Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and Current Fiction
Cord, Robert L.
r Paul Fussell reflecting on the Hiroshima bomb, William Buckley debating James Wechsler, Each is lively and entertaining and together they add valuable texture to the book. In sum, Professor...
...Or our side loses one--South Vietnam, let us not forget itnwe do our bestto explain it was all a mistake to begin with and let's make up and be friends now, only it turns out the other side is busy even as we say it proving that what we are now calling a mistake was an all-too~-accurate analysis of t h e . . . historical situation...
...Finally, Cord treats the views of Madison and Jefferson in such detail that it becomes difficult to impute to either man the "absolutist" view of church-state separation often attributed to them by the modern Supreme Court...
...Churchill had to defeat Hitler...
...This is not a .question of semantics at all...
...And at "Yalta" (that symbol), what could Churchill do, without Roosevelt...
...incorrect...
...hardly missing a beat, it stepped to the front of the resistance against the red one...
...For the court's view that government should be neutral between religion and nonreligion has had effects far beyond particular cases...
...Everson was important, less for its verdict than its rationale, which laid the basis for future court decisions...
...Nonetheless, the question of an establishment of religion had been raised, and the court could not resist advancing, for the first time in its history, a comprehensive interpretation of the minimal prohibitions of the First Amendment's establishment clause...
...Because of Everson, the court, particularly in recent years, has found itself constantly having to decide questions of state aid...
...they should have been settled by the people, in their state legislatures...
...Too, it should have let stand the religiously bland school prayer sponsored by New York State, which it voided in 1962...
...If in the end the book is no more than that, if it fails to rise above the level of an eloquent toast to a bygone and better day, it is at the very least grea t fun to read...
...We rather vaguely speak of a region called Eastern Europe, but Poles have been dying since 1939 for what is left, alas, of the idea of the Occident...
...Naive Americans...
...Allen Ginsberg, for example, leaps backward over the modernists and takes Whitman for his model...
...This is not just history--one of the favored literary forms of Poles--but actuality as well: this is the story, which continues, of underground resistance, against foreigners and totalitarianism, for liberty and independence...
...In 1948, the court said that public school students may not be released from their classes to receive in-school religious instruction taught by ministers, rabbis, and priests...
...It is accomplishment enough that he has done what he set out to do--write a book that successfully criticizes the court's uses of American history...
...prefer one religion to another...
...Cord's reason: in neither case did the state prefer a particular religion...
...Cord covers all these areas...
...Inspiring as the story (which reads like an international thriller) is, today's readers in Warsaw and Gdansk must also find in it some sobering lessons...
...our side--Israel, to take a recent example--wins one, we try very hard to reverse the gain, all the while apologizing profusely for our ally's immaturity and thereby inviting the continuation of international disorder...
...For what, to us Americans, is Poland...
...This is a major literary development, and I believe we have a new major poet on our hands...
...and whether they may provide such auxiliary services as counseling, testing, psychological services, and speech and hearing therapy to parochial schools...
...Cord disagrees not only with many of the judgments in these cases but also with almost every one of their justifications...
...I do not believe it...
...There is nothing going on that Henry Adams had not Roger Kaplan is a writer living in New York City and a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...
...SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: HISTORICAL FACT AND CURRENT FICTION Robert L. Cord / Lambeth Press / $17.50 Terry Eastland Thirty-five years ago in Everson v. Board of Education the Supreme Court held that state financing of school bus fares of parochial school students did not violate the Constitution...
...There still remains, however, the important need for argument--for showing why government need not be neutral between religion and nonreligion...
...It would be inaccurate, however, to say that Cord wishes all of these cases had been properly decided and justified...
...But it strikes me that the court, here as in so many other areas, has been tess interested in history than in using it to advance its particular belief about the kind of society America should be...
...Hamtramck and Stanislawowo, if you are from Detroit or Chicago...
...This must be why this book, first published in a Polish-language edition in London in 1978 and smuggled into Poland, became an instant best-seller when subsequently reissued by the underground NOWA press in 1979...
...Cord goes on to point out the numerous occasions on which the federal government did in fact aid religion, as when thanksgiving and prayer proclamations were issued, when congressional and military chaplaincies were created, and when various Christian missionaries were given federal tax dollars in their efforts to "civilize" the Indians...
...Today the establishment clause has an almost sorcerous power such that its mere mention, like the mention of the words "separation of church and state," suggests for many people--including even political conservatives like Barry Goldwater-that religion must have no place in our public life...
...whether they may underwrite maintenance and repairs of parochial school buildings...
...There can be little doubt that had the court stated this principle, many of the First Amendment questions that it subsequently has had to decide would never have reached it...
...A land under the Communist fist...
...There are those who believe all this ineptitude, this willful blindness, these self-inflicted handicaps, this knee-jerk goo-gooism in international affairs is all due to a sinister concoction of forces gathered for the most part in the elite clubs of the Eastern seaboard: foolish politicians and recklessly irresponsible journalists combining in morbid shortsightedness with pusillanimous mediocrities in the civil service, backed up and confused at the same time by a bored and hopelessly alienated intelligentsia, proving that when the Founders wrote of the "common defense" they knew not what some day the nation would get...
...COURIER FROM WARSAW Jan Nowak / Wayne State UniversityPress / $24.95 Roger Kaplan There are those who claim that World War II never ended...
...This is so because the history of an idea, while obviously important, is not a sufficient reason for accepting its truth...
...But the court moved beyond these to say as well that government may not prefer religion to nonreligion--that it must be, in effect, neutral between them...
...Cord's handling of history is so persuasive that it is hard to see how anyone could disagree with his central conclusion--namely, that the establishment clause was not designed to forbid the government's nondiscriminatory use of religious institutions to further secular ends...
...The court justified its decision on grounds that the state, in this case New Jersey, was merely trying to make sure that children got to school safely...
...In sum, Professor Hart has written a graceful tribute to the fifties, a decade that has been ill-used and badly misunderstood by ideologues and ignoramuses...
...What Justice Black said in Everson, that government may not prefer religion to nonreligion, has been repeated many times by most of his colleagues...
...From a position of isolation, we could not possibly be Iess lucid than we are now...
...Or perhaps it has a lot to do with it...
...Poland was the hot center, the kernel and the acorn, of resistance against the brown plague...
...Could it have been otherwise...
...It is probably a mistake to say that "something happened" around "1968" or "thelatesixties" as it is now pronounced, that wrecked the national will to make this the Anierican Century...
...No one knew quite what to make of it...
...Furthermore, the same Jefferson who gave to history (in 1802, in a letter to the Danbury Baptists) the metaphor of a "wall" separating church and state also, as President, took actions suggesting that in his view the wall was not all that high...
...American Life in the Fifties...
...The most important disagreement between Cord and the court concerns the issue of neutrality...
...already noticed in the manner our political class behaves, there is nothing wrong with our intellectuals that James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers had not already diagnosed, and our foreign policy is largely as Tocqueville said it would be...
...This has nothing or very little to do with the recent appearance of an enormously significant book, Jan Nowak's Courier From Warsaw...
...Separation of Church and State thus is also an attack on the Supreme Court for what Cord terms its "judicial preemption" of issues...
...Indeed, it has not even tried to understand its establishment-clause heroes--Jefferson a~d Madison--in the entirety of their, views...
...This is the enormous, the momentous, the burning significance of Jan Nowak's war memoir, which culminates in the Warsaw Rising of 1944, when the Communist armies stopped their advance on the banks of the Vistula to watch the Polish Home Army, of which Jan Nowak was a lieutenant and a courier (to London), rise in its passion and go down under the German tanks after two months of betrayal and glory...
...Critics did agree the work was strong and musical, and Epstein won the Prix de Rome...
...Rather, he believes that many of them, especially those concerning state aid, should have never reached the Supreme Court...
...for all that, at any rate, we are doing pretty well...
...Among the prohibitions listed by the court were such obvious and uncontroversial ones as that government may not set up a state church or Terry Eastland is editor of the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Virginia...
...But failing that, it certainly deserves to be read in the offices of the eight old men, and the one lady, E1 THE BOOK OF FORTUNE Daniel Mark Epstein / The Overlook Press / $10.95 Jeffrey Hart i n the September 1982 issue of The American Spectator, in the course of a review of Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, a memoir about John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and other mid-century poets, I mentioned the special difficulties that beset poets who wrote in the shadow of the great twentiethcentury modernists...
...but the problem of our modernist inheritance has lingered, troubling Jeffrey Hart is Professor of English at Dartmouth College, a contributing editor of National Review, and author, most recently, of When the Going Was Good...
...The court has been asked among other questions whether states may lend textbooks, instructional materials, and equipment to parochial schoolchildren...
...What is remarkable, of course, is that the modern Supreme Court has somehow found it possible to conclude otherwise, Cord is right to score the justices prayer in question, drawn up by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, preferred these religions to any others and was thus unconstitutional...
...In Howl and, especially, Kaddish, Ginsberg has written well...
...The achievement of Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, joyce, Proust, Pound, and the other towering figures put unusual pressure upon those who came after them...
...It represented the objective correlation of forces...
...Roughly half of Separation of Church and State is given over to a presentation of the "historical fact" that, in Cord's view, exposes much of the court's version of history as little more than "current fiction...
...In any event, Yalta, on paper at least, was neither a betrayal nor a division of Europe...
...Now, in his latest volume, The Book ofFortune, the young poet Daniel Mark Epstein confronts the issue head-on...
...Young Men's Gold (1978) and the verse drama Midnight Visitor, produced off38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983...
...Justice White, one of the few justices in recent years to say something correct about the establishment clause, was right when he noted in 1977 that "the court continues to misconstrue the First Amendment in a manner that discriminates against religion and is contrary to the fundamental educational needs of the country...
...He discusses the intentions of the framers of the establishment clause and concludes that they did not intend to constitutionalize government neutrality toward religion...
...the British, that is to say Churchill and Eden and their advisers, did harm to Nowak and his chiefs...
...He absorbs the technical virtuosity of the classical modernists, but still, marvelous to report, he is not absorbed by them...
...Demonstrating that this idea is wrong would require a lengthy argument about the nature and sources of virtue, and its relationship to the American republic...
...The court has relied mostly upon statements by Madison and Jefferson to support this view...
...Cord's argument with the court is, for the most part, an argument about American history...
...These are geopolitical semantics: we are at war, deny it as we may try to...
...Writing for the court, Justice Hugo Black said that "no tax in any amount large or small can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion...
...That Cord has not attempted to make this argument is, however, no mark against his timely book...
...For Poland, World War II never ended...
...Here was a poet with the technique and intellectual rigor of the Modernists, and the madness of the Beats...
...Battling this belief will require more than invoking history...
...And certainly, if the court had understood history as he does, and used it as he would have, very different opinions would have been handed down over the past 35 years...
...whether they may finance equipment that would-ensure the health, safety, and welfare of parochial school students...
...Yet except in this and perhaps one or two other cases, Cord's views of how the court should have decided particular cases are persuasive...
...It 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 also voided an anti-evolution statute in Arkansas...
...But as Cord points out, Madison also wrote, and in the same year as the "Memorial" in fact, "A Bill for Punishing Disturbers of Religious Worship and Sabbath Breakers" (emphasis added...
...Cord has written the kind of book the court's interest in history invites...
...Poor Poles...
...It explains how the Home Army was organized and, especially (since this is where Nowak's involvement was most direct), how propaganda was conducted against the Germans and liaison established with London, seat of the exiled legitimate government of Poland and, of course, of the British ally...
...But never has it systematically inquired into what the framers of the establishment clause intended it to mean, nor into the attitudes and sentiments prevailing among American political leaders in the founding period...
...According to Cord, the court should have approved the in-school release-time program it struck down in 1948...
...or that it blended right into World War III, with the West choosing, for better or for worse, an essentially defensive strategy...
...Separation of Church and State deserves a wide reading...
...The poets of the sixties, some of them at least, deliberately ducked the issue...
...This is not merely an academic point...
...The first book opened with sensuous love lyrics one might expect from a 24-year-old, and closed with Gothic monologQes reclaiming lost chapters of American history...
...The court has drawn on history to discover the meaning of the establishment clause, but Cord believes the court badly misreads the past...
...Shrewd Soviets...
...Madison, for instance, wrote the famous "Memorial and Remonstrance" against the tax (in Virginia) levied in support of teachers of the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 37 Christian religion, a text often cited by the court in favor of government "neutrality" toward religion...
...For example, President Jefferson approved land grants to sectarian sitting on the court since 1947 for their selective use of history to support their "neutrality" thesis...
...Indeed, it became a handbook for Solidarity...
...Later, in perhaps its most well-known establishment-clause decisions, the court struck down state-sponsored school prayers and Bible readings...
...If the court finally does accept the proposition that even incidental aid to religion might actually serve the public interest, Robert Cord will have the satisfaction of knowing that he demonstrated its honorable historical origins...
...As for the British ally, when the chips were down, first over the Katyn affair (the murder by the Soviets of ten thousand officers, the cream of Poland), then over the question of the composition of the post-war government ("Yalta...
...Moreover, it seems to me that the country would be substantially better off had somewhere along the line-and obviously Everson would have been the best occasion--the court stated clearly that sectarian methods for achieving secular ends are not unconstitutional...
...Our perception of that correlation is, unfortunately but surely, part of the correlation...
...Separation of Church and State by Robert L. Cord, a professor of politics at Northeastern University, is an argument against the modern line of establishment clause decisions, starting with Everson...
...He emerges very much with his own voice...
...I am not sure that on Cord's terms societies dedicated to "propagating the prayer decision,in 1962 was 9 "the gospel among the Heathen...
...And because it will have to be taken into account by more ambitious social historians yet to come, it may turn out to be influential as well...
...it could be argued that the And he specifically asked the Senate to ratify a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians, a condition of which was that federal money would be used to support a Catholic priest in his religious duties...
...Daniel Mark Epstein's No Vacancies InHell (1973) and The Follies (1977) produced impassioned and puzzled responses...
...and unassimilated for the most part...
...For the will was probably never there, and the correct American foreign policy--correct in the sense of being in tune with what the nation is willing to commit itself to abroad--is a splendid isolation combined with a willingness to pursue and destroy international pirates without recourse to any more'entangling alliances than are necessary to the task at hand...
...A doomed, perpetually heroic nation, in the plain lying tragically between Teuton and Rus...
...In particular, this belief is that America should be a secular nation, with religion consigned wholly to private living, none of its distinctive features aUowed to influence public life...
...It will require sustained argument in behalf of an idea, and this argument will have to take place not only in scholarly forums but also the culture at large...
...The failure to develop clear First Amendment guidelines has indeed meant that the court has had to act more or less as a legislature on state aid questions, effectively disenfranchising citizens in an area that should be constitutionally open to them...
...Writing poetry and fiction became difficult...
...Black" propaganda had only a marginal effect on German morale...
Vol. 16 • January 1983 • No. 1
