic immigrants have found themselves the unwitting subject of an intense debate about the very meaning of what it means to be an American.



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Between 1840 and 1924, over 30 million European immigrants relocated to the United States. Many were Catholic, hailing from as far North as Ireland, as far South as Sicily and as far east as Poland. In a country established principally by English-speaking Protestants who traced their ancestry to Northern Europe, these newcomers often met with hostility and derision. From the burning of Boston’s Charlestown Convent in 1834 and the rise of the single-issue, anti-immigrant Know Nothing party in the 1850s (an organization that, for a brief moment, controlled dozens of congressional seats and enjoyed extensive influence within the political anti-slavery coalition)—to the No Irish Need Apply signs of the 1890s—immigrant Catholics faced the brunt of Protestant America’s rage.

In the era of mass immigration, anti-Catholicism often found expression around the issue of education. Rightly fearing that native Protestants wished to inject public schools with an evangelical and sectarian spirit, Catholics created a sweeping, parallel system.

Nowhere was this truer than in New York, where Bishop John Hughes, a fiercely proud native of Ireland’s County Tyrone with a genius for organization, built a massive web of primary and secondary schools that introduced generations of children to the rhythms and orthodoxies of Catholic life. “Dagger John” earned the enmity of the city’s Protestant elite and the adoration of his countrymen when, in the midst of nativist violence in the early 1850s, he armed the parishioners of Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and publicly warned that New York would burn “into a second Moscow” if its Catholic population were harmed. By the late 19th century, he and his counterparts in other cities essentially withdrew from the public education system and created a vibrant subculture that existed in parallel. The Catholic school system, which remained a powerful force well into the 1960s, traced its roots to the politics of 19th-century backlash against immigration.

Naturally, they expected (though almost never received) a fair share of tax money to support this system. As a reaction to this trend, in the 1880s, over 30 states adopted so-called Blaine Amendments (named after U.S. Senator James G. Blaine) barring any state funds for these separatist schools. The issue remained a point of contention well into the mid-20th century.

It was never easy to separate the racial and religious components of anti-Catholic sentiment. Until the 1920s, America’s doors were open to European immigrants, as long as they qualified under a statute passed in 1790 that reserved naturalized citizenship for “free white persons.” Whether Southern and Eastern Europeans of darker hue—or all Catholics, whose presumed loyalty to Rome rendered them suspect candidates for democratic citizenship—qualified under the statute, seemed very much an open question.

As the immigrant landscape grew more complicated in the late 19th century, social scientists and politicians began attempting to classify Americans with greater precision. Whitness, it now seemed, was a matter of degree, and Europeans fell into categories like “Anglo Saxon,” “Celtic,” “Hebrew” and “Asiatic.” Importantly, this move toward racial classification drew heavily on the emerging fields of modern biology and chemistry. In this sense, modern science and social science were contemporaries—and close cousins—of modern racism.

In 1911 the famous Dillingham Commission on Immigration attempted to reduce the mass of new immigrant groups to a simple five-tier racial scheme (Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malay and American). But it wasn’t always so simple. In Volume 9 of its lengthy report, otherwise entitled A Dictionary of Races or Peoples, the commission backtracked and acknowledged that the U.S. Bureau of Immigration “recognizes 45 races or peoples among immigrants coming to the United States, and of these 36 are indigenous to Europe.”

Critically, many scientists and social scientists (the Dillingham Commission experts among them) agreed that race was determinative of behavior, intelligence and physical endowment, and that racial groups could be arranged in a hierarchical fashion. The Dictionary of Races or Peoples, for instance, characterized Bohemians as “the most advanced of all” Slavic race groups. The Southern Italian, on the other hand, it deemed “an individualist having little adaptability to highly organized society.”

Representative of this popular school of thought was the Station for the Study of Evolution, a think tank established by the Carnegie Institution in 1904 at Cold Spring Harbor (Long Island). The institute’s director, Charles Davenport, made it his life’s work to document the relationship between race and comportment. “The idea of a ‘melting pot,’” he wrote, “belongs to a pre-Mendelian age. Now we recognize that characters are inherited as units and do not readily break up.” From arguing that race was both determinative and qualitative, it was no great leap of logic to suggest some racial groups were better fit for citizenship than others.

Senator Ira Hersey of Maine lamented, “We have thrown open wide our gates and through them have come other alien races, of alien blood, from Asia and southern Europe … with their strange and pagan rites, their babble of tongues.” (When he spoke of “pagan rites,” Hersey almost assuredly meant both the Latin Mass and the Hebrew service.) Congressman Earl Michener of Michigan only echoed conventional wisdom when he argued, “the Nordic [race] laid the foundations of society in America,” and to compromise Nordic genius was pure race suicide.

Notably, Catholic immigrants rarely qualified as racially fit.



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In the early 20th century, the backlash against Catholic and Jewish immigrants found its most powerful expression in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization born in the 1860s in violent opposition to the emancipation of black slaves.

Unlike the original Klan, the new organization sought a national profile and identified several groups—not just African Americans—as alien threats to family and nation: Catholics, Jews, immigrants, “new women,” bootleggers, criminals and—of course—black Americans. In effect, the Klan became the sworn enemy of all persons who threatened, whether by heritage, race or behavior, the imagined ideals that had so recently held a nation of small, Protestant communities together. Above all, the Klan touted “one hundred percent Americanism” as an antidote to the social and cultural decay that seemed to be rotting away the core of American values.

Klan members often infused their reflexive anti-Catholicism with a voyeuristic interest in the Catholic Church’s rumored (and wholly fictitious) violations of sexual propriety. Klan literature chronicled the delight that nuns took in whipping young girls. It claimed that members of the Knights of Columbus vowed to “burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive [non-Catholic] heretics; rip open the stomachs and wombs of their women and crash their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.” Popular Klan lecturers like Helen Jackson, an “escaped nun,” regaled listeners with tales of carnal relationships between priests and nuns and forced abortions within convent walls.

For a few years in the early 1920s, the Invisible Empire (as the Klan was also known) was a strong political force, controlling political affairs in Indiana, Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado and exerting tremendous influence in many other states.

Notably, the Klan was not just an agent of rural backlash. As Catholics quickly came to forge demographic majorities and supermajorities in American cities, the organization thrived in many urban areas as an agent of resistance to rising Catholic political influence.

Nationally, these machinations came to a head in 1924, when thousands of delegates and alternates to the Democratic National Convention met at New York City’s Madison Square Garden to agree on a campaign platform and a presidential ticket. This was no small feat for a party rife with divisions between its rural and urban constituencies, its Northeast-Midwest alliance and its Southern-Western wing, and its “wet” (opposed to prohibition) and “dry” (for prohibition) contingents. Even without the Klan there to stir things up, the convention would likely have been a raucous affair.

Coming into the convention, the two leading candidates for the presidential nomination were New York Governor Al Smith, an Irish Catholic and notorious “wet,” and William Gibbs McAdoo, a handsome and courtly Southern transplant to California whose credentials included tenure as Treasury secretary under his father-in-law, Woodrow Wilson, and a successful career in business and law.

McAdoo was no bigot. He had spoken out for pluralism and tolerance in a high-profile address at the University of Southern California the year before. His two chief managers at the convention were a Jew and a Catholic. Neither was McAdoo a perfect representative of rural and small-town America. He had spent most of his adult life navigating the corridors of power on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C.

Yet he quickly became the preferred candidate of a loose coalition that included delegates from the rural South and West, supporters of prohibition and the Klan. The pairing of the first two groups made sense: rural Southerners and Westerners tended to be staunch evangelical Protestants and to endorse the prohibition enacted by the Eighteenth Amendment. These delegates had plenty of cause to oppose the nomination of Al Smith, the archetypal big-city “wet.” But many of McAdoo’s supporters were in a bind over the Klan. They clearly opposed the organization and were embarrassed by its support for their candidate. At the same time, they feared angering and alienating the considerable minority of delegates who belonged to the Invisible Empire. McAdoo’s forces resolved to avoid the Klan issue altogether—to take no position for or against the organization—in order to repair a breech in their ranks and improve their chances of attaining the magic two-thirds vote needed to garner the nomination. The strategy quickly unraveled.

Whether for political gain (to weaken McAdoo’s candidacy) or out of personal motivation (many ethnic delegates honestly believed the Klan was a dangerous and un-American institution), Smith’s supporters initiated a hard-fought battle to include a denunciation of the Klan in the party’s 1924 platform. The proposed language, which singled out the organization for special censure, delved the already fractious party into an all-out civil war. For five days, delegates broke into angry jeers and accusations. First fights broke out within and between different state delegations. Smith’s New York partisans shouted “Ku Klux McAdoo!” to which the California delegation taunted their rivals with cries of, “Booze! Booze! Booze!” Anti-Klan forces threatened to bolt the party and support the Republican nominee in November.

In the final measure, the convention approved a so-called compromise measure that denounced intolerance generally, but avoided specific mention of the Klan. The vote was 543 3/20 in favor, 542 7/20 against. And the fun had only just started. For the next two weeks, the divided convention went through a record 103 ballots before it could agree on a presidential nominee. Madison Square Garden was packed with delegates, alternates, party apparatchiks, reporters and hangers-on. In these days before air conditioning was widely available, the Garden boiled over with summer heat and political intensity. Delegates from each side dripped with sweat as they went about the business or ripping the party to shreds. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans was on site to oversee personally the mayhem his movement had caused.

Finally, on the 103rd ballot, exasperated and desperate, the convention agreed on a compromise candidate, a lackluster federal judge named John W. Davis. Davis was a blank slate. He had no particular credentials recommending him for high office, and yet his low profile also made him an unobjectionable candidate to most of the war-weary Democrats still gathered inside the Garden. Exhausted and divided, the delegates left New York with the party in shambles. Davis went onto a stinging defeat at the hands of incumbent President Calvin Coolidge.

Four years later, with the Klan in a downward death spiral due largely to its own corruption and hypocrisy, Smith captured his party’s nomination. But millions of Protestant Democrats defected to the Republicans, resulting in another crushing defeat for the Democratic Party.



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A lot changed between 1924, when Al Smith faced down the taunts and jeers of anti-Catholic Klan activists, and 1960, when John F. Kennedy won election as the country’s first Catholic president.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the experience of vanquishing the Nazi race state delegitimized bigotry in nearly all of its popular incarnations. During World War II, Americans became avid viewers of “platoon” films in which multi-ethnic military squads—almost always including a Jew, an Italian, an Irishman and a white Protestant (though almost never an African American)—worked together in common cause against Nazi fascism. By 1945, rhetoric that had been acceptable and normative in the political debates of the 1920s was simply no longer acceptable.

Ironically, immigration restriction itself also helped to temper the fires of anti-Catholicism. In 1924, America closed the door to mass immigration. With the steady in-stream of newcomers choked off, immigrant communities seemed gradually more acculturated to American norms and values, particularly as the American-born children of immigrants—yesteryear’s “anchor babies” —grew up, learned to speak English without foreign accents, and fought and died in World War II.

In the 1950s, American politicians embraced a soft form of religiosity as a bulwark against Soviet and communist aggression. Dwight Eisenhower famously remarked that “our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is” —a sentiment that underscored Cold War political consensus. Whereas in the 1930s, the demagogic “radio priest” Charles Coughlin deepened the chasm between Catholics and non-Catholics, by the 1950s, a new broadcast prelate, Fulton Sheen, earned the warm admiration of Jews and Protestants for his centrism.

In 1960, it was widely anticipated that JFK would face high obstacles to attaining the presidency. In truth, his Catholicism proved a low obstacle that he overcame with unexpected ease.



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Francis’ visit comes at a time when immigration rates are at their highest since 1920. Today, over 13 percent of all Americans are immigrants, and at least another 5 percent are the American-born children of immigrants. Many of these newcomers (though certainly not all) are Catholics from Spanish-speaking countries. Like their Irish, German and Italian predecessors, they have quickly become workers, taxpayers, homeowners and voters. As was the case not long ago, their motives and fitness for citizenship have come under fire in the political theater.

The pope’s visit is a welcomed reminder that in an earlier era, political anti-Catholicism was tangled in a complex knot with racial and ethnic resentment. It was always impossible to separate one from the other. In this sense, to welcome Pope Francis to the United States without acknowledging the current backlash against Catholic immigrants is to embark on a perilous and untenable tightrope walk into history.