Abstract
Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy “conveyed an intangible feeling of depression” on the night of January 2, 1960, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Earlier that day, Kennedy had officially announced his intention to run for president. As an advisor to Kennedy’s campaign, Schlesinger enjoyed intimate access to the Catholic candidate. In Schlesinger’s view, Kennedy’s uncharacteristically sullen mood derived from the Catholic candidate’s fear of religious opposition. “I had the sense,” Schlesinger recalled, “that he feels himself increasingly hemmed in as a result of a circumstance over which he has no control—his religion; and he inevitably tends toward gloom and irritation when he considers how the circumstance may deny him what he thinks his talent and efforts have earned.”1
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Notes
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 20.
Mark S. Massa, S. J. Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Crossroad, 2003), 7.
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 79.
Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25.
Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 17.
Mark Nicholls, Investigating the Gunpowder Plot (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991).
Ray A. Billington, The Origins of Nativism in the United States, 1800–1844 (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 1–4.
Kevin P. Philips, Cousins Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Billington, Origins of Nativism, 1–29. See also, Ray A. Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study in the Origins of American Nativism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1938), 1–25.
Jay P. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 24, 20, 15–20.
Dale T. Knobel, “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 34–38.
Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 165–166.
Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 212.
Theodore S. Hamerow, “The Two Worlds of the Forty-Eighters,” in The German Forty-Eighters in the United States, Charlotte L. Brancaforte, ed. (New York: P. Lang, 1989), 33.
John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 29, 58–59.
Bennett, Party of Fear, 153, 155. A. James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), 188.
Mark W. Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Bruce L. Felknor, Dirty Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 30–31.
Although Catholic Roger Taney had served as the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, Cleveland’s subsequent nomination of a Catholic for the nation’s highest court exacerbated nativist suspicions of a papal conspiracy behind the election. Knobel, “America for the Americans,” 202–203. Blaine, who had a Catholic mother, later claimed not to have heard the reverend’s comment. Lawrence H. Fuchs, John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism (New York: Meredith Press, 1967), 59, 65.
Joseph P. O’Grady, How the Irish Became Americans (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), 69–73, 109.
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James Hennesey, S. J., American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 177.
John E. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 92.
John Haynes estimates that Lenin’s orders resulted in 14,000 to 20,000 deaths. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace?, 89. Historian Peter Filene claimed that contemporaries figured that the Cheka murdered anywhere from 9,000 to 1.8 million. The Soviet government’s suppression of Russia’s Catholic churches never inspired the same outrage among Protestant sects, which had little established organization in that nation. A 1923 execution of Monsignor Buchkavich, vicargeneral of the Roman Catholic Church in Russia, particularly inspired strident anticommunism among American Catholics. A Boston Methodist publication, however, accepted the Soviet justification that Monsignor Buschkavich’s engagement in counterrevolutionary activity justified his punishment. Methodists and Quakers, for example, “were convinced that the government did not seek to kill religion, but to liberate it from state control.” Peter G. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 82–84.
James M. O’Toole, Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O’Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859–1944 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 132–136.
Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924).
Christopher M. Finan, Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 191.
Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 206–207.
J. Leonard Bates, Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana: Law and Public Affairs, From TR to FDR (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 234, 237.
Robert K. Murray, The 103rd Ballot: Democrats, Madison Square Garden, and the Politics of Disaster (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 180–200, 207–208, 214.
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© 2004 Thomas J. Carty
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Carty, T.J. (2004). Popish Plots, Religious Liberty, and the Emerging Face of American Catholicism before 1928. In: A Catholic in the White House?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8130-1_2
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