Books in Brief

Religious Liberty and the American Presidency, by Patricia Barrett (Herder and Herder, $4.50) The cant phrase after the 1960 election was that American Catholics had “come of age.” But had we, when the candidate whom 80 per cent of us voted for had as his only distinctions a Capitol Hill attendance record almost as casual as Adam Clayton Powell’s and a kind of celebrity as one of Washington’s gayer middle-aging blades? The campaign was in fact predicated on Catholic gullibility. The Bailey Report, as cynical as it was accurate, outlined how the Catholic vote would be recovered by a Democrat who crossed himself (however seldom). If should have been called the Barnum Report. Can the Attorney General explain, for example, why anti-Catholic hate literature was mailed in many areas only to Irish, Italian and Polish names? Wasn’t it like the old days in Boston, when one of the boys would dress up as a Methodist minister and call on the McGillicuddys to urge them not to vote for that no-good Papist, Fitzgerald? But these and other interesting questions are never touched on in this, the non-book of the month.

n. mccaffrey

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Religious Liberty and the American Presidency, by Patricia Barrett (Herder and Herder, $4.50) The cant phrase after the 1960 election was that American Catholics had “come of age.” But had we, when the candidate whom 80 per cent of us voted for had as his only distinctions a Capitol Hill attendance record almost as casual as Adam Clayton Powell’s and a kind of celebrity as one of Washington’s gayer middle-aging blades? The campaign was in fact predicated on Catholic gullibility. The Bailey Report, as cynical as it was accurate, outlined how the Catholic vote would be recovered by a Democrat who crossed himself (however seldom). If should have been called the Barnum Report. Can the Attorney General explain, for example, why anti-Catholic hate literature was mailed in many areas only to Irish, Italian and Polish names? Wasn’t it like the old days in Boston, when one of the boys would dress up as a Methodist minister and call on the McGillicuddys to urge them not to vote for that no-good Papist, Fitzgerald? But these and other interesting questions are never touched on in this, the non-book of the month.

n. mccaffrey