by Thomas Maier
Smith’s entry into presidential politics became a rallying cry for the Ku Klux Klan, the most widespread hate organization in the Republic’s history. Notorious for lynching blacks in the South, the Klan also perpetuated vile claims and frauds against Catholics, and in 1924, it worked hard to block Smith’s attempt for the Democratic presidential nomination against William G. McAdoo. The dispute forced the party to settle, on the 103rd ballot, for a compromise candidate, John W. Davis, who lost miserably to Republican Calvin Coolidge. Four years later, Smith tried again for the nomination and succeeded.
But the 1928 candidacy of Alfred Emanuel Smith devolved into what his biographer Slayton called “the worst example of cultural wars in American presidential history.”The prospect of a Catholic in the White House rekindled the old nativist conspiracy theories and inspired pamphlets warning of a plot by the Pope to take over America. A photo of the newly constructed Holland Tunnel, connecting New York to New Jersey, became the so-called evidence of a secret passageway being built across the ocean to the Vatican. Governor Smith received bundles of angry letters, some threatening assassination. In Oklahoma City, fertile ground for the Klan, a Baptist minister declared, “If you vote for Al Smith, you’re voting against Christ and you’ll all be damned.”
Some made a fuss when Smith knelt to receive a visiting cardinal’s blessing and kissed the prelate’s ring as a sign of respect. Other critics, aware of Smith’s immigrant heritage, bemoaned the loss of a time when America was “of one blood as we were of one tongue.” In a sense, Smith’s bid became a plebiscite about newcomers, those not of Anglo-Saxon blood, already within the nation’s borders. Many Democrats, particularly in the South, opposed their party’s candidate for the basest religious reasons. With the big cities growing,Al Smith came to represent “the urban stranger who was the symbol of the new America,” wrote Oscar Handlin, one of Smith’s biographers. The ugliness of 1928 spread throughout the land. The Christian Century, the largest and most respected Protestant journal in the nation, argued that a “reasonable voter” wasn’t a “religious bigot” for rejecting Smith. The magazine conceded that it, too, shared the concern of “seating a representative of an alien culture, of a medieval Latin mentality, of an undemocratic hierarchy and of a foreign potentate in the great office of President of the United States.” Hoover avoided mentioning religion, but his wife, Lou Hoover, a well-educated woman who spoke out forcibly against racism toward blacks, nevertheless shared the religious bigotry of large swaths of the American electorate.“There are many people of intense Protestant faith to whom Catholicism is a grievous sin,” she said.“And they have as much right to vote against a man for public office because of that belief ” as anyone else, without being charged with “persecution.”
With the electoral equivalent of a burning cross on his front lawn, Smith realized he needed to address America’s distrust of Catholics. In an eloquent article for the Atlantic, he outlined his belief in the strict separation of church and state. To make sure he wouldn’t alienate Catholics, he asked New York’s Cardinal Hayes to review the article beforehand for errors in church doctrine. While affirming his own Catholic faith, Smith declared:“I recognize no powers in the institutions of my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the laws of the land. I believe in the absolute freedom of conscience for all men and in equality of all churches, all sects, and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor.” Other publications came to Smith’s defense, underlining his credentials as an effective governor of the nation’s then-most populous state and what it might mean if he was rejected for the presidency purely because of religion.“Who has a right to expect Americanization of an immigrant people if we persist in setting before them so flagrant a case of anticonstitutionalism and antitolerance?” asked Commonweal, the magazine published by Catholic laity.
Smith’s loss of several then-traditionally Democratic states, such as Virginia, Florida, North Carolina,Tennessee and Oklahoma, was regarded as proof that anti-Catholicism was a major factor in Smith’s demise. John W. Davis, the defeated Democratic Party nominee of four years earlier, blamed the nation’s religious biases for Smith’s 1928 loss.“Maybe twenty-five years from now . . .” Davis sighed to one reporter. The widespread vitriol against Catholics left Smith shaken, just as it did for a generation of Americans not far from the immigrant experience.“It was disturbing to be forced to wonder whether his conception of Americanism was at fault,” summarized Handlin about Smith’s reaction to the election outcome. “Could it be that he had not read aright the lesson of his own life? If Americans were not really willing to accept an Irish Catholic as fully their equal, where then did he belong?”
His defeat became a source of bitterness for many Catholics, particularly in Boston, where Honey Fitz sang “Sweet Adeline” at Smith rallies. “The saliency of the religious issue in Al Smith’s loss in 1928 rankled Boston Catholics, whose attachment to Smith bordered on hysteria,” observed Jack Beatty, biographer of Mayor James Michael Curley. As their oldest son prepared for the presidency in 1960, the Kennedys still remembered Al Smith’s crushing experience. Handlin noted that Smith’s defeat “made a sharp impression” on John F. Kennedy, who carefully read about Smith before starting his own campaign. Rose and Joe had often felt the sting of anti-Catholic slurs and slights, and they worried that their religion might become a political liability too hard to overcome for their sons. “True, there was now a new generation, and religious tolerance had grown,” Rose Kennedy later wrote in her memoir. “But how much, how far, and how effectively was debatable. There were strong feelings, and in some cases strong convictions, among Catholic as well as Protestant and Jewish leaders that Jack’s Catholicism would prove to be too severe a handicap. Political leaders dislike backing losers.” Perhaps that fear of backing a loser—a great sin in the Kennedy political catechism—was why Joe Kennedy sat out the 1928 election, unwilling to aid the first Catholic to run for president.
EVER THE SWIFT appraiser, Joe Kennedy spotted a winner in Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By 1932, the Depression had knocked out the underpinnings of the U.S. economy, causing a national crisis that Hoover, the engineer turned politician, seemed incapable of fixing. Many Irish Catholics, including Joe’s father-in-law, John F. Fitzgerald, still supported another bid by Al Smith, but Kennedy remained convinced that the country needed a drastic change. Kennedy believed that Roosevelt—Smith’s replacement as governor—was the only one up to the task. He also appeared convinced that Roosevelt would considerably further his own political success.
More than a decade earlier, Kennedy had lost a rancorous dispute with Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, over shipment of battleships from the Fore River shipyard.“Roosevelt was the hardest trader I’d ever run up against,”Kennedy recalled.“When I left his office, I was so disappointed and angry that I broke down and cried.” But this rare experience at losing— and the sage words of several friends who admired Roosevelt—only reinforced Kennedy’s conviction that the Hyde Park aristocrat whom he had once denigrated as “just another rich man’s son” could pull the country out of its dilemma. As biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted, FDR thought of himself as an upstate New Yorker, a country gentleman from Dutchess County, not a city dweller with recent immigrant roots. Annoyed at his inability to attract ethnic voters in urban neighborhoods, Roosevelt once complained:“Al Smith is good at that. I am not.”
During the 1932 campaign, Kennedy worked tirelessly for Roosevelt, contributing $25,000 himself and soliciting more than $100,000 in anonymous donations. He was rewarded not with his first wish—the Treasury Department—but with an appointment as the chairman of the new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, overseeing Wall Street. When some complained privately about the choice, Roosevelt summarized his strategy with a quip: “Set a thief to catch a thief.” Kennedy viewed his entry into government in far grander terms: it was part of a dynastic pla
n, something that Roosevelt clearly understood. “I told him that I did not desire a position with the Government unless it really meant some prestige to my family,” Joe explained to his oldest son. With his wide array of interests and contacts in many fields, Joe Kennedy proved himself helpful to the new president, whether he was twisting the arm of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst to support Roosevelt editorially or writing his own 1936 book, Why I’m for Roosevelt.
During FDR’s first term, Joe Kennedy also became an important liaison between Roosevelt and the Catholic Church, whose congregants formed a vital voting block for the New Deal. Since his days in Boston, Kennedy had nurtured an amiable, businesslike relationship with Cardinal William O’Connell and a mutual alliance with another rising church eminence, Auxiliary Bishop Francis Joseph Spellman. As Roosevelt’s reelection campaign neared in 1936, Kennedy finessed an extraordinary arrangement between the Vatican and the U.S. president that, with the help of the two churchmen, would ensure Kennedy’s status as the leading Catholic layman in America for decades to come.
Cardinal O’Connell, like Kennedy, was an Irish Catholic of many contradictions. Built like a football linebacker, the bald, barrel-chested O’Connell ran the Archdiocese of Boston as if it were his own corporate fiefdom. His proud, defiant stature demanded attention and respect from the powerful entities who had so often abused Irish Catholics in the past. Dating back to Mayor Fitzgerald’s tenure, O’Connell wielded extraordinary power over Boston’s political and social life. The cardinal became a symbol of upward mobility for the Irish, casting a disdainful view on certain elected officials. In one election, he dissuaded the faithful from voting for Mayor James Michael Curley, known as the “Purple Shamrock,” because of his graft and outlandishness.
In the cardinal’s eyes, however, the Kennedys were different. His niece and nephews, Joe O’Connell and Mary O’Connell Ryan, were friends of Rose and Joe, Joe O’Connell having served as godfather for the Kennedys’ firstborn, Joe Jr. For all the cardinal’s rant against Harvard and the movies, Kennedy was the kind of successful Irish Catholic he truly respected. Joe Kennedy’s thousands of dollars in Catholic donations made him more special. Even if Kennedy strayed in his marriage, he wouldn’t let this trespass get in the way of greater glories to God.
THE COMPLEXITIES in Cardinal William O’Connell, enough to rival any wayward politician in Boston,went to extremes when it came to matters of money, spirituality and sex. During the Depression, he used the tithes and donations of working-class families to buy an oceanside summer estate in Marblehead and a winter home in the Bahamas, and he motored around the diocese in a customized Pierce Arrow. He’d been caught pocketing $25,000 in diocesan funds from his earlier assignment in Portland (returned only after his successor questioned it). While in Boston, he built a palatial residence complete with a private golf course. Though a tough-minded administrator and a high-minded public moralist, O’Connell didn’t seem much interested in religion, rarely said daily mass and galloped through services at a pace that sometimes shocked those in the pews.
But his most extraordinary deception involved his nephew, James O’Connell, a priest who was named chancellor and oversaw the diocesan finances. At some point, James O’Connell broke his priestly vows and married a divorced woman who lived in New York. Like some double agent, he divided each week between his dual role: that of a priest in Boston and of a married man using an assumed name in New York. Another priest, an editor of the diocesan newspaper and a friend of James O’Connell’s, also married a woman who didn’t realize he was a priest using an alias. The cardinal looked the other way because his nephew threatened to expose evidence of financial chicanery with church funds and “proofs of the Cardinal’s sexual affection for men,” according to his biographer, James O’Toole. Eventually,word of this scandal reached the ears of Pope Benedict XV, who summoned the cardinal to Rome and asked him directly about the whole affair.“O’Connell foolishly tried to bluff his way through,”wrote O’Toole, who recounted how the angry Pope produced documents to back up the allegations, including the nephew’s marriage certificate.“The cardinal was seriously embarrassed at having been caught in a lie.” Eventually, O’Connell’s nephew and the other priest were forced to resign, but the cardinal, as testimony to his power and influence, survived the scandal.
Boston’s Irish Catholics, accustomed to deferring to the church’s hierarchy, remained oblivious to the contradictions in O’Connell’s personal life. The cardinal now turned his attention to other threats to the soul. O’Connell condemned government programs that, he believed, smacked of communism or “Bolshevism.” He was one of several conservative American Catholic clergy appointed by Rome who echoed the concerns about socialism that were expressed in papal encyclicals, dating back to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, “On the Condition of the Working Class,” of 1891.These themes were reiterated again in 1931 by Pope Pius XI, who stressed the need for a fair and adequate “family wage” for all workers, but rejected atheistic communism. In Depression-stricken America, many Catholics looked to liberal politicians such as Roosevelt to help provide their daily bread. But the church kept a wary eye out for God-less, state-driven movements of the kind that swept through Russia and drove Catholics underground. Instinctively, Joe Kennedy shared the cardinal’s worry about creeping socialism. By the mid–1930s, he also shared another concern with O’Connell—the rise of an outspoken priest from the Midwest, Father Charles Coughlin of Michigan, who accused Roosevelt of a host of evils, including sympathy for communism.
From the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, outside Detroit, Father Coughlin’s radio broadcast on Sunday afternoons became immensely popular throughout America, especially in regions with large Catholic populations such as New England. Mayor Curley, with his finger to the wind, called Boston “the most Coughlinite city in America.”At first, Coughlin, a bespectacled priest with a fiery delivery, espoused the doctrines of social justice found and embraced in Roosevelt’s New Deal. “I will never change my philosophy that the New Deal is Christ’s Deal,” he told listeners, inflecting certain syllables with a brogue. Coughlin based many of his sermons for social justice—a harmony between workers and owners—on the same papal encyclicals that warned of communism. Coughlin had started his broadcasts as a way of addressing anti-Catholic hate after the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the front lawn of his Royal Oak parish. Initially, Roosevelt welcomed the priest’s support and encouraged top administration officials who were Catholic—including Joe Kennedy—to visit Coughlin and keep him in the fold. Kennedy befriended the priest, flattered him with praise and jocular ribbing (he once called Coughlin a “jackass” to his face) and wrote him friendly letters.“Joe was fascinated by Coughlin’s talent on the radio,” recalled James Roosevelt, the president’s son and close friend of Kennedy.“He recognized it as demagoguery, but reveled in what the priest could accomplish. He was intrigued by Coughlin’s use of power.”
In his notes to fellow New Dealers, Kennedy appeared critical of the priest, perhaps more so than he actually was. By December 1933, Kennedy predicted to his friend, future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, that Coughlin was “becoming a very dangerous proposition in the whole country” and could be stopped only through the Vatican’s intervention:
He has the most terrific radio following that you can imagine and to my way of thinking he is becoming an out and out demagog [sic] with a rather superficial knowledge of fundamentals, but a striking way of making attacks that please the masses, with a beautiful voice that stirs them frightfully. Of course, I believe that if Roosevelt would turn against any of the policies that Coughlin is advocating, Coughlin would turn at once against Roosevelt unless he felt that the Apostolic Delegate in Washington might demand his silence.
Cardinal O’Connell was among the first to criticize Coughlin. He warned of “almost hysterical addresses by ecclesiastics,” prompting a flurry of angry letters from Boston parishioners, many of whom were Coughlin’s most faithful li
steners. Some even stopped placing money into the church’s collection baskets in protest. O’Connell argued, somewhat disingenuously, that priests should not get involved in politics and that “the Catholic Church does not take sides with the rich or the poor, the Republican or the Democrat.” Like Kennedy, O’Connell feared Coughlin would become a clarion for a new totalitarian state in America. Increasingly, Coughlin’s broadcasts reeked of nationalism, Roosevelt diatribes and anti-Semitism. Coughlin had a strange and disturbing grip on the sentiment of Irish Catholics. In their struggle for acceptance, the Irish could be remarkably intolerant of other striving immigrant groups, notably Jews. Coughlin’s sermons roused ancient and ugly anti-Semitic tendencies in the history of the Catholic Church itself. “My dear friends, we . . . believe in Christ’s principle of Love Your Neighbor As Yourself, and . . . I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me he does not believe in it!” he boomed to a Cleveland audience. Politically, Coughlin aligned himself with Huey Long, the Louisiana governor and rabid critic of Roosevelt, posing a serious threat to the president’s 1936 reelection campaign. By one Democratic estimate, an independent ticket put together by Long and Coughlin could steal away as many as six million votes from Roosevelt, assuring victory for the Republicans.