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But that was only the surface offense. The Catholic revival also turned a cold eye on liberal democracy, since it identified liberalism with anti-clericalism and Protestantism. "If nineteenth-century liberals idealized human autonomy," McGreevy writes, "Catholics habitually referred to communities." That intellectual alliance with romantic organicism, which also shows up in semi-Catholic movements like the Mercersburg Theology and Episcopal Anglo-Catholicism, threw the new American Catholicism into sympathy with Southern romantic apologists for slavery. (One of McGreevy's strongest suits in this book is his ability to connect events in the international world of the Catholic Church with domestic American crises and issues.) So, when in 1839 Pope Gregory XVI issued a condemnation of the slave trade, but not slavery, this was a signal to American Catholics that Protestant abolitionism was not for them. The signal was read, perhaps entirely too well, by both Catholics and Protestants in America. On the one hand, few Catholics appear in abolitionist organizations. On the other, the first abolitionist martyr, Elijah Lovejoy, was a raving Catholicophobe, and McGreevy notes that Tom's one great success in Uncle Tom's Cabin is the conversion of Little Eva from Catholicism to Methodism.
The secession of American Catholics from the Protestant cultural mainstream might easily have triggered the same kind of kulturkampf that occurred in Bismarck's Germany and Cavour's Italy, culminating in the emergence of Catholic political parties between 1865 and 1900. It never came to that, because Catholics discovered in the Democratic Party a political organization which was, for very different reasons, just as suspicious of northern Protestant imperialism as they were. In a movement parallel to that of Jews in the 20th century, urban Catholics made common cause with white racist agrarian Southerners in an effort to keep the Beechers and the Lovejoys—the old Whig-Republican axis—from using their victory in the Civil War to stamp the entire country with the Protestant evangelical die. Where Russell Conwell saw acres of liberal capitalist diamonds and William James found truth in experience, Southern agrarians and Catholic factory workers saw only Yankee exploitation and interference. The highpoint of this alliance was reached in the 1930s: in 1931, Pius XI issued the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, decrying capitalism as a product of "the errors of individualist economic teaching," and two years later, Dorothy Day founded The Catholic Worker.
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