Plan B Forum

100 years ago, Americans talked about Catholics the way they talk about Muslims today

About a century ago, millions of Americans feared that members of a religious group were amassing an arsenal of weapons for a secret, preplanned takeover of the United States.

The feared religious group was not Muslims. It was, as the Los Angeles Times's Matt Pearce wrote in a great new piece on Wednesday, Catholics:

• Hatred had become big business in southwestern Missouri, and its name was The Menace, a weekly anti-Catholic newspaper whose headlines screamed to readers around the nation about predatory priests, women enslaved in convents and a dangerous Roman Catholic plot to take over America.…
  
  America's deep and widespread skepticism of Catholics is a faint memory in today's post-Sept. 11 world. But as some conservative politicians call for limits on Muslim immigration and raise questions about whether Muslims are more loyal to Islamic law than American law, the story of Aurora's long-ago newspaper is a reminder of a long history of American religious intolerance.
  
  Today, there are calls for federal surveillance of mosques in the name of preventing terrorist attacks; a century ago, it was state laws that allowed the warrantless search of convents and churches in search of supposedly trapped women and purported secret Catholic weapons caches.

This may seem absurd today, but there was a real fear among Protestant Americans back then that Catholics were planning to take over the country. As Pearce reported, the fears led to serious violence: Lynch mobs killed Catholic Italians, arsonists burned down Catholic churches, and there were anti-Catholic riots. It was a similar sentiment to the kind of Islamophobia today that's led many Americans to call for shutting down mosques, forcing Muslims to register in a national database, and even banning Islam.

The point of the comparison is not to say that the US faces the same problems today as it did a century ago, or that the discrimination toward Catholics back then and Muslims today is exactly the same. But when looking back at the history of the US, it's easy to see a pattern of consistent xenophobia and fears of outsiders.

Xenophobia makes a regular appearance in US history

In response to terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, much of the conversation has focused on refugees and immigration. This conversation has been tinged with xenophobia toward Muslims — with many Republican presidential candidates going as far as saying the US should ban Muslim refugees, people from Muslim-dominated countries, or Muslims altogether.

But this sort of rhetoric is not new to the US. As the Pew Research Center found, Americans have generally opposed taking in refugees even as they went through abhorrent, well-known crises. (Vox's Dara Lind noted that America even rejected some Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.)

Xenophobia has fueled other policies, too. In the late 19th century, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to stop the flow of Chinese laborers into the US. During World War II, the US put Japanese Americans in internment camps after the country declared war on Japan. Throughout the war on drugs, lawmakers have regularly tapped into xenophobic sentiments to prohibit certain drugs — such as when San Francisco banned opium smoking that was perceived as popular among Chinese immigrants, and when prohibitionists built up opposition to marijuana by fearmongering about its use among Mexican immigrants.

Throughout all of these periods and policies, the public and lawmakers cited genuine policy interests: national security, keeping American laborers competitive in the job market, and preventing drug abuse. But underlying such policy stances were obvious signs that Americans were simply scared of foreigners who weren't like them.

By and large, we tend to recognize the underlying xenophobia today, and that the policies it produced were wrong, bigoted, and self-destructive.

As Islamophobia rears its ugly head in the US again, it's worth thinking about how we now look back on those moments of American history — and whether we're making the same mistakes again.

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/9/9880942/is ... -catholics

BTW...I actually personally remember some of this anti-Catholic xenophobia bubbling back to the surface in 1960, when I was a freshman in high school, and John F. Kennedy was running for POTUS.

Why yes, that's true. OTOH, those U.S. Roman churchfolk weren't all that much into bomb attacks on random targets

2015.12.12 (Homs, Syria) - Sixteen 'infidels' are pulled limb from limb by two ISIS suicide blasts at a hospital.
2015.12.11 (Kolofata, Cameroon) - Islamists strap a 13-year-old girl with explosives and send her into a house, killing at least eleven inside.
2015.12.11 (Kabul, Afghanistan) - Two Spanish guards are among seven killed when a Taliban suicide bomber detonates at their embassy.
2015.12.10 (Kamuya, Nigeria) - Religion of Peace activists bicycle into a village and massacre fourteen civilians, some by decapitation.
2015.12.10 (Mosul, Iraq) - A female teacher is dragged before a caliphate firing squad and executed.
2015.12.10 (Tal Tamr, Syria) - Three suicide car bombers take out scores bystanders at a hospital and market square.

The KKK were just as anti-catholic as they were anti-black and anti-semitic. Curious then, that it was only the Jews who supported civil rights for blacks.


yrs,
rubato

100 years ago, Americans talked about Catholics the way they talk about Muslims today

etc, etc,

Yeah, that's an interesting historical pseudo-comparison...(pretty much what one would expect from vox.com)

But, uh, let me ask this question...

How many of those Catholics, a hundred years ago, ( or a hundred and fifty years ago) attacked other innocent Americans while yelling "Hail The Pope"!"...?

I'm going to put my bet on the answer to that question being "none"...

Curious then, that it was only the Jews who supported civil rights for blacks.

Congratulations rube, you've done it again...

You haven't posted around here much lately, but nevertheless in just a very few words, you've firmly re-established your complete bigotry and ignorance cred....

Oh, I thought he was criticizing atheists...

MajGenl.Meade wrote:Oh, I thought he was criticizing atheists...

Oh Heaven forfend...absolutely not...

Atheists saved the world from Christian barbarism...

yrs,

rubeheadupmyasso

Still, you do know that 2 of the 3 lads killed in the Freedom Rides were Jewish - and the other one was a local black kid? There was a lot of support in NY and elsewhere for CORE amongst youth from Jewish households

I'm waiting for rube to once again favor us with his annual hatin' on Santa post...telling us once again about how terrible it is to give one's children a few years of belief in a charming, exciting, and wondrous myth...

And what awful parents one must be for perpetrating such a disgusting charade...


It's just not the Christmas season around here without that predictable bit of toxic misanthropy issuing forth from our resident toxic misanthrope....

Lord Jim wrote:Yeah, that's an interesting historical pseudo-comparison...(pretty much what one would expect from vox.com)

The point of the comparison is not to say that the US faces the same problems today as it did a century ago, or that the discrimination toward Catholics back then and Muslims today is exactly the same. But when looking back at the history of the US, it's easy to see a pattern of consistent xenophobia and fears of outsiders.

Oh, and BTW...the original article--clearly credited, quoted, and linked to by vox.com--was from the Los Angeles Times.

I AM SANTACUS!!!

Econo, the USA is not alone in that. All peoples in all parts of the world have their periods, even very, very long periods, even today, during which "the outsider" is regarded with suspicion. It's one of the things that "community" does - look out for each other against outside threats, real, perceived or imaginary. Neighborhood watch committees profile like crazy - anyone not from the neighborhood is suspect.

I get somewhat sick of this continual "we are the worst" breast-beating that some people indulge in. It's as bad as the "we are the best" crap.

Either way, Texas does it better and worse

I get somewhat sick of this continual "we are the worst" breast-beating that some people indulge in. It's as bad as the "we are the best" crap.

me two

dales wrote:

I get somewhat sick of this continual "we are the worst" breast-beating that some people indulge in. It's as bad as the "we are the best" crap.

me two

Where do you see that?

I'd rather expect the best rather than the worst (or even the "well, we're bad but others are worse") of our nation. We've learned to be better than most nations in welcoming the stranger, the outsider, the tired/poor/homeless huddled masses yearning to breathe free (AFAIK, we're the only nation with a monumental statue--a New Colossus!--commemorating that ideal).

Certainly xenophobia is not uniquely American (er...USAsian? USAmerican?). If anything, the minimization of xenophopia may be uniquely North American (deliberately including Canada, there!); we do try over and over to eliminate it but there's always the inevitable relapse. I do think it's useful to keep in mind the pointless and sometimes shameful past episodes of xenophobia, in order to keep the subject, and our ideals, in perspective.

it s only a hunk of metal some frog made for us, unrequested.

it has nothing to do with our law or constitution, as people are so quick to point out when I mention our Declaration or our Preamble... even tho they do...

wesw wrote:it s only a hunk of metal some frog made for us, unrequested.

And the U.S. flag is only a piece of cloth.

Ah, but the poem was written by an American Socialist Jew (born in New York City into a large Sephardic Jewish family which had settled in New York long before the American Revolution). The pedestal which holds the statue and the poem was financed by 120,000 small donations (80% of the donations were for less than $1) from people all over the U.S. (Additional trivia: Emma Lazarus' close friend Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was inspired by "The New Colossus" to found the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.)




P.S. And you won't ever see *ME* denigrating the value of the Declaration of Independence or the Preamble to the Constitution.

yeah, I read that, but I refrained..., oh well...

yer makin' my case....

a frog and a communist....

the lime and the coconut....

geez, and sue and guin and I had just reached a kind of détente too..., that s a shame....

I blame the Chinese...

or the terrorists...

nah..., it s the establishment...

vote trump!

Speaking of the Catholic menace--the first Catholic to run for President was Al Smith, who ran in 1920. He was considered a real contender, but he lost to Warren G. Harding. It is said that as soon as he got the results, he sent a one word Cablegram to the Pope: "Unpack."

People forget that Maryland was founded by Catholics. The second Lord Baltimore, Cecilius Calvert, who sent the first settlers there, was Catholic, and his colony permitted freedom of religion for Catholics. Maryland was owned by the second through the sixth Barons Baltimore (the Sixth baron had no legitimate children, so the title died with him). The flag of the state of Maryland shows the arms of the Barons Baltimore, and the Baltimore Oriole is so named because its colors are those of the barons.

I was going to post that story; it's a good one