National Affairs: My Day in the Lion’s Mouth

In an almost offhand way, Eleanor Roosevelt put her head in the lion’s mouth. In her column “My Day,” she noted that Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, thought that Catholic schools should have a share in federal funds for education. Mrs. Roosevelt disagreed.

Schools supported by public taxes, she wrote, should be completely free of any private or religious control. She did not deny the contributions that “Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist or whatever” schools might make to the community. But if a U.S. citizen wanted his children to have special denominational training, then he should pay for it and not expect the Government to. “The separation of church and state is extremely important to any of us,” she concluded.

When she got some mail accusing her of being anti-Catholic, she wrote a little tartly: “Sometimes I think church organizations are foolish because they do things that lead people to believe they are not interested mainly in the spiritual side of the church but that they have a decided interest also in temporal affairs.”

That probably did it. Francis Cardinal Spellman, speaking from his elevated position in the hierarchy of the U.S. Catholic Church, spread his wrath across a letter to her and forthwith made it public.

“Web of Prejudice.” She wrote from “misinformation, ignorance or prejudice,” he said. He would have ignored her “personal attack,” but she had continued her “anti-Catholic campaign.” Now “your misstatements should be challenged in every quarter of our country where they have already spun and spread their web of prejudice.”

He stood with Mrs. Roosevelt against “religious control of schools which are paid for by the taxpayers’ money.” But he was also certainly against parochial school children being excluded from milk rations, bus transportation, immunization programs, and the use of non-religious textbooks provided by federal funds.

“Even if you cannot find it within your heart to defend the rights of innocent little children and heroic, helpless men like Cardinal Martyr Mindszenty* can you not have the charity not to cast upon them still another stone?”

Catholic youths, said the Cardinal, had fought for the U.S. “Their broken bodies on blood-soaked foreign fields were grim and tragic testimony to this fact.” Would Mrs. Roosevelt deny equality to those Catholic boys? “Now my case is closed,” concluded the Cardinal. And even though Mrs. Roosevelt might “attack” him again, “I shall not again publicly acknowledge you . . . Your record of anti-Catholicism stands for all to see . . . documents of discrimination unworthy of an American mother.”

Vilification. Mrs. Roosevelt retired into shocked silence. Just as shocked but not as silent, New York’s ex-Governor Herbert Lehman rushed to Mrs. Roosevelt’s defense. “The issue is not whether one agrees or disagrees with Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said. “The issue is whether Americans are entitled freely to express their views on public questions without being vilified or accused of religious bias.”

Cardinal Spellman’s remarks had been aimed not only at Mrs. Roosevelt—a bystander, if not exactly an innocent one—but at a bill introduced in the House of Representatives by North Carolina’s stubbornly conservative Graham Barden, whom Spellman had recently characterized as a “new apostle of bigotry.”

The Barden bill provided $300 million in federal funds for U.S. education, but unlike the education bill already passed by the Senate, specifically excluded private and parochial schools from its benefits. The Barden bill was limited strictly to such direct education aid as textbooks, teachers’ salaries, equipment. It did not provide for anyone the milk, bus transportation and medicine which Cardinal

Spellman had been talking about. These items were in other bills before either the House or the Senate, which specified that parochial school students would share equally.

Inaudible Issues. The discussion raised a number of important issues of concern to most Americans.

First, should the federal Government provide money to improve education in states not rich enough to maintain good public schools? Could this be done without threatening the independence of the public schools? Harry Truman answered yes to both questions and incorporated the program in his Fair Deal. The U.S. Senate agreed when it passed its aid-to-education bill. But if such aid became a permanent policy of Government, would the nation’s schools ultimately and inevitably fall into the hands of federal control? Should parochial and private schools which teach Christianity be excluded from federal aid and left to get along as best they could?

All these issues became—temporarily at least—inaudible in the storm of peripheral controversy.

This week Mrs. Roosevelt emerged from her silence. She would not “discuss this question any further on a personal basis with Cardinal Spellman,” she wrote in “My Day.” She pointed out that she had supported Alfred Smith, a Roman Catholic, in every campaign that he made. “I have no ill feeling toward any religion or toward any people of high or low estate because they belong to any religious group. I am sure the Cardinal has written in what to him seems a Christian and kindly manner and I wish to do the same.”

* On Jan. 5, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote that it looked as if the firmest resistance to Communism “was being waged by the priests and laymen of the Roman Catholic faith.” She described Cardinal Mindszenty as “the center and the symbol of resistance during the Nazi occupation” and added: “There is no excuse for the action that has been taken by the [Hungarian] government.” On Jan. 18 she reported the gist of a letter she had had from an editor (whom she did not name) who “claims that the Cardinal is a reactionary, if not a fascist and a notorious anti-Semite . . . Certainly,” she added, “I am in no position to say whether the facts, as sent to me by this man, are true.”