Almost President (19 page)

The most popular figure on radio during the 1930s was a Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin, whose weekly audience was estimated at forty million at its peak. Coughlin began broadcasting in 1926 when a local radio station invited him to solicit funds on air after the Klan had burned down his Detroit-area church. Coughlin's early sermons were simple homilies on religious themes, but as the Depression worsened, he turned to more political fare. Initially a New Deal supporter, Coughlin became more radical, more anti-Semitic and more aggressive in attacking Roosevelt, and his popularity waned.

Despite the broad-based popularity of Catholic personalities like Coughlin and Sheen, Catholics were under no illusion that Protestant America was ready to fully embrace them into their institutions, so another response to the Smith debacle was to create vigorous parallel Catholic institutions. Every diocese began to print its own Catholic newspaper, and the general-interest
Catholic Digest
was begun as an alternative to the Protestant-oriented
Reader's Digest
. The Catholic Youth Organization gave Catholic children a place to play other than the Protestant YMCA. There were now bar associations for Catholic lawyers and medical associations for Catholic physicians, not to mention an American Catholic Sociological Society, a Catholic Poetry Society of America, a Catholic Economic Association, a Catholic Anthropological Society, a National Council of Catholic Nurses, and an Association of Catholic Trade Unionists that would soon be a force in the rise of the CIO.

But many Catholics argued that establishing parallel institutions outside the dominant Protestant culture was not the answer. “How then can one transform America into a Catholic country (or at least relatively, by the infiltration of principles and ideals) by declining all invitations to take root in the American mind?” a
Commonweal
editorial asked. Instead, they intended to “Catholicize” American culture.

The most important invitation accepted by Catholics was to help “clean up” Hollywood and the motion picture industry. Prior to World War II, no better mechanism than motion pictures existed to change American attitudes. During the 1930s, eighty million Americans—65 percent of the entire population—attended movies weekly. Films became infused with Catholic ideals, which took root in the public consciousness through the most popular entertainment medium in the nation, and which changed Catholicism from the strange to the familiar—even to the ideal.

The impact of motion pictures upon the nation's morals had been a concern for many Americans from the first filmed kiss in 1896, but the scandal surrounding the popular comedian Fatty Arbuckle in 1922 (even though Arbuckle was cleared of responsibility in the death of a young woman at an Arbuckle party) led studio executives to ask President Harding's postmaster general Will Hays to head up the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to develop standards on and off set. As film content became even more prurient, however, the MPAA invited two Catholics, Father Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest, and Martin Quigley, who edited the influential distributors' journal
Motion Picture Herald,
to develop a new Production Code, which was adopted by the MPAA in 1930.

The Production Code, as one scholar of this era in Hollywood, Thomas Doherty, has noted, was “deeply Catholic in tone and outlook,” especially reflecting “the intellectual lineage of Ignatius Loyola.” The code demanded that filmmakers show deference to civil and religious authority, insist that characters accept personal responsibility for their actions, demonstrate a belief that suffering has value as a step toward salvation, resist the glorification of sin, and never depict the ultimate triumph of evil over good. The code was written with a confidence that non-Catholics would agree with the Catholic view of what was right and what was wrong, what was proper and what was improper. In essence, Catholic philosophy would now guide the production of the most popular entertainment form in the United States, and this was at least partially the result of the penance the country had decided to accept for the way Smith was treated.

But Hollywood did not immediately and fully conform to the Production Code. For several more years, Hollywood continued to churn out a slew of provocative films that ignored the code, including
Blonde Crazy,
Divorcee,
Night Nurse, Baby Face, Bombshell,
and
Other Men's Women
. A few filmmakers, most notably Cecil B. DeMille, were clever enough to insert nudity, orgies, and other licentious fare into biblical epics in order to make it difficult for clergy to condemn the films. The Catholic hierarchy, however, had had enough of Hollywood ignoring the code, especially a code written by Catholics. “We believed we were dealing with moral gentlemen. We were mistaken,” said George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago.

In 1933, the church hierarchy organized the Legion of Decency, which has been described as “the most successful endeavor undertaken by the church to influence American culture.” Catholics at Sunday Masses were directed by their clergy to join the legion and take oaths that they would refuse to attend movies that violated the Production Code. The legion claimed that twenty million Catholics, or virtually every adult Catholic in the United States, signed the pledge. In 1934, Dennis Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia upped the ante by ordering good Catholics to “avoid
all
motion pictures” until all movies conformed to the code, putting Hollywood in jeopardy of losing fully one-quarter of its audience. Other religious denominations followed suit by suggesting boycotts, and there were threats of federal intervention as well. The film industry had no choice but to promise self-regulation.

The studios formed the Production Code Administration and hired a Catholic journalist named Joseph Breen, whose responsibility was to ensure every film released by the studios carried the PCA code of approval. Any studio that released a film without PCA approval faced a hefty twenty-five thousand dollar fine.

It is probably not surprising that Hollywood, working with a Catholic-written production code that embodied Catholic values and which was enforced by a Catholic censor, began making more films that placed Catholics, especially parish priests, in a positive light.
Commonweal
had predicted as much in a 1929 editorial. If Catholic apologetics were to be “an integral part of the American experience” then the church needed to find the means to make people listen.
Commonweal
volunteered that the most positive Catholic image that could be put forward was “the parish priest—the ‘padre' or the ‘father'—[who] wears the aura of virtuous romance.” And it was the parish priest to whom Hollywood turned as the center of some of its finest films during what is generally considered the “golden age” of motion pictures.

The archetype began with Spencer Tracy in
San Francisco
(1936) as the priest determined to clean up the Barbary Coast, virtuous but still masculine enough to win a fistfight with Clark Gable. Two years later, Tracy played a priest again, this time as Father Flanagan in
Boys Town
(1938), creating a home for orphaned and wayward boys. The film emphasized that Flanagan welcomed all boys in need, regardless of race or faith, and that no boy was required to become Catholic. Yet, in a scene that must have been mildly startling for Protestant audiences, particularly because it evoked Al Smith's greeting to the papal legate a decade before, Tracy is seen bowing before his bishop, a kindly man in full regalia, and then kissing his ring. What had seemed so alien a decade before was now part of mainstream entertainment.

Led by Crosby's Oscar-winning turn as the “hip,” masculine, yet sympathetic “Father Chuck” in
Going My Way
(1944), there were so many glowing portrayals of Catholic priests, from Pat O'Brien in
Angels with Dirty Faces
(1938) to Karl Malden in
On the Waterfront
(1954) and even Catholic saints,
The Song of Bernadette
(1943), that a Michigan woman was moved to complain by letter to the MPAA: “How much longer do we have to tolerate Catholic pictures? As much as we like Bing Crosby, I, and many others have resolved not to see any more of his pictures—until he adopts a different theme,” she said. “After all America is still a Protestant country, and the majority prefer non-sectarian stories.”

Yet, Crosby was Hollywood's top box office draw in both 1944 and 1945, so his films were being seen by millions of Protestants and Jews as well as Catholics. Why? First, these and many more like them were fine films, well written and well acted, deserving of their accolades. But more important, Catholicism seemed familiar and compatible with American culture. It was as Smith had argued; a Catholic from the Bowery was really no different from a Baptist from Iowa. The films might feature characters who were Catholic, even focus on their Catholicity, but the themes were universal. And Catholicism, so rich in the imagery and visual symbolism that filmgoers crave, could easily convey those universal themes. Americans had learned, through films, through radio, through the experience of 1928 and since, that Catholics were not a separate people, but just another part of America.

By the 1950s, the Catholic Church was at the forefront of the crusade against communism. Joe McCarthy and many of his followers were proud Catholics who now played the role of the Klan in deciding who was and was not a good American, and the Knights of Columbus successfully petitioned Congress to add the phrase “under God” to our Pledge of Allegiance. The ugliness of widespread and overt religious prejudice (at least against Catholics) had seemingly dissipated. It had at least receded enough that a young Catholic senator from Massachusetts named John Kennedy, with great encouragement from his family, believed that he might succeed where Smith had failed in becoming the nation's first Catholic president.

Ironically, Kennedy, to advance his own cause, helped cement the myth that Smith's religion was not the reason he had lost so severely in 1928. A 1956 memorandum, written by Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen for the purpose of persuading Adlai Stevenson to select Kennedy as his vice presidential running mate, argued that Smith had fallen victim to general prosperity, his stand on Prohibition, and his ties to Tammany Hall. Sorensen further argued that being Catholic was now an advantage for Kennedy because millions of Catholics who had voted for Eisenhower would return to the Democratic Party in order to vote for a Catholic on the national ticket. A Gallup survey taken earlier in the year found three-quarters of Americans claimed they would vote for a well-qualified Catholic candidate for president.

Kennedy was not the Democrats' vice presidential nominee in 1956, but he was the party's presidential nominee in 1960. His opponent that year, Richard Nixon, was certain Kennedy's religion was now an advantage, not a liability, for all the reasons Sorensen had laid out in his memorandum, most particularly that Catholics would turn out in droves to vote for a Catholic nominee. A Gallup survey found more than half of all Catholics said they would vote for a Catholic candidate even if nominated by the other party. Nixon would receive only 22 percent of the Catholic vote—the lowest any GOP nominee had received since polling began in the 1930s.

But Kennedy, who was personally not very religious, was never certain that his Catholicism was not a liability. Late in the campaign, he took the precaution of addressing a gathering of Protestant ministers in Houston where he so forcefully argued for the total separation of church and state that the joke was that Kennedy became America's first Catholic president by promising to be the nation's first Baptist president.

Kennedy's 1960 candidacy evoked some faint echoes of 1928; an estimated twenty-five million copies of anti-Catholic literature were distributed during the campaign. But Kennedy faced nothing like the onslaught endured by Smith. Still, based on polling and other information, Kennedy had expected that he would win the presidency with 53 percent to 57 percent of the popular vote. When he won with just 49.7 percent of the vote, he privately blamed anti-Catholic bigotry for the narrow margin over Nixon.

And so it is assumed the ghost of Al Smith has been put to rest and Catholics are now full participants in American civic life. This is true to a point. As noted earlier, as of 2012, six of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court were Catholic, including Chief Justice John Roberts, and with the other three justices being Jewish there was not a single Protestant on the nation's highest court. While it is remarked upon, it is not seen as particularly threatening to American Protestants. The United States has also had its first Catholic vice president in Joe Biden, which is hardly remarked upon.

But surveys indicate a majority of Americans still worry that Catholics are trying to force their moral values on the country at large. Further, no Republican Catholic has yet been nominated by that party for either of the two highest offices in the land, and only once since Kennedy have the Democrats nominated another Catholic for president. When John Kerry was nominated in 2004, the issue again arose, as it had in 1928, of whether a Catholic politician must heed the commands of Catholic prelates—but this time the question was asked by some of the Catholic prelates themselves in questioning whether Kerry would abide by the church's teaching on abortion.

Smith, whom Roosevelt tagged “The Happy Warrior” of American politics, might have found the irony amusing, but in truth he found little amusing after 1928. After his defeat, he was hired to run the Empire State Building, then the world's tallest office building. But the Wall Street Crash of 1929 came in October, the very month construction had begun on the Empire State. Smith, who thought his job would provide a lifetime of security, instead found he could not even secure enough tenants to fill a third of the building, even with reduced rents. When the king of Thailand came to visit the imposing but nearly empty skyscraper, he told Smith they had the same things in Thailand. Smith asked what in the world the king could mean? “White elephants,” his highness replied.