Anti-Catholic prejudice in the contemporary United States has recently attracted both scholarly and popular attention. Those who point to real or imagined incidents of anti-Catholicism today, however, would do well to read Justin Nordstrom's Danger on the Doorstep. By showing just how tightly anti-Catholicism was woven into the American fabric in the early twentieth century, Nordstrom's impressively researched and insightful study makes these modern complaints seem trivial or even delusional by comparison.

Nordstrom opens by situating Danger on the Doorstep within the historiographical literature on American nativism. Significantly, he distinguishes his work from the long-reigning definitive study of the subject, John Higham's Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955). Though he acknowledges his considerable debt to Higham, Nordstrom also refines several of his assumptions. Higham emphasized nativism's ethnic dimension, arguing that the intensity of anti-Roman sentiment depended upon the extent to which Catholics were perceived as “foreign.” Nordstrom, on the other hand, stresses the religious underpinnings of nativism, suggesting that xenophobes in the Progressive era targeted certain immigrants because of their Catholic identity. Throughout this period, he argues, nativists objected to popery on ideological rather than theological grounds, claiming that the hierarchical, oligarchic, and politicized clerical structure of the Roman Church posed an imminent threat to America's traditional ideals.

Anti-Catholic publications flourished between 1910 and 1919, reaching at their height a collective weekly circulation of two million readers. In focusing on this decade, Nordstrom wisely sidesteps the elusive and perpetually debated question of what exactly constituted a Progressive reformer. Broadly defined, his “progressives” are people who sought to harness “the power of information to enact change in communities around them” (55). The editors of Watson's Magazine, The Peril, The Menace, and other anti-Romanist newspapers and magazines clearly fit this definition: by publicizing the Catholic menace, they hoped to neutralize it.

Nordstrom's analysis of ten of these anti-Romanist publications reveals striking similarities in content, rhetoric, and tone. Anti-Catholics in the Progressive era certainly relied on familiar tropes, recounting tales of sinister convent kidnappings and revealing details of nefarious Jesuit plots to overthrow the nation. But they were also distinct from their anti-Romanist forerunners in that they tapped into three of the Progressive era's most prominent themes. The first of these was the rise of patriotism and public memory. Citing recent scholarship on nationalism, Nordstrom observes that its ideological forms in the early twentieth century depended heavily on the glorification of the nation's past. He shows that U.S. Catholics were engaged in their own glorification project, rewriting American history to highlight their own contribution to the national narrative, perhaps most obviously through their appropriation of Christopher Columbus. Anti-Catholics interpreted their efforts in this regard as doubly duplicitous. Not only did they accuse Catholics of evincing an insincere patriotism, but they also charged them with misrepresenting facts. This latter was high crime indeed in an era characterized by the belief that social problems could be ameliorated by the collection and analysis of accurate information and its dissemination to the public.

Anti-Romanist publications also capitalized on concerns about encroaching modernity. They were all based in rural areas with small Catholic populations, another key distinction between Progressive-era anti-Catholicism and its earlier manifestations. Nordstrom interprets the rise of rural anti-Catholicism as small-town America's belated response to its own marginalization. As power increasingly shifted to large cities, rural editors could claim a unique advantage over their urban counterparts. Because their regions remained uncorrupted by large Catholic populations and the tyranny of an anti-American hierarchy, these editors maintained, their publications alone were free to print the “truth” about Catholic power.

Nordstrom identifies fluctuating masculine gender conventions as the third theme undergirding anti-Catholic literature in the Progressive era. By insisting that Catholics targeted the weakest members of American society—the weak, the elderly, women, and children—anti-Catholics sought to galvanize Protestant men into defending their country from the corrosive effects of Romanism. Parochial schools, perennial targets of anti-Catholics, were assailed as “training camps for Popish perversion of the coming generation” (112). But anti-Catholic writers also warned about the abuse of women in confessionals, the enslavement of children in Catholic orphanages, and the brainwashing of the sick and elderly in Catholic hospitals. Unfortunately, Nordstrom's superb analysis of manhood and childhood comes at the expense of any substantial discussion of women during this period. Contending that women figured only symbolically into anti-Catholic crusades, he pays little attention to the pronounced anti-Catholicism of many woman suffragists, whose cause also gained considerable momentum in the decade under consideration and whose anti-Catholic rhetoric presumably added fuel to the fire.

Nordstrom also examines how Catholics resisted efforts to demonize them. Apologists for the Catholic faith had plenty to occupy them in the 1910s, as they combed Watson's, The Menace, and other newspapers and magazines for distortions and inaccuracies. They published rebuttals in their own publications, which themselves were substantial in number by this period, and in some cases pursued legal action against the offenders. But Catholics' efforts in their own defense were ultimately less responsible for the abrupt demise of anti-Catholic print culture after 1919 than was the onset of World War I. The conflict not only increased production and distribution costs, putting more financial strain on these publications, but it also presented Americans with an enemy that represented a more immediate and formidable threat than that alleged by anti-Catholics. Above all, the war offered Catholics an opportunity to prove their patriotism, which they did by enlisting in large numbers and by showing almost unqualified enthusiasm for the war effort.

Respite was only temporary, as anti-Catholicism was revived in the 1920s with the second Ku Klux Klan. Nordstrom is careful to show, however, that the anti-Catholicism of the KKK, rooted in claims to ethnic and racial supremacy, was less ideologically based than its Progressive-era predecessor. He makes a similar distinction between Progressive-era anti-Catholicism and the brand popularized by Paul Blanshard and others in the mid-twentieth century, which was intellectual rather than ideological.

Nordstrom includes twenty political cartoons that illustrated prevailing anti-Catholic themes in an appendix. These images are worth the proverbial thousand words, though they would have been more effective had they been interspersed throughout the text. Still, his fine book should go a long way toward demonstrating just how pervasive a force anti-Catholicism has been in American life, especially during this formative period in U.S. history.