Controversy: Backlash Against the Catholic Revival

The eruption of anti-Catholic feeling that reached its climax around 1950 is best understood as a backlash against what was regarded as undue Catholic influence in politics, public morality, and general social policy. Although it testified in a negative way to the reality of the Catholic Revival, it came as a shock to Catholics who did not think they had given just cause for complaint. Their predominant reaction was an impassioned rejection of the charges against them. At the same time, however, reasonable Catholics wished to mitigate the existing tensions by removing any grounds for legitimate criticism. Hence a more irenic and accommodationist line of thought developed, which, though based on the natural law, set in motion tendencies not fully consonant with the premises of the the Catholic Revival. To understand how these crosscurrents affected the ideological context of Catholic higher education, we turn first to the anti-Catholic backlash. Suspicion of and hostility toward the Catholic church, which had subsided after the Al Smith campaign of 1928, began to reawaken in the mid-thirties. Political liberals, a group which included secular humanists as well as Protestants and Jews, were the first affected. On the domestic scene, Father Coughlin’s shift to an anti-New Deal position in 1935-36 alerted them to the fascist potentialities of his influence. Over the next few years, their fears were reinforced by his growing extremism on the menace of Communism, his increasingly open anti-Semitism, and the sometimes violent behavior of his “Christian Front” followers, especially in New York City. Internationally, the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936, was the decisive issue. To American liberals, the war was a clear-cut contest between fascism and democracy, and the church had shown its true colors by rallying to the fascists. But most American Catholics, deeply shocked by the widespread desecration of churches and slaughter of priests that marked the early months of the war, saw the struggle as a conflict between Christian civilization and atheistic Communism. They bitterly resented the indifference displayed by American liberals to the persecution of the church in Spain.

Assimilative Tendencies and Curricular Crosscurrents

Besides its massive impact on the institutional side of Catholic higher education, World War II affected the thinking of Catholic educators. We have already touched upon this dimension in noting how the war and postwar growth required them to expand their horizons and redouble their efforts in research, fundraising, and administration generally. Here we look more closely at how Catholics were affected by the great ideological revival of democracy that accompanied the war. This kind of influence was sometimes explicitly noted by Catholic leaders, as when Archbishop Richard Gushing of Boston called attention to the “neo-democratic mentality of returning servicemen and the university-age generation generally”; others recognized that it created problems since the Catholic church was so widely perceived as incompatible with democracy and “the American way of life.” We shall postpone examination of controversies stemming from this source to the next chapter, turning our attention in this one to the assimilative tendencies reflected in Catholics’ new appreciation for liberal democratic values, and to the major curricular concerns of the era which were also affected by the war. In no area did the democratic revival have a more profound long range effect than in the impetus it lent to the movement for racial equality and civil rights for African Americans. The publication in 1944 of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma marked an epoch in national understanding of what the book’s subtitle called “the Negro problem and modern democracy.” Myrdal himself stressed the importance of the wartime context, which made it impossible to ignore racial discrimination at home while waging war against Nazi racism. At the same time, increasing black militance, the massive migration of African Americans to northern industrial centers, and above all the great Detroit race riot of 1943—reinforced by the anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit” riots in Los Angeles the same summer—suddenly made the improvement of race relations an imperative for American society as a whole. By the end of the war, no fewer than 123 national organizations were working actively to “reduce intergroup tensions,” and the civil rights movement began a steady advance that led directly to the great judicial and political victories it won in the fifties and sixties.

The Beginnings of the Catholic Renaissance

The beginnings of the Catholic Renaissance in the United States were closely linked to the experience of American Catholics in the First World War. As we saw in Chapter 3, mobilization of Catholic energies to meet the wartime crisis led to the creation of the National Catholic War Council. The NCWC’s success in coordinating Catholic participation in the war effort, and the recognition it gained as the representative agency of the church in matters of broad national interest persuaded Catholic leaders that it should be perpetuated after the war. That was accomplished in 1919, when the War Council was transformed into the National Catholic Welfare Council (later National Catholic Welfare Conference). The creation of a national headquarters and staff not only gave the church a more effective voice in public affairs, it also enhanced Catholic visibility and served notice that a new era of purposeful Catholic participation in American life was about to begin. These developments had a tonic effect on Catholic morale and reinforced the sense of emotional solidarity with, and responsibility to, the nation that had grown out of the shared experience of wartime mobilization. The earliest manifestations of the Catholic Revival in the United States emerged from this matrix and took the form of a new kind of Catholic Americanism. There were, of course, certain points of similarity between the Americanism of the war and postwar years and that of the 1890s. Both versions, for example, reflected intense patriotic feeling, and both urged Catholics to identify with, and participate in, American life. Moreover, Cardinal Gibbons, who presided over the creation of the War Council and its transformation into the permanent NCWC, constituted a living link between the two eras. Yet no real effort was made to portray the new Americanism as a continuation of the earlier version. Reticence on this point made good sense tactically, since in 1899 Pope Leo XIII had condemned the opinions that “some comprise under the head of Americanism.”

The Impact of World War I

The importance of World War I as a watershed in twentieth-century American history has long been recognized, and recent studies agree that that interpretation applies to higher education and to American Catholic history. Not surprisingly, it also applies to the development of Catholic higher education. The war did not in itself revolutionize that activity, but by reinforcing and accelerating tendencies already at work it closed the door on one epoch and set the stage for another. The decisive difference between the two eras was that the war settled in favor of the modernizing reformers the debate over the organizational issues discussed in Chapter 2. This came about because efforts to rationalize Catholic higher education were swept along in what David M. Kennedy has called “the great war-forced march toward a better articulated structuring of American life.” Coming after two decades of industrial consolidation and in the midst of a craze for “efficiency,” wartime mobilization brought the movement for planning and control to an unprecedented level of intensity. “Czars” were appointed, or national commissions established, to supervise industrial production, agriculture and food distribution, fuel supplies, labor, the railroads, and shipping. Mobilization of opinion was entrusted to the Committee on Public Information, which reached into every corner of the land, including the schools. This was all carried on at a high pitch of patriotism; the same emotion, along with the felt need to keep pace with ongoing changes, led to the creation of many voluntary agencies of coordination, such as the American Council on Education and the National Research Council, to mention two quite important for higher education. By far the most important result of this impulse among American Catholics was formation in 1917 of the National Catholic War Council and its transformation after the war into a permanent organization called the National Catholic Welfare Conference (both of which used the initials NCWC). Scholars have only recently begun to unravel the complexities of this story, but their work makes clear that, precisely because the NCWC represented so important a step toward centralization, its formation aroused fierce opposition from Catholics fearful of encroachments on their own freedom of action.

Awaking to the Organizational Challenge

Even while they were distracted by the ideological fireworks of the 1890s, Catholic educators began to realize that changes in the organizational realm presented a more immediate challenge than did the conflict over broad issues of ecclesiastical policy. The most important features of this organizational challenge were: the emergence of the free public high school as the characteristic agency of secondary education; the marked increase in collegiate enrollments, which included unprecedented numbers of women attending both coeducational institutions and women’s colleges; the breakdown of the classical curriculum and the proliferation of new fields of study; the rise of the research university as the dominant institution, which was accompanied by a general professionalization of learning and the beginnings of a vast expansion of employment opportunities in the “knowledge industry”; and the development of voluntary associations of educators which acted as quality-control agencies by establishing and enforcing standards of performance at every level of education. Taken together, these and related developments constituted a veritable revolution which reshaped American higher education in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. The Catholic response to these developments constituted a form of modernization, since what Catholic colleges had to do was bring themselves into line with contemporary norms in respect to institutional structure, curricular organization, and articulation between secondary, collegiate, and graduate levels of education. This organizational modernization took place unevenly over a span of several decades. The establishment of the Catholic University of America was a decisive early event, but the general movement did not get under way till around 1900. Thus the first quarter of the twentieth century saw American Catholic collegiate education assume the modernized shape it still retains. Graduate education, too, was being introduced in Catholic institutions; but consideration of its development is best postponed for a later chapter. Catholic educators did not, of course, undertake this organizational modernization simply because they wanted to be up-to-date. On the contrary, most of them were deeply conservative on matters methodological and curricular; they certainly did not regard being modern as a virtue to be sought for its own sake.

Introduction: Catholic Higher Education in 1900

A great many Catholic colleges existed in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century. Exactly how many it is impossible to say with certainty because any answer presupposes agreement on the answer to a prior question: “What should be counted as a college?” The Catholic Directory for 1900 listed 10 universities, 178 “colleges for boys,” 109 seminaries, and 662 “academies for girls.” According to this count, there were no Catholic women’s colleges at that time, although the College of Notre Dame of Maryland graduated its first baccalaureate class in 1899 and is included among the 128 colleges for women listed in U.S. Commissioner of Education’s Report for 1899-1900. The same Report, however, listed only 62 Catholic institutions among the 480 included under the heading: “Universities and colleges for men and for both sexes.” No doubt some Catholic colleges simply failed to provide the information necessary to appear in the Commissioner’s Report. But their failure to do so is in itself significant; and even assuming that is what happened, it still leaves an enormous gap between the Commissioner’s figures and the 188 colleges and universities reported in the Catholic Directory. Moreover, many of the “colleges for boys” could, with equal justice, have been called academies, since elementary- and secondary-level students made up the majority of their student bodies. As the case of Notre Dame of Maryland indicates, Catholic “academies for girls” were beginning to upgrade themselves to collegiate status. Had the word college been more freely applied to non-Catholic institutions for women at an earlier date, a good many of these academies would probably have called themselves colleges long before, for they did not differ all that much from the “colleges for boys” in terms of curricular offerings and age-range of students. While the situation of Catholic institutions was particularly murky, the question “What makes a college a college?” engaged the attention of practically everyone involved in secondary and collegiate education at the turn of the century.

The End of an Era

The coming together of the racial crisis, bitter internal divisions over the Vietnam War, campus upheavals, political radicalism associated with the New Left, the growth of the counterculture, and the emergence of new forms of feminism made the 1960s an epoch of revolutionary change for all Americans. But for American Catholics the profound religious reorientation associated with the Second Vatican Council multiplied the disruptive effect of all the other forces of change. This clashing of the tectonic plates of culture produced nothing less than a spiritual earthquake in the American church. Although the dust has still not fully settled, it was clear from an early date that the old ideological structure of Catholic higher education, which was already under severe strain, had been swept away entirely. As institutions, most Catholic colleges and universities weathered the storm. But institutional survival in the midst of ideological collapse left them uncertain of their identity. That situation still prevails. To explore it fully would require another book. Our task now is to review the emergence of the problem, sketch its general outlines, and point out why it marks the end of an era in the history of Catholic higher education. For a number of reasons, freedom became the central theme in American Catholic higher education in the early 1960s. As the most basic of American values, it was, of course, immensely attractive to the socially assimilated generation of younger Catholics for whom John F. Kennedy’s election and Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento vindicated the hopes of the earlier Americanists, whose travails Catholic historians had so recently explored. Moreover, the contemporaneous demand by African Americans for “Freedom Now” linked freedom to the religious idealism of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violent crusade for civil rights. Freedom was, in addition, the polar opposite of the rigidity, formalism, and authoritarianism that had become so distasteful to American Catholic intellectuals; by contrast, it meshed beautifully with their growing insistence on the importance of individual subjectivity.

Transition to a New Era

We have already noted among the crosscurrents of the postwar decade assimilative tendencies that ran counter to a key impulse of the Catholic Revival— the drive to build a distinctive Catholic culture and thereby “to redeem all things in Christ.” Here we look more systematically at the most significant of those countervailing tendencies from the late 1940s, when they were still a minor theme, to the early 1960s when they merged with the forces unleashed by the Second Vatican Council. We begin with a development in American Catholic historical scholarship—research devoted to the Americanist controversy of the 1890s. The results of this research began to appear during the war; over the next fifteen years, books and articles on the subject assumed the proportions of a small flood. Taken as a whole, the new scholarship reinforced midcentury Catholic liberalism and helped prepare the way for the deeper changes of the 1960s. At bottom, the late nineteenth-century controversy arose from policy differences over how the Catholic church should respond to social and intellectual changes accompanying the onset of what we have been calling modernity. As pointed out in the Introduction, the Catholic University of America was a storm center of conflict; moreover, papal condemnations of Americanism in 1899 and of Modernism in 1907 played a crucial role in establishing the ideological framework within which Catholic higher education developed in the twentieth century. That framework involved a firm rejection of modernity, but the historical recovery of the Americanist episode indirectly nurtured a more positive attitude toward the modern world. The fact that Catholic historians of the generation immediately following the controversy studiously avoided investigating it shows how sensitive the issues remained for almost half a century. Theodore Maynard, who devoted a chapter to “The American Heresy” in his popular Story of American Catholicism (1941), observed that few Catholics had ever heard of such a thing and those who tried to learn more about it would soon find themselves at a dead end.

World War II and Institutional Shifts

World War II set the stage for an era of tremendous growth in American higher education, growth in which the Catholic sector shared fully. Between 1940 and 1960 the number of Catholic colleges and universities increased by one-fifth (from 193 to 231), faculties grew by about 85 percent (from 13,142 to 24,255), and enrollments almost doubled that percentage, zooming from just under 162,000 to just over 426,000, an increase of 164 percent. Sheer growth was thus the most basic of the institutional developments that took place in this era, but it presented itself more as a series of crises than as a process of continuous accretion. The first crisis, brought on by the wartime draft and the attraction of highpaying jobs in defense industries, imperiled the very existence of the colleges by depleting their pool of potential students. Then came the overwhelming surge of postwar veterans that almost swamped the system. And just as educators were regaining their balance from that onslaught, the outbreak of the Korean War threatened to start the cycle all over again. Korea proved to be a mere dimple compared with World War II, but steady growth did not really begin until 1953.

Institutional Developments: Moving into Graduate Work

At the same time Catholic educators were espousing and attempting to put into practice the countercultural intellectual position described in the previous chapters, they continued to modernize their schools in organizational terms. Conservatives warned that accepting the new organizational trends paved the way for secularization, but the experience of the first two decades of the century proved that Catholic institutions could not survive unless they adjusted themselves to prevailing norms. Rigid adherence to the old ways meant extinction. So despite the uneasiness they sometimes felt about what they were doing, most Catholic educators believed that they could modernize their educational structures and practices without compromising their religious distinctiveness. Indeed, the more forward-looking insisted that this kind of organizational reform was essential if the Catholic worldview was to be effectively presented to students and adequately represented in the larger world of learning. The growth of Catholic higher education between 1920 and 1950 seemed to vindicate this line of thinking. Sheer growth was, in fact, the most obvious institutional development of these years. The actual numbers are hard to establish because of differences over time in the way institutions were classified and enrollments recorded. However, the statistics gathered by the National Catholic Welfare Conference provide a reliable indication of overall trends. The table below sets forth the basic data by ten-year intervals from 1920 to 1950, along with comparative figures for all institutions of higher education in the country. These statistics indicate that over a three-decade span of fabulous growth the Catholic sector of American higher education maintained a pretty consistent proportion of national totals in respect to numbers of institutions and faculty members. In terms of enrollment, Catholic schools almost doubled their percentage share of the national total, even with students attending seminaries and strictly teacher-training institutions being excluded from the count. Closer analysis reveals that, although observers at the time spoke of the post-World War II surge in enrollments as unprecedented, the Catholic growth rate of the 1920s far outstripped that of the 1940s.