The Menace, 12 April 1913, an anti-Catholic weekly's front page

The front page of The Menace, an anti-Catholic weekly published at Aurora, Missouri, for 12 April 1913. A counter box claims 574,845 subscriptions, a skull-and-crossbones emblem is labeled "Temporal Power," and the headlines allege a conspiracy of "the Romanists" against the paper. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.

Content note: this page quotes an anti-Catholic newspaper as it printed itself, including its conspiracy claims and its emblem of a skull and crossbones.

The front page

The Menace was a weekly printed at Aurora, Missouri, at two cents a copy, under the Rev. Theo. C. Walker as editor. This issue is its number 104. The archive's transcription covers the masthead, the counter box, the two emblems, the banner headline, the deck, and some sub-heads; the body columns are not transcribed.

When You Have Read This Copy of The Menace, Will You Favor Us By Handing It to Another?

[counter box] [...]

Total number subscriptions this date

574,845

Total edition printed last week 596,360

[emblem: skull and crossbones under a triple crown] TEMPORAL POWER

A PUBLIC MENACE

[...]

[emblem: schoolhouse] THE ANTIDOTE

FOR PAPAL POISON

PUBLISHED for the preservation of liberty, the promotion of progress and the advancement of civilization. As a means to this end we advocate the absolute separation of church and state, the taxation of all church property and the compulsory education of all children up to the age of fourteen years in the public schools.

A Heretofore Unheard of Conspiracy Against The Menace Brought to Light!

Federal Prosecution of the Appeal to Reason in Kansas Reveals Plot of the Romanists to Discredit and Destroy This Paper By Associating It With Socialist Propaganda. [...]

How it sells itself

The archive tags the page with bandwagon and scapegoating, and both are on display. The counter box is the bandwagon: subscriptions previously reported, new ones, expirations, the weekly gain, and a printed edition near six hundred thousand. Those are the paper's own figures, and the archive notes only that they add up as printed. The line at the top asks every reader to pass the copy on.

The scapegoat is the Catholic Church. The emblem puts a skull under a triple crown, and the deck under the banner speaks of a "Plot of the Romanists" and claims a deal under which "Certain Government Officials" would help destroy The Menace in return for Catholic aid against the Appeal to Reason and socialism. The page offers that as evidence brought to light at a hearing; the transcription does not reproduce the evidence.

Liberty as a cover

The masthead's creed borrows real constitutional language, the separation of church and state, and attaches it to a campaign against one church and to compulsory public schooling for every child. Stripped of the emblem, a demand to keep government and religion apart is a sound one. Here it is turned against one faith and its American members, with public schooling offered as "the antidote for papal poison." That was wrong, and the paper's claim to defend liberty does not change it.

The site's case study on the 1920s Klan cites a reading of the Klan's papers in which white Protestants were told the cause of their troubles was Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and Black Americans. The Klan weekly The Imperial Night-Hawk is on this site, as is the Wilson administration essay for the years this issue falls in.