by Scott Farris
The Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts and the Reagan tax cuts were similar in scope. Author Jeff Madrick concluded that the Reagan tax cuts were “more in total dollars after inflation but less as a percentage of GDP than the Kennedy-Johnson cuts.” By the end of Reagan’s two terms, Reagan had cut taxes on the middle fifth of income earners by 0.7 percent, but taxes for the top 10 percent fell by 3.3 percent—and for the top 1 percent they fell by 8.1 percent. Business investment, however, remained significantly weaker as a percentage of GDP in the 1980s than it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. And the national debt kept growing so that by 2012 it had topped $16 trillion.
CHAPTER 19
RELIGION AND THE CULTURE WARS
John F. Kennedy, our nation’s first Roman Catholic president, attended Mass regularly but cared “not a whit for theology,” said top aide Ted Sorensen, and he welcomed the more secular American culture that emerged during the 1960s. Ronald Reagan professed to be deeply religious but seldom attended church while president, yet he became the champion of religious conservatives—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—who set aside major doctrinal differences to unite in their attempt to roll back the secularization that they saw as radical and unhealthy for American society. In their very different responses to the church-state debate, Kennedy and Reagan largely defined the positions of their respective Democratic and Republican parties in what became known as “the culture wars.”
Since Thomas Jefferson was first accused of being an atheist during the 1800 presidential campaign (he was actually a deist), religious belief has often been at the center of our national political debate. Sometimes the candidate himself injected religion into a campaign, none more so than William Jennings Bryan, who in 1896 cited the need to implement Christian principles of charity to support his wide-ranging populist and progressive reform agenda.
But Bryan was a member of America’s Protestant majority. Politicians outside the American Protestant hegemony have been more reluctant to profess their religious faith. These politicians would have preferred to avoid discussion of such a highly personal matter, but were compelled to explain and justify their beliefs to the Protestant majority. The 2012 election, when Mitt Romney became the first Mormon to be a major party presidential nominee, provides one example, but it has been even truer of Catholics who have sought national office.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. called anti-Catholicism “the deepest bias in the history of the American people.” Prejudice against African Americans and other minorities has been more virulent; what Schlesinger argued is that anti-Catholicism is more popularly and historically widespread and so subtly ingrained that people with anti-Catholic views may not even be cognizant they hold a bias. It dates to the founding of the nation. When English Protestants settled America in the mid-seventeenth century, Europe was engulfed in a series of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Even the colony of Maryland, which had been intended as a sanctuary for Catholic colonists, eventually had a Protestant majority that followed the lead of most other colonies in enacting a variety of anti-Catholics laws that included prohibitions on Catholics holding elected office or owning property. The influx of Catholic immigrants during the Irish potato famine exacerbated nativist fears to a point of near hysteria. Work on the Washington Monument, for example, was halted for more than a decade when the rumor spread that its completion was to be a signal for a Catholic uprising and an invasion by papal armies.
Against this history, it is remarkable that a Catholic, Democratic New York governor Al Smith, was even nominated for president in 1928, particularly given that the 1920s saw a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which in that period was as much anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic as it was anti-black. While Smith had hoped that the patriotism exhibited by American Catholics through their service during World War I had caused anti-Catholic sentiment to dissipate, his religion remained a key issue—perhaps the issue—of the 1928 campaign. While Smith may very well have lost the 1928 election to Herbert Hoover regardless of his religion, Catholics believed, and subsequent analysis by historians such as Allan J. Lichtman concluded, that the wide margin of defeat suffered by Smith was due primarily to prejudice against his Catholic faith.
In the wake of Smith’s humiliating defeat, dismayed American Catholics began a concerted campaign to have Catholicism more widely accepted in American culture. Catholics were particularly successful at pressuring Hollywood to offer more positive portrayals of their faith, particularly in the sympathetic characters of Catholic priests such as Spencer Tracy’s Father Flannigan in Boys Town or Bing Crosby’s Academy Award–winning turn as Father “Chuck” O’Malley in Going My Way. Far from the effete, depraved characters of prior Protestant slanders, these priests were vital, optimistic, masculine, and nonjudgmental. One student of how Catholics were portrayed by Hollywood would note the similarities and label Kennedy “the Father O’Malley of Irish Catholic politicians for the postwar American consensus.”
The Catholic Church also won plaudits from their fellow Christians for its aggressive opposition to atheistic Communism. It was, for example, a campaign by the Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus that convinced Congress to add the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. By the 1950s the positive image of Catholicism led some to believe that being a Catholic might actually be a benefit to a candidate in a national election. One of those who hoped so was Kennedy, who presented Adlai Stevenson with an eight-page memorandum in 1956 in an effort to persuade him of the advantages of selecting a Catholic running mate.
The memorandum argued that one reason for Stevenson’s resounding loss to Eisenhower in 1952 was that Eisenhower had won an unusually large share of the Catholic vote for a Republican. Having a Catholic on the ticket would bring Catholic voters back to the Democratic ticket in droves, Kennedy argued, particularly in fourteen states that had large Catholic populations and which cumulatively accounted for 261 electoral votes—five shy of the number needed for election. While Stevenson left the selection of his running mate to the national convention delegates, who narrowly chose Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver over Kennedy, the widely circulated memorandum had served the purpose of having “reopened the previously closed assumption that a Catholic on the ticket spelled defeat.”
Bedeviled by what he called the “damn religious thing,” Kennedy realized that if he were to win his party’s presidential nomination in 1960, he would need to prove he could attract the support of Protestant voters. His path-breaking strategy was to circumvent the party bosses, who usually chose a party’s nominee, and to enter a series of primaries where hoped-for victories would convince convention delegates of his electability.
Kennedy first won the Wisconsin primary with more than 56 percent of the vote, but that victory was discounted by commentators because of the large number of Catholic voters in the state. Kennedy then entered the West Virginia primary, where only 4 percent of the state’s residents were Catholic, and trounced his chief opponent, Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, who complained, “Apparently it is perfectly okay for every person of the Catholic faith to vote for Kennedy, but if a Protestant votes for me then he is a bigot.”
In the general election, Nixon believed—as Humphrey had—that Kennedy was successfully exploiting the religious issue to his advantage, and that the overwhelming support Kennedy received from Catholic voters (Nixon won barely a fifth of the votes of Catholics) represented Kennedy’s margin of victory. Nixon’s attempt to keep religion out of the campaign (Nixon himself was a Quaker) was undermined by bigoted supporters that included the noted Protestant minister Normal Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking.
Peale had joined about 150 other Protestant ministers in placing a statement in several national newspapers that questioned whether a Catholic should be president because a Catholic’s first loyalty would presumably always be to the pope. Peale’s position led Adlai Stevenson to quip that he had always fou
nd Saint Paul “appealing but Peale is appalling.” Kennedy had not put the religious issue behind him with his primary win in West Virginia or anywhere else. Particularly because of Peale’s prominence, Kennedy felt he had to publicly address the religious issue once more. He accepted an invitation to address a gathering of Protestant ministers in Houston on September 12, 1960, to answer whether he could faithfully execute the office of president while still remaining a faithful Catholic.
When a friend once asked Kennedy why he was attending Mass on a holy day of obligation when he was clearly not a devout Catholic, Kennedy stonily replied, “This is one of the things I do for my father.” Ted Sorensen argued that Kennedy was a Catholic more by inheritance than by choice, and Kennedy often chafed at his Catholic upbringing. Kennedy at least partially blamed the lack of affection he received as a child on his mother’s rigid religious piety. When Kennedy was angry with his parents, such as when they pressured him to break off his affair with Inga Arvad, he would threaten to renounce his Catholic faith and become an Episcopalian. He was also impishly impious, even as an adult. Having returned from a trip to the Holy Land in 1939, Kennedy asked a priest he knew, “I saw the rock where our Lord ascended into Heaven in a cloud, and [in] the same area, I saw the place where Mohammed was carried up to Heaven on a white horse, and Mohammed has a big following and Christ has a big following, and why do you think we should believe Christ any more than Mohammed?” The priest urged Kennedy to get some “instruction immediately” or risk becoming an atheist doomed to damnation.
Much as Al Smith had been thirty-two years before (Smith had not even been sure what a papal encyclical was), Kennedy was so unversed in Catholic doctrine that he asked the noted Catholic scholar John Cogley to help prepare the remarks he would deliver to the ministers in Houston. Those remarks would be an almost radical expression of secularism. Kennedy told the pastors that he believed in “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” He added that religious beliefs should be a private matter that should not and would not influence his making of national policy. “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens to be a Catholic,” Kennedy said. “I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me.”
The ministers gave Kennedy a standing ovation, though many questioned whether the line between church and state could be as clear and distinct as Kennedy claimed. Kennedy so distanced himself from his faith that columnist Murray Kempton quipped, “We have again been cheated of the prospect of a Catholic president.” Jackie Kennedy, meanwhile, told columnist Arthur Krock, “I think it is unfair for Jack to be opposed because he is a Catholic. After all, he’s such a poor Catholic.”
In the closing days of the 1960 campaign, Kennedy’s campaign staff thought he was headed toward a comfortable margin of victory and would collect anywhere from 53 to 57 percent of the popular vote. Kennedy blamed the much, much smaller margin of victory (he defeated Nixon by less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the popular vote) on religious bigotry, but that is not necessarily borne out by an analysis of the returns.
Historian W. J. Rorabaugh has concluded that there “was no net religious vote in 1960,” as Kennedy both won and lost votes due to his religion. Kennedy carried several key swing states in the Northeast and the Midwest because of the strong support he received from the large numbers of fellow Catholics who lived in those states. Kennedy may also have lost some Southern states because of his Catholicism—though some of those lost votes may have been due as much to his perceived liberalism as his Catholicism. Rorabaugh added that when voting trends are compared from the 1960 and 1968 elections, when Nixon was the Republican nominee each time, the vote received by 1968 Protestant Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey mirrored Kennedy’s totals.
Kennedy himself believed religion actually had played a role in the narrowness of his win. Given his own irreligiousness, he may have governed the same way regardless of the scrutiny he received as a Catholic, but, in anticipation of a reelection campaign where he would have to win over more Protestant voters if he wanted to increase his margin of victory, he was anxious to prove his faith had not impacted his decisions as president. He was, therefore, scrupulously secular throughout his presidency, even though the early 1960s were a time when many Americans were outraged that the favored status of Christianity in American society, both by tradition and law, was being actively challenged.
Kennedy had already taken steps as a senator to show that he was not beholden to his religion. He broke with the Catholic Church when he opposed federal aid for parochial schools, and also by his support for birth control. The birth control pill for women had become widely available in 1960. Kennedy consulted British economist Barbara Ward on how she reconciled her Catholic beliefs with her support for contraception, especially in the developing world, and Ward told Kennedy she was certain the Catholic Church would soon drop its opposition to birth control. The Catholic Church was, in fact, undergoing tremendous change in the early 1960s with the papacy of Pope John XXIII and his convening of a Second Vatican Council. But while the church instituted a wide range of liturgical and other reforms, Pope John’s successor, Pope Paul VI, upheld the Catholic ban on artificial contraception in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (“Of Human Life”).
The issue that caused the greatest stir across all religious denominations during Kennedy’s administration was a 1962 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Engel v. Vitale that ruled that mandatory prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. Other court decisions a year later prohibited Bible reading in public schools and mandatory recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. It all resulted in a dramatic change in the daily routines of many public schools. When Kennedy took office, about a third of all public schools in the nation began the day with a common prayer and more than 40 percent engaged in daily Bible reading. These percentages were significantly higher in some areas of the country. In the South, 77 percent of public schools required students to participate in a daily prayer, as did 67 percent of schools in the Northeast. In the West and Midwest, the percentages were much lower, less than 20 percent.
Court Outlaws God! one newspaper headline screamed following the Engel decision. Already disenchanted with previous decisions made by the Warren Court, some on the right suggested that Chief Justice Earl Warren had been revealed to be the anti-Christ. Noting that it was the Warren Court that had also struck down school segregation as unconstitutional, opponents of both rulings linked the two decisions as a sign that America was being radically remade. Alabama congressman George Andrews bemoaned, “They put the Negroes in the schools and now they’ve driven God out.”
But anger over the school-prayer decision was not limited to fundamentalists or to segregationists in the South. Leaders such as New York’s Catholic Cardinal Francis Spellman said he was “shocked and frightened by the opinion.” Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston commented, “The Communists are enjoying this day.” The nation’s leading Protestant evangelist, Reverend Billy Graham, thundered, “God pity our country when we can no longer appeal to God for help.” For Graham, the decision on school prayer was another sign that America was slipping into the “cesspool” of secularization. With other decisions loosening restrictions on pornography and access to birth control, Graham warned that America “is under the pending judgment of God . . . unless we have a spiritual revival now, we are done as a nation.”
Surveys showed that three-quarters of Americans disapproved of the ban on school prayer, and one of them was Ronald Reagan, who added a new line to the speech he still gave to many civic groups even after leaving General Electric’s employ: “God isn’t dead. We just can’t talk to Him in the classroom anymore.” As president, Reagan supported an unsuccessful attempt to amend the Constitution to allow school prayer, though as the Supreme Court noted in subsequent decisions, students were not prohibited from praying individually in schools, they simply
could not be coerced into praying as an official part of the school day.
Given the level of national outrage over the school-prayer decision, Kennedy’s response was remarkably sanguine. He urged compliance with the court decision, and added that there was an “easy remedy” for those who disapproved; Americans could simply “pray a good deal more at home . . . attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity, and . . . make the true meaning of prayer more important in the lives of our children.”
It was a perfectly rational response to an issue that was extraordinarily emotional for many Americans, and it came from a president who claimed to distrust emotion and passion. Kennedy’s “faith in reason” was his “original contribution to the politics of his time,” said journalist Theodore White. There were some on the left who felt this dispassion was not a positive attribute. He was accused of favoring a “technocratic liberalism” that lacked “political vitality.” Thomas Reeves, who wrote a highly critical biography of Kennedy, said JFK was “pragmatic to the point of amorality.” But Kennedy argued that pragmatism was what the nation needed. Kennedy told an audience at Yale University in 1962 that the great domestic issues facing America “relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals.” This was two years before one of the most ideological presidential elections in American history, that between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson.
Kennedy did not live to participate in it, but “one was to hear more of ‘morality’ in the campaign of 1964” than in any previous presidential election, according to White. Partly due to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s scuttling of his own presidential bid when he left his wife and married a younger woman, the heightened emphasis was primarily due to the Supreme Court decisions that seemed to ratify a shake-up of the nation’s morals. Republican nominee Goldwater decried the increasing prevalence of “the sick joke . . . the off-color drama, and the pornographic book,” and charged that the Supreme Court’s decision to remove mandatory prayer from the schools was directly responsible for increasing crime, “riot and disorder” in our streets, and “a breakdown of morals in our young people.” The outline of the culture war was beginning to take shape.