Catholicism's role in American history appears infrequently in U.S. textbooks. When Catholics are mentioned, they usually appear as helpless victims of discrimination. Historians of American Catholicism have lobbied their colleagues in the profession to revise this academic landscape. Where are the positive stories of Catholics who contributed significantly to the grand narrative of North America and the United States? While the title Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas suggests that University of Central Arkansas Professor Kenneth Barnes provides yet another account of Protestant resistance to Catholics, the major contributions of this book are the tales of active Catholics within U.S. history.

Historians will need to read with care to find these stories, however, as Kenneth Barnes makes religious prejudice the central theme in this book. Barnes's research objectives derived from personal experience in a rural Arkansas Baptist household. During the 1960s, Barnes recognized his parents' deep-seated hostility toward the Catholic Church. At that time, his high-school-aged older brother converted to Catholicism. Barnes characterized the “angry religious debates” that ensued as “the only traumatic event of my childhood” (ix). In seven chapters, he recounts some of the historical roots of the anti-Catholicism he witnessed at home.

Barnes's postlude suggests another motive: the author traces some continuity between twentieth-century Arkansas anti-Catholicism and that state's twenty-first-century prejudices against African Americans. In both cases, Barnes focuses attention on the “white male Protestant imagination” (201). During the early twentieth century, the power elites listed in the book's subtitle viewed Catholics as a threat to their cultural and political dominance. Other than African Americans, whom Barnes wrote about in an earlier book, Catholics were the greatest danger to this WASP establishment.

To illustrate this continuity, Barnes draws comparison between the fear of African American and Catholic sexuality. Chapter 2, “Sex and the Sisters, 1913–1915,” discusses the Arkansas General Assembly's creation of a Convent Inspection Bill. Barnes's story describes the various factions who lobbied for this bill. These opportunists gained attention, and often profit, by exploiting the antebellum myth that Catholic priests allegedly imprisoned young girls as sexual slaves within church institutions. The proposed legislation would require county sheriffs or grand juries to inspect religious institutions upon request by a judge or petition of twenty or more citizens. In 1915, the bill became a law, although Barnes recounts that at least one sheriff complied with great reluctance about intruding upon a church organization. Prohibition and World War I soon distracted the public (but both of these issues provided peddlers of anti-Catholicism with new reasons to cast aspersions on Catholics).

Rather than present Catholics as mere victims, however, Barnes recounts how Catholic clerics responded in different ways to this bill. For example, a German-born Catholic priest, Father Boniface Spanke, resisted the anti-Catholic slanders that propagandists exploited. Having refitted a railway carriage with horse-drawn carriage wheels, Father Boniface used this “Gospel Wagon” to travel rural Arkansas. The priest's French-made “magic lantern” audio/visual stereopticon slide projector animated his lectures. Father Boniface's courage matched his histrionics as he declared himself willing to serve jail time by resisting any law that mandated police inspections of convents. This priest also challenged a popular anti-Catholic speaker to a public debate that became raucous.

But soon after this contentious confrontation, Boniface's superior, Little Rock Bishop John Morris, directed the priest to end his mobile ministry. From Bishop Morris' perspective, the public dialog appeared to enflame rather than diminish anti-Catholicism. Barnes's commentary that “Bishop John Morris perhaps wisely called off Boniface” (201) requires more explanation. Without some more detail about the demographic, social, and political vulnerability of Catholics in Arkansas, the reader cannot accurately assess this assertion. Was the Klan an imminent threat to Catholic communities and churches?

Based on Barnes's account, these two alternatives—surrender or fight—did not accurately characterize the Catholic choice. Catholic vigilance by Knights of Columbus members persuaded the owner of a Little Rock storeroom to change his mind after he had rented this space to an anti-Catholic lecturer. Although the speaker eventually found a Protestant church to deliver his message, the Knights had taken a public stand in their defense.

While this review focused on the pre–World War I portion of Barnes's book, readers will find that Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas also provides well-researched analysis of the 1928 and 1960 campaigns of Catholic candidates for president. Although several Arkansas ministers and Klansmen sought to gain notoriety and profit from anti-Catholic propagandizing, U.S. Senator Joseph Robinson from Arkansas spoke publicly against this prejudice. The Democratic Party's 1928 Catholic presidential nominee Al Smith rewarded Robinson's courage by selecting him as a running mate.

Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas provides valuable research for historians of the Catholic Church in the United States. On the one hand, the book does not significantly alter previous accounts of Protestant prejudice. Lawmakers employed anti-Catholic attitudes to limit immigration and force Catholics to assimilate on the terms of the Protestant majority. The 1915 Convent Inspection law built upon the same discrimination that led Congress to restrict immigration from Catholic countries during the 1920s. But Barnes recasts this familiar motif by bringing to life individuals such as Father Boniface, who demonstrated that some Catholics prepared to use civil disobedience in the face of a repressive majority. Scholars of Catholicism should build upon Barnes's discovery to seek out more information about this priest and others who prove that Catholics participated in U.S. history as more than mere victims.