ABSTRACT
On one hand the careers and writings of Orestes Augustus Brownson and John Joseph Hughes show the diversity of Catholics' experience in the early United States. Brownson's experience was marked by broad swings in intellectual affiliation, reflecting the dynamism of American antebellum religious and political culture. He was baptized into the Presbyterian Church in 1822, but soon became active in the Workingmen's Party of New York City, and supported Robert Dale Owen's utopian planning for communitarian society. However, beginning in 1840 Brownson grew more conservative, apparently alienated by the Whig victory in the 1840 US presidential election, which he felt revealed a popular naivete. He condemned Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, socialism and any democratic reform attempted without the guidance of the established church, all as forms of 'worship of the human soul'. Unlike the itinerant Brownson, whose bombastic style and multiple conversions many considered eccentric, John Hughes was something of an official Catholic spokesman in America by mid-century.
