Henry F. Bowers
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Henry Francis Bowers (1837–1911) was the founder of the American Protective Association in Clinton, Iowa. It was staunchly politically anti-Catholic.
Biography
Henry Francis Bowers was born in Maryland on August 12, 1837. His father was a German emigrant who had been raised a Lutheran, who married the daughter of a New England Methodist family.[1] An only child, Bowers was raised in his mother's religion, his father having died at sea while traveling to Europe when Henry was still young.[1]
He grew up in Maryland during the era of Know Nothingism, leaving with his mother settle on a farm in eastern Iowa in 1857.[1] After three unsuccessful years of farming, Bowers learned the trade of cabinet-making.[1] He briefly enlisted in the Union army during the American Civil War, but soon contracted typhoid fever and was returned home to recover.[1]
The Republican partisan Bowers began taking an active interest in politics, gaining appointment as a deputy county clerk in 1863 and a deputy county recorder in 1869.[1] He ran for election as county recorder in 1870 and was reelected to that position in 1872.[1]
Making use of his political connections, Bowers was appointed as a special aide-de-camp to Iowa Governor John Henry Gear in 1878, a post accompanied with the honorary rank of lieutenant colonel.[1]
His demands for Catholics to remove themselves from politics, was because he saw Catholics as having dual loyalties. To Bowers they could not be both loyal to the United States and a pope in Rome. Historian Jo Ann Manfra argues that:
- in 1893, Henry Bowers lost personal control of the APA to a vastly expanded national membership that replaced him with Michigan's William Traynor as supreme president. When Bowers regained its leadership in 1898, the organization was only a shadow of its former self, and what remained of the APA died with its founder in 1911.[2]
Footnotes
Further reading
- Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (1988).
- Desmond, Humphrey J., "The American Protective Association," Catholic Encyclopedia (1911).
- Hingham, John. "The Mind of a Nativist: Henry F. Bowers and the A.P.A.," American Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 1952), pp. 16-24. In JSTOR
- Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955.
- Kinzer, Donald L., An Episode in Anti-Catholicism: The American Protective Association. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964.
- Lipset, Seymour Martin and Earl Raab. The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970. (1970).
- Manfra, Jo A. "Hometown Politics and the American Protective Association, 1887-1890." The Annals of Iowa 55 (1996), 138-166. Online
External links
- "Protestant Paranoia: The American Protective Association Oath," www.historymatters.gmu.edu
- "1896: McKinley and the A.P.A.," www.projects.vassar.edu