A Bridge Across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See between the Two World Wars

Chapter 5. Toward Rapprochement: The 1930s

5 TOWARD RAPPROCHEMENT The 1930s Franklin delano roosevelt, the “aPostle oF redemPtion” On the afternoon of July 2, 1932, the fifty-year-old governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, landed at Chicago Midway Airport. The previous evening, the Democratic Party’s national convention had elected him as candidate to the presidency and, breaking with all tradition, he wished to receive the investiture in person. In constrast to Hoover, whom the Republican Party had renominated its candidate in spite of his incompetent management of the economic crisis, Roosevelt had dispelled the skepticism within his party and won the confidence of the public who saw in his indomitable enthusiasm a hope of escaping from the poverty they had suffered for a number of years.1 He was certainly no great thinker, just as he was no ideologist, but he did know how to warm the hearts of “forgotten Americans” who received the message of relief he conveyed during his many journeys before the elections to areas that had most felt the deep economic recession.2 113 1. See William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932– 1940 (New York: Harper, 2009), 1–17. 2. On the New Deal coalition, essential reading is David Plotke, Building a 114 THE 1930s A mutually beneficial alliance established itself between Roosevelt and the Catholic world. Even at critical moments, this meant the creation of a convergence of the ideas behind the New Deal, its concrete realization, the social doctrine of the Church of Rome as revised and in large part put into practice by the encyclicals of Pius XI, and the needs of millions of American Catholics, who were among those who had suffered most in the Great Depression.3 In the early 1960s, Francis J. Lally’s book The Catholic Church in a Changing America pointed out that during the period of the New Deal American Catholics reached “a new level of association indicating a change in the ‘official’ American attitude to the Church, and equally important, in the Church’s disposition toward the government .” He added that it was only from that moment in time that it became possible to speak “in realistic terms of a widespread Catholic social consciousness and with it a willingness not simply to adapt to community life but also to work to transform it.”4 A few years later, in 1968, the historian George Q. Flynn described Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ascent to power as, for Catholics, the beginning of a “new era in their Church’s place in American society.”5 Roosevelt became aware of the strength of the Catholic component in the Democratic Party from the very beginnings of his political career. He was born into the upper-class families of the New York hinterland, and in Manhattan had to measure up to a radically different social environment. The early twentieth-century Tammany Hall was to a large extent controlled by Catholics, most of them Irish, and Roosevelt had known the breed until then only as rough and semiliterate house servants. His impact with New York could only be Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 77–91. 3. See Luca Castagna, “I cattolici statunitensi e il riformismo rooseveltiano: Il New Deal come occasione di riscatto,” in Studi di storia in onore di Gabriele De Rosa, ed. Luigi Rossi (Salerno: Plectica, 2012), 589–604. 4. Francis J. Lally, The Catholic Church in a Changing America (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1962), 48. 5. George Q. Flynn, American Catholics and the Roosevelt Presidency, 1932– 1936 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968), ix. THE 1930s 115 disastrous. Like his cousin Theodore, the young Franklin fought to eradicate so-called bosses from the Democratic Party, and therefore came up against the corrupted leaders, many of whom were, in fact, Catholic. In the presidential elections of 1904, for example, instead of voting for the Democratic candidate, Alton Parker, who had been nominated thanks to the support of one of the most powerful bosses of the party, the Irish Catholic Charles F. Murphy, he voted for the Republican Teddy Roosevelt.6 However, Roosevelt became one of Alfred Smith’s main supporters during the troubled political events of the 1920s. They already agreed on their objectives in the State of New York, and their alliance was sealed on the occasion of the 1924 National Democratic Convention at...