There's no Place Like Rome: American Protestant Fascination with Catholicism

Abstract

Jenny Franchot has produced a dazzling book about a topic that has been long overdue for a new synthetic treatment. In light of the number of recent books reevaluating cultural and intellectual life in antebellum America, her contribution to the historiography of Protestant nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment is as impressive as it is timely. Her central thesis is simple: that antiCatholicism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers of popular and elite fictional and historical texts indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture (p. xvii). The New Historicist method by which anti-Catholic discourse is examined, however, requires patience and continuous engagement from the reader. There is abundant historical evidence that Catholicism functioned as the Other in nineteenth-century Protestant America. Following the removal of non-Protestant populations from the eastern settled areas-most of the eastem Indian tribes were forced to the western frontier in the 1830s-and even before the arrival of a first wave of papists from Ireland and Germany in the 1840s, Protestants constructed a new Catholic enemy. Their suspicions of a Catholic revival beginning in Europe were heightened by the revival of the Jesuit order in 1814, the British Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829, and campaigns in England against increasing state funding for the Catholic seminary founded in 1795 at Maynooth, Ireland. This militant Anglo-Protestantism was in many ways a revival and extension of old Reformation polemics against Rome. Because Americans imported much of their antiCatholic discourse, it seems there would be little novelty in North American anti-Catholic texts. Nonetheless, Franchot contends, by the 1840s American Protestants faced special anxieties about their own disunity despite their hegemony since the seventeenth century. Against these fears of fragmentation