McCARTHYISM AND CATHOLICISISM
Crosby, Donald F.
McCARTHYISM AND CATHOLICISM A new look cit the evidence DONALD F. CROSBY IT IS SURELY one of the great ironies of Joseph McCarthy's story that as much as he tried to direct the glare of...
...His most important ally by far was Monsignor George Higgins, head of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference...
...The magazine's editors found the senator an igno,'ant and irresponsible man, one who made a "moderate and constructive approach" to the problem of loyalty quite impossible...
...it was the method of a "man who runs along ~the back streets to do his cheating when he hasn't the stuff to do things the straight and open way...
...Most important of all, however, the decade brought the inauguration of the first Catholic President, for whose acceptance the Catholic liberals had helped pave the way by demanding religious freedom for all...
...My own research into the story casts further doubt on it...
...Since that time Eugene McCarthy has claimed, "I was the fi;st to challenge Senator Mccarthy," though the impossibility of establishing the exact date of his speech makes it difficult to prove his claim...
...a number of Catholics (mostly conservative Republicans) believed that should a Catholic rise to prominence in Amen/can public life, the Protestants would always push him down...
...The Catholic liberals were especially active during the McCarthy episode, striving to articulate an ethic both of Catholic civil libertarianism and of reasonable anti-Communism...
...First, the Democratic vote in Maryland had long been in decline, a trend that had started in 1938 and had continued despite the state's heavy Democratic registration...
...21 July 1978:456 II THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom has it that on 7 January 1950 McCarthy met for dinner at Washington's Colony restaurant with a prominent Washington attorney William A. Roberts, Professor Charles Kraus of the Department of Political Science at Georgetown University, and Father Edmund Walsh of the same university's School of Foreign Service, a man with a formidable reputation in Catholic circles as an expert on international Communism...
...Even Clement Zablocki, who should know better, still thinks tha.t McCarthy carried his own fourth district...
...Lawrence Seaway Project, but McCarthy .rejected it as .too une~xciting...
...Protestant liberals, as a result, felt litt.le inclination to try to heal the old wounds...
...Catholics were free, absolutely and unqualifiedly free, to make up their minds about Budenz, about Chavez, or nbout anyone else, he wrote...
...Working at breakneck speed, the NCCJ delivered its .telegram to the White House, where it went into the waiting hands of Emmet John Hughes...
...When Catholics voted in the elections in which McCarthyism was a factor, they generally voted like the other voters in their region (as in Appleton, Wisconsin, where McCarthy swept the electorate) or like the other voters in the wing of the political party to which they belonged...
...But McCarthy's political drawing power among his fellow Americans, and also his fellow CathCommonweal: 461 olios, could be measured nowhere more directly than in Wisconsin, where he faced reelection...
...Without doubt he posed a special problem for some of them because of his status as a convert from Communism, his popularity as a Catholic lecturer and author, and his use of the Catholic argument against Communist subversives...
...consin labor unions adopted the same strategy, concen...
...Most serious of all, they produced a scurrilous piece of campaign literature called "From the Record" thnt purported to prove Tydings's pro-Communist leanings...
...well only in the back-country areas where, as one scholar points out, ".the voters had been dispassionately anti-Demozratic since Roosevelt 'tricked' the country into war...
...The Reverend Francis /.,ally of the Boston Pilot saw Matthews's criticisms of the clergy as "friendly" and "a kind of family criticism," though he regretted deeply the opprobrium the press had heaped upon the Protestant clergy, From no sector of the Catholic Church, therefore, did Protestant ministers and spokesmen hear the kind of ringing denunciation of Matthews that they believed they had a right to hear...
...Several years afterward the elder Kennedy tried lamely to deny the whole story, but the evidence supporting the incident is too strong to discount...
...It remained that way until he died in 1972...
...Hughes and his anti-McCarthy cohorts in the White House worked frantically to get a telegram of response from Eisenhower: they knew that McCarthy was preparing to dismiss Matthews anyway, and they wanted to beat him .in reaching the wire services...
...And the rest of the country followed the same course...
...How did the tale get its start...
...McCarthy's interview stirred up an angry altercation between Protestant liberals and conservative Catholics...
...Catholics did precisely that--both to McCarthy and to one another...
...but usu~b ly the invitation came to him, not the other way rownd, and as any shrewd politician would, he accepted the bid...
...It may very well be, therefore, that Tydings did better with tl~e Catholic vote than did either his fellow Democrat, Governor Lane, or his Republican opponent, John M. Buffer...
...Clearly, the Eisenhower sweep carried Mccarthy into the winning column, but his followers nevertheless proclaimed that he had won a "smashing victory...
...The truly vehement McCarthyites and anti-MeCarthyites made up only a small portion of each sample...
...If Mccarthy's win was unconvincing, so was the thesis (advanced by a few) that he ,had taken the state's Catholics along with him...
...The bishops might well urge Catholics to support the ciVil:rights movement for blacks, but many lay Catholics would wonder out loud if the prelates had spoken out of turn...
...indeed, one careful observer has described him as "almost the symbol of clerical anti-Communism in Washington...
...The most important of these weie the Polish Catholics located in Milwaukee's south side and in the Polish wards of Racine, Kenosha and Madison...
...One might suggest the following, by way of ringing down the curtain on l'al~aire Colony: the meeting almost certainly took place, and the participants may well havediscussed Communism...
...Yet he trailed his ticket, he lost all the major cities in Wisconsin, and he did...
...He praised McCarthy, saying that he supported him eathusiastically, and vowed that the anti-McCarthy advertisement would never reach the newspapers (as indeed it did not...
...is not a sort of International FBI...
...patience, sincerity...
...21 July 1978:468...
...Since McCarthy had sworn to drive Tydings out of the Senate, all eyes focused on the Old Line State to see what the Catholics there would do...
...In an obvious reference to McCarthy, Dr...
...Prime mover in the behind-the-scenes activity at the NCCJ was Dr...
...Goldt, man was the first to suggest that McCarthy's Irish blood may have had something to do with the event...
...The small scale of the Catholic population in Maryland should have discouraged hard and fast judgments about McCarthy's impact on the Catholic vote in the Tydings contest...
...The Wis...
...First, many Catholics believed that Protestants opposed McCarthy simply because he was a Catholic...
...AI[hough the incident is, not impossible, there is no firm documentary evidence to support it...
...Drew Pearson was only too accurate when he said that the "chief tragedy" of the Matthews dispute was the deepening of hostility between Protestants and Catholics...
...All of this must have come as something of a surprise to Joseph Raymond McCarthy, who apparently gave hardly a passing thought to the more philosophical and political aspects of his religion and who asked only that he be known as an enemy of subversives, not as a Roman Catholic senator...
...A few have even become "their own Popes and are just as sure of their own infallibility as they were in the days when they parroted the resolutions of the Comintern...
...political liberalism, and his keen interest in ecumenical affairs...
...The Catholic news service's dispatch on the Matthews story hinted darkly that Matthews's charge of Communist infiltration into the Protestant clergy was "~ti.ll a public question...
...When Jackson began reading the statement, the senior Kennedy violently interrupted him, shouting that Gardner and his liberal friends were trying to wreck his son's career...
...Rather, he has been "speaking with special emphasis as a Catholic, investing his appearances and utterances with an added sanctity" by virtue of hi~ .recent conversion...
...In sum, Joe McCarthy had come to represent what the Roman Catholic Church had always seemed to be...
...Virtually alone in condemning McCarthy was the Commonweal, the leading voice for Catholic liberal and intellectual opinion...
...Having decided that he was the one to express liberal Catholics' indignation with Budenz, Chavez rose on the Senate floor on 12 May 1950 delivering an impassioned attack on the ex-Communist...
...Repeated calls of the hierarchy and the lower clergy for the n:asses of lay Catholics to join in crusades against abortion, pornography, or Paul Blanshard had met an indifferent reception...
...THE RELIGIOUS DISPUTE over McCarthy deepened perceptibly after the beginning of his second term in early 1953...
...McMillin is especially insistent about this...
...Zablocki put limits on his support, however, refusing to campaign outside of his district for the Democratic candidate...
...Indeed, his return to Catholicism had been in the back of his mind all during his appearance before the Tydings committee...
...yet Zablocki himself won still another smashing victory, piling up 131,098 votes to his opponent's 72,869...
...Both Catholic and Protestant liberals, meanwhile, had begun .to take Chavez's side in the dispute...
...The clergymen's message denounced Mafthews's attack as "unjustified and deplorable...
...But "for a Catholic to do this to one of ou...
...Lane lost badly to the challenger, Theodore R. McKeldin, who took 61 percent .of the vote...
...McCarthy's method was not the "American way...
...The uncommitted COmmonweal: 467 portion of the Catholic community bulked as large as 56 percent (in March 1953) and as small as 8.7 percent (in December 1953) but usually ran about 20 percent...
...No one knows what Walsh personally thought about McCarthy, since he wrote nothing about him, said nothing in public, and did not even discuss the senator with his Jesuit confreres at Georgetown Univezsity...
...They seemed to believe that what McCarthy the Catholic had done, the Catholic Church had done...
...In other counties he found that the larger the Catholic population, the larger Tydings's losses were...
...Yet others were more guarded in their assessment of the Matthews issue...
...Nevertheless, Walsh made his feelings about the Pea;son article abundantly clear to anyone around the university who cared to listen...
...The number of Protestants with similarly moderate opinions was slightly smaller...
...WIlT CAN ONE say libout the most famous dinner party McCarthy ever attended...
...Noting that McCarthy's enemies had fallen in other states, the l/isitor concluded modestly .that "the masses of Catholic electors have sensed.., that they, and perhaps they alone, can save the world...
...The Commonweal thus sounded the opening blast in its five-year war against Joe McCarthy...
...expressed intense approval of McCarthy never registered over 21 percent of the sample and once fell as low as 11 percent, those who expressed intense disapproval of McCarthy ranged from 14 percent to 25 percent, In the same three polls the group of Catholics with only very mild feelings or with none at all ranged ifnpressively in size from 55 percent to 74 percent...
...When asked if he had been thinking about the church during his appearance on the witness stand, he answered emphatically that it was "overwhelmingly my thought...
...Catholics made no attempt to hide their differences (an~l, indeed, went out of their way to insist that they were not like other Catholics), it seems strange that so many commentators credited McCarthy with massive Catholic support...
...Thus in rural Ca,'roll County, with a Catholic index of only 6 percem Tydings's vote dropped by four points from his position in the 1944 election, but in the city of Baltimore...
...I I I I I I II had hinged on factors that went far beyond the Catholic vote...
...Matthews wrote, "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen...
...Though the Colony incident has many variants, these elements seem to be common to all of them...
...Schmitt conducted a fiercely anr McCarthy campaign, but the incumbent McCarthy rolled over him with Republican voters, 500,000 to 200,000...
...When the Army-McCarthy hearings destroyed McCarthy's national following, they destroyed his Catholic support as well...
...Subsequent versions of the story by Richard Rovere and Eric Goldman added further (and highly imaginative) details to the account...
...Mackay's reference to the "inquisition" was an unmistakable slap at the Catholic Joe McCarthy and Catholics in general, since Protestant liberals of the 1940s and 1950s often used phrases like "the Spanish Inquisition" and "inquisitor" to describe the modern Catholic Church, which they believed was as authoritarian and illiberal as its medieval predecessor...
...How did Catholics react to their co-religionist, Louis F. Budenz...
...and a scrupulous regard for factual information" ought to govern the debate over McCarthy's charges, the Pilot argued...
...The reason...
...When McCarthy himself proposed a large-scale pension plan for the aged, the others condemned it as economically unsound...
...With a trail of u~'esolved accusations behind him," McCarthy lunges from one indictment to the next, mixing "mere assertion" with evidence, it said...
...Third, the state's Democratic organization in 1950 had split badly into two con,tending factions, thus depriving Tydings of the help that he needed in an election promising to be hard fought and very close...
...The polls unmistakably revealed a remarkably large body of vague opinion on McCarthy, with few Americans having deep feelings of either hostility or approval...
...Pearson did not name Walsh, but by that time almost everyone in Washington knew whom he meant...
...Catholics figured prominently in the maneuvering at both ~he NCCJ and the White House...
...After preliminary consultation ~he NCCJ decided that it would send President Eisenhower a telegram protesting Matthews's atlack on the Protestant clergy...
...Although some Catholic publications shared the Tablet's warm enthusiasm for McCarthy, a number agreed with the Boston Pilot (the Catholic paper for that city), which said that a prudent caution was in order...
...In addition to his reputation as the national anti-Communist par excetlence, McCarthy was also a Catholic, a combination sure to cut deep into the traditionally Democratic strength of the Polish precincts...
...Protestants were quick both to deny Matthews's accusations and to react against Catholic support for him...
...The results of the election came as a shock to antiMcCarthy forces across the nation...
...Other Catholic publications shared McGinley's sense of outrage...
...tor's tough fight against Communism and may even have thought that his highly controversial methods were as valuable as his goals...
...Paul, Minnesota, who happened to have the same last name as the Wisconsin senator...
...To the Tyd, ings committee McCarthy now brought his star witness What can one say about the most famous dinner party McCmthy ever attended...
...The Commonweal expressed the indignation of liberals and Democrats everywhere when it asserted that McCarthy's Maryland campaign had debased the "integrity and honor of our n.ational life...
...Two years later the story, somewhat embellished, appeared in the popular biography of the senator by Anderson and May...
...When Pearson wrote in March 1950 that Father Walsh was "not happy at the outcome" of the dinner, he was quite right, but not in the way he suggested...
...In no part of the Union, so it seemed, did Joe McCarthy have a more enthusiastic following than in Kennedy's Massachusetts...
...Reflecting as always the a,'chconservative views of its editor, the Tablet described McCarthy's speech to the Senate of 20 February as "a straightforward American address," one prepared with great skill, and t:uly an "A-I patriotic effort...
...Other prominent Catholic conservatives, such as Louis F. Budenz, agreed with the Tablet that tl...
...Put in its simplest terms, Catholics failed to follow the direction of the church in the matter of McCarthy because that direction was muted and ambiguous at best...
...The assumption, of course, was dead wrong---Catholic liberals opposed McCarthy just as much as did non-Catholic liberals...
...Probably the most vehement attack on C havcz came from a columnist in the Los Angeles Tidings (the Catholic paper for that city) who said that if the attack on Budenz had come from a Communist, it might have made sense...
...Chavez's passionate outburst on the "Catholic issue" brought tempers to the flash point, as always happened during the Mccarthy controversy...
...To Walsh's intense disgust, Pearson ignored the challenge...
...The specter of Al Smith's failure to win the White House in 1928 because 'he was a Catholic once again loomed ahead...
...If McCarthy or Matthews should produce a few real Communistic 21 July 1978:466 ministers, "the public is likely to end up thinking McCarthy was right all the time...
...Did Matthews say that,seven thousand Protestant clergymen in America were proRed...
...Elmer Davis complained that certain ex-Communists, finding that "final truth" does not reside in Moscow, have "sought and found it in Rome...
...VIII TRy...
...It was from the nation's churches, he believed, that the American people would get the "spiritual strength" they needed to do bal~tle "against the forces of godless tyranny and oppression...
...If most Catholics showed a marked tendency (shared by the rest of the country) to avoid taking a strong stand on McCarthy, a number of them refused to go even that far, rendering a no-comment or an I-don'tknow answer when queried about him...
...In the fearful ten months t,h~t followed the 1950 elections, the Democratic strategists in the White House found themselves haunted by a nagging question-would the Republicans be able to use the Communist issue to capture,the Catholic vote in 1952...
...His designs were political and practical, as his friends WiUiam F. Bucldey, Jr., and ROY Cohn readily concede...
...Eric Sevareid, for instance, wrote in 1960 that if Kennedy had taken a bold stand against Mccarthy, "he would have been overwhelmingly defeated...
...Nothing irked him more than the preposterous notion that Catholics ought to support Budenz because he was a member of their church...
...Almost certainly it first appeared in the columns of Drew Pearson, at that time the scourge of Washington politicians and socialites/ Pearson's column in the Washington Post for 14 'March 1950 r an item about the "likable [sic] young Senator Joe McCa,-thy" who had asked his friends for a winning issue and had learned that "any" Senator who consistently attacked Communism would have a great appeal for the voters...
...One of the first to speak out was the liberal Catholic congressman from St...
...Beginning in early 1954 the Gallup agency published several of its surveys of national opinion on McCarthy, carefully including Catholic opinion in the sample...
...What were they...
...Young Kennedy heard his father's performance from the nearby bedroom but said nothing...
...Apparently he hoped that this would convince his listeners of the reliability of his testimony...
...An alert critic, however, would have noted two flaws in the argument-fromthepriesthood: first, Walsh never said a word in public or in private about McCarthy, and second, Walsh al...
...Most amazing of all was ,the vote for the Wisconsin secretary of state, Fred R. Zimmerman, a bitter opponent of McCarthy: he piled up a 505,300 vote margin, the largest of any candidate on the ballot...
...Even less cautious was the McCarthyite Catholic weekly Our Sunday Visitor, which reported enthusiastically that Tydings had been "almost solidly opposed by Maryland Roman Catholics," who were the group chiefly responsible for his demise...
...Like his predecessors Goldman also failed to provide supporting evidence...
...The 750,000 Irish i0 the state were among McCarthy's most ardent admirers (though an embaRled minority opposed him), and no one was more acutely'aware of this than John Kennedy and his campaign staff...
...He never felt comfortable with that kind of stuff...
...For McCarthy's exultant Catholic followers across the nation, this landslide was a cause for unreserved rejoicing, no matter how it came about...
...Since...
...Two of the most concerned were the manager of the Fairchild campaign, Patrick Lucey, and the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic party, James E. Doyle, who worried most of aH that McCarthy would sweep the vote of Wisconsin Catholics from Eastern European countries...
...It appears that many Protestants saw the Matthews attack as a Catholic assault on their .loyalty...
...When the pollsters .asked Catholics how.many.of ~them.regularlyxead, a Catholic newspaper or periodical, only 44 percent of them said that they customarily did so...
...Whatever the reasons, his religious life was a strictly private concern, limited largely to going to Mass on Sunday...
...One can find a number of causes for this...
...The more perceptive writers of recent years, scholars such as James MacGregor Burns, for example, have made considerable efforts to delineate the rift in Catholic ranks over the senator...
...A number of Catholic liberals saw the rift with equal clarity, and repeatedly proclaimed that Catholics were as divided on McCarthy as everyone else...
...If Pearson could not prove them, then he challenged Pearson to pay $1,000 to Waish's own pet philamhropy...
...Meanwhile, Eisenhower took the state by 357,569 votes, and Governor Walter Kohler, Jr., won reelection by 407,327...
...For anti-McCarthy liberals across the country, the pictu,e of Budenz using his Catholicism to denounce suspected Communists was utterly beyond endurance...
...Donald McDonald, for instance, believed that the Catholic McCarthyites had never formed more than a "hard and bitter minority," and John Cogley denied that McCarthy had ever achieved the "sweeping Catholic acceptance" that careless writers often assumed he enjoyed...
...noted political analyst and pollster, soon afterward examined the Catholic vote in Maryland .and concluded that Tydings's "greater losses" were "associated with the greater Catholic concentrations...
...For example, Richard L. Strout of the New Republic, who wrote under the pseudonym of TRB said that McCarthy had a "tremendous gravitational pull on [the] Catholic masses.', Senator Charles Potter noted ominously that "many Catholics arebehind him and so is the Ku Klux Klan...
...The Reverend J. B. Matthews, long known for Iris extreme right-wing political views, enjoyed close contacts not only with . ,the eonservatwe Hearst newspaper chain but with many of the businessmen and polRicians who made up the Republican party's conservative elite...
...What did the nation's Catholics think about McCarthy's performance...
...James E. Doyle, national co-chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action, complained that McCarthy's hiring of Matthews had been an "attempt to intimidate and silence opposition from the Protestant clergy," and the liberal Catholic columnist Donald McDonald said that he was "extremely proud" of Father O'Brien's role in the public repudiation of Matthews...
...The result was a close call...
...The New York Times concluded (without supporting evidence) that the "combination of the Catholic vote and the labor vote" probably made up a "large .bloc of the sentiment that unseated" Tydings...
...they mailed out hundreds of thousands of postcards el.aiming to be signed "personally" by John Marshall Butler, but which in fact were signed for him by paid campaign workers...
...When McCormack announced that he was ready to go Commonweal: 463 along with the arrangement, Gardner Jackson prepared the statement and brought it to Kennedy's apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston to obtain the candidate's signature...
...it is not imposs le that he made up a good part of the story...
...Commonweal: 459 With a growing sense of frustration, he watched Budenz deliver his lengthy story to the Tydings committee...
...Bobby never disavowed McCarthy...
...Can one seriously argue that a spread of eight to ten points constitutes a major difference...
...Finally, Tydings may well have suffered from charges *.hat his investigating committee had "whitewashed" McCarthy's indictments against the administ;ation, though it is impossible to say precisely how much this might have hurt him...
...What coal& Protestants possibly understand about world Corn-: munism (and Communist spies at home) since they...
...Yet a nutnber of authors were Shrewd enough to perceive the split in the Catholic community, and they concluded rightly that Catholics were anything but "monolithic" on McCarthy...
...McCarthy himself seemed to have written off the possibility of his being the "first Catholic President" when he told an interviewer for the Madison State Journal that he would not run for the presidency because of his religion...
...signing the telegram would be a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a Jewish rabbi...
...Frustratingly enough, Anderson and May failed to tell where they got their information...
...A year after McCarthy's death an otherwise sophisticated observer of the political and religious scene concluded that Catholics had shown an "almost monolithic uniformity" on the McCarthy question...
...Nevertheless, it seems clear that few Catholic politicians ever made less public display of their religion than did Joe McCarthy...
...Catholicism became an issue in Budenz's testimony, largely because he made it so...
...And yet the myth survived that Catholics had overwhelmingly turned to McCarthy...
...Even if one takes the polls at face value, they give evidence of a Catholic population not radically different from the rest of the nation in its views of the senator...
...He remembers the "Eastern hotshot intellectuals" who came "piling into Wisconsin," looking for a "nativist, fascist movement" and expecting to find McCarthy acting like a religious bigot in search of .the Catholic vote...
...geopolitics of Russian expansionism, Walsh spent all of his time on the problem of external Communism, not domestic subversion...
...The reality of the Maryland election was thus a complex set of voting patterns, party factions, and shifting structures of party loyalty...
...Lucey even ran advertisements in the Polish language newspaper with photos of Fairchild and Zablocki and a strong endorsement by Zablocki...
...There was no more a "Catholic position,' on McCarthy than there was a ,'Protestant" or "Jewish" one on him, they insisted...
...help McCarthy with his own campaign in Wisconsin, but in reality designed to make sure that McCarthy stayed out of Massa~chusetts...
...If the Catholic Church was an authoritarian institution, the masses of lay Catholics seemed resolutely determined to confine that authority to a set of narrowly defined religious functions...
...After some ~hesitation Kennedy agreed to sign such a declaration, provided that Congressman John McCormack, always a power in Massachusetts, agree r sign it with him...
...One of the dinner companions suggested the St...
...McCarthy's companions then left, thinking that they had done a great service both to him and to the country...
...Although we may never know with certitude why he did this, it seems probable that he refrained from coming to Massachusetts out of respect for his old friend Joseph P...
...O'Brien concluded plausibly that thesenator "needed no suggestion from Father Walsh to realize the political value of the Communist issue...
...I n similar fashion ` the Catholic vote on McCarthy, like the polls of Catholic opinion, showed a divided response...
...As good as McCarthy's effort was, however, he needed help, because time was running out for America: "Every Ame:ican is burdened with the obligation of saving his country before it is too late...
...Pearson wrote that today "the man who urged this latter advice, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Geo:getown University, is not happy at the outcome...
...The "agent" turned out to be Professor Owen Lattimore of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore...
...Mary's County, which boasted a Catholic population of 80 percent--actually gave Tydings a narrow victory over Butler...
...When McCarthy finally dropped Matthews from the committee, Richard Ginder joined the Tablet in honoring Matthews by describing him as "something of a martyr ~o the faith...
...The figures fo, nonCatholics were virtually the same as for Catholics...
...My ancestors brought the cross to this hemisphere," Chavez shouted...
...A survey conducted in March 1950 (a month after the Wheeling address) showed that nearly half (49 percent) of the Catholics believed McCarthy when he said that Communists stitl worked in the State Department, and only 28 percent thought that he was just playing politics...
...As much as it opposed the senator, it strenuously disapproved of abandoning "the tradition of nonintervention into politics by Church leaders just for the sake of another stick with which to beat McCarthy...
...Long known as a popula," authority on the...
...Finally, Father Walsh suggested that McCarthy try the issue of Communist sul~version...
...How did they come to this curious conclusion...
...These concepts helped form the foundation of the "Catholic renaissance" of the 1960s--a period that witnessed the Second Vatican Council and a growing Catholic emphasis on personal freedom, on religious toleration, and on the right of the individual (even the Catholic individual) to a personal expression of his own opinions...
...with anti-Communism such an important part of Catholicism, his religion inevitably became a public topic, subject to incessant discussion and debate...
...Long known for its policy of relentless anti-Protestantism, the Tablet stopped attacking the Protestants long enough to praise Matthews as an "outstanding Protestan,t" and a distinguished national authority on Communism...
...Is it too much to say that out of the conflicts of the McCarthy era came the ecumenical promise of the Kennedy years, that out of the trauma of the early fifties came the promise of the sixths...
...Joe Kennedy genuinely liked McCarthy, and he invited him on occation to the family mansion on Cape Cod for a drink and dinner...
...B UDENZ'S MOST POTENT adversary, however, was a Catholic senator, Dennis Chavez of New Mexico...
...He accused Budenz of using "the Church which I revere" as a "shield and a cloak" to protect testimony that was clearly unfair and untrue...
...It seems clear, in retrospect, that Budenz's trau~aatic departure from Communism, his abrupt entrance into Catholicism, and his highly conservative political posture all converged to produce a man whose religion and politics centered on anti-Communism...
...Write your support of Senator McCarthy NOW...
...Since three of the principals---McCarthy, Walsh .and Roberts---are all dead, and the remaining witness, Professor Kraus, has dropped out of sight, it is impossible to acquire fi,~sthand information about the event...
...At no time was the Catholic group that expressed no comment much different in size from that of the Protestants...
...Furthermore, Catholics were determined to follow their ecclesiastical leaders only in the most strictly defined religious areas, such as attendance at church on Sunday, the requirement of marriage before a Catholic priest, or the maintenance of the parochial school system...
...Sho,'tly after the Wheeling speech, Congressman Eugene McCarthy spoke before a Catholic group in suburban Washington...
...Though .this famous "doctored photo" was Inter shown to be a composite of two separate pictures and therefore an undoubted fake, the discovery came too late to affect the outcome of the election...
...Not surprisingly, the Kennedy staffers (and Kennedy himself) did everything they could to avoid the McCarthy issue, realizing that it could destroy the Kennedy campaign completely...
...McCarthy quickly decided that he would let his case against the State Department "stand or fall" on Owen Lattimoze...
...Even TRB (perhaps trying to have it both ways) eventually discovered the "deep fissure" that McCarthy had created among Catholics...
...The thing to do is hammer at them...
...Bean concluded that although the Catholic vote did ~n0re damage to Tydings in some areas of the state than it did in others, the "direction of its influence appears to have been consistent, against Tydings...
...Now, however, "I speak as a Roman Catholic...
...In sum, when John Kennedy dealt with the McCarthy problem, he had to con~der not only .the senator and his unswerving adherents in Massachusetts but the Kennedy family in addition...
...The opinion polls had always complicated the picture and at first glance made it seem that McCarthy enjoyed a "massive" Catholic following...
...At ,the White House a group of Bisenhower's assistants opposed to McCarthy decided that the time had come to maneuver ~he President into making a public protest against McCarthy...
...He hoped that someday Budenz would make it "unmistakably clear to the American public that the Church...
...Yet at no time during the campaign did McCarthy raise a "religious" issue, or use his Catholicism to capture the Catholic vote...
...Only in New York and Boston did the Catholic masses actively support his campaign, and even in those cities a conservative elite pushed the McCarthy bandwagon fully as much as the masses followed it...
...From earby 1950 umil 1954, rumors flew about repeatedly that the senator would seek the Republican nomination in 1952 or 1956...
...Such a panel would surely have the public confidence, as the present "scandal-screaming investigations just as surely do ~t...
...In the working-class Polish wards of Milwaukee, McCarthy polled only 28 perc,~nt of the vote...
...This article is adapted, with permission, /tom his ]ull-length, documented study God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950-1957, just published ($16.9.5) by the University ol North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill...
...McCarthy leaped at the idea, saying he was sure that this was the issue he needed for his campaign...
...They detested the tendency of many Catholics to think that their religion began and ended with M, ass on Sunday...
...At the same time many Protestants began to see in Joe McCarthy the lurid image of everything thoy had come .to fear in American Catholicism: like many Catholics he showed a certain disinterest in civil .liberties, he demanded conformity to his own set of opinions, he was intolerant of all opposition, he dogmatized mindlessly, and he made a shambles of ~he democratic process by abusing the witnesses who came before his congressional committee...
...Everyone ag;eed that his massive victory and .the nationwide publicity that resulted from it had given h~m a momentum that would make him hard to beat...
...Though the members of the, Democratic minority on McCarthy's committee resented Matthews's presence, he worked freely until he published an article en6tled "Reds and Our Churches" in the July 1953 issue of the American Mercury...
...Tydings lost his Senate seat by more than 40,000 votes, but more impor21 July 1978:460 tantly, many people believed that it was Joe McCarthy, and not John Marshall Butler, who had defeated him...
...It made sense, of course, to say that a priest had given the idea to McCarthy because Catholicism was known to have a special argument with Communism...
...For that matter, the forces of Henry Cabot Lodge did the same...
...After the senator's disastrous bout with the Pentagon, Catholics stopped carrying the torch for McCarthy (except for the hard core of his admirers, epitomized best by the Brooklyn Tablet and its followers...
...The Brooklyn Tablet wrote .that the "stooges" and "assorted pinks" who opposed McCarthy had been "stopped in their mud...
...True, Catholic liberals leaped at the chamce to attack Matthews and McCarthy, but their attempts .to defend the Protestant clergy against Matthews were less than convincing, at least to the Protestant clergymen whom Matthews had offended...
...BY ALL ACCOUNTS the Matthews affair ought to have lessened the strains between Protestants and Catholics, since Protestant and Catholic liberal leaders had joined together in rejec.ting both Matthews and McCarthy...
...The point is worth emphasizing, for the Wisconsin Poles made up the largest single group of Catholics in the state...
...Carthy's expected bulge in the countryside...
...Secondly, everyone in Washington knew of Walsh's long-standing interest in Communism...
...Second, Catholic conserval~ives openly rejoiced in Matthews's indictment of the Protestant clergy, saying that it proved what .they had known all along: the vaunted liberalism of the American Protestant ministry was nothing but a mask over their leftist (and even Communistic) sympathies...
...During the meal McCarthy remarked that he was looking for an issue to get him the publicity he needed to win reelection in 1952...
...Higgins saw Budenz as a seriods threat both to the reputation of the Catholic Church and to its work...
...Clearly it all began with Drew Pearson...
...The Democcats in the Senate who pondered Tydings's fate may also have trembled...
...Many Protestants, on the other hand, believed that McCarthy enjoyed vast Catholic support and that Catholics approved of him simply because he was a Catholic...
...Nor was it true that-Louis F. Budenz ever "speaks for the Catholic Church," nor does Chavez, noc McCarthy, nor even George Higgins, he added...
...Kennedy, 'Sr...
...The point is that there was very litttle . . . religionism in Joe...
...Three of his staunchest critics--Miles McMillin of the Madison Capital-Times and two of the editors of the Commonweal, John Cogiey and James O'Gara--are all emphatic on this point...
...Protestants were especially angered that some Catholic McCarthyites gloated openly over ~he Matthews article...
...McCarthy made few, if any, attempts to exploit his religion for political purposes...
...It is highly improbable, however, that Walsh urged McCarthy to go on a crusade against subversives on the ground that it would bring him instant political stardom...
...Within the Catholic elites, however, a savage battle raged over McCarthy...
...In reality, however, it actually widened the Commonweal: 465 chasm between Protestantism and Catholicism...
...The same people who voted for me voted for McCarthy," he told me in 1972...
...The President's reply, drafted by Hughes, assured the clergymen that he shared their convictions...
...Over the course of McCarthy's five years of crusading, the Gallup and Roper agencies conducted thirty-three samplings of national opinion on the senator, and on twelve different occasions they asked respondents to describe the intensity of their opinion about him...
...It was in many ways a most unconvincing victory: McCarthy enjoyed heavy financing...
...In charge of his own investigating committee, he proceeded to hire a former leftist (and Stalinist) turned Methodist minister as his right-hand man and the head of his investigating staff...
...A few observers t,'ied to ~ttribute McCarthy's overwhelming victory to the Catholic vote, but their explanations were strained and unconvincing...
...Nevertheless, his was clearly the guiding hand behind the Butler forces, as a subsequent congressional investiga, tion revealed...
...The sheer volume of angry argumentation, alone, ought to have been enough to convince the skeptics...
...Nor do his personal papers give us any indication at all of his reactions to either McCarthy or the Colony controversy...
...As Jackson entered the room, he was surprised to see that a large crowd had gathered theremwith Joe Kennedy, in a rare visit to the apartment, seated on the sofa...
...The veterans of 1952 are unanimous on this point, with the Democratic leaders the most emphatic of all...
...McCarthy's accusations were under the severe scrutiny of a Senate investigating committee headed by Democrat Millard E. Tydings...
...President Eisenhower, in turn, was to send a telegram of congratulations to the three clergymen, taking the occasion to condemn Mccarthyistic attacks on the ministry...
...Lawrence Seaway proposal came up, McCarthy is supposed to have said, "That hasn't enough sex...
...Mccarthy simply did well everywhere and with every Republican group, Catholics included...
...An even warmer friendship developed between McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, who served on McCarthy's Permanent Senate Subcommittee on Investigations for six months in 1953 before leaving because of a personal feud with McCarthy's chief counsel, Roy M. Cohn...
...it is not impossible that he made up a good part of the story...
...Kennedy was not only running against a strong and experienced incumbent .;n the person of Henry Cabot Lodge, but he had to deal with the McCarthy matter as well...
...Most political commentators have concluded that if Kennedy had made a false move on the McCarthy issue, he would have gone down to certain defeat...
...had come to the issue so late, so uninformed, and so completely unscathed by it...
...McC IV polled only 28 percent of the vote: the other GOP candidates received at least 38 percent...
...it noted that Catholics seemed more solidly behind McCarthy than did the rest of the populace...
...Out of the eleven Republican candidates on the Wisconsin ticket, McCarthy ran last, winning by only 139,042 votes over Fairchild (McCarthy had dropped 112,616 votes from his 1946 total...
...the other GOP candidates received at least 38 percent...
...Yet th~ senator's whole career was built on the fight against the Communists...
...With the myth of McCarthy's invincibility went a companion myth: that Maryland Catholics had routed Tydings and had put the McCart, hyite Butler in his place...
...If the Gallup poll was any indication , however, Eugene McCarthy's voice rep;esented only a minority of the nation's Catholics...
...He noted that Walsh's intervention "cut deep" into McCarthy's Irish background: "The Irish Catholics of his area, while New Dealers, had always suspected Easterners...
...VII ANOTHER CANDIDATE for the Senate that year was ,the young Congressman from Boston, John F, Kennedy...
...Clearly it cdl began with Drew Pearson...
...The Visitor notwithstanding, the Maryland election By the time Budenz was finished, Chavez was hot with anger, telling a friend, "One of us Catholics ought to challenge this man--one of us should do it I should do it...
...At .that time the advantage seemed to lie with the Catholic 21 luly 1978:438 McCarthyites, because of their greater numbers...
...The story, goes that the liberals among Kennedy's advisers had long been pushing him to make a bold anti-McCarthy statement, one that would appeal to ehe anti-McCa~hy feelings of the liberals in Massachusetts's electorate...
...Without question a McCarthy intervention in Massachusetts would have had momentous consequences for the campaign, so strong did his following among Catholics in that state seem to be...
...The Commonweal reacted strongly against Protestant demands that the Catholic Church make an official condemnation of McCarthy...
...To the vast relief of both the Kennedy and Lodge forces, McCarthy stayed away from Massachusetts...
...In a doctoral disse;1ation on McCarthy, Michael O'Brien has noted that fully three months before the Wheeling speech McCarthy had successfully attacked a leftist reporter for the Madison (Wisc...
...And as recently as 1971 Fred Cook wrote darkly, that a "large and powerful segment" of the church shared Cardinal Spellman's favorable assessment of McCarthy...
...By the time Budenz was finished, he was hot with anger, telling a friend, "One of us Catholics ought to challenge this man--one of us should do it--14 should do it...
...If the Republicans gave him the nod, would he capitalize on his Catholicism to win the Catholic vote...
...Yet he failed in the latter completely, probably because he had succeeded very well in the former...
...Recognizing the seriousness of the challenge, Lucey's forces wo;ked strenuously on the south side, securing the support of organized labor and convincing the popular Congressman Clement Zablocki to support Fairchild...
...Both his admirers and his detractors admitted that II FATIIER DONALD F. CROSBY, S.J., teaches history and religious studies at the University o/Santa Clara...
...Given the senator's growing interest in domestic Communism and Waish's constant preoccupation with what he called "inte,national Marxism," it is also possible that they had an exchange on the politics of anti-Communism...
...Regardless of this problem, it is a fact that the forces of American Catholic liberalism, aptly symbolized by Eugene Mccarthy, wasted no time coming to the conclusion that the junior senator was a menace both to the church and to the nation...
...Each of these surveys showed a sizable group of people who entertained only mild feelings of approval or disapproval...
...Although McCarthy had swept the prima;y with much more ,than simply the "Catholic vote,', his opponents still worried that Catholics would turn out overwhelmingly for him in the general election...
...More important still, what is one to say of the fact that Catholic support for McCarthy rose and fell in exact harmony with the rise and fall of national opinion...
...As early as the Spanish Civil War (1936--39), a majority of Catholics polled in national surveys indicated that they disagreed with the American hierarchy in its public stand on the war (in this case, the proFraneo position that the bishops had adopted...
...The answe, s are not hard to find...
...Thanks to Pearson's subsequent repetitions of the sto:y, the Colony dinner soon became an accepted part of M~arthy lore...
...What is more, if Bean had pushed his study of "Catholic counties" a bit farther, he would have made two interesting discoveries...
...If Catholics paid little attention to papal statements on capitalism, peace and the errors of recent heretics, they seemed equally uninterested in the annual statements of the American bishops on similar topics...
...Public reaction was instantaneous and furious...
...For instance, the Los Angeles Tidings (the Catholic paper for that city) said that Matthews had attacked ,the Protestant clergy because a "disconcerting number" of such clergymen "have brought dishonor on the regiment . . . . Honor will return only with the purge or the penance...
...Adding tension" to the fight was the common belief that Maryland was a heavily '.'Catholic" state, one where the traditional Catholic "ethnic minorities" made up a formidable part of the population...
...It did not, however...
...In addition, the liberal newspapers o Milwaukee and Madison waged a furious campaigl against McCarthy, hoping that tl~y could reduce hi chances for reelection...
...Thei~ version contained snatches of conversation designed to make it interesting reading...
...Chief among these was the fondness of the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., for the senator...
...Only in New England or New York City could Catholics shake off their political passivity long enough to retain laws against birth control or to remove "anti-Catholic" books from the shelves of public libraries...
...Less than a month later, McCarthy gave his famous speech in Wheeling, announcing that he had a list of Communists actually working in the State Department...
...Hence the rumors and the popular bel.ief that Walsh had instigated McCarthy's Red hunt...
...Protestants also took umbrage at an editorial appearing in the Brooklyn Tablet...
...All of this means, quite simply, that Catholics generally followed the pattern of the rest of the state, voting against McCarthy when they lived in cities and with him if they lived in farming, back-country areas...
...It is essential to note, however, that no documentary evidence of any kind exists to prove that Walsh ever exhorted McCarthy to go on his political crusade...
...Asked about R later, he replied laconically that it was just his father's "pride of family...
...Matthews's known association with reactionary groups had aroused deep bitterness among Protestants because they feared that McCarthyism was "developing into a Catholic attack" on Protestantism...
...True, McCarthy did talk occasionally before Catholic groups such as the Holy Name Society or the Knights of Columbus...
...The Anderson and May volume, an immediate commercial llit, gave the story a currency it had not enjoyed before...
...Bitterly he criticized the senator, claiming that his methods directly contradicted Catholic social and political principles...
...They said that destroying trust in .the leaders of Protestantism, Catholicism, or Judaism "by wholesale condemnation" had the result of weakening "the greatest American bulwark against atheisti.c materialism and Communisn...
...IX CATHOLICS ARE free to back McCarthy to the hilt or t~ the wall," a Catholic editor wrote in late 1954...
...Vastly complicating Kennedy's relationship with McCarthy was the tight web of personal contacts that bound McCarthy to the Kennedy clan...
...They did no such thing, McCarthy failed miserably in Zablocki's district, losing 76,408 to Fairchild's 135,852...
...Their popes 'had repeatedly and solemnly declared their opposition to Communism and all its works and pomps, and their denomination had repeatedly suffered persecution at ,the hands of the Communists, beginning in Russia in the 1920s and continuing .unabated in most of the countries locked behind the iron curtain...
...WIHEN ONE LOOKS back on the Catholic experience with McCarthyism, one is also struck by the lack of churchly influence on the nation's Catholics...
...The debate over McCarthyism was thus predominantly an affair of elites~of conservative editors, politicians, editors, business leaders, and leading clergymen --all ranged against liberals drawn largely from the same ranks...
...McCARTHYISM AND CATHOLICISM A new look cit the evidence DONALD F. CROSBY IT IS SURELY one of the great ironies of Joseph McCarthy's story that as much as he tried to direct the glare of publicity onto himself and his career, he tried equally hard to keep his religion quietly to himself...
...A Catholic liberal vr ecumenical sympathies, Hughes had long been looking for a chance to strike a blow against McCarthy, whom he viewed as a menace to American politics and an embarrassment to the Catholic Church...
...Catholic liberals did, of course, condemn Matthews...
...Bean was correct, then, in concluding that McCarthy's vote-getting power among Catholics was "not as solid or as :extensive as is generally assumed...
...Louis Budenz has been using this cross as a club...
...First, the most Catholic county in the state--St...
...This was only the first of many times that it called on its readers to exect public pressure in favor of McCarthy...
...IV MCCARTHY DRAMATICALLY announced on 21 March &|& 1950 that he had the name of the "top Russian espionage agent" in the United States...
...The blunt fact of the matter is that Catholicism had precious little to do with the senator's .hunt for subversives...
...V IN 1950, a major test political power of the of MeCarthyism appeared to be the contest in Maryland, where McCarthy's arch-critic Millard Tydings had to face a McCarthy~te candidate, John Marshall Butler...
...McCarthy also ran poorly in the Polish wards of Kenosha, Racine and Madison, trailing far behind the rest of ,the Republican ticket and losing badly to his opponent...
...Another friend and associate, Chacles Kersten, cannot recall a single occasion when McCarthy mentioned Catholicism in connection with his anti-Communist crusade...
...If so, the article asserted, he ~had really been quite kind to the nation's Protestants, because if there were 250,000 Protestant ministers in the United States, then he had singled out only 3 percent of them...
...government...
...Stone wrote that McCarthy "has had the guidance of Father Edmund A. Walsh," and in the same month the Nation said that Father Walsh had "selected" the "emotion-filled issue of Communism" for McCarthy's attentions...
...McCarthy himself spoke only three times in the Maryland campaign (on one occasion accusing Tydings of shielding traitors "at a time when the survival of Western non-atheistic civilization hangs in the balance...
...The senior Kennedy also admired ,the senaIn the working-clc s Polish wards of Milwaukee...
...trating their efforts on the working-c!ass wards in th~ cities, where the Poles made up one of the larges blocs of voters...
...with a Catholic index of fifty, he dropped by nineteen points...
...The result of all this concerte, activity was that the Catholic laboring groups mad up largely of Eastern Europeans, voted heavily again: 21 .luly 1978:462 the senator...
...VI WITH SLASHING attacks on Adlai Stevenson, including that calculated slip of the tongue, "Alge:--I mean Adlai," McCarthy projected himself imo the center of the 1952 national elections: He toured the country denouncing enemies like William Benton in Connecticut and assisting friends like Barry Goldwater in Arizona...
...The Christian Century, fearing that McCarthy's declaration was merely the first move in a projected campaign .for the White House, called upon the Catholic hierarchy to repudiate his candidacy...
...McC^R'rnY QO~.STION greatly intensified the hostilities already existing between Catholics and Protestants...
...What was the reason...
...The most sensational item in the "Record" was a photograph showing Tydings in animated conversation with Earl Browder, the prominent Communist party leader...
...people who had slandered Matthews were the same people who had smeared McCarthy in the past...
...Second, in the three most Catholic counties and in the city of Baltimore, Tydings ran consistently ahead of the only other Democ;at running on a statewide ticket--the incumbent governor, William P. Lane...
...most never discussed the problem of Communists in...
...Prodigal Sons--amid the joyous howls of all the atheist conspirators against God and mankind--is in my view unspeakably low...
...Thus the Catholics who...
...MUCH BETTER FOUNDED is the famous "Beacon Hill" affair, in which Joe Kennedy exploded in wrath ~t an attempt to get his son to renounce McCarthy and McCarthyism...
...he ran on a GOP ,ticket in a state that was swinging strongly "into the Republican camp, and his reelection coincided wi~l the first national GOP landslide in twenty years...
...Once the story had received the imprimatur of Rove,'e and Goldman, it became firmly fixed in the McCarthy legend, enduring to the present day...
...To Walsh's idea of the Communist hunt, McCarthy reportedly replied, "The government is full of Communists...
...In the general election his Democratic opponent was Judge Thomas Fairchild, whose thoughtfully liberal policies and mild appearance looked pale against McCarthy's virulent anti-Communism...
...Does it posit the existence of a body of Catholic opinion fundamentally different from the rest of the nation...
...The priest whom the NCCJ selected to sign the telegram was the Reverend John O'Brien of Notre Dame University, a Catholic columnist known for his theological sdtolarship, his moderate At the White House a group of Eisenhower's assistants decided that the time had come to maneuver the President into mcd g cz public protest agcrinst McCarthy...
...While this was happening, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, an ecumenic, al body~ located in New York City, decided to make its owfi denunciation of McCarthy, though it wanted the support of the White House in its efforts...
...The McCarthy staffers collected campaign funds that they somehow failed to report...
...Capital-Times, charging that he had Communistic leanings...
...Mackay said that the "new inquisition" even had its "Grand Inquisitor" who like his famous prototype "thinks in patterns, which have been made familiar to the world by totalitarian regimes...
...A survey of Catholic reading habits taken in 1954 dramatically illustrated this phenomenon...
...In the case of Millard Tydings and the election of 1950, :he myth was the invincibility of Joe McCarthy, who had routed the enemy from office...
...To the Jesuit president of Fordham University, Lawrence J. McGinley, Chavez was a "mode,'n Pharisee," the kind who is "always ready to point a self-righteous finger at their fellow man...
...The only dissenting opinion comes from Jack Anderson and R0nald W. May, who wrote in McCarthy: The Man, the Senator, the lsm, a popular account published in 1953, that soon after McCarthy started his crusade against Communism, he began deliberately bringing religion into his speeches in an attempt to build a "religious campaign" on his behalf...
...From this single statement they concluded firmly that McCarthy was waging a religious campaign...
...Since the White House staffers knew that it would be much easier to get a statement out of Eisenhower if he could appear to be responding to a respectable group like ,the NCCJ, they made strenuous efforts to coordinate the ewo actions...
...Normally a restrained and self-possessed man, Walsh angrily told his fellow Jesuits that Pearson was a "liar...
...not only was the country in real danger ~rom the threat of Communist spies, but the voters were ready to support a good Red hunt...
...First, .they remembered that McCarthy, who never repudiated Matthews's article and released him only after coming under great pressure, was a practicing Catholic...
...These figures seemed to reveal a large mass of opinion on McCarthy that was mildly committed or virtually uncommitted...
...They narrowly won the race wRh McCarthy, delivering a copy of both telegrams to the press less than an hour berrore McCarthy broke his own...
...Many observers, nonetheless, remained hard to persuade...
...Taunted Ave Maria, "Haven't you been telling us how keen you are for complete separation of Church and State...
...Thanks to excelleat organization and a furious campaign that saw him visiting every one of the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts, Kennedy was able to defeat Senator Lodge and the Eisenhowcr landslide by the narrow margin of 70,737 votes...
...One was that the Fairchild forces had concentrated their efforts in the cities, believing that if they could win ,the urban areas by a large enough margin, they could overcome Me...
...From that n~oment until hi.s censure in December 1954, hardly a week went by without an editorial or article detailing the senator's latest crimes against the republic...
...The leadership of this band came from the Brooklyn Tablet, which lost no time in climbing on the McCarthy bandwagon...
...In June 1953 I.F...
...Thus, when the St...
...To men like O'Brien and Eagan, devoted to the breaking down of denominational barriers and the building of social justi, ce programs that all three major religions could support, McCarthyism and Matthews seemed destruotive in the extreme...
...For the next three Commonweal: 437 months (all be/ore Wheeling) Communism was the principal and repeated theme of his political speeches...
...OnE gEASO~t McCarthy made no special attempt to snare the Catholic vote was that he spent so little time in Wisconsin during the campaign...
...Louis Bean, the...
...It suggested that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court be asked to appoint a distinguished panel of public figu;es charged with the task of looking impartially into McCarthy's charges...
...James Eagan, a scholarly and liberal Catholic layman whom the NCCJ employed topromote its many interfaith functions...
...Budenz declared confidently that he was "a different man than five years ago" because the Catholic sacrament of "confession" had given him redemption from his past sins...
...His associate Jack Anderson, who embellished it most imaginatively, refused to answer my letters of inquiry, as did Richard Rove'e, who claims that he received his information from "one of the participants...
...Second, Tydings's deeply conservative record had cost him much of his support among union members and blacks as well...
...The first line of the essay roused a storm of debate, caused his ouster from the committee, and deepened the chasm between Protestarrts and Catholics over McCarthy...
...A eloser examination of those same polls, however, would have revealed a certain softness in McCarthy's Catholic strength...
...John A. Mackay~ moderator of the Presbyterian Church USA, issued a statement denouncing Matthews and asserting that Protestants had to confront "the Twentieth Century American version of the Sixteenth Century Spanish Inquisition...
...A month later Pearson repeated his charges, saying that McCarthy's csmpaign had been "encouraged by some of the clergy at Georgetown University acting unofficially and as individuals...
...Most important of all, he hoped that Budenz would make it equally clear that the anti-Communism of the church "goes hand in hand with a radical program of social justice," one that some of the "patriots" who were so enthusiastic about Budenz seemed unwilling to honor...
...When the other three warned him to be careful to "get the facts," McCarthy replied absentmindedly that he would follow their advice...
...The president of the university, Father Hunter Guthrie, stoutly defended Walsh's side of the controve,' sy, but did so only in private...
...His private religious feelings were affairs that he carefully avoided discussing in public, and he never used them as a political lever...
...The percentage of Catholics in the areas of "greater Catholic con=entration" that he studied is too small to prove that it was the Catholic vote that defected from Tydings...
...As often happens, however, the reality escaped the attention of observers, and a convenient myth took its place...
...The Washington Post wondered whether i.t was really necessary for converts to Roman Catholicism to lead the movement away from Communism...
...If nothing else, the affair demonstrated beyond dispute the sensitivity of all the Kennedys to McCarthy's political power in the Bay State...
...The Matthews episode had done nothing to draw Protestant and Catholic liberals closer together...
...this characteristic spanned both the Catholic and the non-Catholic communities...
...An examination of their evidence shows that they based their whole case on the speech in which he said that the two "fundamental truths of religion" were the "God who is eternal" and the "soul which is immortal...
...rathe...
...But more important than this, many Catholics had come to see the war against Communism as "their" issue: their church had opposed Marxism since the Communist Manitesto first appeared i,n 1848...
...Money may have cemented an already firm friendship: the story i~, still current that the elder Kennedy gave McCarthy $50,000 in the fall of 1952, ostensibly to...
...Third, liberal Protestants still believed that Catholics were a reactionary group, ready to support a Matthews-style attack on their patriotism...
...If the story now seems suspect, why did it gain such currency...
...Though McCarthy was unable to uncover enough incriminating evidence to make the charges stick, he reaped a harvest of hometown publicity for his efforts...
...Is it any wonder, then, that the overwhelmingly McCarthyite Catholic press failed to have so little influence on the Catholic readership in America...
...In ,the counties with the largest concentrations of Catholics, McCarthy polled 6 to 7 percent less than in counties with only a few Catholics...
...Unfortunately, Guthrie never denounced the story publicly, nor did Walsh himself ever publish a denial of Pearson's allegations...
...He notes, however, that the factor of population was much more striking than Catholicism in its relation to the McCarthy vote: the greater .the population density, the worse McCarthy's loss was...
...Well, just what are you for...
...A more critical, look at the religious makeup of the state, however, would have revealed that ~the Catholics made up less than 20 percent of the state's population, with most of them packed into the urban Baltimore area...
...Even if one takes the polls at face value, they give evidence of a Catholic population not radically different from the rest of the nation in its views of the senator...
...Lucey's informants told him that the Democ;ats would be "wiped otrt" on the south side, so strong was the bitterness of the Polish Catholics against Communism...
...In the Republican primary McCarthy was opposed by Leonard F. Schmitt, a liberal Republican (and a Catholic) with close ties to the progressive t;adition of the LaFollettes...
...BEAN'S ANALYSIS abounds with difficulties...
...He said that he had even offered Pearson $1,000 for the columnist's favorite cha.Hty if Pearson could prove his accusations...
...Furthermore, the critics of the Matthews article had "gone much too far out on a limb" when they gave the impression that no Protestant minister had ever followed the Communist party line or had belonged to any of its numerous fronts...
...Whether by default, by accident, or by .design, Catholics were in the habit of finding their own answers to most daytoday questions (and in virtually all intellectual, cultural, and political matters) without the help of the duly appointed and official leaders of their church...
...One of the Protestant ministers whom Matthews had singled out for special criticism, Dr...
...Budenz has not been talking merely as a private citizen, Chavez insisted...
...The conservative Catholic weekly Ave Maria bitterly denounced the Century's editorial, saying 21 July 1978:464 that if the Catholic bishops ever took such an action they would he eommi~tting "an unpardonable interference by the Church in matters of State...
...III WITH OR WITHOUT the help of Edmund Walsh, Joseph Raymond McCarthy was soon off and running, swiftly acquiring a national reputation as the coun.try's number-one Communist hunter...
...in the matter of LattimoreJLouis F. Budenz, the former editor of the Daily Worker who had returned to Catholicism in 1945...
...For all the monotonous repetitions of the story, the incident has received only one systematic critique...
...One of the questions that worried Protestants most of all waswhether McCarthy would run for president...
...McCarthy sent his personal staff into the state, where they proceeded to conduct "a despicable 'back-street' type of campaign," as congressional investigators later described it...
...When Louis Bean studied the Catholic vote in Wisconsin, he found that in the largest Catholic centers McCarthy ran poorly...
...Although most of Wisconsin's rural counties were heavily Protestant, the few that were Ca.tholic voted like the other rural areas for McCarthy...
...The activistminded Catholic liberals, to be sure, defended the bishops' right to speak out in favor of black equality (or on any other moral issue) because they believed most vehemently in the thesis that Catholic belief ought to have an impact on all of one's actions...
...His voice trembling with emotion, Chavez said that in all his nineteen years in the Congress, he had never referred publicly to his _9 religion...
...His support among Catholics, therefore, was not "(~atholic" as much as geographical and political...
Vol. 105 • July 1978 • No. 14
