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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2022
This article presents a new account of the Catholic Summer School of America (CSSA), founded in 1892 as the “Catholic Chautauqua.” Long relegated to the footnotes of book history and Catholic studies, the Summer School and its reading circle antecedents are here reclaimed for the study of women and American religion. As a Catholic institution, the Summer School was directed by clergy and laymen; men's names fill the published histories of the site as a religious and educational retreat. I argue, however, that it was Summer School women who nurtured a complementary vision of middle-class respectability and intimate association among a white Catholic elite that promoted theirs as the aspirational and ascendant U.S. Catholic “style” at the turn of the new century. Loosened from their parish boundaries, these summer Catholics traveled north to New York's Adirondack region and converged on the lakefront, lecture hall, and ballroom, extending their social networks, and creating an exclusive space of belonging that distinguished themselves from the diverse “immigrant church” at home. With close readings of the traces that Summer School visitors left behind in visual and textual sources—including photographs, postcards, local newspaper reports, and previously overlooked fiction and nonfiction by Catholic women writers—I draw attention to the Summer School during its first decades as a critical site for studying an upwardly mobile white Catholic leisure class concerned with its social and cultural reproduction.
New research for this article was funded by Colgate University's Upstate Institute. I thank Chris Henke and Julie Dudrick for encouraging my travels, and Helen Nerska and Roger Black for sharing their local knowledge with me. Ray Patterson gifted enthusiasm (and data!) when I was first thinking about the Summer School; members of the Princeton University Religion in the Americas Workshop and the Rochester U.S. History Group read very early drafts; and Ann Braude and the Women's Studies in Religion Program research associates offered significant feedback prior to submission. For their encouragement and help sharpening my arguments, I am especially grateful to Philip Goff and the journal's anonymous readers, and to the members of my pandemic writing group: Kristin Allukian, Faith Barter, RJ Boutelle, and Alice Rutkowski.
1 Descriptions of “Lady Day,” the annual Feast of the Assumption of Mary, are the author's composite based on a collection of photographs held by the Clinton County Historical Association, Plattsburgh, NY (hereafter CCHA), and local newspaper reports. See for example, “An Impressive Scene,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 16, 1895; “Seventh Week at Cliff Haven,” Plattsburgh Republican, August 17, 1907; “The Orange and Green,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 17, 1908; “Feast of the Assumption,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 16, 1909; “Cliff Haven Pleasures,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 16, 1910; “Impressive Ceremonies Held in Connection with Lady Day Fete at Cliff Haven,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 16, 1912; “Enjoyable Social Event,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 12, 1913; “Feast of the Assumption,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 16, 1913; and “Feast of the Assumption,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 15, 1914. On the feast day as Summer School participants would have understood it, see “Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: The Universal Knowledge Foundation, Inc., 1913), 6–7.
2 “A Children's Fete,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 16, 1904.
3 On urban Catholic worship and ethnic parishes, see for example Orsi, Robert A., The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Maldonado-Estrada, Alyssa, Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (New York: NYU Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My thinking on the CSSA lakefront religion has also been shaped by Grainger, Brett Malcolm, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 The only stand-alone work on the CSSA, written barely thirty years after its founding, is Sheedy, Morgan M., “History of the Catholic Summer School of America,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 27, no. 4 (December 1916): 287–95Google Scholar. Most recently, the CSSA serves as an example of the business of middlebrow reading in Harrington-Lueker, Donna, Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), 13, 64, 153, 166–75Google Scholar. Women at the Summer School also receive brief mention in Kane, Paula, Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 207–13Google Scholar.
5 On the “immigrant church” framing of U.S. Catholic histories, see Dolan, Jay, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985)Google Scholar; Fisher, James T., Communion of Immigrants: A History of Catholics in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Steven M. Avella, “The Immigrant Church, 1820–1908” in The Cambridge Companion to American Catholicism, ed. Margaret M. McGuinness and Thomas F. Rzeznik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 31–47. In making the case for studying an upwardly mobile Catholic elite, I propose an analysis of the gendered work of Catholic leisure that builds on the political history of whiteness, which is best summarized in Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. I also draw inspiration from Matthew J. Cressler—writing of U.S. Catholics six decades later during the Civil Rights era—who has urged a “conceptual shift [to] illuminate the ways the very Catholicness of white Catholics—their institutions, their ideas, their actions, their bodies, their relationships, their lives—was structured by racial whiteness.” See “‘Real Good and Sincere Catholics’: White Catholicism and Massive Resistance to Desegregation in Chicago, 1965–1968,” Religion and American Culture 30, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 5.
6 Goessmann, Helena T., “Impressions on the Summer School” summarized in “Local Circle Chronicle,” Catholic Reading Circle Review, January 1897, 303Google Scholar.
7 Progressive-era laywomen's voluntarism has often been described as a transition from single-sex prayer societies to charity work; a strain of “middle-class associationism,” as Paula M. Kane puts it, later “combined good works with cultured events and educational lectures,” and led to 1921 organization of the National Council of Catholic Women. See Kane, “American Catholic Laywomen and Feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Catholicism, ed. Margaret M. McGuinness and Thomas F. Rzeznik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 251–52. On the parallel expansion of higher education for Catholic young women, see Kathleen Sprows Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
8 On “good” and “bad” reading for Catholics, see Monica L. Mercado, “Women and the Word: Gender, Print, and Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2014), 143–48, 164–67; and Bartram, Erin, “The Use and Abuse of Reading, 1865–1873,” Religion and American Culture 29, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 36–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Kelley, Mary, “‘A More Glorious Revolution’: Women's Antebellum Reading Circles and the Pursuit of Public Influence,” New England Quarterly 76, no. 2 (June 2003): 163–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Hull House cultural programs are discussed in a number of works, including Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). On group Bible study, see Christopher D. Cantwell, “The Bible Class Teacher: Piety and Politics in the Age of Fundamentalism” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2011). African American women's reading groups also flourished in the 1890s; see Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 187–295.
11 See, for example, Maria G. Grey and Emily Shirreff, Thoughts on Self-Culture, Addressed to Women (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H. Nichols, 1851); and Harriet Eliza Paine, Chats with Girls on Self-Culture (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1912).
12 Two previous studies document the Catholic reading circles: one, a master's thesis from 1930; the other, a brief sketch of the movement that argues it was a way for young women to “seek an education.” See Sister Mary Aurelius Brennan, “History and Influence of the Catholic Reading Circle Movement” (MA thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1930); and O'Connor, Thomas F., “American Catholic Reading Circles, 1886–1909,” Libraries and Culture 26, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 334–47Google Scholar.
13 “The Columbian Reading Union,” Catholic World, June 1889, 399.
14 Records of the Josepha Reading Circle, the Queen Isabella Reading Circle, and the Sedes Sapientiae Reading Circle are located at the Archives of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, Mount Saint Joseph Convent (Philadelphia, PA). On the convent academy and the built environment of white Catholic womanhood, see Monica L. Mercado, “Loretto Academy, Nerinx, KY,” in Empty Places, a project of the journal American Religion, https://www.american-religion.org/empty-places/loretto.
15 Katherine E. Conway, quoted in “Successful Conference of the Catholic Reading Circles of Philadelphia,” Catholic Reading Circle Review, June 1894, 571–72. To find Conway's remarks in context at the Columbian Exposition, see Progress of the Catholic Church in America and the Great Columbian Catholic Congress of 1893, vol. 2: World's Columbian Catholic Congresses, 6th ed. (Chicago: J. S. Hyland and Company, 1897).
16 Cossen, William S., “Catholic Women, Hidden Work, and Separate Spheres: The Columbian Catholic Congress of 1893,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 20, no. 3 (April 2021): 2Google Scholar.
17 J. L. O'Neil, Catholic Literature in Catholic Homes (New York: O'Shea, 1894), 9–10.
18 Thomas McMillan to Archbishop Corrigan, June 5, 1892, Archbishop Michael Corrigan Collection, Correspondence and Sermons, Box C-30, Archives of the Archdiocese of New York (hereafter AANY). On reports of the first Catholic Summer School season, see Mercado, “Women and the Word,” 218–19.
19 “The Chautauqua System of Education,” The Methodist Year-Book, ed. A. B. Sanford (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1897), 133.
20 “With Readers and Correspondents,” Catholic World, June 1889, 416.
21 “The Catholic Chautauqua,” Bismarck Tribune, March 11, 1893.
22 Rieser, Andrew C., The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 88, 123–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 “Philosophical Journals Abstracts and Notes,” Thomas McMillan Papers, Box 1, Folder 7, Paulist Fathers Archive (Washington, DC). On visions of the Adirondacks as a healing place for American men, see Sturges, Mark, “Consumption in the Adirondacks: Print Culture and the Curative Climate,” New York History 100, no. 1 (Summer 2019): 109–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Gilded Age Adirondacks tourism, see Craig Gilborn, Adirondack Camps: Homes Away from Home, 1850–1950 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000); and Bryant F. Tolles Jr., Resort Hotels of the Adirondacks: The Architecture of a Summer Paradise, 1850–1950 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003).
24 Logistics mattered too: key to the plans for the Cliff Haven site was the fact that the Delaware and Hudson (D&H) railroad tracks already passed through the proposed Summer School grounds. Seeing a business opportunity, the D&H proffered land to the school at no cost. For the railroad agreement, see “Summer School Gold Bonds,” Archbishop Michael Corrigan Collection, Correspondence and Biographical Materials, Box G-77, Folder 21, AANY. On the improvement of train travel over the “old road,” see “A Glimpse of the Adirondacks,” Catholic World, November 1876, 261.
25 Brennan, “History and Influence,” 50–51. On the upstate histories and public memory of Rene Goupil, Isaac Jogues, and John LaLande, the only canonized Roman Catholic martyrs of the United States, see Emma Anderson, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
26 See remarks of the Reverend Dr. Thomas Conaty recorded in “An Impressive Scene.”
27 For mention of the Catholic Winter School at New Orleans, see Archbishop Francis Janssens to the Most Reverend Archbishops and the Right Reverend Bishops of the United States, January 1, 1896, Archbishop Michael Corrigan Collection, Correspondence and Biographical Materials, Box G-15, Folder H-J, AANY and Syllabus of Lectures of the Catholic Winter School of America, First Session (Boston: Heath, 1896). A Western Summer School (sometimes called the Columbian Catholic Summer School) located in Madison, Wisconsin, opened in 1895 and moved to Detroit around 1900. In 1908, a similar summer retreat opened in Spring Bank, Wisconsin. See notices including “Catholic News and Notes,” Sacred Heart Review, October 27, 1894; “The Catholic Summer School,” Sacred Heart Review, July 27, 1895; and “Great Catholic Summer School Will Be Opened for Benefit of the West,” San Francisco Call, July 19, 1908.
28 “The Catholic Summer School,” Irish American Weekly, April 29, 1893.
29 “Sports at Cliff Haven,” Troy Semi-Weekly Times, April 16, 1901.
30 “Enjoyable Social Event,” Plattsburgh Daily Press, August 12, 1913.
31 Descriptions and mapping of the site are taken from “Catholic Summer School,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, September 21, 1901; and “The Catholic Summer School of America,” notes on a talk by George and Eileen Brewer (August 10, 1993), Phyllis Wells Collection on Clinton County Churches and Other Clinton County History, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 10, State University of New York Plattsburgh Special Collections (hereafter Phyllis Wells Collection).
32 Newspaper clippings, Phyllis Wells Collection.
33 Helena T. Goessmann, “Six Summer Screeds: I,” Catholic Reading Circle Review, November 1896, 108; and “Six Summer Screeds: IV,” Catholic Reading Circle Review, February 1897, 337.
34 “Catholic Summer School of America Marked,” New York Almanac, https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2015/08/catholic-summer-school-of-america-marked.
35 See Sturges, “Consumption in the Adirondacks”; and Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
36 Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, eds. Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 157.
37 “The Columbian Reading Union,” Catholic World, March 1893, 880.
38 “The Catholic Summer School,” Irish World, May 13, 1893.
39 “The Columbian Reading Union,” Catholic World, March 1893, 880.
40 “The Catholic Summer School,” New Haven Register, August 2, 1892.
41 “Catholic Summer School,” New York Times, February 19, 1893.
42 Goessmann's lectures are noted in “Catholic Summer School,” New York Herald, July 19, 1893; and Morgan M. Sheedy, “Current History and Literature,” Catholic Reading Circle Review, April 1895, 38. As she and other Catholic women lecturers, such as Katherine Conway, gained prominence, they stood apart from other women speakers of the period supporting woman suffrage. On Catholic antisuffrage, see Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith. In contrast, Chautauqua women at the turn of the century “became increasingly involved in suffrage and women's rights issues.” See Kilde, Jeanne Halgren, “The ‘Predominance of the Feminine’ at Chautauqua: Rethinking the Gender-Space Relationship in Victorian America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 478CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 To chart the reach of women on the lecture platform, in lieu of a full run of summer lecture programs, I rely on data shared with me by Ray Patterson in the Department of Religious Studies at St. Michael's College (Colchester, VT).
44 “Women Are to Take Part,” New York Herald, April 29, 1894, 7.
45 Kane, Paula M., “The Pulpit of the Hearthstone: Katherine Conway and Boston Catholic Women, 1900–1920,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5, nos. 3–4 (Summer–Fall 1986): 370Google Scholar.
46 See Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 34. Images of Catholic womanhood at the CSSA very much line up with Charles Dana Gibson's drawings in, for example, “The American Girl's Evolution in Beauty,” St. Louis Republic magazine section, October 25, 1903. Catholic readers would have been very familiar with these images, if critiques of them in Warren Mosher's reading circle magazine are any measure. See Eugenie Ulrich, “Wanted—A Healthy Ideal,” Mosher's Magazine, March 1901, 355.
47 The “postcard craze” of the early twentieth century dovetails with the growing popularity of the CSSA as a vacation destination. See postcard examples (1906–1910), CCHA and collection of the author. On postcards and U.S. visual culture, see Lynda Klich and Benjamin Weiss, Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation (Boston: MA: Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2022).
48 CSSA photo negatives were catalogued during the 2010s thanks to the efforts of CCHA volunteer Roger Black, who patiently walked me through the collection in Plattsburgh. See Jeff Meyers, “Photos of Historic Catholic Summer School Survive,” Press-Republican, April 29, 2012. The CCHA has recently made a number of these images available online to the public. See Clinton County Historical Association Photo Archive, https://diviner.clintoncountyhistorical.org.
49 Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1894–95, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896), 1073.
50 “Catholic Summer School of America . . . Decennial Session, 1892–1901,” Mosher's Magazine, October 1901, 63.
51 “Points of Information: The Champlain Summer School,” Mosher's Magazine, April 1900, 56–62.
52 “With Readers and Correspondents,” Catholic World, June 1889, 417.
53 Goessmann, quoted in “Local Circle Chronicle,” Catholic Reading Circle Review, January 1897, 303.
54 Helena T. Goessmann, “Six Summer Screeds: II,” Catholic Reading Circle Review, December 1896, 177.
55 Helena T. Goessmann, “Six Summer Screeds: I,” Catholic Reading Circle Review, November 1896, 106.
56 Marion J. Brunowe [Mary J. Browne], “A Fortnight at Cliff Haven,” Catholic World, November 1900, 258.
57 Marion J. Brunowe [Mary J. Browne], “The Summer School Story of the Lone Lorn Delegate,” Mosher's Magazine, December 1898, 128.
58 “Catholic Summer School of America, Champlain Assembly, Cliff Haven, New York. Grand Excursion” (July 9–16, 1898), Archbishop Michael Corrigan Collection, Correspondence and Biographical Materials, Box G-87, Folder 9, AANY.
59 Lida Rose McCabe, “Open Letter to a Stay-At-Home” (1900), Library Collections of the Adirondack Experience: The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake (Blue Mountain Lake, NY).
60 News clipping from Plattsburgh Republican, July 27, 1901, Phyllis Wells Collection.
61 On Sister Corry's early life and vocation, see M. [Mother] Seraphine [Leonard], ed., Immortelles of Catholic Columbian Literature (New York: D. H. McBride and Co., 1897), 180–81; and Dolores Enderle, The Dominicans of Racine, Wisconsin 1901–1964, vol. 3 (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009), 42.
62 M. A. Navarette [Sister Mary Alphonsa Corry], At Lake Monona: An Episode of the Summer School (New York: D .H. McBride and Co., 1899), 14.
63 Navarette, At Lake Monona, 19–20.
64 Navarette, At Lake Monona, 29–39.
65 Navarette, At Lake Monona, 104–105.
66 Navarette, At Lake Monona, 145–55, 156.
67 Lelia Hardin Bugg, “Catholicity in the West,” Catholic World, December 1897, 302.
68 “New Books,” Sacred Heart Review, April 3, 1909, 240.
69 On the Catholic spinster, see Monica L. Mercado, “Intellectual Catholic Women and the fin de siècle Girl: Singleness as Frame for American Catholic Women's History” (paper presented at Single Lives: 200 Years of Independent Women in Literature and Popular Culture, UCD Humanities Institute, Dublin, Ireland, October 13, 2017).
70 Champlain Assembly, Cliff Haven, Lake Champlain, New York: Tercentenary Celebration brochure (New York: Catholic Summer School of America, 1909), 19, Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York State Archives (Albany, NY).
71 J. T. Driscoll, “Catholic Summer Schools,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912).
72 While the existing archival record offers few clues to the operating budgets of the CSSA over these years, one 1916 report to the CSSA Board of Trustees noted a “financial burden under which the Institution is groaning,” and asked for volunteer labor instead of paying visiting lecturers. See Francis P. Siegfried, “To the Board of Trustees of Catholic Summer School of America” (January 10, 1916), Philadelphia Archdiocesan Superintendent of Schools records MC 92, Box 6, Folder 7, Catholic Historical Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA). During the 1920s, New York news reports suggested that Summer School women continued to attend the CSSA with their alumnae groups and fundraised for the movement during the off-season as part of their Catholic philanthropy, but those funds were likely only a drop in the bucket of operating costs. On women's fundraising for the CSSA after World War I, see “Archbishop Hayes Pleads for ‘Womanly’ Type at Luncheon,” New York Times, February 3, 1924; and “Appeal to Women by Cardinal Hayes,” New York Times, February 1, 1925.
73 “Catholic Summer School of America at Cliff Haven,” Catholic Transcript, May 1928, 8.
74 On a twenty-first-century vision for Chautauqua, see “150 Forward: The Strategic Plan for Chautauqua Institution, 2019–2028,” https://150fwd.chq.org.
75 Brunowe, “A Fortnight at Cliff Haven,” 257.
76 See for example the Saturday entertainments described in “Seventh Week at Cliff Haven,” Plattsburgh Republican, August 17, 1907.
77 In suggesting this line of thinking, I am interested in future work that might put Catholic Studies in conversation with scholars working on American histories that do not shy away from the links between white women's association life and the maintenance of racial segregation and white supremacy—a line of questioning that has encouraged my own. See, for example, Cox, Karen, Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021).
78 Goessmann, Helena T., “Six Summer Screeds: VI,” Catholic Reading Circle Review, April 1897, 20–21Google Scholar.