Global Problems, Parochial Concerns: Urban Catholics, New Deal Politics, and the Crises of the 1930s DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Brian Kilmartin Kennedy, M.A. Graduate Program in History * * * * * The Ohio State University 2010 Doctoral Examination Committee: Professor Kevin Boyle, Adviser Professor Peter Hahn Professor Judy Wu ABSTRACT In recent years, historians have increasingly paid attention to the importance of religious identity in twentieth-century American society and politics. This dissertation contributes to that growing body of work by studying the American Catholic response to the domestic and international upheavals of the 1930s. Fusing international, national, and local concerns with the Church’s teachings on the need for social justice, American Catholics promoted a complicated set of political ideas. In doing so, they helped to propel Franklin Roosevelt to four terms in the White House while simultaneously creating deep fissures within the New Deal coalition, invigorating isolationism, and laying the foundation for the postwar conservative revival. This study looks at Catholics in three major urban areas – Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco – during the 1930s. Arguing for a comprehensive approach to the study of politics, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which religious identities shaped Americans’ understanding of international events and the ways in which developments abroad affected perceptions of local and national political developments. I attempted to recapture the pivotal debates of the era, Catholic reaction to and participation in those debates, and the discourse that developed in the Catholic communities of the three cities studied. The papers of prominent Catholics, politicians, and labor leaders from the period were consulted, as were newspapers, both Catholic and secular. The resulting study contributes to our ii understanding of American Catholicism, twentieth-century American politics, and American foreign relations. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I benefited from a great deal of help while writing this dissertation. Kevin Boyle was an ideal Ph.D. adviser. He consistently managed to be both incisive and encouraging. I walked away from each discussion with him more enthusiastic and optimistic, even as he constantly pushed me to do better. Judy Wu was likewise supportive and challenging. Her comments and suggestions frequently caused me to rethink the project and consider additional aspects of the topics at hand. Peter Hahn played a vital role in the development of this dissertation and in my evolution as an historian. I received a great deal of help during the research process. The Massachusetts Historical Society, the Bentley Historical Library, the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, and The Ohio State University provided me with awards which financed much of my research. The MHS also allowed me the opportunity to present my research, and receive thought-provoking feedback, at an early stage in the process. The staffs at all of the libraries and archives I visited were helpful, but the archivists at the San Francisco Archdiocesan archives and the Detroit Archdiocesan archives were extraordinarily helpful. Jeffrey Burns and Heidi Christein shared their insights into each community and provided a new perspective on the events being researched. My time at each archive played a great role in shaping the final dissertation. iv My friends and colleagues at Ohio State provided a supportive and intellectually stimulating environment. Although there are too many to name, Dave Dzurec, Brooke Mikesill, Alison Efford, Chelsey Hankins, Audra Jennings, Susan Dawson, Ursula Gurney, Doug Paul, Rajiv Khanna, Greg Kupsky, Ryan Irwin, Chapin Rydingsward, and David Steigerwald made particularly notable contributions in one respect or the other, often times both. No acknowledgments would be complete, meanwhile, until I note my gratitude towards my family. Karen, Leo, Krista, Chad, Braedan and Michelle all provided an abundance of encouragement, support, and help at each step along the way. Michelle, meanwhile, played an invaluable role in this process by serving as my first and last editor for each chapter. v VITA April 3, 1980 ……………….. Born – Cambridge, Massachusetts 2002…………………………. B.A. History and Psychology, Brandeis University 2005………………………… M.A. History, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: History vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ………………………………………………………………. ii Acknowledgments …………………………………………………… iv Vita …………………………………………………………………… vi Chapters: Introduction …………………………………………………………. 1 1. Chapter 1: Discourse of Distrust …………………………….. 22 2. Chapter 2: Boston …………………...……………………….. 75 3. Chapter 3: Detroit ………………………………………….… 123 4. Chapter 4: San Francisco ………………………………...…… 177 5. Chapter 5: Isolationism………………………………………… 228 Conclusion …………………………………………………………….. 270 Bibliography …………………………………………………………... 284 vii INTRODUCTION In nearly every national election of the past thirty years, working-class white Catholics have been one of the most hotly contested voting blocs. Since the 1970s, these so-called “Reagan Democrats” have tantalized both political parties with their odd mix of politics, at once liberal and conservative. Urban, white, ethnic voters were wedded to the Democratic Party until the 1970s and 1980s, when they began to vote for the GOP and triggered the fall of the New Deal Order. The “New Deal coalition” is a vague term that attempts to encapsulate the broad swath of voters who Franklin Roosevelt was able to mobilize to win four consecutive elections and reshape the Democratic Party into the dominant political force in the nation. In addition to retaining traditional Democrats in the South and in the nation‟s major cities, Roosevelt also managed to bring into the party some groups, including progressive reformers and African Americans, which had traditionally been wedded to the Republican Party. In doing so, Roosevelt created an alliance of middle-class and lower- class, black and white, ethnic and Southern voters. The Democratic Party he developed continued to support a liberal agenda of economic reform and individual rights through 1 the 1960s, only to give way to the Reagan Revolution of 1980 and the subsequent Republican dominance of American politics. At that point, historians began to analyze the “Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order” in order to understand the realignment that had occurred.1 Over the past two decades, a number of scholars have put forth explanations as to how and why Roosevelt‟s New Deal coalition collapsed. They have provided rich and nuanced studies of the development of grassroots conservatism in the West, of a racial backlash in the South, and of the development of populist conservatism. Historians such as Rick Perlstein and Lisa McGirr have provided wonderful studies of the role the Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964 played in stimulating the conservative revival in America, laying the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution sixteen years later. Similarly complex studies of white ethnics have not been as forthcoming.2 Most studies of Reagan Democrats assume the racial unrest of the 1960s and 1970s fueled their shift into the Republican orbit. Jonathan Rieder‟s Canarsie, for instance, provides a fascinating and informative sociological study of one working-class neighborhood, from 1960 to 1980, when, he argues, white ethnics began to rebel against the perceived intrusion of blacks into their turf. Meanwhile, Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary Edsall, in Chain Reaction, argue that working-class voters in the North continued to believe in liberal economic programs in the 1960s but came to distrust the liberal 1 Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). 2 Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 2 Democrats who administered them. Those northern voters, the Edsalls argue, came to believe that the liberals would merely channel their tax money into programs for minorities, on whom it would be wasted. Both Canarsie and Chain Reaction provide important insights into America in the 1970s and 1980s, but they also reinforce the stereotype that a massive realignment occurred all of a sudden in the late 1960s.3 Some historians, most notably Thomas Sugrue, have argued that the roots of the northern, ethnic backlash are deeper than the Edsalls and others acknowledge. The Edsalls, Sugrue argues, “correctly emphasize the importance of white discontent as a national political force, [but] err in their overemphasis on the role of the Great Society and the sixties rebellions in the rise of the “silent majority.”4 In “Crabgrass-Roots Politics” Sugrue argues that the period from 1945 laid the groundwork for the backlash in the city of Detroit. “Detroit whites fashioned a language of discontent directed toward public officials,” he argues, against “Blacks, and liberal reformers who supported public housing and open housing.”5 Although Sugrue thus pushes back the dates of the backlash, he maintains