Report of the County Chairman (10 page)

BUCKS COUNTY POPULATION

I can well recall the shock waves that sped out from lower Bucks when all this began to happen. As was my custom, I dropped around to see Miss Omwake and Mrs. Dale and they gave me this report.

In my long life in Bucks County, without question the most exciting single phenomenon has been this metamorphosis of the southern end of the county. The contempt with which my area viewed these changes is only barely suggested by the conversation of Mrs. Dale and Miss Omwake. Later you will see what a sardonic revenge the good people of my county took on the intruders, but for the moment let us consider only the political repercussions.

Overnight Bucks County was transformed from a Republican county to one in which the Democrats had an outside chance. The vote in several recent elections indicates the wide opportunity for fluctuation:

BUCKS COUNTY VOTE

I was told by a man who was present that after the 1955 vote Mr. Grundy stormed up to Doylestown to a meeting of the Republican central committee. Striding into the room he said, “You, you, and you are fired.” When the stunned politicians asked why, Grundy snapped, “Because your places are going to be taken by the three best young Republicans in Levittown.” When the committee protested that they didn’t know any Republicans in Levittown, Grundy is supposed to have cried, “Find them, and well meet here again tomorrow. Now go home.” Steered by Mr. Grundy’s firm hand, the Republicans made strong inroads into the Levittown area, and as the 1960 Presidential race began, the county-wide situation stood thus: Republican registrations 76,354; Democratic registrations 59,559. It therefore looked as if the Republicans ought to win by about 17,000 votes, or 56 percent. On the other hand, the Democrats were working harder than ever, so that in early September my reasoning
was that whereas John Kennedy had almost no chance of carrying the county, we could hope that his margin of defeat would be held to about 2,000, which would represent an enormous victory and might enable Democratic majorities in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to hold Pennsylvania’s 32 votes for Kennedy.

But when I reported my hopeful conclusions to Johnny Welsh, he shook his head gravely and said, “I wish I knew what the up-county religious are going to do.”

When I agreed to head the Bucks County Citizens for Kennedy Committee, the fact was routinely reported in a wide sampling of newspapers, and within three days I began to receive the first trickle of that flood of mail which was to characterize the campaign. I can forget the endless speeches, the hopeful conversations, and the great good will which I found on every side. But I will not be able to forget the deluge of anti-Catholic mail that I received.

Usually the letters began, “Did you know that the Catholic Church …” and ended with a miserable recital of lies, historic fact, sexual indecency and legitimate comment
on Church excesses in Spain or Venezuela. Quotations from scholarly works gave the whole a cloak of respectability, and if one wanted to indulge in anti-Catholic hatreds, here was inviting material upon which to feed.

During the first week I received eleven such letters, and it may be interesting to specify where they originated. Five had been mailed from outside Pennsylvania; four had been mailed from the state but outside Bucks County; two were from my own county. It is noteworthy that during the entire campaign I did not receive one anonymous letter on this subject. All were signed and all contained return addresses. Of my first eleven, four were from private individuals; four were from committees of one kind or another; and three were from specific churches. As autumn progressed, an increasingly higher percentage of my mail came direct from churches. Only two letters came from the South. None came from anyone that I knew personally, but several dozen came from people who began, “From reading your books I almost feel as if I know you, and I was shocked this morning to find that a man who seems to be as intelligent as you are could be blind to the terrible thing you are doing in helping to put the Pope in our White House.”

Without exception, each of the many letters contained pamphlets defaming the Catholic Church, and it was surprising how little duplication there was. I gave most of them away to convince unbelieving friends that an anti-Catholic campaign was under way, but I suppose I must have received upwards of eighty different items.

They fell into three distinct types. First came the relatively
honest summary of civil intrusions made by the Church in such countries as Spain, Ireland and Colombia. I never objected to these compilations, nor to the people who sent them out, for they represented an intellectually respectable charge against the Church, and if any voter was sufficiently frightened by the recital of facts contained in these reports, I felt that he ought not to vote for John Kennedy. Later in the campaign I was especially glad that I had never inveighed against such publications, because the Roman Catholic bishops in Puerto Rico very obligingly proved that the fundamental political charge made against the Church was true. Some of my Democratic friends circulated the current rumor that Republicans must have paid the Puerto Rican bishops to release their bombshell at the precise moment when it would damage Kennedy most, but rabid anti-Catholics effectively killed that charge; ingeniously they explained that Cardinal Spellman had ordered the Puerto Rican churchmen to act as they did so as to kill Kennedy’s chances for the Presidency, because if, when Pope John died, the United States already had a Catholic President, the cardinals would be loath to elect Spellman Pope because that would place too much of the Church’s power in American hands. But if Kennedy lost, the cardinals would almost have to elect Spellman in order to keep the American Catholics happy. Therefore, Cardinal Spellman was determined to defeat Kennedy so as to further his own interests.

The second category contained numerous pamphlets not founded on fact but consisting mostly of ranting, rodomontade and bigotry. One of the most impressive carried a cover showing a fat and apparently venal bishop
on his throne, with “The Rest of Us” kneeling abjectly and kissing his foot. Most of these pamphlets made a good deal of this foot-kissing routine as something especially subversive. They also played up supposedly lurid details of the confessional. A characteristic of the material in this second category was its repeated assertion that in all Catholic countries priests immediately took over the schools, the newspapers, and the civil government. No mention was ever made of countries like France or Belgium, or Canada or Mexico, where the religious problem had been fought, by Catholics, to reasonable solutions. I suppose that most votes that were changed by the religious issue were influenced by this segment of the material. Certainly whenever I finished reading some of it I felt obligated to rush out and shoot the first Catholic I encountered. Such material injected into the bloodstream of democracy was persuasive and fearfully poisonous.

One of the pamphlets most widely circulated in Bucks County showed a trio of priests supervising the following tortures of Protestants: one victim was being crucified upside down; another was being hauled aloft by his hands twisted behind his back while weights were applied to his feet; a third was stretched prone while water was being forced into him; a fourth had his bare feet in a fire while another fire was about to be pushed into his stomach; and the last was having his skin peeled off by a smiling assistant armed with a butcher knife. The text pointed out, among other things, that Congressman John W. McCormack of Massachusetts had personally forced the federal government to give his church “more than thirty millions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds.”

The third category offered a redundant procession of lurid confessions of one-time Catholics who had fled from either the priesthood or the nunnery. For some reason which I do not fully understand, unless it is that the Church has always stressed a kind of secret ritualism, there seems to be an insatiable desire on the part of Protestants to know what goes on within the hierarchy. All of the confessions that I received dated back to the nineteenth century, but they appeared to be as popular now as they must have been a hundred years ago. So far as I can recall, I received none in which the fugitive had fled the terrors of the Church in this century, although I suppose that such confessions must exist. Probably it is the nineteenth-century masterpieces that report the best horrors. I read about ten of these case histories and got the clear impression that the Catholic Church was well rid of some rather stupid characters and that the Protestants had been gulled. As a matter of fact, I think a good case could be made for the theory that all these authors were in reality counter-agents spuriously expelled by the Catholics to confuse the enemy. On the other hand, if one wanted to feed his bigotry, I must admit that some of the passages of these confessions were calculated to provide nourishment for hatred and confusion.

There was a sub-category of this third group that merits special mention. These were the confessions of nuns who had fled the almost indescribable terrors of convent life, they claimed. These books were downright salacious and had obviously been composed with that effect in mind.
Maria Monk
, which was exceptionally popular during the election, is an old nineteenth-century classic, written so
far as I know by a London hack, who offered the public a clever barrage of sexual titillation. One advertisement for this old worthy claimed: “See for yourself how innocent girls are trapped and imprisoned inside dark convents. How young priests visit them at night and force their attentions upon them. How the unwanted babies are strangled and thrown into wells. Live again the horrors of the Catholic Church with Maria Monk. In her own words.”