Grappling with Secularism: Anti-Communism and Catholicism in Cold-War Detroit

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Notes

¹ Nicholas Schorn, “Why the Block Rosary,” Our Lady of the Cape, February 1952, 7–10; Michigan Catholic, April 10, 1952, 5. Despite the fact that Mary hardly appears in the Bible, she has been one of the most venerated figures in Catholicism, and the rosary, known as “Mary's special prayer,” has been the most popular form of Marian veneration. Catholics say the rosary, a lengthy series of Hail Marys, Our Fathers, and Glory Be to the Fathers that are counted out on the rosary beads, to implore Mary to act as the Mediatrix between God and man. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).

² Ellen Schrecker, for example, asserted that anticommunism was not a mass movement that bubbled up from below. Instead, she argued that Cold War anticommunism was “political repression” carried out by a “broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists” that ultimately turned dissent into disloyalty and “drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.” Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Revisionists have been particularly critical of anticommunist liberals for their role in creating an atmosphere in which McCarthyism sprang to life. Richard Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and Internal Security, 1946–1948 (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986); David Oshinsky, “Labor's Cold War: The CIO and the Communists,” in The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism; Steve Rosswurm, Robert Griffeth and Anton Theoharrs, eds., The CIO's Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

³ This is a term John Earl Haynes uses in John Earl Haynes, “The Cold War Debate Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism,” Journal of Cold War Studies (Winter 2000): 76–115. Traditionalists have been at the forefront in examining and publishing recently released Comintern documents, official records of the CPUSA, and the Venona transcripts. These traditionalists criticize revisionists, particularly Ellen Schrecker, for ignoring the new evidence and continuing to apologize for Stalinist excesses. See also Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York, 1999); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Nigel West, Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage (Encounter Books, 2003); Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997).

⁴ For an analysis of 20th century historians’ neglect of religion, see Leo Ribuffo, “God and Contemporary Politics,” Journal of American History 79 (March 1993): 1515–31. One notable exception is John McGreevey, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the 20th Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

⁵ The membership statistics are from the 1950 Official Catholic Directory and are quoted in Michigan Catholic, June 1, 1950, 1. While seventy percent of Catholics attended mass at least once a week during the 1950s, only one-third of Protestants attended weekly services. Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor: A Sociological Study Of Religion's Impact On Politics, Economics, And Family Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 34. The total population of the Detroit urbanized area was 2,659,398. United States Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Population: 1950. Volume II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 22, Michigan (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, (1952). The boundaries of the archdiocese and the urbanized area as defined by the census do not correspond.

⁶ Much of the scholarship on Catholic anti-Communism has focused either on Catholic support for McCarthy or on elite anti-Communism. Historians have found that Catholic support for Senator McCarthy was neither uniform nor that much different from the rest of the country. Catholic conservatives and liberals often battled over political issues, and support for McCarthy was no different. Such prominent conservatives as Cardinal Spellman of New York appeared to embrace McCarthy while more liberal clergymen, such as Bishop Bernard Sheil of Chicago, criticized McCarthy's tactics while still supporting anti-communism. The liberal Catholic periodical Commonweal opposed McCarthy from 1950 until his censure while the Brooklyn Tablet remained a staunch ally. But most importantly, McCarthy's support amongst Catholics did not translate into a change in voting patterns. For the most part, urban Catholics continued to support the Democrats, even in McCarthy's home state. David O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform (New York, 1968); Donald F. Crosby, S.J., God, Church and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church: 1950–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Donald F. Crosby, S.J., “The Politics of Religion: American Catholics and the Anti-communist Impulse,” Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis, pp. 20–38. The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) was one of the most prominent liberal Catholic anticommunist organizations. See Neil Betten, Catholic Activism and the Industrial Worker (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1976) and Douglas P. Seaton, Catholics and Radicals (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1981). Labor priests were often critical of the excesses of red baiting even as they fought communists within the CIO. See Steve Rosswurm and Joshua B. Freeman, “The Education of an Anti-Communist: Father John Cronin and the Baltimore Labor Movement,” Labor History, 33 (1992): 217–247; Charles Owen Rice, “Confessions of an Anti-Communist,” Labor History, 30 (Summer 1989).

⁷ Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum: encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII on the condition of the working classes (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1983). The Pope harkened back to a supposed golden age in which masters assumed responsibility for their apprentices’ training while protecting their workers from unemployment and starvation. According to the encyclical, as guilds disappeared and industrialization increased during the nineteenth century, the relationship between employer and employee changed profoundly. The new industrialists had no social compact with their workers. Instead, the connection between capitalist and laborer became purely economic. Pope Leo XIII also criticized laissez-faire capitalists, who argued that the state should not step in to alleviate the abuses of industrialism. Leo feared that the freedom inherent in laissez-faire capitalism only extended to the capitalist, not the increasingly downtrodden worker.

⁸ Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (The Fortieth Year): On Reconstruction of the Social Order (May 1931), paragraph 71.

⁹ Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI on Atheistic Communism (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1937). According to Divini Redemptoris, “In such a doctrine, as is evident, there is no room for the idea of God; there is no difference between matter and spirit, between soul and body; there is neither survival of the soul after death nor any hope in a future life.” Communism's defeat required the “infusion of social justice and the sentiment of Christian love into the social-economic order.” The corporatist doctrine that Pius XI discussed was quite similar to Mussolini's fascism.

¹⁰ Coughlin quote in Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982), 95. Coughlin had first taken to the local airways in October 1926. By 1930 his popularity had spread and he broadcast nationally. His radio sermons made Coughlin one of the most popular figures in both Detroit and the country during the early 1930s.

¹¹ Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI on Atheistic Communism (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1937), 16.

¹² Coughlin quote in Leslie Tentler, Seasons of Grace: A History of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 336.

¹³ Vance Marran, Detroit, MI, to Arch. Mooney, December 26, 1938; Edward Mooney Collection, Coughlin Series, General Correspondence, Archives of the Archdiocese of Detroit (AAD).

¹⁴ While Coughlin and his supporters expressed important elements of an ideology that would be widely shared by many Americans during the Cold War, Coughlin's virulent anti-Semitism and pro-fascism limited his popularity. Before World War II, anti-Semitism was a prominent theme in Catholic anticommunism. After the Holocaust, such speech was no longer publicly acceptable and was condemned by prominent conservative Catholics like William F. Buckley. John Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

¹⁵ Mooney believed that Jews were active in communist causes “all out of proportion to their number in the population” and he blamed Jews for giving Coughlin publicity by making a “terrific howl” and not ignoring what he had to say. In her history of the Detroit archdiocese, Leslie Tentler argues that Mooney didn’t silence Coughlin for his anti-Semitism because he, like most Americans, lived in a culturally isolated world. According to Tentler, “It took the horrors of the Second World War to breach the walls that kept the tribes apart.” Tentler, Seasons of Grace, 338.

¹⁶ Mooney quoted in Tentler, Seasons of Grace, 332, 343.

¹⁷ Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 403.

¹⁸ Steve Rosswurm, “The Catholic Church and the Left-Led Unions,” in Rosswurm The CIO's Left-Led Unions, 123, 126.

¹⁹ A.J. Beck wrote in the Michigan Catholic that “There is growing in this country the naïve belief that the day of religious persecution in Russia is over.” In response, the Central Bureau of the Catholic Central Verein stated that “There is still no indication that Stalin has departed from the rules governing the Communist attitude toward religion as laid down by the master, Lenin.” The Soviets did appear to be giving some liberty to the Orthodox Church, which American Catholic clergymen believed was being used to “smear the Catholic Church and to promote the Soviet's political program. Granting some degree of liberty to the Orthodox patriarch in Russia is expected to make a favorable impression on Orthodox Church members in the Balkans and thus further Russia's expansion program.” A.J. Beck, “The Lookout,” Michigan Catholic, April 27, 1944, 4.

²⁰ “Peril to Christianity Seen in Russian Claims Against Poland,” Michigan Catholic, February 24, 1944, 1.

²¹ According to the 1950 census, Poles were the second largest immigrant group (behind Canadians) in the Detroit Urbanized Area (which included Hamtramck, a heavily Polish enclave). In 1950, greater Detroit had 59,343 Polish immigrants out of a total foreign-born population of 371,409. There were also sizeable immigrant communities from the USSR (21,076), Hungary (12,278), Yugoslavia (7201), and Czechoslovakia (5350), as well as hundreds of thousands of second- and third-generation Eastern Europeans. The total population of the urbanized area was 2,659,398. United States Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Population: 1950. Volume II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 22, Michigan (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1952.

²² This manifesto was signed by the leaders of the Polish Roman Catholic Union, Polish National Alliance, Polish Women's Alliance, and the Polish Lawyers Society. Thaddeus C. Radzilowski, Introduction to Margaret Collingwood Nowak, Two Who Were There: A Biography of Stanley Nowak (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 18–20.

²³ Margaret Collingwood Nowak, Two Who Were There, 217. Nowak met almost daily with Adler while both were in Poland.

²⁴ Michigan Catholic, February 15, 1945, 1. The Polish Daily News was the largest Polish paper in Michigan.

²⁵ Michigan Catholic, August 9, 1945, 3.

²⁶ Walter Dushnyck, “Reds’ Aim: Crush Church, Win World,” Michigan Catholic, August 8, 1946, 1.

²⁷ Margaret Collingwood Nowak, Two Who Were There, 221–222, 228.

²⁸ “Calls Poland Test of Just Peace,” Michigan Catholic, May 10, 1945, 3.

²⁹ Letter to the editor from Arthur I. Zakrzewski, Michigan Catholic, March 9, 1944, 4.

³⁰ “KC Resolve to ‘Expose’ Reds,” Michigan Catholic, August 29, 1946, 9.

³¹ As the Michigan Catholic noted, Catholic editorials were at last finding a “counterpart in the secular papers of the nation” by late 1945 and early 1946. Michigan Catholic, December 6, 1945, 1. A letter to the Michigan Catholic editor from “A Listening Baptist” praised Msgr. Fulton Sheen's weekly radio show for “showing Communism up for what it is … . Msgr. Sheen is doing more than anyone in America to show up Communism, and in the name of the many grateful thousands of all faiths who hear these facts I want to thank WWJ and The [Detroit] News for making it possible for us to hear them.” Letter from “A Listening Baptist,” Michigan Catholic, March 6, 1947, 4.

³² The Catholic Encyclopedia defines popular devotions as “external practices of piety by which the devotion of the faithful finds life and expression.” Catholic Encyclopedia, (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12275b.htm).

³³ The “fertile soil” quote is from the American Bishops, statement on secularism, “Exclusion of God Root of World Woes,” Michigan Catholic, November 20, 1947, 3.

³⁴ The rosary dates from the thirteenth century, when St. Dominic claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin while he was conducting the Inquisition against the Albigensian heretics. From the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, the rosary became a weapon in the fight against the Church's new enemies, especially anticlerical liberalism and the expanding modern state. In Germany, for instance, a Marian apparition at Marpingen during the late 19th century coincided with the Kulturkampf, the attempt by Bismarck to crush the Church's power and extend state control. In 1931, a Marian vision in Ezkioga in the Basque Country appeared just as the Spanish Second Republic had undertaken its campaign against the Church. Hundreds of thousands of worshipers flocked to the sites of these visions and eagerly embraced Mary's call to say the rosary, despite the fact that the Church hierarchy did not approve the apparitions at either Marpingen or Ezkioga. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 305–309; David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); William A. Christian, Visionaries: the Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

³⁵ Sandra L. Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary: From LaSalette to Medjugorje (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 68; “‘Prayer, Penance, Miracle of Mary’ World's Hope,” Michigan Catholic, April 3, 1947, 3. The Virgin's message was repeated often in the diocesan paper. See, for example, Michigan Catholic, August 14, 1947, 4; October 16, 1947, 4; February 5, 1948, 4; March 25, 1948, 7; February 9, 1950, 4; May 4, 1950, 4.

³⁶ Other Marian devotions had long been popular in Detroit. During the 1920s, for instance, thousands of Detroit Catholics flocked to novenas, or nine-day-long prayers, in honor of Our Lady of Lourdes, drawn, no doubt, by reports of miraculous cures at the grotto at Detroit's St. Mary's Church. During the Depression, novenas for the unemployed and needy drew thousands of venerators.

³⁷ “Our Blessed Mother's Revelations to a Privileged Soul,” Fatima Rosary, Family Rosary, Block Rosary newsletter from the Block Rosary Lay Apostolate, n.d. Blue Army of Fatima File, Chancery Collection, 1950–81, AAD.

³⁸ Rather than attempting to view this apparition and the devotion that grew out of it in functionalist terms, I instead am following historian Robert Orsi's admonition to recognize that modern historiography lacks the language with which to discuss these moments when the “transcendent breaks into time.” Orsi points out that “Western modernity exists under the sign of absence. Time and space are emptied of presence … Drained of presence, religious experience is remade in conformity with modern liberal notions of what ‘religion’ is: autonomous, a distinct domain apart from other areas of life, private, in conformity with the causal laws of nature, reasonable, interior—all the things that Marian apparitions and what follows from them are not.” For devout Catholics like the housewife discussed above, “in the culture within which apparitions take place there is nothing out of the ordinary about them … . They are anticipated, longed for, even expected.” Robert A. Orsi, “Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity,” Historically Speaking (September/October 2008), 12–16.

³⁹ “Newest Fatima Clubs Thrill ‘Pioneer,’” Michigan Catholic, October 30, 1947, 3. While the Church always viewed uninvestigated apparitions and miracles with a great deal of skepticism, it was loath to reject anything that increased devotion and religious participation. On the other hand, personal revelation potentially undermined the authority of the Church. The Catholic Church during the Cold War was thus forced to walk a fine line between encouraging devotion to officially approved apparitions like Fatima while controlling and confining lay enthusiasm as much as possible. See undated letter from the Office of the Archdiocese, Edward Mooney Collection, AAD. Schorn's beliefs were similar to those expressed by conservative Catholic intellectuals, who saw the cold war as an “eschatological struggle in which Christian Western civilization, the preserve of truth and faith, confronted a demonic nemesis.” Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 60. The “fertile soil” quote is from the American Bishops’ statement on secularism, “Exclusion of God Root of World Woes,” Michigan Catholic, November 20, 1947, 3.

⁴⁰ “Nicholas Schorn, “Why the Block Rosary,” rough draft in Chancery Collection, Rosary Societies, AAD.

⁴¹ “Let's Recapture May Day for Mary,” Michigan Catholic, April 3, 1947, 1.

⁴² St. John's Bulletin, April 25, 1948, AAD.

⁴³ “They Recaptured May Day for Mary,” Michigan Catholic, May 8, 1947, 1. This yearly assembly continued to draw between 3,000 and 10,000 celebrants every May 1st until 1958.

⁴⁴ 1954 was the year when the pope named Mary Queen of Heaven. Michigan Catholic, May 27, 1954, 1–2; “15,000 Here Honor Mary on Her Day,” Michigan Catholic, May 15, 1947.

⁴⁵ In the Detroit metropolitan area, twenty-seven percent of women over the age of fourteen were employed outside of the home in 1950. United States Government Printing Office, Census of the Population, 1950, Volume II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 22, Michigan, Table 35. Percentage is of women in the standard metropolitan area (SMA) of Detroit.

⁴⁶ Text of speech by John J. Maher, state commander of the Catholic War Veterans, April 1947, Chancery Collection, Organizations and Societies, AAD.

⁴⁷ Rev. Patrick Peyton, “Report on the Family Rosary,” UDEV 13/13, Family Rosary; “The Story of the Family Rosary,” COHA 10/08, Archives of the University of Notre Dame.

⁴⁸ Text of speech by John J. Maher, state commander of the Catholic War Veterans, April 1947, Chancery Collection, Organizations and Societies, AAD.

⁴⁹ In Detroit, the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Men, a prominent lay group, spread the message of the Family Rosary with their Radio Rosary Crusade. The Council broadcast the rosary over station WJLB from 7:15 to 7:30 every night in October, the month of the Holy Rosary. By 1950, the Council estimated that 200,000 Detroit area residents turned in to this program and joined in the rosary recitation. “Annual Report of the Detroit Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Men for the Year Ending March 31, 1950,” Edward Mooney Collection, AAD.

⁵⁰ Rev. Patrick Peyton, “Report on the Family Rosary,” UDEV 13/13, Family Rosary; “The Story of the Family Rosary,” COHA 10/08, Archives of the University of Notre Dame.

⁵¹ In this way, Catholics were not unusual. As Elaine Tyler May has noted, “The legendary family of the 1950s … represented something new. It was not, as common wisdom tells us, the last gasp of ‘traditional’ family life with roots deep in the past.” Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 11.

⁵² “Time for Rededication to Her Ideals,” Michigan Catholic, May 12, 1955, 4.

⁵³ St. John's Bulletin, September 12, 1948, AAD.

⁵⁴ Archbishop Mooney was elevated to the College of Cardinals in 1946. Cardinal Mooney speech before the Marian Congress in Ottawa, “To Jesus Through Mary!” Michigan Catholic, June 26, 1947, 5.

⁵⁵ Non-working women were asked to describe the things that made them feel most useful. Catholic women were far more likely than their Protestant counterparts to answer that homemaking and childrearing gave them the greatest sense of accomplishment. Likewise, amongst women who worked outside of the home, non-Catholics were more likely to say that working or having a regular job gave them the greatest sense of satisfaction than were Catholics. 1956 Detroit Area Study, question 13: “Thinking of all the things you do, what are the things that make you feel useful?” Amongst Detroit Catholic non-working women, 55.7 percent said that homemaking made them feel most useful and 18.6 percent said the same for childrearing. In comparison, only 39 percent of non-Catholic Detroit housewives celebrated homemaking and 11 percent claimed that childrearing was their most valuable accomplishment. A similar pattern existed for suburban woman: 45.2 percent of Catholic suburban housewives claimed that homemaking made them feel most worthwhile and 28.6 percent claimed the same for childrearing, while 35.5 percent of non-Catholic suburban woman embraced homemaking and 14.5 percent felt that childrearing was their most useful activity. 1956 Detroit Area Study, question 6a: “Thinking of all the things you do, what are the things that make you feel most important?” The pollsters asked employed women to answer this question and asked question 13 of women who were not employed outside of the home. For working women, 23 percent of non-Catholic Detroit women answered that work made them feel most useful compared to 16 percent of Catholics. For question 6a, the number of employed Catholic and non-Catholic suburban women was so small as to be almost statistically insignificant. However, 3 of 21 (14 percent) of working Catholic suburban women and 3 of 27 (11 percent) of non-Catholic suburban women answered that work or making a living made them feel most important.

⁵⁶ Alice Therese Diehl, “Hearts Turn to Mary During Month of May,” Michigan Catholic, April 21, 1949.

⁵⁷ According to the 1953 Detroit Area Study, twenty-seven percent of the residents in the Detroit area had lived there all their lives, while twenty-eight percent had moved to Detroit in the period from 1945 to early 1953. Detroit Area Study, A Social Profile of Detroit: 1953 (Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan: 1954), 13.

⁵⁸ In reality, these ethnic neighborhoods had been far from completely Catholic. However, parishioners’ cultural and spiritual lives so centered around the parish that Catholics often mistakenly reported that they lived in completely Catholic neighbourhoods, when in fact only fifty percent of the residents belonged to the Church. McGreevey, Parish Boundaries, 79.

⁵⁹ Kathryn A. Johnson, “The Home is a Little Church: Gender, Culture, and Authority in American Catholicism, 1940–1962.” (unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1997), 18.

⁶⁰ Tentler, Seasons of Grace, 358–359.

⁶¹ Fr. Hubert A. Maino, “The Parish: Focus and Factory of Our Fellowship in Christ,” Michigan Catholic, January 11, 1951, 8.

⁶² Statistics quoted in Lenski, The Religious Factor, 41.

⁶³ Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude, 182–183.

⁶⁴ Huff, Allen Tate and the Catholic Revival, 10; Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street; Kathryn Johnson, “The Home is a Little Church.”

⁶⁵ For instance, according to Schorn, when “Mrs. E … ” of an east side Detroit parish formed a block rosary, ten of the sixteen families who agreed to participate were Protestant. Nicholas Schorn, “Why the Block Rosary,” Our Lady of the Cape, February 1952, 7–10. In an article about Schorn, he was quoted as stating that “The practice of rotating weekly meetings from home to home has created a mass religious consciousness, causing many who had been indifferent to return to the Sacraments … . In Detroit there has been a large number of baptisms of non-Catholics who joined Rosary groups.” “Rosary Block Circles the World,” Michigan Catholic, February 10, 1949, 2.

⁶⁶ Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).