Unlike other government agencies, the United States Postal Service is funded primarily through the sale of its products.

In the 1890s, even the salaries of post office employees were paid for out of the sale of stamps at their particular location.

For Louise Imogen Guiney, who was the postmistress in Auburndale in 1894, this would create a problem. The reason was that she was a Roman Catholic, and Auburndale Protestants were boycotting her appointment by refusing to buy stamps.

In 1887, Protestants in Iowa had founded the American Protective Association, which was intended to resist what they saw as the unwanted foreign influence of the Roman Catholic religion. It grew throughout the United States, and promoted what to modern readers seem like incredibly outlandish ideas, like that the Catholic Church had started the US Civil War, or that President Grover Cleveland, a devout Presbyterian, was secretly submitting to the Pope.

Cleveland had appointed Guiney to her position.

Many in the 1890s believed that the Catholic Church wanted to control all levels of government as part of a plot to destroy the separation of church and state and American values.

A Catholic woman, even one who had lived in Auburndale for eight years, was not someone they wanted running a government office. While they would continue to use the post office to mail and receive packages (implying they weren’t concerned about her rifling through their letters), they went elsewhere to buy stamps. This would lead to her salary being cut.

“Auburndale is a town populated with retired missionaries and bigots of small intellectual calibre,” Guiney would later write.

This boycott would backfire, because Guiney was not solely a postmistress: she was also a writer who was beloved in the Boston intellectual scene. She had applied to the position due to the difficulties in supporting herself and her widowed mother from freelance writing.

She was well known for her poetry, and she also wrote histories, such as her 1892 book on the youngest general of the French royalist counter-revolution.

Guiney was first published in Boston’s Catholic newspaper, the Pilot, in 1880. But she was also supported by Protestant luminaries like Oliver Wendell Holmes. She “seemed destined to bridge the gap and help heal the animosity between the Irish immigrant community and the existing Yankee culture in Boston,” wrote Patricia Fanning in her article “Boycott! Louise Imogen Guiney and the American Protective Association.”

One of her friends, MIT English professor Arlo Bates, wrote in her defense: “A lady of highest character, of rich and unusual gifts, of perfect official rectitude–the daughter of a brave and patriotic officer in the Union Army–is being hounded out of her means of livelihood by a company of narrow-minded and violent fanatics, simply on account of her faith.”

Bates’s full letter in support would be reprinted in both Catholic and secular newspapers throughout the country, and suddenly Auburndale’s post office was beset with orders for stamps. Guiney’s salary was no longer in jeopardy.

But running a post office was more work than she had anticipated. She worked from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., with only a short break. While she was able to publish some writing, it wasn’t as much as she had hoped. She was finally able to take a break in the summer of 1895, luckily leaving town before the American Protective Association started an anti-Catholic riot in Boston on July 4.

In 1897, the American Protective Association started a new campaign to have Guiney removed from her job. Although she was re-appointed, the stress of the work, combined with chronic health problems, led her to resign later that year.

“I’m going to quit the U.S.P.O. and be a penniless free-lance again,” she wrote. She would become a cataloger at the Boston Public Library before moving to England in 1901, where she would spend the rest of her life.

She never married, but she had a longtime companion, fellow writer Alice Brown.

Anti-Catholic furor was rampant in the 19th century, as expressed in this poster by the Protestant-led anti-Catholic group American Protective Association. Wikimedia Commons photo
APA propaganda depicting the Pope as the master decision-maker controlling the White House, Congress, and federal financial and publishing institutions. (Art from an 1894 book.)

Guiney also adopted two orphaned nieces, Ruth and Grace. While living in England, she began to write more poetry about English Catholic subjects, like martyred Jesuit Edmund Campion.

Her immense Anglophilia, while it had endeared her to Boston’s Yankee literary elite, did not create friends between her and her fellow Irish-Americans. She became estranged from her best friend, fellow Auburndale resident Mary Boyle O’Reilly, after the 1916 Easter Rising, in which the British government executed several Irish revolutionary leaders.

After Guiney’s death, O’Reilly was unhappy a Catholic firm was planning to publish Guiney’s letters.

“Louise was not loyal to the old traditions–even the country for which her father fought became to her a fading memory,” O’Reilly said.

Guiney, whose mother’s family was not Irish, had struggled with the Irish-American sense of ethnic identity and with the lack of intellectual respect afforded Catholics within the United States.

“Her response to cultural conflicts facing her peers in America was to flee the crassness of America and to immerse herself in British gentility. She remade herself into an English Catholic as far as she could,” writes Paula Kane in “Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900-1920.”

She would receive posthumous descriptors of the kind usually reserved for male authors like “Laureate of the Lost” and “Belated Cavalier.”

Perhaps in part due to her gender and her religion, her work is not read widely today. However, the Newton Public Library has some material by and about her, and the Boston Public Library has even more for those willing to make the trip.