Abstract
“[American Catholics] don’t deserve to have a President,” Joseph P. Kennedy said in response to a deluge of criticism that the Catholic public and press heaped upon his son John Kennedy in 1959.1 Seeking to dispel suspicion of a Catholic presidential candidate, the younger Kennedy agreed with Supreme Court decisions that limited federal aid to Catholic schools, opposed official recognition of the Holy See through the appointment of a U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, and asserted that “nothing takes precedence over [one’s] oath to uphold the Constitution.”2 After Kennedy’s quotations appeared in the March 1959 Look magazine, many ordinary Catholics and editors of Catholic publications denounced such strong assertions that Catholicism would not significantly affect his political decisions. Kennedy received numerous letters critical of his apparent absolute separation of church and state, and the Indiana Catholic and Record summarized the view of the general Catholic press by writing, “Young Senator Kennedy had better watch his language.”
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Notes
Thomas Maier, The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings: A Five-Generation History of the Ultimate Irish-Catholic Family (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 320.
Robert A. Slayton, “The Great Smith-Roosevelt Feud,” in FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933–1945, ed. David B. Woolner and Richard G. Kurial (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 59.
Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 309.
Slayton, Empire Statesman, 311. Edmund A. Moore, A Catholic Runs for President: The Campaign of 1928 (New York: Ronald Press, 1956), 154, 25, 46, 109, 161.
Christopher M. Finan, Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 211.
David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918–1932 (New York: Knopf, 1968), 208–216
David Burner, Herbert Hoover: The Public Life (New York: Knopf, 1979), 204.
“A Test for Governor Smith,” New Republic, April 6, 1927, p. 183; “More about Catholicism and the Presidency,” New Republic, May 11, 1927, pp. 315–316. Walter Lippman to Al Smith, March 21, 1927 in Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann, ed. John Morton Blum (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985), 201–202. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 171.
Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1980), 245–246.
Jay P. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 163.
J. Leonard Bates, Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana: Law and Public Affairs, From TR to FDR (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 282.
Quoted in Paul Carter, “The Other Catholic Candidate,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (January 1964): 4.
Paul Carter, Politics, Religion, and Rockets: Essays in Twentieth Century American History (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 41–42.
George Q. Flynn, American Catholics and the Roosevelt Presidency, 1932–1936 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968), 15–25.
James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 260.
Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 147.
Gerald P. Fogarty, S. J., “Roosevelt and the American Catholic Hierarchy,” in FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933–1945, ed. David B. Woolner and Richard G. Kurial (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 18.
Edward Kantowicz, “Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago and the Shaping of Twentieth Century American Catholicism,” Journal of American History 68 (June 1981): 52–68.
James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story: The Roosevelt Years (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948), 225–229.
Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 20.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 6–7. Maier, The Kennedys, 280–281.
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© 2004 Thomas J. Carty
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Carty, T.J. (2004). Protestant America or a Nation of Immigrants?. In: A Catholic in the White House?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8130-1_3
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