Cossen has written an ambitious book signaling significant generational and historiographical shifts. In his hands, Isaac Hecker (1819–1888) and “nationalist Catholics” (5) are no longer losers in what historian Thomas T. McAvoy called in his 1957 book of the same name, the “Great Crisis in American Catholic History,” haunted by the aroma of “heresy.” No longer “Americanists” in some esoteric Catholic sense having to do with end-of-nineteenth-century intramural controversies over schools, ethnic languages, and beer, Cossen moves them to the very center of contested American religious nationalism in the Gilded Age and into the twentieth century.

If a dynamic tension between separation and assimilation has characterized the narration of the history of Catholics in the US, Cossen pushes back hard on the separatist emphasis typical of most histories of American Catholics in the interwar period. Instead of as outsiders in the US, Cossen portrays Catholics as “an empowered and influential political and cultural force” (4). This is a daring historiographical move that perhaps could only have taken place within the last decade or two after the demographic decline of the Protestant Mainline and the end of clerical dominance over the telling of the history of Catholics in the U.S. In Cossen’s hands, “Catholic” becomes “a complex identity” that embraces roles as diverse as “beleaguered minorities,” “true Americans,” and “Progressive reformers” (10).

Cossen’s narrative covers the period from President Ulysses S. Grant’s post-Civil War 1868 Peace Policy to the aftermath of Al Smith’s loss in the 1928 presidential election. He makes his case in five chapters. Chapter 1, “Reconstructing the Catholic West,” extends Reconstruction to Indigenous missions where Protestants and Catholics battle for influence on government policy. It focuses on the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions and its schools, and the role of westward expansion in the “whitening and Americanizing of the entire Catholic Church” (21). Cossen reads the Church’s complicity in the “cultural conquest of Native Americans” as “laying the intellectual groundwork for US Catholic imperialism” fully expressed after the Spanish–American War and US colonization of the Philippines (48). The latter will be the subject of Chapter 3.

A relatively brief Chapter 2 functions as a “thematic interlude” (12) between Chapter 1 and Chapter 3. Chapter 2 treats Catholic participation in the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in 1492. Such world fairs “allowed middle and upper class, white Americans to make sense of and justify imperialism, colonialism, industrialization, new technologies, and the rapid advance of capitalism” (11). Their participation in the world’s fair through the Columbian Catholic Congress and the World’s Parliament of Religions was both a “public debut for Catholic intellectuals as American intellectuals” and an “exercise in American Catholic nation-building” (50).

Chapter 3 presents Catholics “arguing for their place in American imperialism” and their participation in the “shared racial ideology” (13) behind Philippine colonization. Here, Cossen emphasizes the racial Anglo-Saxonism (70–71) in Hecker’s The Church and the Age (1888). He concludes that “nationalist American Catholics” purchased their community’s own belongings “at the expense of their Filipino fellow Catholics” (92). Continuing in this vein, Chapter 4, “Catholic Gatekeepers,” is set in the context of the waves of new migrants between 1880 and 1910 from Italy, Poland, and Eastern Europe, and argues that Catholic nationalists often bought into “prevailing theories of white racial superiority” (15), exhibiting nativism toward fellow Catholics who were new immigrants (110).

Chapter 5, “Toward Tri-Faith America,” treats the rise of anti-Catholicism in the Progressive Era around the election of 1928. Cossen finds in Catholic negotiation of this situation “a preview of the forging of a tri-faith America” (15) characteristic of the mid-twentieth century (139). Contributing to Smith’s loss was the failure of nationalist Catholics who were prohibitionists to support him. “Smith’s run and its aftermath signaled the increasingly vocal, public presence of Catholics” in the US (142). Despite Pope Leo XIII’s censure of theological Americanism in 1899, “the more nationalistic and patriotic form of Catholic Americanism” continued to grow after 1899. While they may have lost “the smaller theological battle,” Hecker and John Ireland and other nationalist Catholics “were having the last laugh in the larger political and social spheres …” (116).

Given the central role of Hecker’s monthly journal Catholic World in the book, it is perhaps necessary to point out that it was not a “newspaper,” as it is most frequently referred to in the text, but a monthly “periodical” (46, 64). Supporting the direction of Cossen’s argument, Hecker most likely modeled it on the Atlantic Monthly.

The question that hovered in the air as I read this book was how many of Cossen’s Catholic nationalists there really were. That they were anywhere close to a majority is difficult to imagine. Cossen raises the question of numbers at various points. Numbers, however, he argues, “are not as important as real-world impact” (7). The argument, therefore, depends on Cossen’s ability to convey the impact that nationalist Catholics had on US nation-building and national policy and culture in the period under discussion. In this regard, Making Catholic America is exceptionally well-researched, in terms of archives and primary and secondary sources. It is well-argued and well-narrated. Readers will have to judge how successful Cossen has been in making his case and accomplishing a major shift of perspective in US history. In the end, how other historians receive it will determine whether Making Catholic America is the beginning of a lasting historiographical breakthrough that makes Catholics central actors in the development of American nationalism or whether it is more like an exercise in historiographical sleight of hand. My money is on the former. In any case, all historians concerned with religious nationalism in the US need to read Making Catholic America.