In Lakeville Crucifix, local historian Geoffrey Brown illuminates a quaint religious controversy in northwestern Connecticut during the 1880s, and he could have done even more. The conflict occurred in the “furnace village” of Lakeville, part of the thriving iron-producing town of Salisbury, then dominated by the Barnum & Richardson Company, employer of hundreds of Irish Roman Catholic workers in the manufacture of railroad wheels (17). The dispute began in 1882, when Irish-born priest Henry Lynch erected a twelve-foot cross featuring an imported “near-life-size” corpus of the crucified Jesus on the front lawn of Lakeville's newly-established St. Mary's Church (155). Offended by this conspicuous display, a delegation of Protestant Lakeville shopkeepers, led by former-Nativist Republican ex-governor Alexander Holley, went to ask Lynch to remove it—they had no objection to putting it inside—but Lynch refused. Insulted by the request, Catholic members of St. Mary's organized a boycott of Lakeville stores, and the shopkeepers in retaliation demanded that local industrialist William Barnum fire his Catholic laborers. Furthermore, wealthy Protestant wives threatened to dismiss Irish domestic workers, and local Protestant officials balked at accommodating a Catholic convent dedication. These tit-for-tat events captured local and national newspaper attention, but the crucifix remained outdoors until 1887.
Although published privately by the Between the Lakes Group, a local historical society for which Brown is the principal partner, Lakeville Crucifix provides an astute account of this story that utilizes the scholarly conventions of footnotes, index, and references to authoritative secondary sources—notably those by Ed Kirby on the Salisbury iron district; Ann Taves, Thomas Bokenkotter, and Jay Dolan on Roman Catholicism in America; Kevin Kenny on the Irish; and John Higham on Nativism—if not a thorough historiographical review. A map would have been most helpful. The book opens with a background discussion of “trends” that precipitated the Lakeville event, including Salisbury's Puritan heritage (although the local Protestant majority was quite diverse by the 1880s), heavy Irish Catholic immigration into the area, and pre-Civil War Nativist and Know-Nothing activity. The book then proceeds with a year-by-year chronology of events and biographies starting in 1517, working down to the crucifix controversy of the 1880s, where it adopts nearly a documentary approach, block quoting and reprinting a wide range of newspaper articles (some occupying four pages of text) mainly from the New York Times, Hartford Courant, and Connecticut Western News, letting the newspapers tell the story while the author provides interpretation.
As such, the Lakeville Crucifix advances the discussion of late nineteenth-century Protestant-Catholic religious strife in America. It contends that changes within Catholicism itself, not just anti-Catholic prejudice, contributed to the 1880s Lakeville incident. Drawing on Taves and Kenny, the book argues that authoritarian church leadership and “devotionalism” in religious practice developing under Pope Pius IX and the First Vatican Council heavily influenced Catholicism in America, especially in the Irish immigrant church. An exemplar of these influences, Lakeville's Father Lynch likely erected the crucifix publicly to cultivate piety among his flock and affirm “Catholic distinctiveness” in a Protestant-majority community (38–41).
Drawing on Higham, moreover, Brown maintains that Salisbury's history of Nativism built upon local Puritan heritage—one that avoided ostentatious religious displays while favoring Congregationalism's more democratic church structure—to produce a strongly negative Protestant reaction to the out-of-doors crucifix. Thirty years before, he explains, the Salisbury iron district had been a springboard for Connecticut's Nativists and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party, and key figures from that movement, like ex-governor Holley, joined the shopkeepers’ delegation to Father Lynch in 1883 to demand the crucifix's public removal.
Brown's extensive journalistic documentation illustrates the local history of this story in great detail. News reports exposed local political rivalries, revealed tensions between Protestant merchants and the Irish working class, disclosed local school board politics (that ironically elected Father Lynch to be a visitor overseeing Protestant schools), and described wealthy Protestant women's vow to secure “colored servant girls” to replace Irish domestic help (234). Newspapers also fully covered the dedication of Lakeville's Catholic convent, while the Republican-leaning New York Times used the incident to denounce industrialist William Barnum, a nationally prominent Democratic ex-Senator.
Extending to The Nation, Catholic Review, and southern, western, and even European papers, the book's wide-ranging journalistic documentation also reflects on Protestant-Catholic opinion more generally in the 1880s. Lakeville Crucifix uncovers one story about a nearly identical crucifix protest that occurred simultaneously in Dundee, Scotland. Regarding America, the book determines that many papers carried the Lakeville story merely as “sensational filler,” although it finds a few that condemned the event as an exposition of bigotry and others that sympathized with Protestant sensibilities (196). Mostly, newspapers come across in the book as viewing the Lakeville incident as a kind of oddity and overwrought affair, hardly the occasion for religious warfare.
Brown acknowledges that lack of vandalism and violence distinguished the Lakeville event from pre-Civil War episodes of Nativism, but his book's local focus and concentration on newspaper coverage stops short of exploring historical differences or Lakeville's relationship to the larger ethno-religious context of the 1880s. Evidence presented in the book suggests that Nativism's earlier religious nationalism—the fear that Catholic immigrants endangered the republic—was wholly absent in Lakeville; it also suggests that economic Nativism of earlier times—the worry of Protestant workmen that Catholic immigrants would depress wages—seems to have given way to other rivalries. In the wake of the Hartford Archdiocese's expansion, Father Lynch's aggressive institution-building of church, convent, and parochial school, along with the local Irish Catholic working class's increasing political clout, apparently threatened the ascendancy of Lakeville's Protestant small business class, the core of opposition to the publicly displayed crucifix. Moreover, the Lakeville incident seems passé as an instance of Nativism, given Nativists’ growing anti-radicalism (instead of anti-Catholicism) and new concerns about Asian and southeastern European immigrants. The Lakeville Crucifix thus deserves credit for highlighting this event for our attention, but the incident's full significance remains to be worked out in regard to its distinctive socio-political dynamics and its relationship to Nativism's shifting currents nationwide in the late 1800s.
