Nativists flocked to the American Protective Association (APA) in the Gilded Age. American NATIVISM was often linked to anti-Catholicism, which had deep roots in the Anglo-American Protestant culture of the United States. Nativist groups used anti-Catholic rhetoric to arouse the long-standing fears and misgivings that Americans had of Catholics. Several developments in the 1870s and 1880s exacerbated anti-Catholic suspicions: the rise to political power of Irish and German Catholics in some of the nation’s major cities; the rapid expansion of parish and parochial schools and the controversy over public aid to those schools; and the perceived Catholic influence over organized labor.
On March 13, 1887, Henry F. Bowers, a self-taught Iowa lawyer, founded the APA, which became the largest American nativist organization of the late 19th century. The APA was an oath-bound organization open to anyone committed to bringing a halt to immigration and resisting the so-called Catholic menace. It absorbed many of the smaller nativist societies that had sprung up in the years immediately following the Civil War. By 1894 membership in the APA had reached a reported 500,000 people, with councils (local chapters) in cities throughout the Middle West, Northeast, and Far West.
The growth of the APA was partially the result of new leadership. In 1893 William J. Traynor replaced Bowers as
The organization’s supreme president. Traynor had been the president of the Michigan council and was a vocal, committed nativist who not only had experience in promoting several anti-Catholic groups but also possessed a keen sense of politics. His vigorous leadership, however, was not the sole cause of the increase in membership. The economic depression of 1893 had stimulated anti-Catholic and antiimmigrant feelings in America and served as a powerful recruiting tool. The members of the APA portrayed immigrants as “job stealers” and accused Catholics of plotting to disrupt the nation’s economic system and paving the way for the pope to seize power.
By the late 1890s, the APA began to weaken. Not only was the organization beset by internal dissension, but nativ-ism was also being gradually eclipsed by more pressing issues. Like its Know-Nothing predecessor in the 1850s, the APA created much nativist excitement and anti-Catholic anxiety, but unlike the Know-Nothings, it had little political success.
See also IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS.
Further reading: David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Donald L. Kinzer, An Episode in Anti-Catholicism: The American Protective Association (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964).
—Phillip Papas
World History
