Awful disclosures and American decency

In January 1836, a book called The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: the Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed was published by a New York publishing house under the imprint of Howe and Bates.

The book, which purported to expose the crimes and scandals of the Catholic Church--specifically rapes and child murders committed by priests and nuns affiliated with the Hotel Dieu convent in Montreal--was a huge success. In just a few months it sold more than 26,000 copies. And it had legs, still in print at the start of the Civil War, having sold more than 300,000 copies. It spawned a 1937 sequel, Further Disclosures of Maria Monk, which also sold well and continued to be reprinted well into the 20th century. Though it's generally received as a camp artifact, you can still find copies of it for sale. You can even download it as an ebook.

It is, of course, utter nonsense. While there was an unfortunate Canadian woman named Maria Monk, she was never a nun. Her only connection with any Catholic institution was a stay as a teenage inmate of the Magdalene asylum in Montreal; she left when she became pregnant. She subsequently became the mistress of a Protestant minister named William K. Hoyte, who was possibly the father of her child and certainly the head of a benign-sounding organization called the Canadian Benevolent Society.

But Hoyte's CBS was as much about ginning up anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant propaganda as spreading the gospel. He took Monk with him to New York, where with fellow anti-Catholics George Bourne and J. J. Slocum and (likely) ghostwriter Theodore Dwight, the nephew of Yale's president, concocted Maria's story.

We know more about the origins of Awful Disclosures than we might otherwise because the book's success sparked some legal wrangling among the collaborators--suits and countersuits were filed. Monk's mother came forward and declared that her daughter was a willful and troubled child. She attributed what she called her daughter's "ridiculous but most plausible stories" to Maria's having been jabbed in the ear with a pencil when she was 7 years old.

"[S]ince that time her mental faculties were deranged, and by times much more than at other times, but that she was far from being an idiot," her mother wrote.

In the furor after the publication, Monk threw over the Rev. Hoyte and ran off to Philadelphia with another man. When she resurfaced, she claimed to have been kidnapped by a cabal of Catholic priests. She died in an "almshouse" in 1849 on what is now New York's Roosevelt Island, shortly after being arrested for picking the pocket of a man who had hired her as a prostitute. She was 33 years old.

The publishing house that published her book was a dummy corporation set up by James Harper, the principal founder of Harper & Brothers, the company that would eventually become Harper & Row and is now HarperCollins. Harper saw the commercial potential of Awful Disclosures, but he didn't want to alienate Catholic customers. (It is interesting to note that a book refuting Awful Disclosures was also published under the Howe and Bates rubric--it might be the only other book that H & B published.)

Harper & Brothers wasn't the only concern that James Harper founded; in 1843 he helped found the American Republican Party, a nativist group opposed to immigrant voters and officeholders. He was elected mayor of New York in 1844, the same year the party swept municipal elections in Philadelphia. At the party's first national convention in 1845, the party changed its name to the Native American Party. One of the main planks the NAP's platform was to require immigrants to live in the U.S. 21 years before being eligible for naturalization.

Their idea was to "purify" American politics by limiting the influence of Irish and German Catholics, whom they regarded as hostile to American values and beholden to the Pope. (Specifically they charged that Pope Pius IX was an enemy of democracy who was largely responsible for the liberal revolutions that took place in several European countries in 1848. Not only had these revolutions been unable to establish democracies in these countries, they had caused thousands of refugees to seek a better life in America.) They limited their membership to Protestant white men.

These days this nativist movement, which ultimately named itself the American Party (though it was better known by the name Horace Greeley gave it, the Know-Nothing party) might take up a few paragraphs in a high school textbook if it gets covered at all. The higher dramas of Southern secession and the Civil War take precedence over what was ultimately an unsuccessful attempt to privilege "real Americans" over wretched refuse and huddled masses.

The sentiment is nothing new. The problem isn't so much that a billionaire without scruples has managed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party by exploiting certain self-inflicted vulnerabilities. It's that Americans are no more noble than other people when they are scared. As much as we might venerate our mongrel heritage, we've always been susceptible to demagoguery. It's been the chief enemy of democracy since ancient Greece.

It's always fed on ignorance and fear, and at times it's manifested itself in shameful ways like the internment of Japanese citizens (and some German and Italian Americans) during World War II. There was a time when papal bulls could foment the same sort of panic that so-called Sharia Law does in some blighted corners today.

I don't know that it should reassure us that our republic has so far survived the reckless and divisive rhetoric of people like "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, Huey Long, Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy. We've lost any common clearinghouse for objective truth; it's never been easier to substitute one's own wishfulness or paranoia for reality.

Decency and common sense used to be our last line of defense. But they don't prevail all the time. Tomorrow isn't promised. There will always be those willing to publish the next edition of Awful Disclosures--even if they aren't willing to put their name to it.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

Editorial on 08/28/2016

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