The response to [Smith's religion] was public and private, during a campaign that lasted only two months, from September to November. Yet feelings were so strong that they swirled into a hurricane of abuse, a crescendo of fear and hate blasting through eight weeks. The school board of Daytona Beach, Fla., sent a note home with every student. It read simply: “We must prevent the election of Alfred E. Smith to the Presidency. If he is elected President, you will not be allowed to have or read a Bible.” * Fliers informed voters that if Smith took the White House, all Protestant marriages would be annulled, their offspring rendered illegitimate on the spot.
While my mother grew up in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, on the city's far West Side, my father lived about two miles away, in suburban Oak Park. The village was once described by one of its most famous residents, Ernest Hemingway, as a place of "broad lawns and narrow minds." And I imagine that was true when the future novelist was growing up in the first two decades of the twentieth century. I picture Oak Park as a very proper -- and Protestant -- town, far removed from the city and its vices. The village was dry in those days, of course; the residents were much more given to "ice cream socials," that uniquely Protestant creation.
And this raises one of the first big differences between Protestants and Catholics: while the former usually treated drinking as a (very private) weakness, the latter accepted even heavy public drinking as a matter-of-fact part of daily life. (Except for my father's mother, who didn't allow drinking in the home. More on that later.)
Another famous resident of Oak Park, Frank Lloyd Wright, once said his community had "So many churches for so many good people to go to." (I think the architect was being a little sarcastic. And where did he get that syntax?) Wright was no doubt referring to mainline Protestant churches, like the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Methodist and Episcopal.
But by the time my father was nine, in 1928, there were three Catholic churches in Oak Park: Ascension, St. Edmund's and the newly-formed St. Giles. (There were also two in nearby River Forest: St. Luke's and St. Vincent Ferrer.) Surely Catholics were becoming more interwoven in the fabric of America. Well, not so fast. The paragraph above mentions the "school board" of Daytona Beach, Florida. What about the separation of church and state we've come to accept about America and its schools? Prior to the 1960s, there was no separation of church and state, at least not in the public schools. The United States was a Christian country, a Protestant one, and the schools reflected that. So did my parents experience anti-Catholic bigotry in their classrooms? No, they attended the local parish schools. (In my father's case, it was Ascension.) Why? Well, it was a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. The public schools, representing the greater culture, were "Protestant," so Catholics founded their own schools. Since most Catholic kids were expected to attend the local parish school, the public schools remained largely "Protestant" by default. But the effect was clear: it was "Us" vs. "Them." We didn't trust them and they didn't trust us. (My father even slipped once and referred to a public school as a "Protestant" one.)
So this was the world in which my parents grew up. (And I haven't even gotten to my mother.) To review, the United States was a predominantly Protestant country with a minority of Catholics clustered in and near the larger cities of the north. There was a great deal of mistrust on both sides, but -- since this is about my family -- my parents grew up feeling like members of a minority. And the reaction of the country to the candidacy of Al Smith must have only reinforced that.
Next: I'm not sure what's next, but stay tuned; there's a lot of material here.
* Protestants read the Bible; Catholics followed the teachings of the clergy.
No comments:
Post a Comment