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1 The America They Left Behind When you were a youngster, what kind of people did your family dislike? Did you hear talk at home against the Jews or the Negroes or the Catholics or the Methodists or the Chinese ? Did you hate city people or Bostonians or Southerners, or those who didn’t speak English very well? —“The Stab of Intolerance,” New York Times, 1941 Most of the time—in everyday life—America’s prejudices stay hidden . Americans pass their lives working, spending time with family and friends, trying to get through the days within a comfortable and accepted order of things. But those prejudices lurk just below the surface, and they emerge when that comfortable and accepted order is challenged from time to time. One of those times came in 1928. That year, Alfred Emmanuel Smith ran for president. The candidacy of Al Smith exposed nearly all of the hate and distrust of a people spread across a vast continent who came from all over the world, worshiped different gods in different ways, and were held together in their own estimation by lines on a map and not much more. Along came Al Smith, not only a New Yorker but from New York City. He was a child of Irish immigrants . He was a Roman Catholic. In support of one or more of these traits, millions of city folks, immigrants and their children, and Roman Catholics flocked to Smith’s banner. In response to one or all of those same traits, millions of Americans temporarily left behind the relative calm of their everyday lives to stop this man, this symbol of all that could upset would it meant to them to be American.1 The assault began early, when in April 1927 Columbia Law School graduate and student of canon law Charles C. Marshall wrote an open letter to Smith in the Atlantic Monthly. Marshall relied on the Catholic Encyclopedia and papal encyclicals to make his case that “certain conceptions” held by “a The America They Left Behind 18 loyal and conscientious Roman Catholic” such as Smith were “irreconcilable with that Constitution which as President you must support and defend, and with the principles of civil and religious liberty on which American institutions are based.” In short, Marshall wanted to know how Smith could be loyal to the strict rules and hierarchy of Rome and the freedoms of the United States at the same time.2 In the next month’s issue, Governor Smith replied in a long letter written by a team of advisors. He refuted Marshall’s letter point by point, making the case that both by church law and his personal experience, none of Marshall’s concerns were valid. Smith argued that American history proved that there was nothing incompatible between the Roman Catholic Church and American institutions, as two Catholic Supreme Court chief justices—Roger Brooke Taney and Edward Douglass White—and “the tens of thousands of young Catholics who have risked and sacrificed their lives in defense of our country ” had shown. He concluded with a profession of his faith as an American Catholic: I believe in the worship of God according to the faith and practice of the Roman Catholic Church. I recognize no power in the institutions of my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the law of the land. I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and in equality of all churches, all sects, and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State and in the strict enforcement of the provisions of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. I believe that no tribunal of any church has any power to make any decree of any force in the law of the land, other than to establish the status of its own communicants within its own church. I believe in the support of the public school as one of the cornerstones of American liberty. I believe in the right of every parent to choose whether his child shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school supported by those of his own faith. I believe in the principled noninterference by this country in the internal affairs of other nations and that we...

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