CAHENSLY AND THE CONGRESS

The position that so incensed the Canadians of New England owed to developments in the German American community. From 1883 on, German immigrants to the Midwest advocated for their own national church, which would protect their traditional rites and minister in their own language. They too were animated by a cultural ideology developed in the old country. Their concern was given voice by Peter Paul Cahensly, the general secretary of a benevolent society for emigrants who feared that his countrymen, in leaving Europe, might lose their ties to the Church. On their behalf, Cahensly argued for greater autonomy from Irish episcopal authority by providing German immigrants with bishops of their own nationality. Led by John Ireland, the archbishop of St. Paul, the American hierarchy stood firmly against the “balkanizing” doctrine of “Cahenslyism.” From 1885 to 1891, the two camps struggled to persuade the Holy See. To one German American prelate, “[d]enationalization is demoralization … A foreigner who loses his nationality is in danger of losing his faith and character.” Without proper shepherding, from a German bishop for instance, immigrants would find in the United States a land of religious “perdition,” quickly succumbing to materialism associated with the Protestant faith. Ireland, for his part, feared that petty national animosities might divide the American Church and encourage nativist discourse. Worse, accession to German American requests might introduce Prussian political influence in this country. The hierarchy was eager to quiet the rampant anti-Catholicism that grew out of associations with foreign power and foreign cultures.Footnote ¹¹

The struggle culminated in April 1891 with an audience Cahensly obtained from Pope Leo XIII. In a memorial signed by Germans, Austrians, Belgians, and Italians, Cahensly and others argued that Church structures should follow nationality, lest good Catholics swell Protestant ranks. The controversy continued that summer, adding fuel to nativist bigotry. In response, numerous American bishops supported Ireland's position. “Loyalty to God's Church and to our country,” Cardinal James Gibbons, the archbishop of Baltimore, preached in August. “We owe our allegiance to one country, and that country is America. We must be in harmony with our political institutions.” Adroitly, the pope opted not to intervene, thus rejecting “Cahenslyism” and sparing American bishops continued attacks from inside the Church and from nativists. By the end of 1892, the controversy was largely dead.Footnote ¹² But, if quelled, it left traces. From this debate over accommodation and a decade's worth of nativist aggression, many in the hierarchy grew intolerant of ethnic particularities and proved less likely to concede anything to Catholic minorities. Further, in response to the German American Catholic annual congresses, initiated in Chicago in 1887, the bishops laid the basis for an alternate, all-American Catholic Congress—to be held in Baltimore, in November 1889. Tellingly, the lead episcopal advisor to the planning committee would be John Ireland.

In Baltimore, the lay delegates prefaced their resolutions by repudiating “the assertion that we need to lay aside any of our devotedness to our church to be true Americans; the insinuation that we need to abate any of our love for our country's principles and institutions to be faithful Catholics.” Their professions of patriotism went on, as the Congress neared the end of its second day. At last came the resolution that stirred the French Canadian community:

Confrontation ensued. French Canadians of a nationalistic temperament were not caught unprepared for that battle. They refined and reinvigorated a language of protest that had animated the activist elements of the community for several generations. From the Congress of 1889 on, the Franco American press and community leaders, zealous and confident, pressed their claims on the bishops of New England. In the process, they gave evidence of a larger North American struggle for the recognition of their cultural claims.

PROVIDENCE AND “PANSAXONISM”

Historians typically identify two camps in episcopal reactions to Cahenslyism. On one side lay the Americanizers or “liberals,” among them Archbishops Ireland and Gibbons. Against them stood a nameless group of “conservatives” who feared that the Church might cede too much to Protestant American culture and instead accepted concessions to Catholic minorities. This latter camp would have included most of New England's hierarchy, including its senior-most bishop, Louis DeGoesbriand of Burlington. Along with colleagues John J. Williams of Boston and James A. Healy of Portland, Maine, DeGoesbriand had accommodated incoming Canadians in the prior two decades by establishing national parishes, seeking Canadian priests to serve south of the border, and supporting organizing efforts in immigrant communities.Footnote ¹⁴ There was logic, not simply sympathy, to this accommodating spirit. “Let us provide the Canadians with Canadian missionaries,” Burlington's bishop explained, “and you will be surprised by the liberality of these poor immigrants.” When granted the right pastors, they generously funded the construction of new churches and provided for their spiritual guides. But by no means would they pay pew rents or even stand to hear an English sermon, nor would they stay in a congregation whose pastor did not understand them. In such cases, the French Canadians of New England would likely desert their faith entirely.Footnote ¹⁵

Supported by this narrative of looming apostasy, events in the Franco American community paralleled those in the German American one. In a high-profile struggle in Fall River, Massachusetts, from 1884 to 1886, Canadian parishioners mobilized against a series of English-speaking curates appointed by the Irish-born Bishop Thomas Hendricken of Providence.Footnote ¹⁶ Hendricken's reluctance to compromise impressed upon the immigrant population the need to have not only priests, but also bishops, chancellors, and vicars general who might protect their cultural interests. Agitation for the cause reached new heights when statistics from one Father Hamon revealed that a majority of Catholics in the dioceses of Ogdensburg, Burlington, Manchester, and Portland were Canadian. French-language newspapers Le Travailleur (Worcester, MA.), L'Indépendant (Fall River), and Le National (Plattsburgh, NY) joined hands for “the rights of the majority.” The cause seemed invigorated in December 1888 with news of a letter from Pope Leo XIII to American bishops. The Holy See entrusted to the latter Italian prelates to provide spiritual care to Italian immigrants in their own language and according to their traditions. A correspondent for Le Travailleur complained that even German Americans in the Midwest could count on bishops of their own national origin while Canadian migrants could not. But little could be done, as the nationalists put it, with the prejudiced Irish religious establishment in the East, which seemed to refuse Canadians positions of authority and thus control over their “national” destiny. The only word of caution came to argue against public demonstrations, lest scandal afflict American Catholicism as it had during the Fall River controversy.Footnote ¹⁷

DeGoesbriand, offended by the press's allegations, seized the opportunity presented by the pope's letter and took the extraordinary step of answering the critics directly. In early 1889, the bishop accepted that “God, in his Providence, wishes that nations be evangelized at least generally by apostles who speak their language, who know their habits and dispositions; that nations be evangelized by their own priests.” More than that, the French of Canada had a providential part to play in the conversion of America. On the basis of over thirty years' service as a bishop and the experience of numerous meetings of New England's episcopacy, DeGoesbriand sought to dispel the sense that he, his peers, and their advisors were animated by prejudice. What better evidence could there be of their good intentions than the ninety-nine national parishes established for French Canadians from 1870 to 1886? The bishops never refused the services of Canadian priests, but only with difficulty were they able to obtain from their Canadian brethren a number proportionate to the growing immigrant community in the United States.Footnote ¹⁸

The Franco American press, unconvinced by DeGoesbriand, was ready for the Catholic Congress that convened that very fall, even if the resolution on national societies was unexpected. Yet the Congress did force a reevaluation of the threat posed to French Canadian national life in the United States. It seemed that the American Church's highest authorities were less interested in preserving some Hibernian hegemony than in suppressing the ethnic flair of local Catholic societies and parishes.Footnote ¹⁹ In its rush to Americanize, Catholicism might now ruin itself on the shoals of materialism or Protestantism. This dire prospect promised Canadian migrants and immigrants, still attached to their traditional customs and protected by their distinct language, a prominent role in manning the walls of the faith. The language of a providential mission, seen in DeGoesbriand's address, was expanded.Footnote ²⁰

At the end of the year, L'Indépendant condemned the resolutions of the Congress and pointed to a consensus within the French-language press. Leading the charge, it first denounced the French Canadian representatives in Baltimore as unpatriotic for failing to defend “national” societies under the auspices of American Catholicism. Another newspaper—its editor equally vexed—answered that delegates were not given the opportunity to speak. The proceedings had been orchestrated to the last letter: only those invited as speakers ahead of time were allowed to voice ideas and the chair of the session on national societies refused to take proposals or motions. Vindicated, L'Indépendant relayed the information.Footnote ²¹ In spite of the numerous precedents set in New England, most clearly seen in national parishes, the press now depicted the American Church as thoroughly hostile to the concerns of immigrants. Hostile, too, to its own mission: surely this policy of Americanization would alienate minority groups, which would only serve the cause of Protestantism. Worcester's Le Travailleur pushed further. “This will not keep us from continuing the struggle which we have undertaken against the proponents of assimilation,” it declared, “should we even, to succeed, break with those Catholics who, under the pretext of making the religion less odious to Protestants, impose upon it dangerous concessions.”Footnote ²²

Though genuinely and strongly felt, the anger was unlikely to produce schism. In the pages of Le Travailleur, Emile H. Tardivel opined that the Baltimore Congress had usurped the authority of the Holy See, “the only one we recognize.” The Franco American press was quick to enroll Pope Leo XIII in its own ranks. At the end of November, word was received that the Holy Father had appointed an apostolic vicar to provide for the spiritual care of Italians immigrating to the United States. The editor of L'Avenir national declared,

From North Dakota, a French Canadian missionary expressed similar views. Everywhere, J. F. Malo explained, the Church adapted to local customs and ministered in the local language. So it had been since the apostles had received the gift of tongues. Like the Great Republic itself, Catholicism embodied “diversity in Unity.” With such certainty, the Canadians of New England and beyond accepted the fight brought to them by Church authorities. That militancy can only be fully understood through the lens of the broader North American context, that is, by including the developments in Canada that molded the expatriates' cultural consciousness.Footnote ²⁴

Zéphirin Desmeules's L'Echo de l'Ouest, published in Archbishop Ireland's diocese, asked, “What would have become of the Catholic faith in Canada if not for our schools and national societies?”Footnote ²⁵ The image was that of an embattled minority struggling across its North American homeland, yet one providentially destined to prevail—adding, in the process, to the numbers and glory of the Church. American Catholic leaders struggled with one crisis in the last two decades of the century, the answer to which ultimately was Americanization. French Canadians on both sides of the border lived through a crisis of their own. In the face of an aggressive pansaxonisme, broadly designating the alleged efforts of English Canadians and Irish Americans to extinguish their “race,” they circled the wagons.

Coinciding with the fight in Fall River, the Riel affair had clarified the terms of the debate. In 1885, Louis Riel, a politician of Catholic conviction and substantial French Canadian heritage, led métis communities in Western Canada in rebellion over land claims. Defeated, Riel was sent to trial and executed that year. French Canada and its expatriates interpreted the verdict and sentence as political decisions that signaled a forthcoming abrogation of minority rights—and as an attempt to undermine their distinct existence outside of Quebec. In fact, the biennial Franco American convention, gathered in Rutland, Vermont, in 1886, devoted greater attention to the Riel affair than to the events in Fall River. In Canada, with the subsequent question of Catholic education in Manitoba, the handling of Riel's rebellion produced a political shift that would contribute, in time, to the election of post-Confederation Canada's first francophone prime minister. Meanwhile, in Quebec, Honoré Mercier led discontented members of the provincial assembly into a new Parti national, which took office in 1887. Far from confining his activities to his home province, Mercier became a spokesman for French rights throughout North America.Footnote ²⁶

Then at the height of his popularity, Mercier was cordially received in Baltimore, in 1889, and was given the opportunity to speak to delegates of the Catholic Congress. His address, part panegyric to Bishop John Carroll, part ode to American liberty, concluded with French Canadians' demand for justice in Canada and the value of Catholic education.Footnote ²⁷ One paper, Le Monde, attacked Mercier for failing to speak up for Franco American rights while in Baltimore. From Le Travailleur came a defense of sorts. The premier had been invited, not formally delegated; moreover, he had no authority to speak on behalf of the French Canadians of New England.Footnote ²⁸ Mercier was not the only Quebecker at the Congress: also present were Cardinal Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau from Quebec City and Bishop Louis-François Laflèche of Trois-Rivières, both of whom played a ceremonial role. These figures escaped allegations, for though Quebec's hierarchy sought to prevent outmigration, they had nevertheless demanded better spiritual care on the migrants' behalf. And that advocacy continued. One abbé Villeneuve lent support to Cahensly's European allies in 1890, and two years later, Bishop Antoine Racine of Sherbrooke, Quebec, brought the case of New England's French Canadians to the attention of the Sacred Congregation for Propagation of the Faith. Much as German Americans reached across the ocean for clergymen willing to press their case, the French Canadians who assumed the worst on the part of New England's episcopacy depended on Canadian bishops.Footnote ²⁹

By making such a strong case for national societies, the Franco American press conceded that American society still threatened immigrants with cultural and religious assimilation.Footnote ³⁰ For its part, a Canadian outlet, La Vérité, found it “beyond all doubt that the French Canadians who, when immigrating to the United States, lose their national character, their language, their traditions, and their customs, also lose their faith.”Footnote ³¹ Yet, if the Great Republic proved a hostile environment, as Quebec's elites also unceasingly repeated, this appeared to be of limited concern to those wishing to escape a life of hardship along the St. Lawrence River. In Montreal, in 1890, a correspondent for the New York Times found a large contingent of farming families from the Lower St. Lawrence now heading to Worcester, Massachusetts. “They said that they were tired of the poverty of farm life, and that many of their friends had gone to the United States before them and done well,” the correspondent explained. “They wanted to do better, and felt that there was no chance for them in Quebec.”Footnote ³² A year past the Lay Catholic Congress, the warnings of Quebec's religious and political establishment appeared to fall on deaf ears as the southward flow of French Canadian families seemed unlikely to relent.

SUSTAINING THE CULTURAL CRUSADE

In turbulent Fall River, where L'Indépendant continued to agitate public sentiment, the battle was joined by the Ligue des Patriotes. Behind this “national” organization stood Hugo Dubuque, an immigrant whose Patriote father had risen up in the rebellion of 1837. Dubuque had cofounded not only the Ligue but the newspaper that became L'Indépendant, which persistently weighed on the Riel affair. He had taken an active part in the defense of Fall River's national parish system through the prior decade. On the first Sunday of January 1890, the Ligue approved a defiant resolution as a direct challenge to the Catholic Congress and, seemingly, to the hierarchy. Dubuque added that French Canadians, when naturalized in the United States, should not be deemed lesser citizens because they spoke the language of Lafayette just as they did that of Washington.Footnote ³³ The new decade opened with battle lines drawn.

On the face of it, the Congress's spirit seemed unlikely to triumph in such a city as Fall River, where, by 1888, French Canadians could claim ten organizations of a national character, three national parishes, two newspapers, and a population of approximately 15,000. Indeed, in the major industrial centers, established precedents in religious and cultural affairs would prove difficult to undo. The Congress of 1889 fanned the flames of nationalistic discourse in cities, already aroused by the Riel affair and religious controversy in Fall River, but it proved most decisive in laying the basis for confrontation in small towns across New England, where cultural gains were more tentative.Footnote ³⁴ In Danielson, Connecticut, antagonized by Irish victories over them at the polls, the Canadians demanded a curate of their nationality and greater access to French-language education. Inspired by earlier events in Fall River, they went on strike: they deserted the parish until their demands were met. Encouraged by Dubuque, fiery statements in L'Indépendant, and a sense that the Holy See would find them in the right, the Canadians of Danielson continued to agitate even after the appointment of a European French prelate—until, that is, the anticlimactic failure of one of their emissaries in Rome. In the wake of numerous labor walkouts, in which natives of Quebec participated alongside other textile workers, French Canadians called for a national parish in North Brookfield, Massachusetts. These “separatists” quickly lost their appeal in Rome; tellingly, the prefect of the Propaganda sent his verdict not to the aggrieved, but to their bishop. Amidst the disruptions, episcopal authority was upheld. Supported by the Holy See, bishops jealously guarded their authority—and thus the integrity of the New England Church—over any friendly feelings they might have for Canadians.Footnote ³⁵

Historian Robert Rumilly and the many scholars of Franco American life who followed him did not acknowledge bishops as active and central figures in the course charted by the late-century Church. Rumilly credited French Canadians with the establishment of four national parishes in 1892 and an additional four the following year, but without mentioning the bishops. Such has been the dominant pattern in Franco American studies since those contentious last decades of the nineteenth century: insufficient attention to the dilemma faced by bishops, who contended with minorities' push for accommodation, the problem of nativism, and concern for the institutional interest of American Catholicism. Bishops walked a difficult tightrope, having few options in their struggle against anti-Catholicism and the spiritual protection of the flock entrusted to them. More recently, Yves Roby has helpfully explained that the Holy See had opted to leave such issues to the discretion of local bishops when, in 1889, it supported Bishop Healy of Portland in his defense of one Father Gorman, in Brunswick, Maine, against French Canadians' allegations. There was still an opportunity to effect change at the diocesan level at this time when personality and affinity seemed to matter so much, even if the safeguard of institutional interests indicated otherwise and Archbishop Ireland's voice rang the loudest. French Canadian agitation continued.Footnote ³⁶

Nowhere, it seemed to many French Canadians, were they free from the hostile “pansaxonism” of the day. The most prominent press outlets gave voice to it. Heeding economic imperatives, the New York Times argued that “immigration is a source of strength to the country in so far as it is capable of being readily assimilated and Americanized.” Naturalization alone was not the answer, for the Times, for citizens of Canadians descent would vote as a bloc and force legislation based on “their special and separate interests.” These immigrants ought to be good workers and good citizens—and do so by conforming to the dominant spirit.Footnote ³⁷ Several years later, the paper narrowed its analysis to the interweaving of faith and nationality. “Quebec is transferred bodily to Manchester and Fall River and Lowell,” the Times lamented. Following Congregational Minister Egbert Smyth, it explained that “this migration of these people is part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith.” Only legislation would effectively bring under control a group that “takes possession of the centres of population and has the power to crowd out the less productive race in the struggle for the survival of the fittest.” English-language education, strongly advocated by Archbishop Ireland, ought to be mandatory.Footnote ³⁸

Nationalistic French Canadian elements and those Americans most fearful of foreign influence lobbed allegations using similar terms. The matter was chiefly one of cultural imperialism, carried out not through force of arms but by sheer numbers. It is by demographic means that minority groups would prevail culturally and politically in the ethnic ghetto, in the city machine, within the diocese, and soon on a larger scale. In the parlance of the day, this was a contest of races subscribing to very different values. Both sides suspected that the existing American population might not hold back the tide from Canada and Europe, causing one group anxiety over the future of republican institutions and eliciting from the other cries of unjust persecution. Indeed, among Canadians, this was a case of numbers. That their influence within the Church did not reflect their population in New England's northern dioceses, for instance, reflected the pansaxonist assimilationism of old-stock Americans and their Irish Catholic allies. It meant that they were losing their Eglise-nation and thus control over their larger destiny. Yet, their numbers could fortify the immigrants even as they appealed to a higher power abroad. Sustained by a healthy birth rate, the expansion of Quebec's outmigration would strengthen the position of French Canadians' language, customs, and faith in the United States (and in British Canada) and thus fulfill Bishop DeGoesbriand's vision for his coreligionists.Footnote ³⁹

Time and time again the immigrants and first-generation Americans responded to assert their commitment to the Great Republic, but always refusing to yield on culture. When a Minnesota delegate to the Catholic Congress challenged its stance on national societies, Le Travailleur exposed its critic's inconsistency: those so quick to denounce national (ethnic) organizations as hostile to the spirit of the Church were the same who promoted an American nationalism. If patriotism was a Catholic virtue, as both sides of the debate argued, the question then was whether an American national sentiment should overcome all others—not to mention what that sentiment actually entailed. The editor of Le Travailleur reiterated Canadians' respect for the Constitution and obedience to the laws of their adoptive country.Footnote ⁴⁰ After a decade's worth of perplexities, primarily experienced in religion, the arguments remained largely the same as community leaders gathered in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1901.

Those community leaders were among those displaced by the saturation of liberal professions in Quebec and drawn to the United States by the prospect of financial security. Like the working-class men and women who labored as factory operatives, the professionals expected their exile to be temporary: soon they would resume their career paths in Quebec. Demographic data from Fall River suggests that though some leaders advocated naturalization from the Rutland Convention onward, professionals' time in American cities and towns was indeed transitory—or so it was until the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, well before the Springfield Convention, these professionals were conscious of their elite status among the immigrants and their upward mobility. They also remained preoccupied with political developments in Canada. They carried with them, in their ideological arsenal, struggles lifted directly from the Canadian context. In New England, that elite consciousness and a sense of cultural responsibility brought them into conflict with bishops and priests, including, sometimes, French Canadian prelates.Footnote ⁴¹

In Springfield, the expatriate professionals took the lead in the denunciation of “saxonizing” cultural imperialism. Physician, attorneys, editors, and secretaries and presidents of local sociétés Saint-Jean-Baptiste were the prime movers of the cause. Each was quick to emphasize that bishops and priests were not the Church, and that the laity ought to be heard in their communities and have the right to appeal directly to Rome. Dr. Omer LaRue of Putnam, Connecticut, but ten miles from Danielson, opened the discussion on “our religious situation.” Though the struggles of the prior fifteen years indicated otherwise, LaRue insisted that this was still a matter of numbers and that Rome, when well-informed, would rule in French Canadians' favor. F. X. Belleau, an attorney from Lewiston, Maine, weighed in similarly; so did the editor and former papal zouave Joseph Henri Guillet, who, twelve years after the fact, reiterated the pope's care and concern for emigrating Italians.Footnote ⁴²

In strong language, several speakers identified the Irish, in a rush to Americanize themselves and Catholicism, as the enemy. In no way would they find partners in the French Canadian community. There was also, however, something in the way of positive cultural affirmation. In this, J. C. Hogue's remarks, in his capacity as president of New York's société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, are telling. Immigration from Canada was unlike that from Europe, Hogue explained:

With geographical distance, other groups also distanced themselves from ancient customs. But “between the Province of Quebec, true homeland of French Canadians, and the United States where we labor, there is no separation.” Nothing ought to prevent the immigrants, or migrants, from celebrating their culture and speaking their language as well as they did north of the imaginary line, Hogue added.Footnote ⁴⁴ That might be done without sacrificing dedication to the host country, notwithstanding other groups' failed attempt, in previous decades, to show the complementarity of their customs and republican institutions. Whereas the Irish, in response to the “crisis of the eighties,” answered critics by condemning apparent ethnic clannishness, Canadians drew an important distinction between culture and political allegiance. They could be true to inherited customs and still be loyal Americans. At this time when societies no less than individuals were subjected to the survival of the fittest, journalist Charles-Edouard Boivin of Fall River indicated, his countrymen would not falter: they would not succumb to the pressures of Anglo-Saxon domination.Footnote ⁴⁵

From 1892 onward, French Canadian leaders in New England found, at best, lukewarm support for their battles among Canadians back home. Occasional allies, like Premier Mercier and the bishops in Quebec, were primarily concerned with depopulation. They believed that this supposed conquest of the continent was undermining French Canadians' power and influence in Canada, thus slowly dissolving their identity in the culture of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. In addition, for Quebec historian Lionel Groulx and his followers, the primary vocation of the French of North America was agricultural, far removed from the factories of New England. Against them stood the Jesuit writer Edouard Hamon and editor Jules-Paul Tardivel, both at one time residents of the United States, who answered the rhetoric of pansaxonism with their own manifest destiny: unbroken, in time French Canadians would fulfill their religious destiny and reunite in a new North American state untouched by concessions to Protestants.Footnote ⁴⁶

The turn of the century marked a turning point in other regards. First, it marked the passing of a generation within the Catholic episcopacy. In New England, the conservatives who had done most to accommodate French Canadians—rather than Yankee opinion—passed away: DeGoesbriand in 1899, Healy of Portland in 1900, Bishop Denis Bradley of Manchester in 1903, and Williams of Boston in 1907.Footnote ⁴⁷ Second, the Canadians were again subjected to a readjustment of opinion among Irish Americans. “Beginning in the late 1890s and carrying through to the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century,” Timothy Meagher explains, Irish nationalists in Worcester, as elsewhere, “marched every March 17 to trumpet the rise of a new spirit of ethnic chauvinism and belligerence.” The Irish would, with renewed fervor, see themselves as shepherds of a “pan-ethnic Catholic community,” leading “all nationalities into a new group … Catholic and patriotically American.” Now deprived of their unacknowledged ecclesiastical protectors, French Canadians continued to fight for Church leaders and Church structures that would prove welcoming to their cultural aspirations.Footnote ⁴⁸

On the surface, the Springfield Convention did not announce a new approach to the ongoing religious controversy. The middle-class community leaders did not admit to failure both locally and in Rome; nor did they mourn the recent passing of two of their episcopal friends. It appeared as though Franco Americans would remain attached to their heritage for decades to come. Yet, just as ordinary Canadians had disregarded the advice of their leaders in Quebec and dared to brave the threat of assimilation in the United States, opinion was also imperceptibly shifting within the budding Franco American community at the turn of the century—sometimes in ways that undercut the transnational cultural and ideological project of nationalists. The naturalization movement, strongly endorsed at the Springfield Convention, gained steam and, as immigrants formed families on American soil, the proportion of citizens grew. National parishes and their schools remained, but bilingualism became the norm and the immigrants' Franco American children absorbed mass culture.Footnote ⁴⁹ When aggrieved, they no longer expected a new Cardinal Taschereau or Bishop Racine to advocate their cause, but instead a George Albert Guertin—the first Franco American bishop, appointed to the diocese of Manchester in 1907. Additionally, the spirit of providential imperialism succumbed to the distinct realities imposed by the international border. In 1917, when the United States entered the First World War and the Canadian government introduced conscription, the Franco American press proved cold to nationalists in Quebec who resisted the duty to serve. Simultaneously, it celebrated the opportunity to serve Old Glory, the banner of freedom, by way of which Franco Americans might assert their patriotic bona fides.Footnote ⁵⁰ Rumilly put the shift in clear terms. As things stood at the time of the war,

Groulx's writings provided further evidence that the larger North American francophonie was fracturing. He portrayed the United States as “a graveyard for the [French Canadian] race.” The transnational cultural project of the late nineteenth century broke off as Quebec's elites, led by Groulx, began the process of refocusing nationalist discourse within the Canadian polity exclusively.Footnote ⁵²

LEGACY

The case of French Canadian immigration, often overlooked in immigration studies, suggests greater attention to an Americanizing Catholic Church, which proved one of the most powerful agents of acculturation in the late nineteenth-century United States. Much has been made of Catholicism's continued struggle for acceptance in the aftermath of the Second World War, yet, as ethnic sources from the prior century reveal, expatriated French Canadians complained that the Church was already too Americanized at the time of the Spanish-American War.Footnote ⁵³ “[T]he Christian nationalism exhibited by the majority of Catholics reveals just how ‘American’ the church had become by the end of the nineteenth century,” writes Benjamin Wetzel. “If not all Catholics were political and cultural ‘Americanists,’ many nevertheless imbibed American political and cultural assumptions that included ideas such as national providentialism and Manifest Destiny.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The lead proponent of this Catholic Americanism, Wetzel explains, was none other than the lead episcopal architect of the Lay Congress of 1889, John Ireland.

To the Italians, Germans, and French Canadians who deplored the intense Americanizing process of the Catholic Church, the whole affair proved to be vicious. As immigration increased, the Church became less tolerant of national or ethnic particularities. Bishops like Ireland sought to appease native-born Protestant opinion by proving the Church's patriotic credentials. As scholars consider more thoroughly the Church's position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through immigrant eyes, they are likely to find not an Irish Church desperately isolated from the American mainstream, but a zealously American Church eager to blend national differences into a single “Catholic body of the English tongue,” as John Gilmary Shea put it.

Like other cultural communities in similar circumstances, the French Canadian case is enlightening.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a nationalist press molded by events in ancestral lands seized on the Catholic Congress and other high-profile controversies to defend some circling of the wagons, without which their people might lose their most cherished traditions and, in time, their faith.Footnote ⁵⁶ Regrettably, in their analysis of ethnic newspapers and in their study of this belligerence, legitimate or not, scholars of ethnicity have paid insufficient attention to the institutional interests that guided the episcopacy. That Catholicism in the United States was Americanizing is clear; that there were regional variations and continued interest in the concerns of minority groups among some bishops is equally so. Research in diocesan archives—and into the transitory period of the late nineteenth century—will bring much-needed nuance to the lofty but disparaging claims of the Franco American press and shed light on actual episcopal practice at the local level. It will, indeed, complicate a story that too easily casts bishops as villains or foils. In short, scholarship on immigration and acculturation in the Gilded Age will profit by including voices that challenge the narrative of inevitable Americanization. Among these are Germans and French Canadians who utilized cultural baggage inherited from their home countries to challenge an apparent American kulturkampf or pansaxonisme and the “conservative” bishops who dissented from John Ireland's hopes.

In addition, this should encourage Canadian and American scholars to historicize the nationalism that migrants and immigrants brought to the United States and to explore how it evolved in its new context. The French Canadian case can be particularly helpful here, for it demands perhaps more than any other group a transnational perspective. Theirs is a North American story that invites comparison to Mexican migrants in the southwestern United States, both of these communities proving more problematic to Americanizing institutions, including the Catholic Church, by virtue of constant, immediate, and direct exchanges with the homeland. French Canadians' self-definition as an Eglise-nation with providential designs challenged political boundaries. They deserve greater study, however, for the fuel that their national cultural aspirations added to American Catholicism's liberal-conservative controversy and for the questions they raised as to the manner in which the Church would be American.Footnote ⁵⁷