The Americanist Vision Since 1932, Pt. 1
Democracy Conguent with Catholicism
Part I
by Dr. Justin Walsh
The Americanism of [John Ireland] ...embraced American democracy and culture as congruent with Catholic ideals....
Now, as this history of the Knights makes clear, every major phase in the evolution of Columbianism embraced the Amercanist...vision.l
During their second 50 years the Knights of Columbus continued to promote patriotism and Americanist Catholicism. In the midst of the Great Depression they spent $50,000 to honor James Cardinal Gibbons with a life-size sculpture. The unveiling in August 1932, on a site in the nation's capital donated by Congress, was the highlight of the Golden Anniversary convention. At its Diamond Jubilee celebration in 1957 the Order dedicated an equally elaborate memorial to its founder, Fr. Michael J. McGivney, in his hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut. In 1959 the Order dedicated its most ambitious memorial, a one million dollar belltower for the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. The bronze tablet at the tower entrance proclaims:
The Knights' Tower
Gift of the Knights of Columbus...as a Pledge of the
Devotion of Its Members to Our Blessed Lady
Patroness of the United States.2
The Knights struck what they believed to be a great blow for God and Country during the Korean War (1950-1953). The Order customarily opened meetings with a prayer followed by recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance; in 1951 the national officers asked members to add "under God" after the phrase "one nation." As recited by Knights, the text now read:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Luke Hart, Supreme Knight from 1953 to 1965, urged Congress to accept this change, and the bill effecting it became law on Flag Day, June 14, 1954. At the next convention Hart read a letter he received from President Dwight D. Eisenhower: "These words 'under God' will remind Americans that despite our great physical strength we must remain humble."3
The deity that both Eisenhower and Hart endorsed was of course the ecumenical "God" of religious liberty, a vague, inchoate entity, not Jesus the God-man, not Christ the King of Roman Catholicism. Masons, Odd Fellows, the American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars helped lobby to change the pledge on behalf of such an all-American "God."
From Rev. Charles E. Coughlin to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
In the 1930s there appeared a priest who seemed tailor-made to inspire an order of laymen dominated by Irishmen and dedicated to our Blessed Mother. Samuel Eliot Morison, a liberal Protestant, described the "formidable" Reverend Charles E. Coughlin as
an Irish-Canadian rector of the parish of Royal Oak, near Detroit. In 1926 he began operating the "Shrine of the Little Flower Radio Station" and preaching what he called a Christian solution to the nation's economic difficulties....A consummate radio orator, his Irish humor attracted attention [and] by 1934 ten million people were listening to Coughlin's radio broadcasts, and voluntary contributions of half a million dollars a year were rolling in to the Shrine of the Little Flower. Up to that time, Coughlin supported [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the New Deal, which he even called "Christ's deal." But then he decided that the President had gone over to the bankers and began to attack the "Jew Deal," anti-Semitism being one of Coughlin's favorite stocks in trade.4
Coughlin also broadcast homilies on the Mother of God, supported General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and denounced "godless Communists" persecuting the Church in Mexico. By 1937 his weekly audience had risen to an estimated 20 million listeners.
During Fr. Coughlin's heyday the Knights of Columbus conducted a crusade of their own to thwart Communism in Mexico. This caused an unexpected conflict with the National Catholic Welfare Conference as to which body—the Knights of Columbus or the NCWC—should lead the response of American Catholics to the situation south of the border. In 1937 the Supreme Council asked Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston to arbitrate the matter just as Knights in Detroit were planning a huge rally featuring Coughlin, the city's most famous Catholic. In his response Cardinal O'Connell declared that "the NCWC was more concerned about the activities of...the controversial radio priest, than with the Knights' Mexican program."
Supreme Knight Carmody ordered the Michigan State Council to cancel Coughlin's appearance because he "alienated many representatives of the...hierarchy and press by his anti-Roosevelt, anti-union, and anti-Semitic statements." The following August Bishop Edward Mooney, chairman of the NCWC, was named archbishop of Detroit. In 1938 he "confronted the problem of Father Coughlin [who] some said...had courage, others that he lacked prudence." Mooney invoked a new synodal law making it mandatory for priests to secure his approval on anything to be printed or broadcast. Then he ordered the pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower to cease and desist. According to Mooney's biographer,
Whatever transpired [next] is a secret between Archbishop Mooney and Father. It is to the everlasting priestly credit of both men that they said nothing and went on to new successes: Fr. Coughlin to become a devoted pastor...Archbishop Mooney to the Sacred College of Cardinals [in 1947].5
As for the Knights of Columbus, the monthly "Columbiad remained entirely aloof from Coughlin, never once commenting on any of his positions."6
Rev. Fr. Charles Coughlin
Fr. Coughlin was but one of three outspokenly anti-communist Irishmen either ignored or vilified by the leadership of the Knights of Columbus. A second was Clarence E. Manion, in 1917 "a K. of C. scholar at Catholic University and a Knight from Henderson, Kentucky." During World War I he became a hero of the Order due to his work with the servicemen's centers. In the innocuous phrasing of Christopher Kauffman, Manion "later became Dean of the Law School at the University of Notre Dame."7 What Kauffman must have known but did not say is that Dean Manion, like Fr. Coughlin, was blessed with a magnificent, made-for-radio voice. In the 1950s he was featured on the weekly "Manion Forum" propagating the message of Our Lady of Fatima and staunch anti-communism. As a result Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame, harassed and hounded Manion for "tarnishing" the University's image. Brother Manion was forced to resign his Deanship in the early 1960s with nary a word of protest from the Knights of Columbus.
The third outspoken Irishman was the most reviled Knight in the history of the Order. The year 1937 proved pivotal in the life of Joseph Raymond McCarthy, studying law at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In March a Jesuit priest introduced Joe the student to Divini Redemptoris, the encyclical in which Pope Pius XI stated that "Communism is intrinsically evil and no one who would save Christian civilization may cooperate with it in any undertaking whatsoever." McCarthy, who aspired to a career in politics, was guided by this papal dictum for the rest of his life. In May, aware that fraternal affiliation was useful for ambitious politicians, he joined the Knights of Columbus. In June he graduated and began his political career, winning his first office the following November.
After service in the Marine Corps during World War II, Brother Joe launched a national career; in 1946 he won a seat in the United States Senate from Wisconsin. In that same year another anticommunist Irishman, Brother John E. Swift, launched a national "crusade" against Communism after winning election as Supreme Knight. At the outset of the Cold War almost everyone thought Swift's crusade a wonderful idea. Even Harry Truman endorsed it. In a letter to Swift, the President hoped the entire membership "will join the crusade with zeal and enthusiasm." The President added that "Our goal must be to drive out of our American life every movement which aims to promote within our borders any form of totalitarianism or any subversive movement." The Knights prepared a Manual for Discussion Groups for Swift's crusade, a manual that Auxiliary Bishop John J. Wright of Boston lauded as "an amazing production, profoundly thought-provoking and admirably condensed."8 Again, almost everyone endorsed Brother Swift's crusade.
Before long, however, almost everyone was on record opposing anything smacking of a crusade against Communism. When Alger Hiss was exposed in 1948, President Truman, a Democrat and a 33rd degree Mason, dismissed the case as "a Republican red herring." Privately, when shown evidence that Hiss lied when he denied passing classified information to the Soviet Union, Truman was less partisan. "Why, the dirty s.o.b. betrayed his country," said the President, according to Bert Andrews, a reporter for the Washington Post. In 1950, however, when McCarthy voiced concern about subversion in the State Department, Truman reverted to partisanship. The President denounced "McCarthy's witch-hunt," and he was joined by an hysterical choir of professors, journalists, and newscasters who made the Wisconsonite the most reviled American politician of his day.9 As one indication of how McCarthy has been denigrated, witness the following from a recent "conservative" history of anticommunism:
[The] speech at the 1950 Lincoln Day dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia, [was] the greatest disaster in the disastrous history of American anticommunism. Anticommunism would never be the same after those instantly famous words..."I have here in my hand a list of 205...members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."...McCarthy made ludicrous the notion that anticommunism could be based on sound morality....In the mouth of McCarthy, the truths of anticommunism would turn into evil, malicious lies.10
McCarthy surely swallowed a bitter cup when such luminaries as Auxiliary Bishops John J. Wright of Boston and Bernard J. Shiel of Chicago, along with such Catholic magazines as America and Commonweal joined the chorus of calumny and detraction. Eventually, and probably most incomprehensibly to the Brother from Appleton, the leadership of his fraternal order and its magazine joined the chorus. Christopher Kauffman wrote that "During the entire McCarthy period, only two Columbiad editorials defended the Senator," and the reader gets the feeling that Kauffman thought this two too many. The historian lauded the magazine for lampooning McCarthy under the fictional name of O'Clavichord "because McCarthyism had by 1953 engendered tensions among pro and anti forces within the Church, as well as hostility between Catholics and Protestants...." Kauffman ended his discourse on McCarthy by quoting Columbiad: "[T]he disease of O'Clavichordism inevitably leads to a loss of freedom of the press, speech, and assembly."11
In 1978 Donald F. Crosby, a Jesuit priest, published God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950-1957. Although Crosby's tome is typical of liberal diatribes against McCarthy, historian Kauffman was only enraged by the Jesuit's charges against the Knights of Columbus. Crosby represented "a curious subordination of historical fact to stereotyped banalities" said Kauffman before quoting the Jesuit: "The Knights' pro-McCarthy policy was perfectly congruent with their long history of political conservatism, ...flag-waving patriotism, and their abiding distaste for Protestants, liberals, and intellectuals of every religion." Faith and Fraternalism is "a point-blank refutation of Crosby's careless cliches," said Kauffman. He added that the conflict between liberalism and conservatism in American Catholicism "is historically grounded in the conflict between Archbishop John Ireland and Archbishop Michael Corrigan in the 1890s."12
There is mounting evidence that Joseph R. McCarthy was on target while his detractors were either duped or knowingly mendacious. As M. Stanton Evans wrote in 1999,
We have learned a lot in recent years about the ways of Soviet subversion—long denied but now confirmed by secrets from the Kremlin archives, and our own. What was once considered unthinkable stuff about spies and agents in lofty places turned out to be not only thinkable, but true.13
The evidence was so strong that even such liberal, left-wing publications as the New York Times and Time Magazine suggested that McCarthy was more right than wrong regarding the activities of American communists. Any vindication of the senator poses a disturbing question: Does the real tragedy of Joe McCarthy, the most reviled American politician of the 20th century, lie in the shabby way his co-religionists—including many Brother Knights—aided and abetted the diabolic forces arrayed against him?
Margaret Sanger vs. Catholicism
The only reference to Margaret Sanger in the Knights of Columbus history is a fleeting mention as "a leading spokesperson of the American birth-control movement." Sanger may have deserved more attention because her crusade for contraception aroused Catholic resistance in 1940 especially in the two states where the Order originated. It is inconceivable that the Supreme Council in New Haven, Connecticut, was unaware of the fight that pitted Catholics against Sanger in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
Margaret Sanger
Public opinion regarding birth control changed about 1930 when many Protestants approved of contraception, a practice that the Catholic Church condemned as "intrinsically evil." Many states liberalized their laws; Connecticut and Massachusetts were among the few that still prohibited the distribution of contraceptives or information about their use. The New England Mothers' Health Council, an affiliate of what today is known as Planned Parenthood, sought repeal of these laws; in the fall of 1940 Margaret Sanger toured on the Council's behalf.
In early October the First Congregational Church in Holyoke agreed to lend its meeting room for a Sanger speech on the 16th. Unbeknownst to the Congregationalists, however, Catholic Bishop Thomas M. O'Leary was determined to prevent a public discussion of birth control in his diocese. His pastoral declaration on the subject began
We have been informed...that a campaign is about to be launched...in the interest of the detestable practice [and Sanger] is to be featured as a speaker in its defense. The plan, ultimately, is to arouse enough people in its promotion to pass a state law enabling physicians to pass out this type of advice freely, and even to establish clinics for the general distribution of information now prohibited by law.
Monsignor Edward McGuire, the senior-most Catholic pastor in town, released the Bishop's statement to the Holyoke newspaper along with two observations. One, said McGuire, "every Pope has cried out against this sin so contrary to the very end for which the sacrament of matrimony was instituted." And two, the sponsors of "this lecture are engaged in a work that is unpatriotic and a disgrace to the Christian community." Catholics, he added, "will be guided by the mind of Christ and His Church."
On the morning of October 15, non-Catholic businessmen expressed fear of a Catholic boycott. A trustee at First Congregational who was also a banker met with Monsignor McGuire. He recalled that the priest stated that Mothers' Health was not really for mothers' health but for birth control. According to the banker Fr. McGuire also said, "It is the same outfit that met in New York and exhibited all the devices of birth control, indeed did everything but commit the sex act in public." The priest said further that the Catholic Church was established by Christ to defend divine laws; that God told Eve and Adam to multiply; and that birth control violated the Fifth Commandment which tells us not to kill. The priest ended by pledging that the Church would "fight birth control with all the means at its command [including]...the use of economic boycott against those who foster the birth control movement and violate divine law."
Because of Catholic pressure the First Congregational Church reneged. By noon of October 16 Sanger had no place to speak except, possibly, a street corner. "This certainly does not seem like the United States. It's more like Russia or perhaps Nazi Germany," she told a reporter. Sanger was in fact familiar with eugenic experiments in Nazi Germany. Indeed, some of her statements in Birth Control Review, which she edited, could well have come from Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Enlightenment under Adolph Hitler: "Birth control—more children from the fit, less from the unfit"; "Birth control to create a race of thoroughbreds"; "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the negro population..."14 At the last minute in Holyoke in 1940 the Textile Workers offered space to Sanger because "Most of the girls [in the Union] are young and want to keep their jobs." The Union Hall manager added that many were nominally Catholic and had fallen for quack birth-control schemes or tried induced abortions.
In her speech Sanger threatened that Americans would not be deprived of civil liberties by Catholics. As for birth control, she averred "What we are trying to do...is level the unequal birth rate in this country, so that people with intelligence, means and health will have more children, and the poor, sickly mother will be allowed to space her pregnancies." Bishop O'Leary's Catholic Mirror commented that "these 'people with intelligence, means and health' are not reproducing in sufficient numbers to guarantee their future existence...." The local Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus summarized the significance of the incident in 1947 when he explained why "we chased out Margaret Sanger":
No individual has any right whatsoever to interfere with divine law. And birth control is an interference with divine law. The priest doesn't have to place on me any moral obligation to fight against birth control; the obligation is already on me in divine law. We chased out Margaret Sanger, you might as well say, on a pure and simple religious issue. Wouldn't you stand up for your religion and fight damn hard if anyone openly attacked it the way the Sanger crowd did.15
The defenders of Catholic doctrine recognized that while Margaret Sanger was intent on making contraception socially acceptable she was also planting seeds for legalized abortion, race suicide, and forced sterilization. Bishop O'Leary obviously saw this when he warned that the real aim was to establish "clinics" for the performance of acts "now prohibited by law." Catholics in Holyoke may have been primed because Sanger had been at war with the Church for some 30 years.
In the early 1930s she brought the attack into the halls of Congress during hearings on federal family planning proposals. "Before we can have birth control we must have Church control," said Sanger at a hearing in 1932. She had written earlier that Catholics had "degenerated terribly" due to the celibacy of priests and nuns. They were from "the more intelligent and splendid types" and their failure to reproduce left the "Catholic race in very inferior racial health."16
The NCWC picked Fr. John A. Ryan, a left-leaning professor of sociology at the Catholic University, to answer Sanger. Known as "Monsignor New Deal" because he served as an assistant secretary in Franklin Roosevelt's Department of Labor, Ryan was dismissed derisively by Sanger as "an amateur economist." But the priest-bureaucrat, a better quipster than Catholic apologist, gave as good as he got. As an expert on labor problems he noted pointedly how "the lady's idea that birth control will ease unemployment is fantastic." On another occasion Ryan described the world sought by birth controllers as "the Sangerian Shangri La"—Shangri La being the name James Hilton gave to his Utopia in the 1931 novel Lost Horizon. Ryan never quite addressed a salient point, however, why the Catholic Church opposed birth control.
John Augustine Ryan was born in the diocese of St. Paul, Minnesota, and ordained by Archbishop John Ireland in 1898. In his autobiography Ryan remembered Ireland as "a patriot, a liberal, and a progressive." In the same work Ryan recalled his delight when Rome refused to condemn the Knights of Labor, thereby vindicating "the vigilance and social vision of Cardinal Gibbons and the American hierarchy." Of incidental interest, Margaret Sanger's father, an apostate Irishman named Michael Higgins, was a member of the Knights, a secret society which escaped Rome's vigilance only because of persistence by Ireland and Gibbons.17
With his Americanist background, Monsignor Ryan was an unlikely apologist for Catholic orthodoxy. As an advocate for the semi-socialist programs of the New Deal, Ryan never gave more than lip-service to opposing family planning schemes. Such was the priest that the NCWC picked to uphold Catholic doctrine regarding the scourge of birth control! The choice of such a man sent a message to Catholics: Do not let any controversy over contraception disturb Catholic tranquility under America's religious liberty.
The wider context of Holyoke proves the point. Immediately after Sanger's speech the local paper pleaded for tolerance, saying "No one anywhere wants any division among our churches." It called for a return to the status quo ante bellum: "We have through the years established a high degree of unity among our churches on all civic community problems. We want to hold on to it; to develop it further." Catholics could hardly be blamed if they did not understand non-Catholic concerns that opposition to birth control on religious grounds violated the religious liberty of Protestants. No less a personage than the highest ranking prelate in New England gave Holyoke Catholics their cue in the mid-1930s when city fathers solicited statements to inscribe on the façade of the Veterans' Building, "the most costly and modern municipal structure in the city." Along with "Banish War" and "Enthrone Peace" was found the slogan "Religious Freedom Glorifies America." These last words "were sent by the Rt. Rev. William Cardinal O'Connell [Cardinal Archbishop of Boston] to a committee seeking... 'sentiments which would represent all the people of Holyoke...'" [Emphasis added].18
Holyoke generated national attention because it suggested that American Catholics sometimes acted like integral Catholics. When they did they were perceived by Protestants as dangerous to American freedom. While locals in the suffragan city of Holyoke did not understand the implications, their hierarchy in Boston did. So Sanger's tour continued without further Catholic opposition. In fact, the silence of William Cardinal O'Connell and his Auxiliary, Bishop Richard J. Cushing, was deafening throughout September and October. Only Cardinal O'Connell's assertion that "Religious Freedom Glorifies America" can explain the silence. Better to be mute than perceived as antagonistic to American religious liberty. That also was why the national office of the Knights of Columbus was silent on Holyoke, and why the Catholic hierarchy in the United States never rallied openly behind a straightforward opposition to family planning and concomitant evils. In the tradition of Americanism dating back to Bishop John Carroll in 1789, nothing must upset the comfortable accommodation between American Catholicism and American Freedom.
Two weeks after Sanger spoke in Holyoke, Franklin Roosevelt ended his campaign for a third term with a nationwide radio address from Boston. "I would like to say a few words to the mothers and fathers of America," said the President. "I have said this before and I shall say it again, and again, and again—your boys are not going to fight in any foreign wars." Roosevelt won the election but could not keep his word to America's parents. After the United States became a belligerent, the President explained what the Second World War was really all about. With a vision even more grandiose than Wilson's in 1917, he declared that America fought not for Democracy or to end war. No! America now fought "so all men everywhere might enjoy Four Freedoms." Two of Roosevelt's Freedoms—from fear and from want—came from the New Deal. The other two Freedoms—of religion and of speech—came from the Bill of Rights. Roosevelt overlooked two other First Amendment freedoms—of the press and of assembly—perhaps because the phrase "Four Freedoms" was nice and alliterative while "Six Freedoms" was not. The president always had an orator's ear for a resounding phrase.
At any rate Roosevelt included freedom of religion even though the nation was allied with the officially atheistic Soviet Union. And so it came to pass in the Second World War that American religious liberty was spread to the four corners of the earth. At the time few Catholics understood that their religious liberty protected unbelief as well as belief, to the ultimate detriment of all religious belief. The condition of Church and State in the United States of the 1990s is proof of the depth of this Catholic misunderstanding.
Dr. Justin Walsh has an undergraduate degree in Journalism and a Master's degree in History from Marquette University and a doctorate in History from Indiana University. He currently teaches at the Society of Saint Pius X's St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, Winona, Minnesota, United States of America.
1. Christopher J. Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus, 1882-1982 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 367.
2. Ibid., Gibbons memorial, pp. 322-323; McGivney Memorial, pp. 387-388; Knights' Tower, p. 384.
3. Ibid., pp. 385-386.
4. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 972-973. The author, a professor at Harvard University, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his biography of Christopher Columbus entitled Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
5. "Edward Cardinal Mooney," in Francis Beauchesne Thornton, Our American Princes: The Story of the Seventeen American Cardinals (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1963), pp. 176, 179. Thornton does not explain how he divined the opinion of the nearly 20 million Catholics who listened to Fr. Coughlin "religiously" every week.
6. For the K. of C. and Coughlin, see Kauffman, pp. 313, 334.
7. Ibid., p. 206.
8. Ibid., pp. 362-363.
9. For a dissection of how McCarthy has been treated in history books see M. Stanton Evans, "Joe McCarthy and the Historians: How Standard References Distort the Record and Misrepresent the Evidence of Subversion," Human Events, January 1, 1999, Special Supplement. Evans quotes a May 1950 story in Newsweek Magazine that Senate Democrats colluded with State Department leaders to pursue "the total and eternal destruction" of McCarthy [emphasis in original].
10. Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 235.
11. Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism, p. 363.
13. Evans, "McCarthy and the Historians," p. Sl. Evans adds that "a string of revelations show McCarthy was correct in many of his uproarious battles...."
14. See Elasah Drogin, Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society (New Hope, Kentucky: CUL Publications, 1985), pp. 12-13. Mrs. Drogin added that Harvard Professor Lothrop Stoddard, a director of the American Birth Control League of which Sanger was president, published Nazi Germany Today in 1940. Stoddard included a chapter advocating sterilization for the unfit to "weed ...out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and humanitarian way."
15. Information about the Holyoke controversy was drawn from Kenneth Wilson Underwood, Protestant and Catholic, Religious and Social Interaction in an Industrial Community (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 1-38, with quotations from pp. 6, 9, 18, 21, 25, and 36-37.
16. Interestingly, liberal Catholics sometimes agree with Sanger about the deleterious effects of celibacy on the American Church. A study in 1997 commented upon arguments by Monsignor John Tracy Ellis in the 1950s that American Catholics could not think, by lamenting "the cost of the Catholic predisposition that smart boys should go into the priesthood." Since all of Ellis's performance data were based on lay statistics, removing 50,000 of the brightest Catholic males and an even larger number of academically inclined women out of the reproductive population had to have an impact. See Charles R. Morris, American Catholicism: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 269.
17. For biographical data and quotes regarding Sanger and Ryan, see Drogin, pp. 9-38, 97-127.
18. Underwood, p. 180.
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