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Davenport, Iowa: Once Again a Battleground between the Forces of Light and Darkness

June 13, 2019
by Peter Feinman
Field of Dreams in flooded Davenport, Iowa (Brian Powers/The Register)

Davenport, Iowa, does not make the front pages often. Except for the flooding of the Mississippi, Davenport is normally part of the flyover country. It never attained the status of Peoria. But every now and then like Brigadoon it reappears on schedule. These sightings occur not once every century but once every four-years along with its sister communities in the state. It does so because of the Iowa caucuses for the nomination to be president of the United States.

It is in Iowa where a former Vice President accused the current President of being an existential threat to the character of the nation. It is in Iowa where Individual #1 returned to his favorite venue: the professional wrestling arena where he performs in the role of THE DONALD. He feeds of that energy the way normal human beings need oxygen. If Jon Meacham is correct and he is a professional wrestler 24/7, then there is no there there, he always is reality TV character. But as Hugh White, emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University said on the appeal of China over America: “Trump looks weak and unreliable, despite the tough talk.”  The rest of the world has caught on that the DONALD is not real, Trumpicans have not. It’s showtime in Iowa.

Davenport Iowa WWE Champion Seth Rollins (Kelsey Kremer/The Register)

Unbeknownst to many, the quadrennial return of the political circus to Iowa is part of a longstanding tradition in the state. The idea of outsiders traveling throughout the state to entertain the people and bring news from back east is part and parcel of the Iowa DNA. The people of the small communities have been looking forward to such entertainment juggernauts for more than a century.

I am referring to the now-forgotten but once major phenomenon of the Circuit Chautauquas. These traveling shows brought to the local communities the “talent” they lacked. These communities fervently anticipated THE SHOW. It was big news when the advance team arrived in town to erect the tents that would be home to the show soon to arrive. It reminds me a little of the scenes in Showboat when it first appears at the towns along the river to the sounds of whistles announcing the big show was coming.

Circuit Chautauquas were extremely properly in their time before World War, the radio, the movie screen, the TV, and, of course, the internet. They were the link to the larger world with real people from that world now standing right before them to explain that world to them and to entertain them. At the center of the Circuit Chautauquas was Iowa where for a while it was headquartered. For Teddy Roosevelt the Circuit Chautauquas were the most American thing in America.

But the times, they were a changing even as the Circuit Chautauquas were in their prime. The Iowa world was experiencing a change just as it thought it had everything just the way they wanted it to be. From the 1850s onward, Iowa had become the fulfillment of the American Dream.

Let’s turn to the words of the Methodists of the Upper Iowa Conference. The term “conference” does not refer to a sports league. It is a Methodist term somewhat like diocese or parish. These conferences would be created as Methodists moved across the country as the United States expanded. At one point a conference might be quite extensive like the Louisiana territories. Over time as people settled, smaller and smaller conferences would be carved out just as states were. One such conference was the Upper Iowa Conference. These rural conferences were serviced by circuit riders, the heroic itinerant warriors of light, who traveled throughout their assigned circuit bringing religion to people scattered in in the forests and on the plains. Then there were the annual camp meetings to bring people together. Then the Circuit Chautauquas. Then the State Fairs. And now the Presidential Caucuses…which do not do as good a job of bring people together as the earlier shows but do attract more national attention.

The Upper Iowa Conference reports in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century tell the story of a people confronting what they perceived as a new threat to their way of life. The world had changed quickly. One moment the Iowa Methodists were celebrating the victory of the Union (1865), the centennial of Methodism in America (1866), a part-time Methodist who had become president of the United States after having led the Union armies to victory (1868-1876), and the centennial of America (1876), and then suddenly they were fighting an old threat which they didn’t expect to see on their doorsteps.

The apocalyptic description of the state vote on prohibition by the Iowa State Register on June 25, 1882, reflects the new field of battle:

The two armies on the contest over the amendment move into the field to-morrow for the contest on Tuesday. To-day the two legions are passing by; to-morrow they will be camped on the threshold of the day of conflict, each under its own colors . . . . No fairer army ever moved under fairer banners than that which is going now into the field of open context to battle for the amendment . . . . Here is the other army—the army of occupation, silent, sullen and dark. It puts no song on the air, and has no flag to give to the breeze, and no voice in all the earth praying for it . . . .

Demographic trends of post-Civil War America affected the Midwest. The report of an Upper Iowa district at the 1883 Conference contained the following concern about local events: “Upon the river borders Catholicism and German rationalism press upon us. Rum and Rome and Rationalism practically coalesce while Protestantism, pressed into the minority, instinctively ‘rises and retires.’”

In the Upper Iowa Conference, the battle against foreign elements resumed with gusto in 1885. It resolved that Romanism had to be stopped. They were going to take back their country from these foreigners with their alien religion, different ethnicity, and loyalty to foreign leaders. It was as if the Upper Iowa Conference Methodists were watching all their hard work in fulfilling the American Dream had come to naught. Everything they had built and struggled to achieve was being undone by an alien presence of those who did not live what they perceived to be the American way of life.

The missionary activity stressed by the Upper Iowa Conference in 1887 was domestic not foreign:

Throughout a wide area on either side of the Mississippi river, a foreign immigration has been steadily driving out our native population and has so weakened our Churches as to make it impossible in some cases and difficult in many, to maintain our existence.

The battle raged on against the foreign element. It can be tracked in the annual report of the districts. For example, in 1892, Decorah reported an heroic effort against the depletion of its eastern borders: it was fighting the good fight to hold the territory for Protestant Christianity. Dubuque Methodists declared than even in the midst of a Roman Catholic population, it was not dead. This conflict was no idle matter to the people who had settled the prairies only a few decades before only now to find themselves fighting for their cultural and religious life in the land they regarded as home.

The 1899 Conference report from the DAVENPORT district asked the question: “Am I in the United States of America, or Scandinavia, or the Emerald Isle, or Germany?” In doing so it echoed the words Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1751 in response to German immigration in Pennsylvania. Now these alien immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany among elsewhere continued to overrun the land threatening the Methodist and therefore American way of life. Looks like Norway was a Trump-hole country to these Iowa Methodists!

The Decorah district in 1902 reported a disturbing trend in the once-Methodist lands:

. . . [T]he stranger has got possession of the gates, and the native American Methodist farmer seems, and feels himself to be, a stranger in the new surroundings. Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians and Irish are buying the farms all the more easily, because the American early settlers have reached years when they wish the rest they have earned and the advantages of town life and have the means to gratify the desire. The new occupants bring with them Romanism, Lutheranism, or hatred of all churches, and whatever the form it is in the antagonism to Methodism. Notwithstanding, we are still optimistic, because we believe in God, the gospel go-ahead-itiveness, which last is a synonym for Methodism.

These people even thought of themselves as native Americans! Obviously they were not woke!

The situation only seemed to get worse. In 1904, DAVENPORT reported only three Methodist pastors in a county of 45,000 people as the “old stock . . . sold out and moved to the city or died off, and the foreigner [came] in to take the[ir] place . . . . In many places the old church buildings still stand like the Druidic pillars of old England, to mark the glory of the past.” Decorah continued to report the dominance of foreigners and Dubuque joined the parade of bewailing the transformation of the land from one of Protestants to Roman Catholics.

In 1905, DAVENPORT sought to focus on the young new arrivals as the most likely candidates for saving through education: “The spirit of our fathers, who two generations ago reclaimed this territory from frontier barbarism, and the methods of our missionaries in the fatherlands of some of these same foreigners will work out great results for the Master.” The evangelization of the world required the Christianization of America which was now a battlefront. Decorah reported that the Pope “evidently has designs on fair Iowa.”

Then things began to change. The 1912 Conference was upbeat about the prospects for the community, the state, and the country. Perhaps the long-term plan of educating immigrants to be Americans was finally paying off:

The time is come, or about to come, when the loss of membership on account of the inroad of the foreigner, and the departure of the American is being stayed. In some localities the foreigner is disappearing, and the American is returning to his own. In many other communities the foreigner is becoming so American as to demand English preaching. This is specially true of those of the second generation of the alien . . . . [M]any are finding out that the same reason for coming to America at all is the same reason for coming to the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The following year the Conference report proudly declared that those born in the country have learned English and have demonstrated a strong proclivity for American institutions. Perhaps America was a melting pot for people who seek to be free after all. Maybe Iowa could even become a Field of Dreams for all Americans and not just presidential candidates.

At the 1918 conference, the Dubuque district which had been struggling with the impact of immigration reported that the polyglot community now spoke English thanks to the public schools and the great world war. The Conference expressed great optimism about the world to come given the pending Allied victory:

When this war shall come at last to its final end with a peace that shall have in it no compromise with evil, but an end that shall mean an end to all wars, when autocracy shall everywhere be superseded by a world-wide democracy . . . . [W]hen there shall come to us, whose sons are now in this gigantic struggle, the time of the “sunset and evening star,” we can look upon the great and eternal gains, that have been secured, and we can say with proud satisfaction, “My children were in that war.”

Methodists had given their blood to make God’s Kingdom safe for democracy. Bleeding alongside of them on the European battlefields over there were the newcomers to the Upper Iowa Conference lands. They also had become Americans by choice. As the celebration of the Methodist Centenary approached, Upper Iowa Methodists eagerly anticipated the century to come. Now that a century has passed since then, I wonder what they think of the new culture war and the current crop of presidential entertainers.

 

For additional information see Peter Feinman, “The Methodist Upper Iowa Conference: From Wilderness to Melting Pot,” Methodist History 47 2009:226-241.

 

Should Andrew Jackson Have Banned Catholics?

February 15, 2017
by Peter Feinman

Field of Dreams in the City on a Hill

For centuries the City on a Hill has been buffeted by the tides of religious strife threatening to undo the realm that the eyes of the world are upon. We all remember the dread experienced by the Puritans when confronted by the quaking Quakers. These fearsome advocates of all that is unholy challenged the Visible Saints to stand guard to protect what God had rendered. And what about the Baptists, the Methodists, and Lord only knows what other religious monstrosity would invade our defenseless shores? It’s a wonder the City on a Hill even survived the religious onslaught to come.

Worst of all were the Catholics. Wave after wave of Catholics washed up to undo the work of the Elect of God. The demise of the America can be traced to the failure of Andrew Jackson to stop the encroachment of Catholics when he had the chance. Now we all pay the price for his ineptitude starting right here in New York.

Samuel F. B. Morse was upset, very upset. The Hudson Valley was being overrun by the wrong kind of people. Everything he hoped to accomplish was being threatened by the new immigrants who were overwhelming the natives (who now included Dutch and Germans as well as English) of good stock. Here is how the painter and future inventor of the telegraph described the situation in Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (1835) based on a series of articles he had written for the New York Observer:

Foreign immigrants are flocking to our shores in increased numbers, two thirds at least are Roman Catholics, and of the most ignorant classes, and thus pauperism and crime are alarmingly increased. . . . The great body of emigrants to this country are the hard-working, mentally neglected poor of Catholic countries in Europe, who have left a land where they were enslaved, for one of freedom. . . .They are not fitted to act with the judgment in the political affairs of their new country, like native citizens, educated from their infancy in the principles and habits of our institutions. Most of them are too ignorant to act at all for themselves, and expect to be guided wholly by others [the priests].

Morse’s ire against a supposed great papal conspiracy was, if not a majority opinion at the time, very popular. And we recognize the idiom he used as well:

If Popery is tolerant, let us see Italy, Austria, and Spain open their doors to the teachers of the Protestant faith. The conspirators against our liberties . . . are now organized in every part of the country; they are all subordinates, standing in regular steps of slave and master . . . the great master-slave Metternich, who commands and obeys his illustrious Master, the Emperor [of Austria-Hungary]. . . . It is a war, and all true patriots must wake to the cry of danger. They must up and gird themselves for battle. It is no false alarm. Our liberties are in danger. The Philistines are upon us.

Morse’s song is still sung today. His words have been updated to our words: “If Popery is tolerant (today we would say “If Islam is a religion of peace”), let us see Italy, Austria, and Spain (today we would say “Syria, Iran, and Libya and four others”), open their doors to the teachers of the Protestant faith (today we would say “if they want to build a mosque”).

Morse was not finished: “Where Popery has put darkness, we must put light. Where Popery has planted its crosses, its colleges, its churches, its chapels, its nunneries, Protestant patriotism must put side by side college for college, seminary for seminary, church for church.” Morse called for naturalization laws to prevent the lifeboat of the world from capsizing: “Our naturalization laws were never intended to convert this land into the almshouse of Europe.” Morse didn’t want Europe’s tired, its poor and its enslaved masses incapable of being free-he didn’t want the Catholics and he certainly didn’t want the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Jews of Eastern and Central Europe whose odyssey to American shores had yet to begin in earnest in the mid-1830s. Don’t send your wretched refuse to me. Instead, he wrote that,

we must have the [naturalization] law so amended that no FOREIGNER WHO MAY COME INTO THIS COUNTRY, AFTER THE PASSAGE OF THE NEW LAW, SHALL EVER BE ALLOWED EXERCISE THE ELECTIVE FRANCHISE. This alone meets evil in its fullest extent.

At the time Morse and others were writing such things there was a great concern in the land that the Mississippi Valley, not yet the heartland, and America in general were under siege. The papal minions were fanning out across the country spreading their pagan ways among God-fearing Protestants and they had to be stopped. America had to be saved from the clutches of this global religious conspiracy of people not capable of freedom and liberty and slaves to their overseas master.”

“War must be fought” is Morse’s title for chapter 9.

As already noted, Morse by no means was alone in his views about the threat to America. The Know-Nothing Party arose in large part out of anti-Catholic bigotry, and it had non-trivial support in its day. But it also had its detractors, and against these Morse also took aim. Writing in 1835, Morse characterized the media for saying his chosen war was “the fruits of an intolerant, bigoted, fanatical spirit, and the revival of ancient prejudices,” but he would have none of it: “We have fallen on strange times, indeed, when subjects of the deepest political importance to the country may not be mooted in the political journals of the day without meeting the indiscriminating hostility and denunciations of such journals.”

In the decades to follow, another wave of Catholics swept across America irrevocably changing the realm until the field of dreams was no more and all was nightmare. Consider these reports from Iowa.

The report of one of the Methodist Upper Iowa districts at the 1883 Conference contained the following concern about events in its district:

Upon the river borders Catholicism and German rationalism press upon us.  Rum and Rome and Rationalism practically coalesce while Protestantism, pressed into the minority, instinctively “rises and retires.”

In the Upper Conference, as Methodist districts were known, the battle against foreign elements resumed with gusto in 1885.  The Conference resolved to support the Evangelical Protestant Association in its efforts to evangelize the foreign population amidst the large cities of the country:

Whereas, the growth of Romanism and its efforts to obtain power, demand that active exertions be made to preserve our institutions from its insidious attacks; and

Whereas, the most successful method of awakening the power of Romanism is the conversion of its followers …

 Resolved 1st.  That we cordially endorse this evangelistic agency and pray that it may become more and more efficient in reaching the foreign Romanish population in our land.

The missionary activity stressed by the Upper Iowa Conference in 1887 was domestic not foreign in scope.

Throughout a wide area on either side of the Mississippi river, a foreign immigration has been steadily driving out our native population and has so weakened our Churches as to make it impossible in some cases and difficult in many, to maintain our existence.

The threat of Romanism and infidelity loomed large on the Midwestern plains.

According to the 1890 census, Iowa was divided between 40% pietist (Protestant) and 29% liturgical (Catholic) with 31% nonmembers, a clearcut sign that the battle waged to protect America was being lost.

The battle against Catholicism at the local level in the Upper Iowa Conference region can be tracked in the annual report of the districts.  For example, in 1892, Decorah reported an heroic effort against the depletion of its eastern borders: it was fighting the good fight to hold the territory for Protestant Christianity.  Dubuque Methodists declared than even in the midst of a Roman Catholic population, it was not dead.  This conflict was no idle matter to the people who had settled the prairies only a few decades before only now to find themselves fighting for their cultural and religious life in the land they regarded as home.

The 1899 Conference report from the Davenport district asks the question:

Am I in the United States of America, or Scandinavia, or the Emerald Isle, or Germany?

Now these alien immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany among elsewhere continued to overrun the land threatening the Methodist and therefore American way of life.

The Decorah district in 1902 reported a disturbing trend in the once-Methodist lands:

the stranger has got possession of the gates, and the native American Methodist farmer seems, and feels himself to be, a stranger in the new surroundings.  Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians and Irish are buying the farms all the more easily, because the American early settlers have reached years when they wish the rest they have earned and the advantages of town life and have the means to gratify the desire.  The new occupants bring with them Romanism, Lutheranism, or hatred of all churches, and whatever the form it is in the antagonism to Methodism.  Notwithstanding, we are still optimistic, because we believe in God, the gospel go-ahead-itiveness, which last is a synonym for Methodism.

The Pope had designs on Iowa as Decorah reported.

The principal embarrassment to our work, as all well know, is the outgoing of our original New England and Middle States’ people and the incoming, principally of people from the countries of Europe and alien to our Methodistic type of Evangelical religion.  Those people who are Protestant are of the state-church type of Lutheran sacramentarians.  The major part of them are however, papists.  Rome evidently has designs on fair Iowa.

First the City on the Hill had been swept away by the incoming flood of Irish Catholics. Then the field of dreams had been plowed under due to the incoming flood of German Catholics. How much more indignity could the American people endure?

Little did they know that Italian Catholics were about to arrive. “Why have you come, Joe DiMaggio?” sang the anthem of the beleaguered Americans. Those Italian Catholics will never sing to “My Way.” They will only sing to their way. Can anyone even imagine at Yankee Stadium, the great stadium to America’s national pastime at the city at the center of the universe, that Italian Catholics could sing the praises of New York New York?

Woe is us. Even as I write these words the Irish American Heritage Museum is hosting a Governor Martin Glynn Symposium on February 18 in honor of New York’s 40th Governor and its first Irish American Roman Catholic Governor. What’s next? A Catholic President? Catholics on the Supreme Court? Papal Law becoming the law of the land, our Constitution in tatters, people eating pizza?! American is undone all because Andrew Jackson lacked the right stuff to do what is necessary to protect the country from the threat from abroad. We should all be on our knees in prayer giving thanks that our President today will not make the same mistake Andrew Jackson did when he allowed those religious aliens to settle in our country and establish foreign rule even in Middle America!

 

Portions of this post appeared in “The Methodist Upper Iowa Conference: From Wilderness Settlement to Middle-American Melting Pot,” Methodist History 2009 47/4:226-241 and “The Immigrant Experience in American History: Who Is an American?” American Interest, June 27, 2012, http://www.the-american-interest.com/byline/peter-feinman/.