During the Cold War, one criticism of socialists/communists was that they were taking orders from Moscow. Likewise, Catholics were presumed to be taking orders from Rome.
> Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the United States was being hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in defense of their traditional religious and political values.
During the later 1800s, many "charity hospitals" would abduct children of Catholic women and then sell them as orphans that other people could adopt. The Klu Klux Klan would also attack Catholics - not just burning crosses and lynching black people.
> Not only were Irish immigrants viewed as interlopers by many white Americans (an irony, considering the historical treatment of Native Americans), but these immigrants were Catholics in a primarily Protestant land. It was a religious difference that widened the divide, as did the fact that many Irish immigrants didn't speak English. As strange as may it may sound today, Irish immigrants were not considered "white" and were sometimes referred to "negroes turned inside out."
The Wikipedia page has lots of links and references about PWE.
> In 1998, the International Sociological Association listed this work as the fourth most important sociological book of the 20th century, after Weber's Economy and Society, C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination, and Robert K. Merton's Social Theory and Social Structure.[3] It is the eighth most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.
