by Scott Farris
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.
Smith had hoped the Democrats might turn to him once more in 1932. He even defeated Roosevelt in the Massachusetts primary and arrived at the convention with two hundred pledged delegates. But it was Roosevelt’s turn and it was Smith himself who had put FDR on the road to the White House by insisting Roosevelt run for governor of New York in 1928. That Roosevelt, whom Smith considered a lightweight despite their friendship, could succeed where Smith failed, and that this was due at least in part to religious bigotry, embittered Smith, and he became a leading critic of Roosevelt and the New Deal, damaging Smith’s own reputation among liberals.
At the annual Washington, D.C., dinner of the Liberty League, before the group of industrialists and financiers who were solidly opposed to Roosevelt and who also were Smith’s new friends and business partners, Smith gave an angry speech over nationwide radio, accusing Roosevelt and his New Deal of fomenting class warfare. “There can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow,” he said. When Roosevelt won an enormous landslide victory later that year, Smith could only remark, “You can’t lick Santa Claus.”
In time, Smith’s bitterness ebbed, and when war seemed imminent, he judged it his patriotic duty to support the president and his policies. Roosevelt had always been more baffled than angry by Smith’s enmity, and during the war he invited Smith to the White House for a chat that led to reconciliation. In May 1944, Smith’s beloved wife, Katie, died, and he followed her in death five months later. Commonweal said in Smith’s obituary that his defeat in 1928 “was a blow from which he never fully recovered.” But the country recovered from the bigotry infecting that election, and that is the great legacy of Al Smith.
3 Smith was known to enjoy a highball—though not the eight per day Republicans alleged during the campaign—but he tried to stake out a moderate position by favoring “temperance” over Prohibition. He argued that only the ban on the sale of beer and wine should be lifted and praised Prohibition for eliminating the saloon and reducing the per capita consumption of alcohol in the United States.
4 In the late 1940s, it was estimated that 38 percent of the American population lived in areas where the sale of alcohol was still prohibited by local regulation.
CHAPTER SIX
THOMAS E. DEWEY
1944, 1948
It is our solemn duty . . . to show that government can have both a head and a heart; that it can be both progressive and solvent; that it can serve the people without becoming their master.
Thomas E. Dewey, despite having lost not one, but two presidential elections, can stake a claim to being the most influential Republican of the twentieth century. Dewey, along with his protégés Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, moved the Republican Party away from an agenda of repealing the New Deal to a grudging acceptance of the permanent welfare state. The philosophy of “Modern Republicanism” inspired by Dewey’s pragmatic politics continued to define the limits of Republican conservatism into the early twenty-first century, when the “Tea Party,” dedicated to shrinking the federal government, still shied away from even relatively modest reforms of federal entitlements, including not only the New Deal’s Social Security program, but also the Great Society’s Medicare program.
Yet, to the degree Dewey is remembered today, it is as a supposedly tepid and bumbling campaigner who allowed Harry Truman to defy the odds in 1948 and win re-election in the greatest upset in presidential election history. The shock of that upset is forever enshrined by the infamous Chicago Tribune headline Dewey Defeats Truman. But as much as any presidential loser in history, Dewey reminds us that a lost election is only the loss of one political battle in a much larger struggle to set the political direction of the nation. Under Dewey’s leadership—and both Eisenhower and Nixon owe a considerable debt for their presidencies to Dewey’s favors and efforts—the so-called Eastern establishment wing of the Republican Party dominated the GOP for more than three decades and altered the central thinking of even the party’s conservative wing. In the more than half century since Dewey outmaneuvered the right wing for control of the Republican Party, only one Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater in 1964, seriously challenged the idea that the welfare state is here to stay, and he suffered the most overwhelming defeat of any Republican candidate since Alf Landon in 1936.
Dewey’s image as “the little man on a wedding cake,” an epithet hung on him by a sharp-tongued socialite (which one is in some dispute), is in need of revision. In truth, Dewey was a charismatic crime fighter, as feared by the underworld as “The Untouchable” Eliot Ness. Dewey made his name and his political career as a fearless New York prosecuting attorney whose exploits inspired dozens of Hollywood films, with Dewey portrayed on screen by tough guys like Humphrey Bogart. His fame made him a presidential contender at age thirty-seven—while he was still just a district attorney. In his career, Dewey put behind bars the man advertised as head of Murder Inc., as well as the former president of the New York Stock Exchange, a leading boss of Tammany Hall, and most famously, the racketeer Charles “Lucky” Luciano. So effective was Dewey in his crime busting that the gangster Dutch Schultz was plotting Dewey’s assassination when Schultz himself was murdered in a gangland killing.
There were plenty among the right wing of the Republican Party who later wished Schultz had been able to finish the job. Dewey was a heretic to conservatives because he had concluded in the early 1940s, after he had already sought the Republican nomination once, that the GOP should embrace rather than repeal the New Deal and such liberal reforms as Social Security. To do otherwise, Dewey insisted, would be political suicide, for if Republicans yielded to the forces of reaction, they would be doomed to permanent minority status. Rather, Dewey argued, Republicans needed to pursue progressive ends by conservative means. It was fine for the federal government to initiate social reforms, Dewey believed, but those reforms should be implemented at the state or local level and they should be funded in a fiscally responsible manner that did not increase the national debt. Dewey’s fine biographer, Richard Norton Smith, called Dewey’s philosophy “pay-as-you-go liberalism.”
To true blue conservatives, such as Dewey’s arch-nemesis Ohio senator Robert Taft and later Goldwater, Dewey was not offering a conservative alternative to liberalism, only more “me-too-ism.” They questioned why the Grand Old Party should follow the lead of a man who had been defeated not once but twice. But as of this writing, Dewey’s warning that the GOP cannot repeal popular social programs without facing electoral disaster has been heeded by Republicans.
While espousing conservative rhetoric may have helped elect Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, each also presided over (and often initiated) expansions of federal spending, federal power, and domestic programs. None dismantled a major New Deal or Great Society program. Echoing Dewey, Eisenhower conceded that the most accurate label for his own two-term presidency was “responsible progressive.” As Nixon prepared to assume the presidency, his attorney general–designate, John Mitchell, told Southern civil rights leaders, “Watch what we do, no
t what we say.” The 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, said his model president was the Republican progressive Theodore Roosevelt—who had also been Dewey’s boyhood political idol.
Even Goldwater had to concede that the election of an avowedly conservative president like Reagan had not led to a dismantling of federal power. During the Reagan presidency, Goldwater complained to conservative journalist William F. Buckley, “We used to say about the Democrats, ‘They spend and spend and elect and elect.’ Now the Republicans—‘They borrow and borrow and elect and elect.’ So there’s basically no difference.”
Goldwater has been the only Republican presidential nominee since 1948 to ignore Dewey’s advice and instead offer what Dewey scorned as “a platform of back to Methuselah.” Goldwater fulfilled Dewey’s prediction of the fate of such a platform when Lyndon Johnson trounced him in 1964 by winning the largest popular vote percentage in presidential election history. Dewey could only shake his head in wonder at those who insisted on ideological purity and who wanted to purge the party of moderates and liberals. If the Republican Party were only a party of conservatives, Dewey warned, and truly became the party of reaction that yearned to return the nation to “the miscalled ‘good old days’ of the nineteenth century . . . you can bury the Republican Party as the deadest pigeon in the country.” Democrats would win every election, Dewey said. The United States would end up being ruled by one party, which would be a prelude to totalitarianism and the end of liberty.