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The End Of The Small-Town Golden Age: A Rural Newspaper’S Role In The Urban-Rural Clash Of Anti-Catholicism, Christopher S. Saladin

History: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Anti-Catholicism is an often forgotten feature of our country’s past that was extremely widespread, especially across rural America. In this essay, I focus on an anti-Catholic newspaper, titled The Menace, which was published out of the small Midwestern town of Aurora, Missouri and enjoyed national success. I argue that anti-Catholic sentiments were largely tied to rural values and fears of urbanization, which were being fueled by a massive influx of Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants into the United States. Rural communities cried out against this “Catholic invasion” because they truly believed that urban immigrant populations were taking away their …