June 23, 1949—Seldom if ever did Eleanor Roosevelt and Francis Cardinal Spellman shrink from controversy, but the one that began in earnest on this day with publication of her “My Day” newspaper column concerning his proposal for parochial school aid became particularly charged, with the New York Archbishop eventually claiming that the former First Lady had demonstrated anti-Catholic bigotry “unworthy of an American mother."
It took an entire summer for the feud to subside, by which time Spellman had instructed clergy in the archdiocese to denounce Mrs. Roosevelt from the pulpit, she had urged President Harry S. Truman to withdraw her nomination as a delegate to the U.N. General Assembly because of Spellman’s “strange campaign,” and the Vatican itself decided to rein in the outspoken conservative prelate.
It all was finally resolved the way heated diplomatic disputes usually are: through the intercession of a trusted intermediary (in this case, New York boss Edward J. Flynn), with the help of written statements that do nothing to paper over real differences and insincere smiles by both sides at an afternoon tea.
“First Citizen of the World” Vs. “The American Pope”
In the court of posterity, for far more numerous reasons than Spellman’s hysterical response above, the verdict has gone overwhelmingly to the woman Harry Truman called “the first citizen of the world” rather than the portly prelate often seen as, to use the title of a biographer, the “American Pope.”
It’s hard not to sympathize with a woman who stood up for the rights of Jews and African-Americans when they needed champions the most; who served as a trailblazer for women in politics; who suffered as a young orphan, a homely young mother, a belittled daughter-in-law, and betrayed wife; who always visited union workers and soldiers, making them feel that their cause was hers, too.
And it’s downright impossible to like a prince of the church who always told those in the pews which films were pornographic, denouncing all sorts of sexual sins, while at least somewhat credibly charged with being a closeted homosexual; who probably knew more about Manhattan real estate than he did about the Vulgate; and who lorded it over dissenting pastors and archdiocesan cemetery workers who only wanted to form a union so they could earn what Pope Leo XIII had said they were entitled to, like all workingmen: a living wage.
Case closed. Court adjourned.
Wait a second…
Controversies don’t begin and end as debates where points are neatly made and tallied. They spring from one’s personal interactions as an adult, one’s education, one’s childhood experiences, even the unchallenged, instinctive presumptions of those in your circle dating back generations.
If only the Roosevelt-Spellman donnybrook merely rested on a reading of the Constitution and First Amendment law! But it became so publicly turbulent because of long-simmering resentments on each side.
In short, though he acted in an uncivilized, even sometimes un-Christian manner that embarrassed his Church, Spellman had a point: Eleanor Roosevelt possessed considerable traces of an anti-Catholicism that she couldn’t fully hide and that many of her admirers would rather not acknowledge even existed.
It took an entire summer for the feud to subside, by which time Spellman had instructed clergy in the archdiocese to denounce Mrs. Roosevelt from the pulpit, she had urged President Harry S. Truman to withdraw her nomination as a delegate to the U.N. General Assembly because of Spellman’s “strange campaign,” and the Vatican itself decided to rein in the outspoken conservative prelate.
It all was finally resolved the way heated diplomatic disputes usually are: through the intercession of a trusted intermediary (in this case, New York boss Edward J. Flynn), with the help of written statements that do nothing to paper over real differences and insincere smiles by both sides at an afternoon tea.
“First Citizen of the World” Vs. “The American Pope”
In the court of posterity, for far more numerous reasons than Spellman’s hysterical response above, the verdict has gone overwhelmingly to the woman Harry Truman called “the first citizen of the world” rather than the portly prelate often seen as, to use the title of a biographer, the “American Pope.”
It’s hard not to sympathize with a woman who stood up for the rights of Jews and African-Americans when they needed champions the most; who served as a trailblazer for women in politics; who suffered as a young orphan, a homely young mother, a belittled daughter-in-law, and betrayed wife; who always visited union workers and soldiers, making them feel that their cause was hers, too.
And it’s downright impossible to like a prince of the church who always told those in the pews which films were pornographic, denouncing all sorts of sexual sins, while at least somewhat credibly charged with being a closeted homosexual; who probably knew more about Manhattan real estate than he did about the Vulgate; and who lorded it over dissenting pastors and archdiocesan cemetery workers who only wanted to form a union so they could earn what Pope Leo XIII had said they were entitled to, like all workingmen: a living wage.
Case closed. Court adjourned.
Wait a second…
Controversies don’t begin and end as debates where points are neatly made and tallied. They spring from one’s personal interactions as an adult, one’s education, one’s childhood experiences, even the unchallenged, instinctive presumptions of those in your circle dating back generations.
If only the Roosevelt-Spellman donnybrook merely rested on a reading of the Constitution and First Amendment law! But it became so publicly turbulent because of long-simmering resentments on each side.
In short, though he acted in an uncivilized, even sometimes un-Christian manner that embarrassed his Church, Spellman had a point: Eleanor Roosevelt possessed considerable traces of an anti-Catholicism that she couldn’t fully hide and that many of her admirers would rather not acknowledge even existed.
She might not have been as reactionary as her opponent in this debate, but the fact that it erupted at all indicates that she was, in her way, equally tone-deaf to the concerns of the other side.
The Barden Education Bill
What set the two at loggerheads was a House bill by Graham A. Barden, a North Carolina Democrat, calling for funding for public schools. Spellman and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy took issue with the lack of provisions for parochial schools—a deficit that the New York archbishop ascribed to “a craven crusade of religious prejudice against Catholic schools.”
Let’s consider at the outset—how often were Congressman Barden and Mrs. Roosevelt on the same side?
Yes, he was a Democrat, but for most of the stands he took during his 13 terms on Capitol Hill—school segregation, the Taft-Hartley Act, and even other education bills (seven years later, he would kill a school construction measure)—his views strongly diverged from hers.
The Barden Education Bill
What set the two at loggerheads was a House bill by Graham A. Barden, a North Carolina Democrat, calling for funding for public schools. Spellman and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy took issue with the lack of provisions for parochial schools—a deficit that the New York archbishop ascribed to “a craven crusade of religious prejudice against Catholic schools.”
Let’s consider at the outset—how often were Congressman Barden and Mrs. Roosevelt on the same side?
Yes, he was a Democrat, but for most of the stands he took during his 13 terms on Capitol Hill—school segregation, the Taft-Hartley Act, and even other education bills (seven years later, he would kill a school construction measure)—his views strongly diverged from hers.
At his death in 1967, Time Magazine called him a “dedicated obstructionist.” Offhand, I can’t think of another instance in which Mrs. Roosevelt agreed with him on anything—which makes it all the more striking that they did on this point.
Mrs. Roosevelt could see none of Cardinal Spellman’s concerns, and he made an ideal foil for her.
Mrs. Roosevelt could see none of Cardinal Spellman’s concerns, and he made an ideal foil for her.
Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy made anti-anti-communism respectable through his baseless charges, Spellman’s vitriolic, ad hominem outbursts made anti-Catholicism respectable. The process was the same: the object of denunciation instantly became “innocent by association.”
Thus, legitimate concerns about the guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg could be dismissed out of hand because McCarthy had accused so many others with no foundation whatsoever, and Spellman’s targets instantly won sympathy because he was always going off on someone or other.
Believers in Mrs. Roosevelt, very much including her protégé and eventual biographer, Joseph P. Lash, certainly took her side in this, seeing no grounds for his annoyance.
I think they’re missing something. Did Mrs. Roosevelt call the cardinal a “papist,” or any other loaded ethnic term? No. On the other hand, her comments were pointed, personalizing the issue more than it had to be.
Consider that the very first sentence of her column spoke of “the controversy brought about by the request made by Cardinal Spellman.” That wasn’t likely to improve his digestion as he ate his cereal.
Franklin Roosevelt, one strongly suspects, would have approached things differently. Not that he didn’t share her general worldview.
From his first days as an Albany legislator, when he became the focal point of the Democrats' anti-Tammany "reform" wing, down to the 1940 campaign, when his maneuverings for a precedent-shattering third term inevitably denied the Presidency to longtime advisor Jim Farley, FDR's dealings with Irish party leaders carried "an air of jaunty patronization," writes biographer Geoffrey C. Ward.
“Catholics and Jews Are Here Under Sufferance”
The Roosevelts’ attitudes toward Irish Catholics – and, indeed, non-Protestants in general – are best seen in a conversation involving Leo T. Crowley, a Catholic economist just appointed to a government post, and FDR’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., who was Jewish.
Thus, legitimate concerns about the guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg could be dismissed out of hand because McCarthy had accused so many others with no foundation whatsoever, and Spellman’s targets instantly won sympathy because he was always going off on someone or other.
Believers in Mrs. Roosevelt, very much including her protégé and eventual biographer, Joseph P. Lash, certainly took her side in this, seeing no grounds for his annoyance.
I think they’re missing something. Did Mrs. Roosevelt call the cardinal a “papist,” or any other loaded ethnic term? No. On the other hand, her comments were pointed, personalizing the issue more than it had to be.
Consider that the very first sentence of her column spoke of “the controversy brought about by the request made by Cardinal Spellman.” That wasn’t likely to improve his digestion as he ate his cereal.
Franklin Roosevelt, one strongly suspects, would have approached things differently. Not that he didn’t share her general worldview.
From his first days as an Albany legislator, when he became the focal point of the Democrats' anti-Tammany "reform" wing, down to the 1940 campaign, when his maneuverings for a precedent-shattering third term inevitably denied the Presidency to longtime advisor Jim Farley, FDR's dealings with Irish party leaders carried "an air of jaunty patronization," writes biographer Geoffrey C. Ward.
“Catholics and Jews Are Here Under Sufferance”
The Roosevelts’ attitudes toward Irish Catholics – and, indeed, non-Protestants in general – are best seen in a conversation involving Leo T. Crowley, a Catholic economist just appointed to a government post, and FDR’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., who was Jewish.
Morgenthau recounted FDR’s comments in his diary: “Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance. It is up to you to go along with anything that I want.”
The tone here – of a lord of the manor, addressing his inferiors – is as unmistakable as it is ugly.
Yet Catholics, and especially those of Irish ancestry, reaped the rewards of Franklin Roosevelt’s ascension to the Presidency.
Yet Catholics, and especially those of Irish ancestry, reaped the rewards of Franklin Roosevelt’s ascension to the Presidency.
Recognizing their importance in his coalition, FDR appointed Irish Catholics in unprecedented numbers throughout his administration – not only in his Cabinet (Postmaster-General Jim Farley and Frank Murphy) but among his closest advisers (Bronx boss and Democratic national chairman Flynn, personal secretary Grace Tully and White House aide Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran).
Like the rest of American society, Irish Catholics benefited from the relief and massive jobs programs generated by the New Deal, and they responded with unswerving loyalty and votes for Roosevelt.
Ward's judgment of why FDR softened his attitudes towards Irish Americans is judicious but pointed:
Like the rest of American society, Irish Catholics benefited from the relief and massive jobs programs generated by the New Deal, and they responded with unswerving loyalty and votes for Roosevelt.
Ward's judgment of why FDR softened his attitudes towards Irish Americans is judicious but pointed:
"Franklin would learn tolerance as he went along, dictated by the realities of power; he would finally prove shrewd enough never to allow his private prejudice to deny him access to any individual who might be useful to him."
Many Irish-Americans strongly—and probably correctly—suspected Spellman of harboring GOP sympathies.
Many Irish-Americans strongly—and probably correctly—suspected Spellman of harboring GOP sympathies.
Yet FDR, no matter what he might have privately thought, would have cleared a place for the cleric on his schedule, where the cardinal would be humored, regaled, massaged until he fairly purred.
The Roots of Mrs. Roosevelt’s Anti-Catholicism
That wasn’t Eleanor’s style. She didn’t have to work with or through the cardinal.
The Roots of Mrs. Roosevelt’s Anti-Catholicism
That wasn’t Eleanor’s style. She didn’t have to work with or through the cardinal.
Following her husband’s example, she made one of her first significant appearances on the public stage by battling Tammany Hall boss Charles F. Murphy – in this case, over his insistence on appointing two female delegates to the 1924 Democratic Convention.
During her husband’s administration and after, she did not endear herself to many other Catholics by supporting birth control and the Loyalist (anti-clerical) government in the Spanish Civil War.
During her husband’s administration and after, she did not endear herself to many other Catholics by supporting birth control and the Loyalist (anti-clerical) government in the Spanish Civil War.
True, like FDR, she employed Irish Catholics as close aides.
But the whiff of ethnic condescension is as unmistakable as affection in her description of New York Senator Thomas Grady: "He was a very charming Irishman, in spite of the fact that he liked his Irish liquor somewhat too well."
(She should have been more careful about talking about ascribing ethnicity to liquor: her own father was an alcoholic.)
Even as devoted an admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt as Lash acknowledged, “Somewhere deep in her subconscious was an anti-Catholicism which was a part of her Protestant heritage.” He traced this to her great-grandmother Ludlow’s Sunday school exercise books, which inveighed against “popery.”
Mrs. Roosevelt’s son Elliott was considerably more emphatic about the sources of her prejudices in the memoir he co-authored with James Brough, Mother R: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Untold Story.
Even as devoted an admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt as Lash acknowledged, “Somewhere deep in her subconscious was an anti-Catholicism which was a part of her Protestant heritage.” He traced this to her great-grandmother Ludlow’s Sunday school exercise books, which inveighed against “popery.”
Mrs. Roosevelt’s son Elliott was considerably more emphatic about the sources of her prejudices in the memoir he co-authored with James Brough, Mother R: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Untold Story.
He relates in detail how, from childhood on, she associated Catholicism with Tammany Hall corruption; how she felt that Catholics owed more loyalty to their faith than their country; how she supported (as she claimed correctly in her rejoinder to Spellman) Al Smith as President, but only for as long as he proved useful in getting her polio-stricken husband back into the political arena; and how, on her most vulnerable point, she remembered her husband's affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, a Catholic.
Unlike her statements on African-Americans and Jews, where she frequently, generously—and accurately—alluded to their struggle for acceptance and rights, you would have to search high and low to find a similar comment on behalf of Catholics.
Unlike her statements on African-Americans and Jews, where she frequently, generously—and accurately—alluded to their struggle for acceptance and rights, you would have to search high and low to find a similar comment on behalf of Catholics.
Missing throughout her columns on the controversy is any admission of the existence of the Know-Nothings, the 19th-century burning of convents, the existence of the Ku Klux Klan’s anti-Catholic activism, of “No Irish Need Apply” signs.
(She denounced the Klan’s activities against Al Smith, but this was at a time when supporting the Democratic Presidential nominee—and the most popular party politician in New York—would prove extremely helpful to her husband.)
Paul Blanshard, an editor at The Nation and son of three generations of Protestant ministers, provided intellectual ballast for Mrs. Roosevelt’s opposition to the bill with his increasingly strident denunciations of the Church. American Freedom and Catholic Power, a bestseller in 1949 and 1950, likened the Church to the Soviet Union as an anti-democratic institution.
On one point, Mrs. Roosevelt’s attempt to sound conciliatory revealed a lack of understanding of American acculturation that had already taken place:
Paul Blanshard, an editor at The Nation and son of three generations of Protestant ministers, provided intellectual ballast for Mrs. Roosevelt’s opposition to the bill with his increasingly strident denunciations of the Church. American Freedom and Catholic Power, a bestseller in 1949 and 1950, likened the Church to the Soviet Union as an anti-democratic institution.
On one point, Mrs. Roosevelt’s attempt to sound conciliatory revealed a lack of understanding of American acculturation that had already taken place:
“It is quite possible,” she wrote, that religious schools “may make a great contribution to the public school systems, both on the lower levels and on the higher levels.”
As a matter of fact, they already had. The presence of Catholic schools not only helped public schools avoid overcrowding, but these institutions, as Jay P. Dolan noted in The American Catholic Experience, acted as agents of Americanization for generations of successive immigrants.
On another point, Mrs. Roosevelt transformed a complicated history into a simple black-and-white one. To change “the original traditions of our nation” concerning separation of church and state, she wrote, would be “harmful…to our whole attitude of tolerance in the religious area.”
She did not note that in large parts of the nation—including New England—Protestant schools were funded until well into the 19th century, when Catholic schools’ request for similar treatment led to a convenient reconsideration of the whole concept of separation of church and state.
The Roosevelt-Spellman imbroglio had a ripple effect a decade later, when Mrs. Roosevelt saw John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism as a barrier to his ability to win the election, as well as her own endorsement of him as the Democratic standard-bearer. It has also served as a kind of prototype of subsequent troubled church-state relations.
Like Spellman, today’s Catholic archbishops have, all too often, moved with precious little political dexterity.
As a matter of fact, they already had. The presence of Catholic schools not only helped public schools avoid overcrowding, but these institutions, as Jay P. Dolan noted in The American Catholic Experience, acted as agents of Americanization for generations of successive immigrants.
On another point, Mrs. Roosevelt transformed a complicated history into a simple black-and-white one. To change “the original traditions of our nation” concerning separation of church and state, she wrote, would be “harmful…to our whole attitude of tolerance in the religious area.”
She did not note that in large parts of the nation—including New England—Protestant schools were funded until well into the 19th century, when Catholic schools’ request for similar treatment led to a convenient reconsideration of the whole concept of separation of church and state.
The Roosevelt-Spellman imbroglio had a ripple effect a decade later, when Mrs. Roosevelt saw John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism as a barrier to his ability to win the election, as well as her own endorsement of him as the Democratic standard-bearer. It has also served as a kind of prototype of subsequent troubled church-state relations.
Like Spellman, today’s Catholic archbishops have, all too often, moved with precious little political dexterity.
At the same time, many historians and commentators have, like Mrs. Roosevelt, been unable to view the vast array of church-state issues with anything other than an often simplified view of an American tableau with as much turbulence as glory.
The public suffers the most from this gulf of mutual incomprehension.
3 comments:
Considering Jim Farley was F.D.R.'s campaign manager from the time he was Governor of NY until 1940 i think Mr. Farley was a closer adviser than Ed Fynn, who came on in 1940...get you facts straight if your going to discuss political religious figure.
And how about when Farley ran against F.D.R. in 1940 against the third term and Roosevelt had his biographer leak to the press that Farley could not be president because of the Al Smith debacle...and he could not be vice President because the Presidency would be used a a stalking horse for the pope.....How quickly we forget about those gems......God is watching...and judging :)
A very interesting column and wonderfully nuanced, so rare these days. As a Catholic, it's sad for me to see so many Catholics today intolerant of other immigrants when at one time they were on the receiving end of intolerance.
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