December 9, 2015 By Matt Pearce
The
year was 1915, and the strange new newspaper in Aurora, Mo., had grown
so quickly in its first four years that rail officials had to build
extra tracks for all the paper and printing materials suddenly rolling
into town.
The Aurora post office, according to one account, more
than tripled its staff to handle mail to and from the publication's
astonishing 1.5 million weekly subscribers — a circulation that dwarfed
the largest daily newspapers in New York and Chicago.
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.
"The cowardice of a Roman thug has no parallel in
either the human or animal kingdom," the newspaper frothed in one 1914
edition, calling for "men with red blood in their veins" to defend women
and children from Catholics. "If we are compelled to live in this
county with Romanists, as our weak-kneed Protestant critics say we are,
the Romanists will have to be taught their place in society."
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.
"I
see huge parallels," said Sharon Davies, executive director of the
Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State
University. "I think we haven't seen anything quite like this since the
beginning of the 20th century, when we passed laws that permitted the
Catholics to be treated in ways that no other religious group was
treated."
Anti-Catholicism stretches back to the nation's colonial
times, when some states barred Catholics from holding office, and
continued through the mid-1800s, which saw the Know-Nothing party's
campaign against Catholic politicians. Lynch mobs killed Italian
immigrants and arsonists burned down Catholic churches.
Perhaps no
publication captures the animus toward Catholicism at the start of the
20th century as vividly as the Menace, launched in an old opera house in
Aurora in 1911, when the city's population was only a little over
4,000.
The Menace wasn't the country's first anti-Catholic
newspaper, but it quickly became one of the biggest, eventually selling
anti-Catholic books and launching a lecture series. Its editor, the Rev.
Theodore C. Walker, claimed its target was not rank-and-file Catholics
but the Catholic Church itself.
"It begins a kind of tidal wave, a
journalistic explosion that sweeps the entire country," said Justin
Nordstrom, an associate professor of history at Penn State Hazleton who
has studied the Menace. "There are people paying attention to this
newspaper — urban settings, rural settings — all across the country."
On
its banner, the Menace sometimes bore the logo of skull and crossbones
wearing a papal hat, as well as a drawing of a public school, which is
described as "the antidote for papal poison."
"OPEN
ROME'S PRISON HOUSES IN AMERICA!" blared one headline for a December
1911 story that claimed the church was murdering the babies of nuns and
throwing the infant corpses into a pit.
In the same issue, the
Menace urged its readers to vote against all Catholic political
candidates regardless of party or platform, describing the church as
"the most dangerous power that threatens our government today." It added
ominously, "A defeat at the polls today is far better than a defeat at
arms tomorrow."
"There was a widespread belief that Catholics were
waiting for the day the pope would put into motion a campaign to make
the country Catholic, and in the meantime amassing [stockpiles] of
weaponry that would be used when that day came," Davies said.
Not everyone bought what the Menace was selling — which was a year's subscription for 50 cents.
"It
is a menace to decency — a menace to peace and order — a menace to
tolerance — a menace to true Americanism — a menace to the spirit of
fraternity," Chicago journalist Charles A. Windle wrote in one broadside
against the weekly. "It breeds bitterness and strife between neighbors
and converts life-long friends into enemies. Its columns reek with
slander. Every page is a seething cesspool, in which writhe and wriggle
hell-born lies."
Catholic leaders also mobilized against the
Menace, clipping out accounts asserting lewd behavior by priests to
prompt federal prosecutors to indict the paper's editors on suspicion of
mailing obscene materials, according to Nordstrom's book on the
anti-Catholic press, "Danger on the Doorstep."
When the Menace won
the federal obscenity trial in Joplin, Mo., in 1916, one sympathizer
wrote that Aurora celebrated, with "an immense crowd comprising more
than half the population gathered at the depot, headed by the band, and
when the defendants stepped from the train they were royally welcomed."
The Menace described its home base as "The World's Headquarters for
Anti-Papal Literature."
"It was a black page in Aurora's past,"
said Mary Strickrodt, president of Aurora's historical society. "I wish
everyone had been aghast and run them out of town, but it seems to have
hired a lot of people. We have postcards [showing] a huge amount of
train cars being loaded with the newspaper to be shipped out."
The paper's immense popularity Strickrodt finds baffling.
"Why did it get big?" she wondered. "Why are people so quick to find people to hate? To be bigger than?"
The
paper's circulation declined as the nation turned its attention to the
First World War, and soon after the newspaper's printing plant burned
down in 1919, the Menace sputtered out, along with other anti-Catholic
publications.
Anti-Catholicism lived on in the Ku Klux Klan, but
after the country elected its first Roman Catholic president, John F.
Kennedy, in 1960, the worst of the hatred seemed to fade.
Rick Hinshaw, a spokesman for the Catholic
League for Religious and Civil Rights, said the group's biggest concerns
today are anti-Catholic depictions on TV and in movies and the federal
government's healthcare mandates.
"Today, it's more the cultural elite that we feel we run into," Hinshaw said.
Little trace remains of the Menace in Aurora, except when new
homeowners tear down walls or explore attics and find copies, like the
man from Rhode Island who moved to town and called local Chamber of
Commerce director Shannon Walker to tell her about a strange discovery
in his home.
"You'll never guess what I found," Walker recalled the man telling her.
"The Menace?" she replied. "How did you know?"
latimes
