The Menace (Aurora, Mo.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
418 issues from 1911 to 1919, published in Aurora, Missouri, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Menace was established in Aurora, Missouri, by Wilbur Franklin Phelps and his stepson, Thomas Earl McClure, as an anti-Catholic publication. Launched on April 15, 1911, the Saturday four-page paper began with 22 subscribers, but with a low subscription cost of fifty cents per year, its circulation grew quickly. In less than three years, the paper had over one million subscribers. Upon reaching this milestone the Menace wrote, “We have shouted from the house-tops the danger to this republic, and a sleeping people have…acknowledged our shouts with a magnificent response.” Aside from the newspaper, Phelps and McClure used their publishing plant in Aurora to print books and pamphlets denouncing the Catholic Church. The popularity of the Menace during the 1910s was so great that the post office in Aurora established a sub-station on the railroad to handle the overwhelming task managing its circulation. In the mid-1910s, the annual cost of postage to publish the Menace was $40,000, and this weekly paper from a small southwestern Missouri town had more readers than many daily newspapers published out of New York City or Chicago.
The newspaper was not opposed to Catholic religious beliefs, as such. Rather, the Menace railed against what Phelps and McClure viewed as the political machinations of Rome and the Catholic Church’s interference in American institutions and government. They campaigned against Roman Catholics running for elected office and denounced the “gigantic power…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Aurora, Missouri, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress