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Title: Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: a Study of the Origins of American Nativism by Ray A. Billington ISBN: 0-8446-1076-3 Publisher: Peter Smith Pub Pub. Date: June, 1938 Format: Textbook Binding List Price(USD): $8.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

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Summary: Anti-Catholicism and Nativism
Comment: Ray Billington, a pioneer in the study of nativism, helped to bring the study of nativism into the mainstream in the 1930s. As a student of American social and intellectual history at Harvard under Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., he began to study the social significance of Know-Nothingism, and in 1933 finished his doctoral dissertation on the origins of American Nativism. His dissertation eventually became The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860 in 1938. Like his contemporaries, he focused heavily on nativism as an anti-Catholic movement. That Billington began his work with Know-Nothingism helps to explain why he focuses on anti-Catholicism almost to the exclusion of other manifestations of nativism. He also acknowledges the influence of Schlesinger throughout the process, which further helps to explain the scope and direction of Billington's work. Schlesinger believed anti-Catholicism to be one of the most persistent themes in American History, and his declaration seems to have strongly influenced his student. Billington's equation of nativism and anti-Catholicism does not, however, detract from his work. In 1996, historian of nativism Dale T. Knobel wrote that, "although dated, Ray Allen Billington's The Protestant Crusade, is still the place for a student of the nativist movement to begin." Billington presents a thorough and detailed description of anti-Catholic movements in the first half on the nineteenth century, at times touching on anti-foreign manifestations of Know-Nothingism, but only as peripheral to his anti-Catholic focus. Billington treats nativism as an Anglo-American cultural inheritance and often as the practice of and the mob, but he nevertheless provides a careful description and at analysis of the important events, organizations and individuals.

Billington argues for two causes of the eruption of nativism into national politics in the early 1840s, first "a hatred of Catholicism bred by the forces of organized No-Popery," and second "a fear of the immigrant, not only as a Catholic, but as a menace to the economic, political, and social structure." He also traces the development of anti-Catholic sentiment into organized movements and sees their propagandizing through sermons, lectures, periodicals and tracts as influential in bringing the issue into the political realm.

Thus, while Billington deals well with nativism as an issue of national policy, he is less effective in dealing with the underlying causes of nativism. For instance he sees propagandizing as influential in swaying public opinion toward the nativist cause, but fails to explain either why certain Americans decided to spread such propaganda, or why the American people were so receptive to it. So too, he argued that the Know-Nothings faced ridicule for their principles inimical to the founding principles of the nation, but Billington fails to explain why Americans who might at one time have ascribed to Know-Nothingism suddenly found its principles untenable.

Even so Billington's careful narrative history of the antebellum anti-Catholic movement is unsurpassed. Moreover, the book is beautifully written and an excellent read. Anyone with even a passing interest in nativism and the history of American anti-Catholicism will thoroughly enjoy this book