Henry Francis Bowers

Henry Francis Bowers (August 12, 1837 – November 9, 1911) was an American attorney and political activist. Bowers is best remembered as the founder of the American Protective Association, a staunchly anti-Catholic secret political society.

Biography Early years

Henry Francis Bowers was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on August 12, 1837. His father was an emigrant from the Rhineland region of Germany, He married the daughter of a New England Methodist family.

American Protective Association

Bowers was an active Freemason from the decade of the 1870s and came to believe that the American republic was founded by Masons in opposition to the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church. Believing Catholicism and Americanism to be incompatible doctrines, Bowers sought to bolster the latter with the establishment a new political society bearing certain structural forms derived from the secret ritualistic lodges of Masonry.

His demands for Catholics to remove themselves from politics, was because he saw Catholics as having dual loyalties. To Bowers they could not be both loyal to the United States and a pope in Rome. Historian Jo Ann Manfra argues that:

Footnotes