Commentators in the nation’s newspapers foresaw impending doom. In the United States, as well as across the Atlantic, a frightening intellectual movement was gaining steam in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The movement supposedly portended the end of Christianity, morality, and civil society. Writing in the Chicago Tribune (1870), one commentator chided the “moral weakness” of the movement, which embraced “mere facts without faiths or fancies, mere knowledge without affection of imagination, and mere science without worship or inspiration.” In 1877, a commentator for the Weekly Tribune in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, saw in the movement a “bigotry” and “hostility” to life that revealed its hollow core. In 1889, the Pittsburgh Dispatch quoted the Archbishop of New York on the dreadful danger of this movement: “What will human life be in this world? What will become of the family? What of civil society itself?”