Catholics, Whiteness, and the Movies, 1928 - 1973
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2013 The Costumed Catholic: Catholics, Whiteness, and the Movies, 1928 - 1973 Albert William Vogt III Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the American Film Studies Commons Recommended Citation Vogt, Albert William III, "The Costumed Catholic: Catholics, Whiteness, and the Movies, 1928 - 1973" (2013). Dissertations. 693. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/693 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2013 Albert William Vogt III LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO THE COSTUMED CATHOLIC: CATHOLICS, WHITENESS, AND THE MOVIES, 1928–1973 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN AMERICAN HISTORY BY ALBERT W. VOGT III CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2013 Copyright by Albert W. Vogt III, 2013 All rights reserved. To my parents TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES v ABSTRACT vi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER TWO: THE CLOAK OF WHITENESS POPULAR REPRESENTATIONS OF CATHOLCS IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES 43 CHAPTER THREE: MAKING THE CATHOLIC WHITE THE RISE OF CATHOLIC INFLUENCE ON THE MOVIES, 1928–49 92 CHAPTER FOUR: REMOVING THE WHITE MASK THE DECLINE OF CATHOLIC REPRESNETATION ON FILM, 1950–1968 141 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION: CATHOLICS ON FILM SOMETHING LESS THAN WHITE 190 BIBLIOGRAPHY 217 VITA 240 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Harper’s Weekly, “The American River Ganges” 51 Figure 2: Harper’s Weekly, “Roman Catholics Disgracing Themselves” 53 Figure 3: Harper’s Weekly, “Scene on the Road to Jerome Park” 59 Figure 4: Harper’s Weekly, “North-South/Black-White Scale” 62 Figure 5: Pear’s Soap Ad 68 Figure 6: Nuns Seated at 1926 Eucharistic Congress at Soldier Field, Chicago 97 Figure 7: Legion of Decency Angel Protecting White Purity 105 Figure 8: Father Tim Mullin Boxing Blackie Norton in San Francisco (1936) 112 Figure 9: Father Chuck O’Malley in Going My Way (1944) 127 Figure 10: Father Barry in On the Waterfront (1954) 152 Figure 11: Father Michael Logan in I Confess (1953) 156 Figure 12: Sister Scholastica Playing Tennis in Come to the Stable (1949) 167 Figure 13: Homer Smith Teaches English to the Nuns in Lilies of the Field (1963) 170 Figure 14: Rosemary Woodhouse Being Raped by the Devil in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) 192 Figure 15: Cartoon from “Heroes of the Fiery Cross” Showing Klansman Clubbing the Hairy Beast Arm of Rome 193 Figure 16: Fathers Karras and Merrin Attempting Exorcism on Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973) 196 Figure 17: Father Dyer Entertaining at the MacNeils Party in The Exorcist (1973) 197 v ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the impact movies had on the place of Catholics of European descent in mainstream white America. Most scholars who study the history of Catholic populations in this country assume that they attained whiteness at some point. Whether with the Irish in the late nineteenth century, or more generally when urban parishes began the move to the suburbs post-World War II, the historiography claims that Catholics earned white status. However, an analysis of twentieth century American film complicates the historiography of Catholicism. A set of negative stereotypes, instead, have colored the presentation of the religion in cinema that have called attention to aspects of the Catholic character that separated from other whites. Many of these ideas were the product of the nineteenth century when Protestant America first became exposed to large numbers of Irish Catholics. Film in the next century inherited those ideas from minstrelsy and vaudeville, and applied new stereotypes like urban settings and violence that they thought typified the behavior of all Catholics. Catholics responded by creating the Legion of Decency and paying more attention to film content beginning in the 1930s, though their efforts only further cemented many of the notions that audiences adopted in thinking of Catholicism. As their power in Hollywood waned from the 1950s forward, a time when their religion supposedly entered mainstream whiteness, Catholicism on film took a darker turn that has lasted until today. vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION That system is training millions of children to morality and decency. One of its objects is the making of moral citizens of our youth, devoted to their country and obedient to its laws. But if the talking picture, by lowering moral standards, neutralizes the effects of this training, we are bound to condemn it and combat it. —George Cardinal Mundelein writing about the Catholic educational system, 1930.1 Going My Way, starring popular singer and Catholic Bing Crosby, delighted movie audiences in 1944. In reviewing the film for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote, “It is the story of new versus old customs, of traditional age versus youth. And it is a story of human relations in a simple, sentimental, honest vein. But it is far from a serious story—in the telling anyhow. It is as humored and full of modern crackle as a Bing Crosby film has got to be.”2 Crowther’s review speaks to how Catholics were not taken seriously in American society and culture. Mundelein’s words, however, reveal that Catholics wanted their place as “devoted” citizens of the United States, “obedient to its laws.” Non-Catholic Americans like Crowther exhibited ambivalence as to whether Papists, with their “old customs,” could be Americans. In a country with a popular 1 The Martin J. Quigley Papers, Individual Correspondence Series, Box 1, Folder 3, University of Georgetown Special Collections. 2 Bosley Crowther, “‘Going My Way,’ Comedy-Drama With Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald at Paramount--New Film,” New York Times, May 3, 1944. 1 2 culture fixated on the modern1, a religion like Catholicism tagged by Crowther as “traditional” was seldom regarded as “serious.” Read together, Mundelein and Crowther demonstrate that for Catholics there existed a push and pull between the often conflicting exigencies of new and old; in other words, between Americanism2 and fealty to Rome. Analyzing Catholicism on film between the 1930s and early 1970s helps to make sense of these conflicting exigencies and points to a better understanding of Catholics’ place in American society and culture. This dissertation will identify the impact movies had on European Catholics’ attempt to integrate into mainstream white American society. In a Protestant dominated United States, true whites did not practice Catholicism, live in close packed urban parishes, or traditionally make up a part of the working classes. Since Catholics usually 1 Many texts exist that discuss American culture, both in broad and specific terms, in terms of new cultural ephemera replacing older ones in popular culture. The constant reinvention of popular culture was particularly true on a mass scale. While one might argue that mass culture’s preoccupation with the next new thing is not peculiar to the United States, calling America a country “fixated on the modern” rings true when one considers that, especially in the twentieth century, American popular culture gave the world such phenomena as film, jazz, and rock ‘n roll, to name a few. For further reading on the effects of popular culture on modernity, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 3-15; Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 261; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 1-15; Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984); Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family in Postwar America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1-10; Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 2 Americanism involves a set of beliefs that historically consisted of ideas like white superiority, Capitalism, and Protestantism. The process of begetting these attitudes onto newcomers and future generations is called Americanization. See James R. Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Rethinking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930,” The Journal of American History, 79 (3), 996-1020. 3 did not measure up to these white standards, it made integration difficult. Prior to the country’s founding, Americans inherited from the British a distrust of Catholic peoples,whom the English saw as savage and uncivilized.3 Protestant Americans defined Roman Catholics of all ethnicities as an “other” group in politics and culture.4 The otherness of Catholics, the alien nature of their religious practices, and their presumed fidelity to a hierarchical institution that looked to a foreign prelate for guidance, proved antithetical to constructions of Americanness. According to historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, self-professed Americans of the early nineteenth century espoused ideals of 3 This is known as the “Black Legend,” the notion held by British colonists that French and Spanish colonies, in cahoots with the Catholic Church, practiced a more brutal style of slavery.