From Reed Ueda, ed., A Companion to American Immigration (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 513-27

Religion and Ethnicity

 JOHN MCCLYMER

This chapter tackles a very large but understudied set of questions. In the literature of case studies of immigrant groups only a handful pay close attention to religion. Relying to a considerable extent upon a study of Worcester, Massachusetts, this chapter emphasizes the experiences of European groups in northern cities between the 1870s and the 1920s, although it does also consider experiences of present-day immigrants. Rather than attempting a broad synthesis, the chapter sketches several dimensions of the topic, frames questions for research, and formulates very tentative suggestions about how to begin answering them.

One way to begin is to look at "lived religion" - the phrase is Robert Orsi's whose The Madonna of ll5th Street "approaches all religion as lived experience, theology no less than lighting a candle. . . ." How did the ways in which immigrants and their descendants actually practice their religions influence their lives? Was faith a support in times of crisis, as they so often claimed? Beyond the impact of belief upon experience is the matter of religion's contribution to increasing the density of community life. Believers did more than attend services. They joined sports teams, played in orchestras, acted in local theatre productions, attended dances, competed in basketball leagues, all under the sponsorship of a church or temple. They also looked to community needs. They raised money for causes of all sorts, volunteered their time and energy, and, in the process, became important people in their com­munities. In this and other ways religion was a crucial component in acculturation and assimilation. The children who attended parochial schools learned about American history as filtered through a specific ethnic and religious sensibility. They learned too that their chances in life would depend on how their group was perceived, and not only by Yankees but also by other religious and ethnic communities.

Anti-Catholicism and, to a lesser degree, anti-Semitism were crucial determinants of how immigrants and their children were welcomed. Despite the classic works of Ray Allen Billington and John Higham, anti-Catholicism is often ignored in the secondary literature. And the way in which it played into relations among immigrant groups is almost never considered. Also left largely unexplored to date is the impact of religion in the emerging popular culture and mass media, both in terms of the roles of religious organizations such as the Catholic Legion of Decency and in terms of the portrayals of religious characters and rituals, as with Yom Kippur in The Jazz Singer. Worcester, Massachusetts in the last quarter of the nineteenth century pro­vides vivid glimpses into several of these dimensions of the influence of religion on the immigrant experience.

Religion and the Ethnic Experience in the "Heart of the Commonwealth"

"The French Canadian loves his church and is loyal to it," Carroll D. Wright wrote in his 1881 Report for the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor. Wright had held a hearing on their situation at the insistence of the French Canadians. They were outraged because, in his 1880 Report, he had disparaged them as "the Chinese of the eastern states." They were, he wrote, a "horde of industrial invaders" who cared "nothing for our institutions." The hearing caused him to change his mind. He concluded that the Canadians' complete assimilation with the American people was but a question of time.

It was their love of their church that made their assimilation inevitable, Wright concluded. Priests came from Canada, initially as missionaries, and established parishes. Canadians gathered around them, and the missionaries became pastors. Eager to see their flocks "grow and prosper," the priests urged parishioners to acquire property and take out citizenship papers. The parishes then built convents, schools, orphanages, hospitals. They sponsored literary associations, choruses, orchestras, drama societies, and sports teams in addition to sodalities and other religious clubs. The density of community life, focused upon the local church, struck most, as it had Wright at first, as an insistence "upon preserving a distinct national existence within the Republic." That is also how the Canadians themselves viewed it. Worcester editor Ferdinand Gagnon wrote in 1872 that his compatriots in New England "make up a separate society."

They have formed their own nation. . . . All they have in common with Americans is material interests; beyond that an abyss separates them and their sole concern is to make this abyss impassable. Their true country is Lower Canada.

Not so, Wright concluded. Their efforts to set themselves apart, with parochial schools, French language newspapers, and other Canadian institutions, created more numerous and deeper connections to their new homes. The result, Wright wrote, was that Canadians found "themselves more attached to the new [land] than to the old." In 1901 the Rev. Jules Graton, pastor of St. Joseph's Church in the "French Hill" section of Worcester spelled out some of the underlying logic of this process to the Ward Three Naturalization Club of which he was chaplain. In the early years of the "colony" in Worcester, Canadians were "lost."

We watched citizens meeting to deliberate upon matters of municipal interest, where they could pass measures that would endanger our political or religious advancement, and we had no voice…. We knew no road but the road to the factory, and we had no place to act but in manufacturing… we lived in a lethargy that was capable of bringing us to our death.

How long have you been getting any consideration? Since you've been voting. In the past no one knew you, but today when they meet you, they salute you, they even know your name, and they smile at you, because you have become something, because they need you.

L'Abbe T.A. Chandonnet, a missionary priest from Quebec who spent several months preaching at Notre-Dame-Des-Canadiens parish in Worcester, Massachusetts, explained the local church's importance in his history of that congregation. In Canada, the government provided funding, but here a parish is "an achievement." It required "heroic" sacrifices from people who had little to spare. The parish proved their love of their religion, he wrote, and their cultural loyalties. Within their own church, they could hear the Gospel preached in French by a fellow Canadien. They could practice Quebecois customs, midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, for example. And their children could learn both the catechism and "proper French." Public examinations on the catechism became important events. Each child required new clothes for the occasion. All the parents turned out to watch. Their children's ability to answer correctly, wrote Chandonnet, proved to parents that they were growing up both Catholic and French Canadian.

Immigrants used their churches, starting with the actual buildings, to proclaim their own worthiness. The second French Canadian church in Worcester, St. Joseph's, rose directly across the street from the Irish St. Stephen's. St. Joseph's was larger, and not by accident. Its cathedral-like expanse made a statement and one directed at the Irish and other Catholic groups more than towards the Yankees. A walking tour of the South Side of Chicago would show the same phenomenon. As ethnic groups moved into the area, they set about building national parishes. Most made it a point of honor to ensure their church would be grander than those that preceded it.
Open expressions of group pride, the buildings can also tell us something import­ant about acculturation, namely that we need to widen our study of it beyond the relations between the host culture and a particular ethnic community. Immigrants sought to find their way into a plural society. In doing so they engaged in what Charles Estus, Sr. and I have called "cultural triangulation." In defining their place in the new land they looked to their own cultural traditions, to the host culture, and to other immigrant groups. Religion was a key component in this process. A Worcester example can serve.

In November of 1888, 600 Swedes marched from the Second Swedish Methodist Church through a snowstorm to a temperance rally at Mechanics Hall where the keynote speaker, US Senator George Frisbie Hoar, hailed as "one of the best omens to the city . . . the coming to us in large numbers of brethren of Scandinavian birth." In the same speech he bemoaned "the great addiction to drink" of "our Irish brethren." Hoar concluded by welcoming the Swedes to the ranks of those who sought each year to pass a referendum banning the licensing of saloons. John Corneli, speaking for his fellow Swedes, indicated that they understood the terms of their welcome. He began with a boast: "The Swedish people are all Protestants." Further, "in this city you will not find a saloon that is run by a Scandinavian, nor one who acts as a tail to one kept by a Frenchman, Irishman, or German." This gained him an enthusiastic round of applause. Yet Corneli and company had marched past Martin Trulson's saloon on their way to the rally. It was directly across the street from the church. And, at least among themselves, Swedes candidly acknowledged that all too many of their countrymen shared the "great addiction to drink" of the Irish.

Less important than the veracity of Comeli's boast was his pledge that "the American people... will find that we will not antagonize" their "principles." Swedes would demonstrate, that is, both their attachment to "American" values and the differences between themselves and the Catholic immigrant groups in the city. The Irish reliably voted Democratic. Swedes flocked to Senator Hoar's Republican Party. The Irish voted against the licensing referendum, despite the activities of the Fr. Matthews, as the members of the Catholic temperance societies were called. The Swedes voted for the referendum, despite the convictions of the Lutherans in their midst that the moderate use of alcohol was permissible.

Swedes and Yankees would forge what Kenneth J. Moynihan (1989) has called a "Protestant Partnership." The first Swedes to build a church in Worcester were Methodists. Their Yankee co-religionists generously helped out. One of the first pastors noted in his diary that when the congregation wanted a bell, all they had to pay for was the rope. Swedish Congregationalists and other dissenters had similar experiences. Yankee churches raised funds to help them get started. Swedish Lutherans were the last denomination to build a church. This was because, on the advice of the Bishop of Sweden, they initially attended Episcopal services. There they encountered a welcome so warm that they waited almost a full generation before erecting a church of their own.

These connections to the Yankee community spurred rivalries and ethnic hatreds with other ethnic groups. Catholic and Jewish immigrants not only received no help from the Yankees in building their churches and synagogues but also recognized that the Yankees would discriminate against them because of their faith. Yet, as Wright recognized, their success in building communities centered on church and shul did not shut them off from American life. Wright's insight did not become conventional wisdom, however, even after W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki devel­oped it in great detail in their classic The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20). This is perhaps because they wrote about Catholic groups. Applied to Protestant groups, Wright's views were conventional wisdom. Hence the willingness of Yankee Protestants to help build foreign language churches in Worcester.

Swedes and other Protestant immigrant groups claimed a fundamental affinity for American culture. Catholics claimed a fundamental commitment to American political ideals which they carefully distinguished from Yankee customs and values. So did Jews. Some Orthodox Jews recognized profound dissonances between their faith and American culture. Particular groups, such as the Hasidim, solved this by living in a self-imposed quarantine. They joined the Mennonites in establishing distinctive and homogeneous communities. For the most part, however, Wright's paradigm held. Efforts to create Little Canadas or Little Italys mediated but did not impede assimilation.

Lived Religion

Despite the evident importance immigrants and their children attached to religion, and the acclaim Thomas and Znaniecki received for exploring the manifold ways in which parish life shaped the immigrant experience, most scholars have largely down­played the role of religion when they have not ignored it altogether. A conspicuous exception is Robert Orsi who begins his The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (1985) with a detailed description of the annual festa which began on July 16 and went on for several days. At its heart was the great procession in which all participated and during which the faithful would carry enormous candles, some weighing 50 or 60 pounds, often shaped as legs, arms, and other body parts. The idea was to honor the precise way in which the Virgin had interceded to help them regain their health. When they reached the steps of the church from which the procession would proceed, "penitents crawled up the steps on their hands and knees, some of them dragging their tongues along the stone." Orsi continues:

The questions we must now ask are: What did this devotion mean to the immigrants and their children in the new land? What role did it play in the history of East Harlem? How could this devotion not only survive the sea change but take on a new and powerful life in New York City? What does the devotion reveal about the immigrants' values and hopes? What does it teach us about the nature of their religious faith?

Life in America placed enormous strain upon the traditional southern Italian family and especially upon mothers who were expected to hold the family together and to pass on to the next generation core values of loyalty to blood and respect for elders. Overwhelmed by familial cares, they turned to the Madonna, writing letters to her in which they spelled out their anxieties and prayed for her intercession. The letters provide a rich source of first person narrative about daily life in the community.

Orsi makes a compelling case for the importance of "lived religion" in addressing his questions; he also demonstrates the value of parish records for the study of ethnic communities. Nonetheless his questions remain peripheral to most schol­arly discussions of ethnic life; and parish records remain grossly undervalued and underused. There is, for example, a scholarly debate going on about the portrayal of the Day of Atonement in The Jazz Singer but not about the role of this most solemn religious event in Jewish life in the decades of the great migration from eastern Europe. Irving Howe wrote in World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (1976) that Yom Kippur had "so sacred a resonance" that immigrants "felt that to go [to shul] then was to confirm one's identity as a Jew." How did the Day of Atonement ceremonies and prayers shape that identity? How did they enable immigrants to express the sense of loss they experienced in a new and secular world? How did they help them express their hopes? Howe did not attempt to answer any of these questions. There is a vital, fascinating literature still to be written that will take up these questions and analog­ous ones for other groups.

Religion and the Density of Community Life

Pastors and rabbis openly acknowledged that ethnic groups competed with each other - for jobs, for housing, and for respect. Immigrants had to accept whatever jobs they could find, live in whatever dwelling they could afford. Respect too did not come easily. Others mocked and disparaged one's group and, by extension, oneself. As Thomas and Znaniecki showed, the parish community could soften the blow. Trooping off to work in the stockyards or the steel mills, one was just another Polack. Inside Po/ania one was respected. One might be president of a society, coach of a team, soloist in the choir. One might play a lead in the annual drama club presentation. A look at parish newsletters shows how varied church organizations were. And how duplicative. The reason, Thomas and Znaniecki argued, was to make certain that there were enough places of honor to go around. Anyone willing to put in the time could be a somebody in the community.

Timothy Meagher's (2001) work on the Irish in Worcester deepens our under­standing of the churches' role in building ethnic communities. Parishes, he shows, directly fostered upward mobility. There was a strong correlation between membership in their temperance societies and occupational success. Membership signaled one's reliability and ambition. It also brought contacts with already successful parishioners. Politicians, lawyers, doctors, opticians, morticians, the whole middle class including the saloon keepers maintained a highly visible connection to their local parish. The parish was a core building block of their success. So was the College of the Holy Cross. It trained a portion of the next generation to become professionals, a role played by the much smaller Assumption College for French Canadians in the city.
While often rivals, the Irish and French Canadians could cooperate as Catholics. Spurned by Worcester's Yankee-dominated banks, they pooled their resources to found Bay State Bank. It provided both groups with mortgages and other financial services and with white-collar jobs as tellers and bookkeepers. Similarly, when City and Memorial Hospitals refused admitting privileges to Irish and French Canadian physicians, Catholics created St. Vincent's Hospital. French Canadians took the lead in erecting the St. Francis Home for the Aged but received active Irish support. Cemeteries were a different matter. Each group had its own.

What this meant was that immigrants and their children could live much of their lives in an Irish or French Canadian or Polish subculture within a larger American Catholic subculture. They gave birth in a Catholic hospital where the attending physician was a member of their own parish, sent their children off to a parochial school, played sports in church leagues, went to dances in the parish hall, marked small and major events with church rituals - baptisms, marriages, funerals - and determined what movies to see from the ratings of the Legion of Decency. Jewish immigrants built similar institutions - hospitals, orphanages, charitable associations, yeshivas, and synagogues. Religious services also defined key moments in their lives. And, as with Catholics, they lived within a Jewish American subculture. Jews might divide among Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox or between German and eastern European, but they all shared a Jewish identity. So too, Catholic ethnic groups could be bitter rivals but all acknowledged a Catholic identity.

Protestant immigrants, such as Worcester's Swedes, had their own subculture as well. Fairlawn was their hospital; Commerce Bank grew out of their Skandia Credit Union; the Lutheran Home cared for their elderly. Their churches sponsored just as many organizations, fielded as many sports teams, hosted as many events. The Lucia Fest packed their churches every December. The key difference, however, was that Swedes lived within a larger American Protestant subculture, one that included Yankees and that claimed to be the American culture.
Will Herberg's classic Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) first articulated the notion that America was not a single "melting pot" but rather three separate pots. Americans had to be religious to be fully accepted by their fellow citizens, he argued, but it no longer mattered which religion one followed. I follow Herberg's overall analysis here, but I have several reservations. One is that these subcultures developed over a much longer period of time than Herberg thought. A second is that it does matter to which religion one belongs - Protestantism was, and remains, normative. Another is that we can no longer think in terms of three major religious traditions. A new immigration from Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East is bringing with it new religions.

Religion and Acculturation/Assimilation

First a word about words. Following Milton Gordon (1964), I use acculturation to describe how immigrants adopt American ways. Assimilation describes how they find their way into coherent niches in American society. In using either term we must be careful to avoid several misleading assumptions. The first is that either is a zero-sum process, namely that the more American one became, the less ethnic one necessarily was. Starting with religion, immigrants insisted upon an additive model. There was an American civic religion that many deeply mistrusted because of its clear Protes­tant bias, as manifested, for example, in the YMCAs and YWCAs. This distrust sometimes took institutional form as in the case of the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO). The principal purpose of the CYO was to keep Catholic children away from the YMCAs and YWCAs.

Another assumption, briefly mentioned above, is that immigrants focused primarily upon the host society. Immigrants knew they were making their way in a society which was often intolerant and which judged them by their accents, their last names, and their religion. They knew that they were in open competition with members of other nationalities. "America does not consist of groups," Woodrow Wilson told an audience of newly naturalized citizens in 1916. "Anyone who thinks of himself as a member of a group is not a true American." Immigrants knew better. Acculturation and assimilation meant more than learning American ways or coming to appreciate American ideals. They meant gaining acceptance for one's own group, both one's specific nationality and the larger Catholic or Jewish community. Protestants did not have this same concern since the host society was already Protestant.

A substantial literature examines the roles of secular agencies, often Yankee-led and funded, in immigrant communities. Studies of settlement houses are especially numerous. The YMCA and YWCA have also attracted attention. What these studies acknowledge only in passing is that these agencies were in direct competition with parishes and synagogues. Nowhere was this sharper than in their claims to be Americanizing agencies. The churches made the same claim. But they meant some­thing quite different.

Both settlement workers and ethnic clerics shared a deep concern about the dangers American culture posed for immigrants and their children. One can hear it in a sermon on the benefits of "mediocrity" given by Father Jean-Baptiste Primeau as recorded in L'Abbe Chandonnet's history. Poverty tempted one to crime and to alcohol as a refuge from suffering, he told parishioners at Notre-Dame. But wealth had its own dangers. It led to the Yankee Protestant world and to apostasy. It led to a concern with fashion and worldly goods. It was a "happy mediocrity" which pre­served faith and accomplished great things. Jane Addams did not regard the Yankee Protestant culture as a threat. Hull House existed to bring a secularized version of it to its neighbors. But she did express concern with the commercial "places" – in Chicago, she wrote, "we just say places" - springing up to meet the "working girl's" and her male counterpart's desire for pleasure. Dance halls headed her list of menaces followed by saloons, movie theatres, amusement parks, and the cheaper kinds of vaudeville. Hull House and other settlements along with the YMCA and YWCA made concerted efforts to provide safe alternatives. And thousands and thousands of immigrants and their children availed themselves of the opportunities they offered.

Millions flocked to parish-sponsored competing programs. There they encoun­tered the churches' and synagogues' myriad Americanization efforts, efforts ignored in the large literature on Americanization. Clergy typically sought to contain the allure of American popular culture even as they insisted upon the intense patriotism of the ethnic group. At dances, for example, there were American popular songs and dance steps and also songs and dances from the Old Country. There were also chaperones and strict rules against drinking. In the church leagues immigrants and their children played American sports such as baseball and basketball but they played against other ethnic parish teams. Would Our Lady of Mount Carmel beat St. Patrick's for the championship? Group pride was at stake. Once again we see the additive model and cultural triangulation in operation.

We can see it too in such overt expressions of ethnic pride as St. Patrick's Day or Saint Jean Baptiste Day or Midsommar. Most festivals honored a saint. Even when they did not, church groups provided many of the floats and most of the marchers. Clergy occupied special places of honor. So did American flags and other patriotic symbols. The implicit claim was that one's own group made the best Americans. Nor were Americans the sole audience. Each nationality wanted to have the most impressive parade, the biggest floats, the largest crowd of onlookers. Swedish news­papers in Worcester, for example, annually bemoaned the size of the St. Patrick's Day parade. For years differences over temperance prevented the city's Swedes from creating a grand Swedish festival, as "drys" refused to attend any event at which alcohol was served. Religious beliefs could divide as well as unite.

Parish minstrel shows provide another example of triangulation. They not only intro­duced immigrants to traditional American racism, songs, dances, and jokes. They also provided opportunities to make fun of other ethnics and of Yankee Protestants. In 1906 the minstrels of St. John's High School in Worcester mocked Germans in one number and Native Americans in another. This stands in stark contrast to programs at Hull House where each group could depend upon receiving the utmost respect.

Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Semitism

In 1854 a handwritten “platform” of the Native American Party circulated in Massachusetts. Among its planks were the following:

4. War to the hilt, on political Romanism
7. Hostility to all Papal influences, when brought to bear against the Republic
10. The amplest protection to Protestant Interests
14. Eternal enmity to all who attempt to carry out the principles of a Foreign Church or State.

In addition to being a high-water mark of anti-Catholicism, the 1850s also witnesses the triumph of the Maine Law, from New England, where all six states prohibited the sale of alcohol, to New York, to the Nebraska Territory, to Texas. This is not coincidence. Prohibition would triumph again, in 1919, and the 1920s would be marked by equally intense anti-Catholicism. Millions joined the Ku Klux Klan. Millions more shared the Klan's hostility to Catholicism. William Robinson Pattangall, defeated Democratic candidate for governor of Maine in 1924, ran on a platform sharply critical of the Klan. He later admitted that he had seriously under­estimated the salience of anti-Catholicism. "I did not even know it [hatred from 'the long-dead days of the religious wars'] existed, did not realize at all how persistent such a hatred could be when there was nothing to excite it" except "the Klan's brilliant incendiarism." Yet Pattangall himself stated in a 1925 article in The Forum that the Klan's "complaints made against the Catholics and foreign-born are very largely true." More specifically:

The most valid of all the charges the Klan brings against the Roman hierarchy is that secretly it does not accept the American principle of the separation of church and state, but furtively goes into politics as a church and attempts to use its spiritual hold on its members as a means for political control.

The Forum had, in its preceding issue, in August 1924, sponsored an "impartial discussion of the Americanism of the Roman Catholic Church," and its reporter who most frequently wrote critically about the Ku Klux Klan, Stanley Frost, warned in the June 1928 issue that Al Smith's "inevitable" defeat, should he gain the Democratic nomination, would likely lead to the creation of a "Catholic Party" modeled on those of Europe. Similar discussions of the "Catholic influence" upon American politics filled the newspapers and magazines of the 1920s.
Thanks to Ray Allen Billington, the salience of anti-Catholicism for understanding the Know Nothings is clear. Its importance for temperance reform, however, is largely overlooked. Henry S. Clubb, secretary of the Maine Law Statistical Society, an organization dedicated to documenting the effect of prohibition, wrote in his The Maine Liquor Law: Its Origi1l, History, and Results, Including A Life of Hon. Neal Dow (1856):

Perhaps there is no more difficult class to control than the Germans, and next to them the Irish, who form combinations among their respective countrymen to evade the law, and to defeat the ends of justice by either refusing to give evidence or swearing falsely. This is the case in many parts of Worcester County; but the more stringent law just passed [by the newly elected Know Nothings] is expected to reach even these difficult cases.

Both the Maine Law and the Volstead Act were Protestant reforms, attempts to impose evangelical beliefs upon recalcitrant newcomers. Although much studied, scholars have yet to appreciate the temperance movement's importance in the shaping of American culture. For a full century, from the 1830s through the repeal of pro­hibition in 1933, temperance was by far the most popular reform movement as well as the most divisive. Its appeal to Protestants who also supported the Know Nothings in the 1850s and the Klan in the 1920s is a clue scholars have yet to investigate.

Historians of the 1920s, including historians of the Ku Klux Klan, pay little heed to anti-Catholicism and only slightly more to anti-Semitism. Gary Gerstle, for example, devotes a chapter to the 1920s in his American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2001). It was a decade of nativist triumph, of "racial nationalism," he writes. Yet Gerstle does not discuss the impact of anti-Catholicism, does not even mention AI Smith's campaign for the presidency. Over 36 million people voted in 1928, 13 million more than in 1924. This was an increase of more than 56 percent. As a result, despite the Hoover landslide, Smith got twice as many votes as the 1924 Democratic candidate, John W. Davis. In fact, Smith captured almost as many votes as Coolidge had in 1924. Why, we need to ask, did Smith partisans turn out in record numbers even though their candidate's defeat was a sure thing. His total was 8 million higher than Davis's. Why did Hoover voters turn out in such large numbers when his victory was an equally sure thing? His total was 6 million higher than Coolidge's. This was an increase of 40 percent. The short answer is that this race pro­duced a level of passion rarely seen in American politics. Religion fueled that passion.

Gerstle does discuss, at length, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 but only in terms of racism. This is overly simple. Quotas under the law were directly tied to nationality groups. But it did not escape anyone's notice at the time that the quotas discriminated against Jews, Catholics, and Greek and Russian Orthodox believers. The only Catholic nation with a quota comparable to those for Great Britain, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries was the Irish Free State. Norway's quota (6,453) dwarfed Hungary's (473); Sweden's (9,561) was more than four times larger than Russia's (2,248). Racial and religious categories overlapped so strikingly that in proscribing immigrants from eastern and southern Europe one automatically reduced immigration by non-Protestants. In addition, the neo-Lamarckian ideas espoused by eugenicists and other advocates of restriction linked religion and race. Lamarck had theorized that acquired characteristics could be inherited. In the eugenics-inspired version of Lamarck's ideas Catholic countries bred a certain type of person, one easily dominated by authority. It was a characteristic acquired by obedience to an authoritarian church and passed on to each new generation. So too with Jews. Hiram Wesley Evans, Imperial Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, explained to an audience at the Texas State Fair in 1923 that Jews could not become real Americans. Centuries of persecution had ingrained in them a congenital inability to feel patriotism. No Jew, no matter if he and his descendants lived in the United States for a thousand years, could experience the sentiments of love for his new country that an immigrant from Britain might feel within a year. This was a large part of "the menace of modern immigration."

Religion in the Emerging Popular Culture of the Twentieth Century

Henry Ford actively stirred up anti-Semitic sentiments, first by subsidizing the transla­tion of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and then by publishing The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (1922). In it he deplores how "Jewish Jazz" was "becoming our national music."

The people are fed from day to day on the moron suggestiveness that flows in a slimy flood out of "Tin Pan Alley," the head factory of filth in New York which is populated by the "Abies," the "Izzies," and the "Moes" who make up the composing staffs of the various institutions.

Ford was equally appalled by the Jewish control of the movie studios. "The motion picture influence of the United States, of the whole world, is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind."

Ford's fears of an international Jewish conspiracy were delusional. But Jewish immigrants and their children did do much to shape popular culture during the first half of the twentieth century. A joke of the era went that Americans could not have a holiday without an Irving Berlin song. If Jews wrote much of the popular music, Jews (AI Jolson, Fanny Brice) and Catholics (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra) also sang much of it. Jews and Catholics (Gallagher and Sheen, Bums and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante) wrote and told many of the jokes. And Jews did control production of most of the nation's movies.

In some cases - The Jazz Singer (1927) and Going My Way (1944) are examples - films dealt directly with the religious experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants. In The Jazz Singer AI Jolson played a cantor's son who runs away from home when forbidden to sing "American" songs. The song that most provokes his father's wrath is Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," a cinematic response to Henry Ford's denunciations. At the heart of the film is the conflict between Judaism and American popular culture. Jolson's character must choose either to sing the Kol Nidre on the Day of Atonement or to star in a Broadway revue. He can be either Jakie Rabinowitz, the cantor's boy, or Jack Robin, the jazz singer. In the end, he chooses to be a Jew. His father's dying words, spoken while Jakie sings in the synagogue across the street, are "We have our boy again." Of course, Jakie also gets to star on Broadway as Jack, and the film closes with Jolson performing "Mammy" in blackface to his mother in the audience.

Much has been written about the use of blackface. This preoccupation has had the unfortunate effect of diverting attention from the movie's loving depiction of Jewish religious rites. Cantor Rabinowitz is stubborn as well as blind to the joys of Amer­ican popular culture but the film endorses his love for sacred music. Jakie/Jack, however much he loves "jazzy" tunes, is still haunted by the beauties of religious song. In Chicago, where he is performing in vaudeville, he attends a concert of Jewish sacred music and flashes back to memories of his father in the synagogue. When forced to choose, he picks his religion. His subsequent success vindicates his choice and affirms that Jews are as American as minstrelsy.

Few other films depicted Jewish religious practices but many dealt with Caholi­cism. The priest, as played by Bing Crosby in Going My Way (1944), Spencer Tracy in Boy’s Town (1938), or Pat O'Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), became a heroic figure in the movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Going My Way, written and directed by Irish Catholic Leo McCarey and starring Irish Catholic Bing Crosby and co-starring Irish Catholic Barry Fitzgerald, all of whom won Oscars, tells the story of Father Chuck O'Malley. Father O'Malley initially displeases the elderly pastor (Fitzgerald) with his fondness for attending baseball games and going fishing but soon wins him over, and the rest of the parish, by turning street gangs into a choir, fixing the church's financial problems, and arranging for a trip back to Ireland for the pastor. Audiences fell in love with Father O'Malley. Going My Way was the highest grossing film of 1944, and The Bells of St. Mary brought Father O'Malley back the next year in a highly successful sequel. What Crosby's lovable character does is make the parish work. The films' message is that you can bring all of your troubles to church and find solutions. Or, as Father O'Malley tells a nun played by Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary, if you have a problem, "just dial 0 for O'Malley. "

Hollywood's sympathetic treatment of Catholicism in so many films reflected the considerable power wielded by the Church over the industry. The story of how Catholic pressure forced studio executives to adopt the Production Code of 1934 is well known. Numerous other groups, including many Protestant churches, also had wanted the industry to eliminate explicit references to sex and to ban nudity on screen. What made the difference was that millions of Catholics took an oath annu­ally at Mass to heed the classifications of the Legion of Decency. The Legion rated every film. Catholics promised not to go to see any classed as "objectionable in part" or as "condemned." Either rating spelled box office trouble. The studios therefore made sure that their own Code conformed to the Legion's standards.

Where Hollywood led, radio and television would soon follow. Media censorship had a distinct Catholic tone, and no one dared produce anything that the Church might take amiss. This too constituted acculturation, albeit not of the sort imagined by those historians who bemoan the influence of the movies and mass media gener­ally in homogenizing American culture at the expense of ethnicity. In this instance we need to set Antonio Gramsci and theories of cultural hegemony aside. This is a case of second- and third-generation Catholics imposing their moral values upon the culture generally.

Irving Berlin could not impose; he had to charm. But he did put his stamp upon the popular culture in ways we are only beginning to recognize. One was to senti­mentalize and secularize traditional Christian holy days. In Holiday Inn, the movie in which Crosby introduced "White Christmas," Berlin seamlessly wove together Christmas with St. Valentine's Day and the Fourth of July as holidays all Americans could celebrate equally. The climax of Easter Parade, for which Berlin wrote the title song, featured Fred Astaire and Judy Garland walking down Fifth Avenue, she in her "Easter bonnet" and both so well dressed that newspaper photographers rushed to take their picture. If they passed St. Patrick's Cathedral, they did not stop to attend mass. "White Christmas" continues to influence the way we celebrate the holiday. "God Bless America," introduced by and long associated with Irish Catholic singer Kate Smith, is Berlin's one explicitly religious song. It has become an unofficial anthem. "One cannot have a holiday without a Berlin song" was not just a joke. It was a statement of fact.

Given the ferocity of anti-Catholicism in the 1920s and the rising hostility to Jews through the 1930s, both the sympathetic portrayals of Catholics and Jews in the mass media and the secularizing of Christian holy days were important counterweights. They undermined the notion that the United States was a Protestant country. They enabled first- and second-generation immigrants to see themselves as actively contributing to the culture they were entering. If we could understand how central anti-Catholicism was in American life, we could begin to ask how and why it has diminished to such a remarkable extent. We could say, as Chandonnet did of the building of a parish, that toleration is an achievement.

A New Pluralism?

It is an achievement that grows ever more complex, as Diana L. Eck's A New Religious America (2001) explores. In large measure because of the change in immigration laws in the 1960s which permitted previously prohibited groups to enter the United States, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism are all growing rapidly. There were as many Muslims as Jews in the United States in 2000; soon there will be substantially more. Some, such as Samuel P. Huntington (2004), are voicing a new nativism. America's "core culture," Huntington insists, is Christian. It can accommodate Jews and Catholics but not Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus. Their religious traditions and values are too different. This is not a matter of the Hindu prohibition against eating beef or the Muslim use of Friday as the Sabbath or the Buddhist quest for Nirvana rather than Paradise, according to Huntington. It is that the entire complex of beliefs, values, and practices threatens to undermine the American "core."
In many ways this new nativism rehearses earlier arguments against Catholics and Jews. For example, in the 1890s Worcester's Protestants rallied to the cause of high school principal Alfred S. Roe when he was reprimanded for giving special privileges to Protestant pupils. They succeeded in electing a school committee committed to firing the superintendent. Roe went on to a career in the state legislature. He was standing up for the Yankee Protestants, the class which "forms the foundation of New England's character, determines her purposes, and makes and maintains her reputation," and does so "without the intervention of priest, king, or noble."

The new pluralism is complicated, moreover, by the ongoing war against terror­ism launched by the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and by the long history of racial discrimination. All of the suicide bombers were radical Islamists, followers of Osama bin Laden. All believed they were doing Allah's bidding in crashing aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The American government, beginning with President George W. Bush, has repeatedly proclaimed that the war on terror is not a war against Islam. But the enemies it has chosen to strike are Muslim. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan sheltered bin Laden and his followers and endorsed his holy war against the United States and the West. The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was thoroughly secular. But the occupation of that country gave rise to a number of groups animated by religious belief who proclaimed their hostility to the United States.

This enormously complicates the lives of American Muslims who must constantly defend their religion from criticism and who must constantly profess their own loyalty. This task is all the more difficult because Islam, like Catholicism, rejects the separation of church and state in principle. The Koran, believers insist, provides the guide to the whole of life. Law, therefore, must respect Koranic regulations and rest upon Koranic principles. American Muslims, like Catholics before them, have to demonstrate that they nonetheless accept American law, even when it prohibits what the Koran permits (polygamy, for example) or permits what the Koran prohibits (alcohol, for example).
Hindus and Buddhists do not face these problems, at least not to the same extent. They do, however, share the problem of finding ways of practicing their religion in an American context. Eck's study suggests how each community is meeting this challenge. Muslim temples sponsor Scout troops, for example, and for the same reasons that Catholic parishes and Jewish synagogues do. Their children want to participate in American activities; parents and clergy want to make sure that tradition is respected. And so Muslim scouts promise fidelity to Allah and to country. On July 31, 2004 Worcester's Muslims announced plans for a new mosque, and the city's only daily put the story on page one. It detailed that this was to be "far more" than a place of worship. It would have a gymnasium for sports teams; it would have classrooms; it would have facilities for providing assistance to the elderly. It would, the story reassured, operate like the Catholic parishes, Jewish temples, and Protestant churches its readers were already familiar with.

How racist stereotypes will play out in the experiences of Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus remains to be seen. Japanese and Chinese immigrants encountered venom­ous hostility, exclusion, and discrimination, culminating in the "relocation" of first­ and second-generation Japanese Americans living on the west coast during World War II. Later, they became "model" minorities. Chinese temples in American cities have become tourist attractions. Time alone will tell if new immigrants from Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East will have to pass through the same travails.

Conclusion

Historians routinely label Thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America a classic and cite its treatment of the Polish community in Chicago as a model. Few adopt the model in their own research, however. The monographs dealing with one group or another in one city or another form a large and growing literature. Only a handful use parish records, church newsletters, or similar sources even though these are the very materials Thomas used to construct his portrait of Chicago's Polania. The same is true of Robert Orsi's work on Italian Harlem. We hail it as a classic but do not adopt its focus on religion as lived experience. What of Higham's Strangers in the Land, perhaps the most admired work in the entire liter­ature? Has it spawned monographs that examine anti-Catholicism? There is Daniel L. Kinzer's An Episode in Anti-Catholicism: The American Protective Association (1964) and Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999), but not much in between.

Indeed it is not too much to say that we pay little attention to religion at all. This chapter attempts to demonstrate that religion was, and remains, a central dimension of the immigrant experience, one that influences every other aspect of that experience. It supplied a frame through which immigrants and their descendants made sense of their new world; it spoke to their need to find hope and solace; it became the focal point of their efforts to build communities; it mediated their adoption of American ways; it assisted their efforts to become citizens and to rise economically; it channeled their rivalries. It is long past time that we started taking it seriously.