The Panic of 1893 and the APA in Connecticut

By David M. Roth

The Panic of 1893 was one of those periodic, nineteenth-century economic downturns, similar to those in 1819, 1837, 1857, and 1873, that had a crushing impact upon American business activity. The particular root of the 1893 collapse was the failure in November 1890 of the British banking house of Baring Brothers. There then followed widespread British dumping of securities, including a substantial number of American stocks. The resulting drain of gold from the United States was enormous and unfortunately came at a time when gold reserves were falling because of a sharp decline in revenues related to the high rates of the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and to the enormous pension grants made by the Harrison administration. By April 1893 United States gold reserves had fallen below the magic $100 million mark, precipitating the crash of the New York Stock Market in June. Following the market crash came more calamities—banks called in their loans, businesses failed, and unemployment increased alarmingly.

Industrial Connecticut, highly vulnerable to such business blights, felt the misery. Many of the state's major industries—silvermaking, firearms, machine tool, and cutlery—operated from the summer of 1893 until well into 1894 at less than seventy percent of capacity, and thousands of workingmen were either discharged or had their wages cut substantially.

Another repercussion of the Depression of the 1890s in Connecticut was the intensification of anti-Catholic sentiment. Connecticut had been militantly anti-Catholic since its founding in the 1630s. Connecticut's Puritans, with their theological roots in the Reformation, regarded the Roman Catholic Church as a principal source of the world's evil. Such Connecticut anti-Catholicism was manifested in the late 1840s and 1850s when thousands of Irish Roman Catholic immigrants settled in Connecticut's growing cities.

Similar Connecticut anti-Catholic sentiment surfaced in the late nineteenth century when the state began to experience the highly Catholic "New Immigration" from Eastern and Southern Europe. The hostility toward the "New Immigrants" was particularly evident following the Panic of 1893. Connecticut workers, already pressed by unemployment and falling wages, could see little benefits to be derived from a growing supply of unskilled labor willing to work for the lowest wages.

A principal manifestation of anti-Catholicism in the 1890s was the appearance in Connecticut of the American Protective Association. Born in Iowa in the late 1880s, the APA sought to limit the political participation of Roman Catholics who were viewed as but agents of the Pope seeking to subvert American republican principles.

APA strength grew in Connecticut in 1893-1894, with the APA entering politics via local Republican party caucuses. APA members succeeded in gaining control of local Republican organizations in cities such as Bridgeport, New Britain, and Greenwich. A typical APA charge was that Roman Catholics were not fit for American citizenship because their "foreign loyalties" made them enemies of American values such as freedom of the press and free public schools. The height, or depth, of such APA rhetoric came in 1894 when an APA official told a Hartford audience that "Abraham Lincoln was shot on direct orders of the Pope."

Yet, the APA appearance in Connecticut proved to be short-lived. Important members of the state's Protestant leadership, particularly Congregational, spoke out against the APA as an organization which said it sought to save American freedom, but in fact conducted its organizational affairs with secrecy and discrimination. Too, the state's increasing recovery from the high unemployment of 1893-1884 weakened the appeal of the APA. By 1896 the APA had little remaining visibility or strength in Connecticut.

In the course of the next decades, however, it also was apparent that the anti-Catholicism on which the APA fed had by no means disappeared. A continuing dark strain in Connecticut public life, particularly evident during World War I and the 1920s, would be very visible tension between Connecticut natives, as well as Protestant immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, and Roman Catholic immigrants and their descendants.

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