A Church Divided: Roman Catholicism, Americanization, and the Spanish-American War

The age of nationalities and nationalism associated with nineteenth-century Europe also found expression in North America in the same period: French Canadians developed a national consciousness charged with a religious and providential mission. As these Canadians crossed into the United States in ever-rising numbers and established permanent “colonies” during the Gilded Age, they carried with them a cultural ideology that kept them apart from mainstream American society—and apart from their Irish American coreligionists and coworkers. Claiming the freedoms promised to them by the Constitution, these immigrants from the North battled for accommodation not only in political conventions or state legislatures, but also in the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders seemed intent on doing away with foreign languages and customs. The religious battle came to a head as lay and clerical Catholics gathered in Baltimore, in 1889, to reassert the Church's unity as well as its patriotic credentials. By drawing attention to French Canadian immigration, often overlooked in immigration studies, this article refocuses the question of Americanization on the Catholic Church, which proved one of the most powerful agents of acculturation in late nineteenth-century America.

Section: E G a C Ymentioning

confidence: 99%

Americanization by Catholic Means: French Canadian Nationalism and Transnationalism, 1889–1901

Lacroix

2017

Unclasping the Eagle's Talons: Mark Twain, American Freethought, and the Responses to Imperialism

Alexander¹

2018

This article situates Mark Twain's anti-imperialism within the wider atheist and freethought response to debates about the American turn to empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While historians have been alert to the ways in which religion influenced debates around empire at this time, there have yet to be any studies of the views of American atheists and freethinkers on this question. I examine Twain and Robert Ingersoll, the leading American freethinker of the era, as well as some of the major freethought periodicals in the United States, the Truth Seeker, the Blue-Grass Blade, and the Free Thought Magazine, and argue that their irreligious views informed their responses to imperialism, from the initial support for a war against Catholic Spain, to opposition to the war against the Philippines motivated in large part by a hostility toward organized religion and its role in American expansion. More broadly, I argue for the need to move beyond a simplistic understanding of anti-imperialism within an American religious landscape that was basically Protestant, to a more nuanced understanding that incorporates the diversity of religious and nonreligious perspectives.

Henry Adams’s Protean Views of the American Empire, 1890–1905

Cortés

2022

In the history of the Gilded Age and its geopolitics, Henry Adams has a reputation for being an imperialist. While not universally subscribed to by historians, this characterization has waxed sufficiently as to eclipse Adams’s more complex, even contradictory, record on the American Empire. The evidence I will marshal will not prove that Adams was actually an anti-imperialist, but it will reveal the protean nature of Adams’s views of the American Empire. To get a grip on this relatively unexamined aspect of Adams’s thought, I will analyze his correspondence during the last decade of the nineteenth century in which he criticized the extension of American power across the Pacific, particularly in regard to its political economy, religion, and civilization. With the onset of the American Filipino War, Adams raged at the news of American atrocities. This paper shows that Adams’s outrage was part of an incipient civilizational ideology, one that neither materialized into an attachment to the anti-imperialist cause nor accepted the vaunted superiority of the West. Even though Adams possessed no principle to guide his thinking on the empire, his pessimistic evaluation of the extension of American power is enough to reconsider his reputation as an imperialist.