A menacing force that just won't go away

One of the country's biggest — and most hateful — newspapers was once published in my small Missouri hometown. The paper folded 100 years ago, but its ideals persist.

There’s a haunting reason why there are so many train tracks in Aurora. 

When I was a kid growing up there, I didn’t think twice about the wide stretch of train tracks that separated my side of town from the north side of town, a geographic and cultural divide based on class, not race, because there weren’t enough families of color to fill a neighborhood block.

When I was a kid, the train still ran, blowing its horn, politely but persistently, throughout the night. It still comes and goes at all hours of the day, carrying grain, waste, and whatever they make in the dog food flavoring factory whose smell gives the town an eau de burnt cheese casserole. 

But in the 1910s, those trains carried something else: Copies of The Menace, an anti-Catholic newspaper that at one point during its short incarnation had 1.5 million subscribers, far more than the daily papers in New York City. 

The train depot is now the town’s Chamber of Commerce and historical center.  

The paper launched in 1911 in an old opera house with 22 subscribers, but within three years, it reached a million people around the country every week. Aurora had 4,000 people at the time, down from a peak of 15,000 during the area’s mining boom. 

At their printing facility, Phelps and McClure, whose names still grace the streets of Aurora, published other books and pamphlets that stoked fears that the Catholic Church was enslaving women in convents, hoarding weapons, and being controlled by church officials in Rome. 

According to the State Historical Society of Missouri, The Menace was so popular in the 1910s that the post office in Aurora established a railroad substation to handle its circulation.

Courtesy of Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

For the first few years, the Catholic Church ignored the paper. By 1916, it had grown so large and influential that the Knights of Columbus sued The Menace for slander and libel. That summer, The Menace won a federal obscenity trial in nearby Joplin, and after the trial, the editors arrived by train to enormous crowds of supporters.

Then World War I happened, and Americans found a new menace: Germans. The newspaper’s subscriptions fell off almost as quickly as they rose. By the end of the year 1919, the paper closed after another fire. The building was lost, and the mailing list was the only item saved from the flames. 

With that mailing list, they started the New Menace in April 1920, first in Branson and then, in 1922, moved it back to Aurora. This was when the Ku Klux Klan, which is where many fervent anti-Catholics found themselves, was also on the rise. The paper would defend the actions of Klansmen throughout its run until 1931 when it closed for good. 

The train through Aurora no longer carries passengers or copies of The Menace, but it is a busy rail line nonetheless.

I didn't know about this newspaper as a young journalist working at my hometown paper in high school. Or if my bosses told me about it, the gravity of the history didn’t sink in until 2015, when Matt Pearce, a writer for the LA Times, wrote about The Menace. (He was writing about American religious intolerance in response to the shooting at the synagogue in Kansas City, where a man from near Aurora killed three people in a hate crime.)