Jedediah Morse’s son, a New York City painting professor and tinkerer, developed a sideline as a hysterical anti-Catholic crusader just as he was about to invent his telegraph. Samuel F. B. Morse’s 1835 book, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, was an exposé of “the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy…the existence of a foreign conspiracy against the liberties of the country.”
