Report of the County Chairman

by James A. Michener

  Without exception, each of the many letters contained pamphlets defaming the Catholic Church, and it was surprising how little duplication there was. I gave most of them away to convince unbelieving friends that an anti-Catholic campaign was under way, but I suppose I must have received upwards of eighty different items.

  They fell into three distinct types. First came the relatively honest summary of civil intrusions made by the Church in such countries as Spain, Ireland and Colombia. I never objected to these compilations, nor to the people who sent them out, for they represented an intellectually respectable charge against the Church, and if any voter was sufficiently frightened by the recital of facts contained in these reports, I felt that he ought not to vote for John Kennedy. Later in the campaign I was especially glad that I had never inveighed against such publications, because the Roman Catholic bishops in Puerto Rico very obligingly proved that the fundamental political charge made against the Church was true. Some of my Democratic friends circulated the current rumor that Republicans must have paid the Puerto Rican bishops to release their bombshell at the precise moment when it would damage Kennedy most, but rabid anti-Catholics effectively killed that charge; ingeniously they explained that Cardinal Spellman had ordered the Puerto Rican churchmen to act as they did so as to kill Kennedy’s chances for the Presidency, because if, when Pope John died, the United States already had a Catholic President, the cardinals would be loath to elect Spellman Pope because that would place too much of the Church’s power in American hands. But if Kennedy lost, the cardinals would almost have to elect Spellman in order to keep the American Catholics happy. Therefore, Cardinal Spellman was determined to defeat Kennedy so as to further his own interests.

  The second category contained numerous pamphlets not founded on fact but consisting mostly of ranting, rodomontade and bigotry. One of the most impressive carried a cover showing a fat and apparently venal bishop on his throne, with “The Rest of Us” kneeling abjectly and kissing his foot. Most of these pamphlets made a good deal of this foot-kissing routine as something especially subversive. They also played up supposedly lurid details of the confessional. A characteristic of the material in this second category was its repeated assertion that in all Catholic countries priests immediately took over the schools, the newspapers, and the civil government. No mention was ever made of countries like France or Belgium, or Canada or Mexico, where the religious problem had been fought, by Catholics, to reasonable solutions. I suppose that most votes that were changed by the religious issue were influenced by this segment of the material. Certainly whenever I finished reading some of it I felt obligated to rush out and shoot the first Catholic I encountered. Such material injected into the bloodstream of democracy was persuasive and fearfully poisonous.

  One of the pamphlets most widely circulated in Bucks County showed a trio of priests supervising the following tortures of Protestants: one victim was being crucified upside down; another was being hauled aloft by his hands twisted behind his back while weights were applied to his feet; a third was stretched prone while water was being forced into him; a fourth had his bare feet in a fire while another fire was about to be pushed into his stomach; and the last was having his skin peeled off by a smiling assistant armed with a butcher knife. The text pointed out, among other things, that Congressman John W. McCormack of Massachusetts had personally forced the federal government to give his church “more than thirty millions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds.”

  The third category offered a redundant procession of lurid confessions of one-time Catholics who had fled from either the priesthood or the nunnery. For some reason which I do not fully understand, unless it is that the Church has always stressed a kind of secret ritualism, there seems to be an insatiable desire on the part of Protestants to know what goes on within the hierarchy. All of the confessions that I received dated back to the nineteenth century, but they appeared to be as popular now as they must have been a hundred years ago. So far as I can recall, I received none in which the fugitive had fled the terrors of the Church in this century, although I suppose that such confessions must exist. Probably it is the nineteenth-century masterpieces that report the best horrors. I read about ten of these case histories and got the clear impression that the Catholic Church was well rid of some rather stupid characters and that the Protestants had been gulled. As a matter of fact, I think a good case could be made for the theory that all these authors were in reality counter-agents spuriously expelled by the Catholics to confuse the enemy. On the other hand, if one wanted to feed his bigotry, I must admit that some of the passages of these confessions were calculated to provide nourishment for hatred and confusion.

  There was a sub-category of this third group that merits special mention. These were the confessions of nuns who had fled the almost indescribable terrors of convent life, they claimed. These books were downright salacious and had obviously been composed with that effect in mind. Maria Monk, which was exceptionally popular during the election, is an old nineteenth-century classic, written so far as I know by a London hack, who offered the public a clever barrage of sexual titillation. One advertisement for this old worthy claimed: “See for yourself how innocent girls are trapped and imprisoned inside dark convents. How young priests visit them at night and force their attentions upon them. How the unwanted babies are strangled and thrown into wells. Live again the horrors of the Catholic Church with Maria Monk. In her own words.”

  A typical selection of anti-Catholic books which could be ordered by mail was circulated throughout Bucks County at the height of the election. Some of the titles were:

  The Catholic Church Unmasked I Married a Monk

  House of Death and Gates of Hell Convent Life Unveiled

  Why I Left the Church of Rome My Life in the Convent

  My Pilgrimage to Lourdes Maria Monk

  The Priest, the Woman and the

  Confessional The Convent Horror

  Abolish the Nunneries and Save the Girls The Menace of Rome

  What infuriated me personally, as head of a committee trying to elect John Kennedy, was that the dissemination of material in all the above categories, from the factual to the obscene, was paid for by personal contributions which were made for a political purpose and which were tax exempt! If a hard-working Democrat wanted to give me $100 to help the Democratic side of the campaign, it cost him $100 to do so, and it was not tax exempt. But if some addle-brained Republican wanted to get in savage blows, and there is evidence that some did, he could give $100 to any of the churches peddling this filth and, depending upon his income tax bracket, he might gain a rebate of $50 to $70 and clobber the Democrats at the same time. I know of no single electoral practice in my lifetime that was as unfair and dangerous as this.

  Let me state quickly that in Bucks County, at least, the formal Republican party took no part in this vicious campaign. One district chairman circulated a pamphlet in which a Catholic priest explained why Kennedy should not be elected, but as soon as we protested he stopped. That single individuals did make financial contributions cannot be questioned, for the churches involved could not possibly have maintained their vastly increased publishing programs without additional financial help. That this insane program ultimately reacted against the Republicans and helped elect a Catholic President was one of the ironic twists of political fate, so I suppose I ought not object. But I do. Religious hatreds ought not be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis. In fact, one of the most violent of the churches involved in peddling this material mistakenly sent me during the campaign a letter pleading for additional funds, this time to underwrite their legal right to continue distributing the discredited Oath of the Knights of Columbus. In its letter soliciting funds the church specifically stated, “Your offering can be deducted from your income tax.”

  When this avalanche of hate literature began to hit Bucks County I was unable to guess what practical effect it was having, and I consulted with Mrs. Eva Home Derr, the lively st
ate committeewoman from the northern end of the county. She was a non-hysterical type of woman whose German father had been justice of the peace, postmaster and leading Democrat at Applebachsville for thirty years. On his death Eva, one of seven children, had taken his place in many respects, acquiring elective office and a high place in Democratic councils. Her greatest sorrow was that most of her family had turned Republican. Eva was a devout Lutheran and one of her brothers was a thirty-third-degree Mason, as were many Protestants in northern Bucks.

  She reported, “This religious business is going to damage the Democrats. We hear stories of ministers instructing their congregations to vote Republican.”

  “They won’t obey, will they?” I asked.

  Eva looked at me as though I weren’t too bright and said, “Let me tell you a story. Two months ago I had ideas like yours. Schoolbook stuff. Separation of church and state. Sacredness of the ballot box and all that stuff. Then I accompanied the officers on the registration drive.”

  She stopped, shook her head in disgust and started to laugh. “What happened?” I asked.

  “We went to this one old lady; she’d lived in the same house for sixty-eight years and had never voted. This time she wanted to vote and the traveling registrar says, ‘How do you wish to register?’ ‘Lutheran,’ she says, and even Mr. Ziegler, he’s the Republican county chairman, had to laugh and he said, ‘We don’t mean your religion. We mean how you’re going to vote.’ And the old lady snaps, I’m going to vote Lutheran. Reverend Himmelright told me to.

  “You think well run into a lot of that?” I asked.

  “That I’m not afraid of,” Mrs. Derr said. “What worries me is the fact that many of my registered Democrats won’t talk with me. They’ve decided they can’t vote for a Catholic.”

  When I heard enough of these reports, I convened several meetings to discuss what we should do, and in mid-September we agreed upon this procedure: “We must respect the fact that in our county a lot of people are either Lutheran or Mennonite, and the historic position of their churches has always been to fight Rome. For us to term these people bigots would be historically wrong. They were against Rome when I was a boy. They’ll be against it when I’m a ghost. Furthermore, to charge them with bigotry would be politically unwise, for the Democrats among them might leave our party and never come back. Therefore at our public meetings we won’t use that word.

  “As for the ministers who preach against Senator Kennedy, what can we do? We won’t fight them. We won’t argue with them. If your minister gives a sermon like that, sit there and take it and next week go out and work a little harder for Kennedy.

  “We can take consolation in this. Religious intolerance has already gained for the other side all the votes it’s going to deliver, and I don’t think that anything you or I say will win back a single one of those votes, so don’t worry about them. Argue with nobody.

  “But from now on, you watch. A little more of this anti-Catholic smear stuff and a lot of uncommitted people who might have voted Republican are going to vote for us, simply because they’re sickened by the filthy material that’s being shoveled into this county. And sensitive Catholics who voted Republican the last two times are going to be driven back to our side. We’ve lost all we’re going to lose, and from here on out it’s got to be pure profit for us.”

  One worker asked in a hesitant voice, “Should we show this filthy material to Catholics who haven’t seen any of it yet?”

  I thought about this a long time and asked, “Are you a Catholic?”

  “Yes,” the woman said.

  “Are you personally mad about the stuff you’ve seen?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Well, if you honestly resent it, I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm for you to tell your friends,” I counseled.

  Later, however, one of our overly zealous workers pasted a selection of the worst anti-Catholic pamphlets on the windows of one of our offices with a sign that read, “This is what we’re up against.” As soon as I heard of this, I ordered the sign and the anti-Catholic material taken down. “You may not use such material in this campaign,” I said.

  “You mean we can’t fight back?” my workers asked.

  “Such filth fights right back by itself,” I argued, and I still believe I was right, yet even I had to smile at one placard I saw: “A Quaker beat a Catholic in 1928; it’ll happen again in 1960.”

  The major breakthrough on the religious problem, in our area at least, came with the Norman Vincent Peale-Daniel Poling report of the anti-Catholic convention in Washington. The storm that broke over this unsavory and ill-advised performance both surprised and pleased me. The newspapers of the country quickly identified the dangers represented by this meeting. They underscored its secret nature and questioned its impartial motives. What had been planned as a body blow to the Democrats was quickly transformed into a very dangerous situation for the Republicans, who as a party had probably not been involved in convening the regrettable convocation of Catholic-haters.

  On the other hand, we in Bucks County remembered that Dr. Daniel Poling was an avowed Republican partisan who had once stood for election as mayor of Philadelphia on the Republican ticket, and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale had frequently been identified with Republican causes. For these two gentlemen to pose as impartial arbiters of a sensitive political question seemed to me an improper intrusion of religion into politics. But when the storm erupted, I was impressed by the dignity with which Dr. Poling conducted himself. It was he who had broken the controversial story of Representative Kennedy’s withdrawal from the dedication of an inter-faith chapel honoring the four chaplains who had given their lives in the North Atlantic in World War II. According to Poling, whose son was one of those chaplains, Kennedy had agreed to participate but had then refused, under direct pressure from Cardinal Dougherty. I could respect Poling’s firm position, even though it hurt my candidate.

  But Dr. Peale’s performance I found undignified. When newspapers around the country, properly mindful of the sensibilities of their Catholic readers, started to cancel the Peale column—the Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the first—the good doctor quickly issued an apology for his fumbling performance, and did so through the agency of the business firm that distributed his column. Then he confessed ineptly to his church that he hadn’t known what he was doing, didn’t mean what he had done, and had been made a fool of by people smarter than he. I felt ashamed for a man I had once vigorously defended on radio and whom I liked personally, yet I had to be grateful to him, and shall always remain so, for in our area at least he helped us counteract religious prejudice and thus proved instrumental in the election of Senator Kennedy.

  What was equally important, he inadvertently introduced some humor into an ugly question; for in subsequent weeks, whenever the religious issue arose at any meeting that I was addressing, I always remarked that the audience would forgive me if I avoided making a fool of myself, as Dr. Norman Vincent Peale had done. Always there was hearty laughter. I then made a few comments about the fact that I could respect a man like Dr. Poling, who stated frankly that he did not want to see John F. Kennedy elected President of the United States. I always said, “There must be a lot of us in the audience tonight who feel exactly as Dr. Poling feels, and that’s a perfectly honorable stand to take. I’m certainly not going to try to argue down an honest religious conviction. But if you’re just vaguely afraid of this Catholic question, if you’ve heard a lot of rumors and read a lot of the hate literature that’s being circulated, remember that Dr. Peale apologized for bringing such matters up. Don’t make the same silly mistake that he made.” Sometimes I quoted the nifty that Adlai Stevenson is supposed to have started: “In this campaign it seems as if each party has a patron saint. Personally I must admit that I find St. Paul appealing and St. Peale appalling.” Always in our meetings we acknowledged the honest fears of those who could not vote for a Catholic, and we approached the others with humor. In the long run we accomplish
ed some good.

  That one part of my analysis of this religious problem was correct—namely, that during the first few weeks the Democrats had lost all the votes they were going to lose because of religious bigotry and that from there on the issue would only aid them—was proved shortly after the Peale-Poling fiasco when I received on the same day from two highly placed Republicans personal appeals that I get in touch with Senator Kennedy and “try to persuade him to get the Democrats off the religious issue.” It seemed to me there were two errors in this approach. I did not know Senator Kennedy personally and thus could have no influence upon his actions even if one supposed that he were guilty. More importantly, it was intellectual effrontery of the worst sort to suggest that a man who stood to lose the Presidency of the United States because of his religion had somehow “introduced the religious issue.” For the life of me I could not understand how my correspondents had reached the conclusion that Kennedy was to blame for the eruption of the religious question, and I concluded what now seems to be even more clear than it was then, that the Republican high command had awakened belatedly to the fact that this issue might inflame the big cities and cost Richard Nixon the Presidency. The fact that each of my correspondents was a good friend whom I respected led me to respond as follows: