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In 1796, twelve white settlers traveled north from the Ohio River into what became known as the Miami Valley. There, they established a small settlement on the banks of the Great Miami River, not far from where the Mad River, the Stillwater River, and Wolf Creek empty into the Great Miami. They named their new town after Jonathan Dayton, a Revolutionary War veteran, investor in land in Ohio, and the youngest signer of the US Constitution. Though the settlement grew slowly at first, once connected by canal (1829), railroad (1851), and telegraph (1847), the city began to flourish. By the time of the US Civil War, Dayton had emerged as a manufacturing city with an increasingly diverse population. Between the 1870s and 1920s, Dayton became known for products ranging from paper to potato chips, cash registers, bicycles, and refrigerators. During this time, several individuals from Dayton rose to international prominence, including poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and the inventors of the airplane, Wilbur and Orville Wright. This period also witnessed the most important event in Dayton’s history, the 1913 flood. After that, Dayton became the largest city in the United States to adopt the city manager form of city government. After World War II, Dayton, like many cities in the so-called “Rust Belt,” suffered from deindustrialization and racial tensions. Dayton’s population peaked in the 1960s and, thereafter, the city lost population in every decade through the 2020s. Deep and lasting patterns of racial segregation divided Dayton’s population between an African American West Side and the largely white East and North Dayton. Local leaders embraced urban renewal and highway construction as potential answers to the city’s challenges with, at best, mixed results. As economic and population losses continued into the 21st century, the local economy shifted from manufacturing to “eds and meds.”

Americans grappled with the implications of industrialization, technological progress, urbanization, and mass immigration with startling vigor and creativity in the 1920s even as wide numbers kept their eyes as much on the past as on the future. American industrial engineers and managers were global leaders in mass production, and millions of citizens consumed factory-made products, including electric refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, technological marvels like radios and phonographs, and that most revolutionary of mass-produced durables, the automobile. They flocked to commercial amusements (movies, sporting events, amusement parks) and absorbed mass culture in their homes, through the radio and commercial recordings. In the major cities, skyscrapers drew Americans upward while thousands of new miles of roads scattered them across the country. Even while embracing the dynamism of modernity, Americans repudiated many of the progressive impulses of the preceding era. The transition from war to peace in 1919 and 1920 was tumultuous, marked by class conflict, a massive strike wave, economic crisis, and political repression. Exhausted by reform, war, and social experimentation, millions of Americans recoiled from central planning and federal power and sought determinedly to bypass traditional politics in the 1920s. This did not mean a retreat from active and engaged citizenship; Americans fought bitterly over racial equality, immigration, religion, morals, Prohibition, economic justice, and politics. In a greatly divided nation, citizens experimented with new forms of nationalism, cultural identity, and social order that could be alternatively exclusive and pluralistic. Whether repressive or tolerant, such efforts held the promise of unity amid diversity; even those in the throes of reaction sought new ways of integration. The result was a nation at odds with itself, embracing modernity, sometimes heedlessly, while seeking desperately to retain a grip on the past.

Historian John Higham once referred to anti-Catholicism as “by far the oldest, and the most powerful of anti-foreign traditions” in North American intellectual and cultural history. But Higham’s famous observation actually elided three different types of anti-Catholic nativism that have enjoyed a long and quite vibrant life in North America: a cultural distrust of Catholics, based on an understanding of North American public culture rooted in a profoundly British and Protestant ordering of human society; an intellectual distrust of Catholics, based on a set of epistemological and philosophical ideas first elucidated in the English (Lockean) and Scottish (“Common Sense Realist”) Enlightenments and the British Whig tradition of political thought; and a nativist distrust of Catholics as deviant members of American society, a perception central to the Protestant mainstream’s duty of “boundary maintenance” (to utilize Emile Durkheim’s reading of how “outsiders” help “insiders” maintain social control). An examination of the long history of anti-Catholicism in the United States can be divided into three parts: first, an overview of the types of anti-Catholic animus utilizing the typology adumbrated above; second, a narrative history of the most important anti-Catholic events in U.S. culture (e.g., Harvard’s Dudleian Lectures, the Suffolk Resolves, the burning of the Charlestown convent, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures); and finally, a discussion of American Catholic efforts to address the animus.