The Imperial Church

Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire

Katherine D. Moran

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501748820
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia americana temprana

Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, The Imperial Church undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful reference for Americans narrating US settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. Katherine D. Moran traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the US colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors.

Moran shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. She demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries: the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in the Midwest, the Franciscan Junípero Serra in Southern California, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of US national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire.

The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.

PART I

Jacques Marquette in the Upper Midwest

Chapter 1

Making a Founding Father out of a French Jesuit

On 29 February 1896, Edward Jones was arrested in Washington, DC. He must have seemed like an unlikely criminal: a “well-dressed, well-appearing man of about 50 years of age,” the Chicago Daily Tribune reported; just a tourist, visiting from New York. Yet this middle-aged tourist had become apoplectic in his nation’s capital, threatening to return at night with his broadax and destroy federal property. Luckily for Jones, his arrest did not last long. Within an hour of being detained he had apologized and been released from the guardroom. One can imagine Jones returning to New York, explaining his arrest sheepishly to his family or laughing about it with friends. “What came over you?” they might have asked. The answer: he had seen a statue of a Jesuit in the National Statuary Hall.¹

The object of Jones’s wrath was the marble figure of Father Jacques Marquette, the French Jesuit missionary and explorer who had helped chart the course of the Mississippi in the seventeenth century. In 1864, the U.S. Congress had invited each state to send two representative monuments to the nation’s newly established National Statuary Hall. Vermont and Massachusetts sent Ethan Allen and Samuel Adams, respectively; Wisconsin sent Père Marquette. In response, anti-Catholic individuals and organizations, most notably the American Protective Association (APA), launched a national protest. A Catholic missionary in clerical garb should not occupy pride of place in the nation’s capital, they argued. Plans for an elaborate unveiling of the statue were scrapped: it was installed silently overnight, and a round-the-clock guard was employed to protect it from destruction. It was not until 1904 that the U.S. Congress finally passed a measure officially accepting the statue from the state of Wisconsin.²

Figure 1. Statue of Jacques Marquette in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, DC. Gaetano Trentanove, sculptor. The text on the pedestal reads: “Wisconsin’s tribute. James Marquette, S.J., who, with Louis Joliet, discovered the Mississippi River at Prairie du Chien, Wis., June 17, 1673.” Undated photograph, Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI.

Students of the history of Catholicism in the United States are familiar with the story of the APA: of the organization’s founding in Iowa in 1887, its rise to national prominence in the 1890s, and its initiates’ vows to neither vote for a Catholic nor hire one.³ The story of Marquette’s statue, then, is generally treated as a minor episode in the history of the upper Midwest and the APA: an illustrative anecdote, but hardly a surprising one.⁴

But what if we read the episode of Edward Jones and the Marquette statue backward, concentrating not on the ranting of Jones but rather on the simple presence of the statue in the capitol in the first place? As one of the statue’s historians has remarked: “In a decade of blatant anti-Catholic bigotry, perhaps the worst in American history, the opponents of the Marquette statue were never able to muster enough support to block this undertaking.”⁵ It is time we asked why.

This chapter and the next argue that Wisconsin’s bid to install the statue in the nation’s capital was not an isolated event. It emerged, instead, out of a broad-based and ongoing cross-confessional coalition dedicated to the commemoration of the French Jesuit missionary. From roughly 1880 to well past the First World War, Protestant and Catholic women and men came together throughout the upper Midwest to celebrate Marquette.⁶ By 1920, owing to the careful work of politicians, town boosters, businessmen, journalists, and amateur and professional historians, Marquette’s name or figure graced monuments, buildings, streets, towns, a university, and even a U.S. postage stamp.

The celebration of Marquette in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Midwest, then, was a widespread, energetic, and cross-confessional affair. Indeed, Marquette was cast as a midwestern hero precisely at the moment when the Midwest most needed one. In the late nineteenth century, the very idea of the “Middle West” as a distinct region was emerging. At the same time, the Midwest was being transformed by industrialization and Catholic immigration. To anti-Catholic observers, these Catholic immigrants—people whose priests and prayers were transported to American soil from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Poland—seemed to threaten the future of a nation whose greatness, they believed, stemmed from its Anglo-Protestant roots.⁷

Marquette both embodied and transcended the hopes and fears at the heart of the Midwest’s regional emergence. Historians and popular commentators used Marquette’s French birth and Jesuit affiliation to distinguish the history of the Midwest from the history of British colonialism to the east and Spanish empire to the south and west. At the same time, they argued that Marquette’s European birth and “civilizing” work justified his inclusion among the imperial nation’s pantheon of founding fathers, and the Midwest’s inclusion in a larger American origin story. Marquette’s Catholic faith presented a counterargument to anti-Catholic fears about Catholic immigrants as threats to the republic. To celebrate Marquette as a founding father was to cast Catholicism as present at the creation: at the very roots of the U.S. nation and empire, rather than a risk to it.

This chapter examines the rise of the commemorative culture around Marquette in the upper Midwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces the efforts of a cross-confessional group of Marquette admirers to enlist the Jesuit as a midwestern and American founding father, and argues that they did so by recasting French Catholic history as part of a common “white,” European, Christian national and imperial origin story. To do so meant three things: first, it naturalized the previous history of U.S. territorial expansion, writing the contingency and diversity out of a history that included various British, French, and Indigenous people, groups, and ambitions, and transforming it into the history of a common European Christian project of advancing religion and civilization. Against a politics of confessional division, Marquette commemorations became moments when a common cross-confessional Christianity could be assembled through a celebration of the imperial history of the nation. Second, it cast “white” as a capacious racial term, inclusive of what were considered various racially distinct European groups. Doing so was a strike against nativism and was often celebrated by commemorators themselves as an advance in the history of American tolerance and pluralism. Yet, appealing to a common “white” identity both reflected and reinforced distinctions between those who would be considered white and those who would not, relegating Native Americans to the continuous role of objects of Marquette’s civilizing and Christianizing imperative, and writing the increasing number of African Americans in the Midwest—including black Catholics—out of the story entirely. Third, and finally, the celebration of Marquette as founding father of the Midwest drew on his intense and visible piety to cast him as a spiritualized midwestern brand, sanctifying the growth of the Midwest into a global economic hub.

Commemorating Marquette

A variety of people engaged in the creation of the commemorative culture surrounding Marquette. Its origins lay in U.S. amateur and professional historical study: in local historical societies and in the nascent U.S. historical profession’s fascination with the history of the French in the Great Lakes region.⁸ Around the mid-nineteenth century, a predominantly Protestant group of U.S. historians began to mine the Jesuit Relations—records of seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary activity in New France, which were compiled and published in France by the missionaries’ contemporaries—to write books that became both popular and academic touchstones.⁹ The statesman and romantic historian George Bancroft included a brief account of Marquette’s voyage in his monumental History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent (ten volumes, originally published from 1834 to 1874). In 1839, the Harvard historian and Unitarian minister Jared Sparks published an essay-length history of Marquette in his edited Library of American Biography series.¹⁰ Shortly thereafter, the Catholic historian John Gilmary Shea located new sources on Marquette in Montreal and wrote The Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley in 1852. Francis Parkman’s multivolume France and England in North America followed, published from 1865 to 1892. And, in 1902, these classics of the field were joined by another major text, a biography of Marquette written by the longtime secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Reuben Gold Thwaites, who had also led the project that produced the seventy-three volume published edition, in French and English, of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (1896–1901).¹¹

The work of historians from Bancroft to Thwaites offered source material for popular, civic, and institutional commemorations of Marquette. Midwestern Marquette commemorations began in significant numbers in the 1870s, became organized and productive in the 1890s and 1900s, and then settled down to become the common sense of local history by the end of the 1910s. The most famous monument to Marquette was the one that inspired Edward Jones’s fantasies about his broadax: the Italian sculptor Gaetano Trentanove’s statue in the National Statuary Hall, unveiled in February 1896. But on a smaller scale, Marquette’s image and name popped up all over the landscape of the upper Midwest. Monuments were erected in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan by the Chicago and Alton Railroad, a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a member of the Chicago Historical Society, a group of wealthy boosters and tourists on Mackinac Island, and a Catholic academy in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, to name only a few.¹² In 1898, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Marquette stamp, which, like the Trentanove statue, the APA also protested. (“Just think,” crowed one APA opponent, “of the members of the great American Protective Association being compelled to lick the back-side of Father Marquette every time they mail a piece of literature to enlighten the American people concerning the disloyalty of their Catholic fellow citizens.”¹³) Marquette’s name was adopted by Marquette College (now University) in 1881 and by a major (and predominantly Protestant) Chicago Republican political club in 1886.¹⁴ The club’s minutes even record confusion with other Marquette clubs in Chicago: a Marquette Social Club and a West Side Marquette Dancing Club.¹⁵ And in 1895 a new office building in Chicago was christened the Marquette Building and decorated with bronze bas-reliefs and brightly colored mosaics depicting events in Marquette’s life.¹⁶

Figure 2. Marquette one-cent stamp, part of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Commemorative Stamp Issue, 1898. The image on the stamp is based on the 1869 painting Father Marquette and the Indians by Wilhelm Lamprecht. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI.

Marquette commemorations were encouraged and accompanied by continued discoveries of Marquette artifacts, real or imagined. One catalyst for the expanding public interest in Marquette in the 1880s was Fr. Edward Jacker’s 1877 discovery of what he believed to be Marquette’s remains at St. Ignace, Michigan.¹⁷ In the 1890s, a cross was found near Starved Rock, along the Illinois River, that some thought might be Marquette’s cross.¹⁸ And then there was an old log church in Highland Park, Illinois: locals called it “Marquette’s Church,” though in reality it was likely erected by German Catholic settlers in the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁹ The celebration of Marquette existed at a popular-scholarly intersection: it incorporated everything from exuberant mythmaking and creative amateur archaeology to well-cited investigations into the minutia of Marquette history.

Marquette commemorators formed a kind of loosely connected network. One can follow threads of influence and association from place to place, institution to institution. For example, the Marquette Monument Association of Mackinac Island, Michigan, was founded by a group of regional notables, one of whom was the prominent Catholic Chicagoan William J. Onahan. Onahan was invited to speak on the subject of Marquette at Marquette College, on the occasion of the laying of their cornerstone. Two years later, Marquette College received a painting of Marquette by Wilhelm Lamprecht, which was later used as the model for the U.S. postage stamp. One could go on.²⁰ While Marquette...