526 - The Survival of American Innocence: Catholicism in an Era of Disillusionment, 1920-1940

The Survival of American Innocence:
Catholicism in an Era of Disillusionment, 1920-1940
By William M. Halsey
Notre Dame, Ind., University of Notre Dame Press. 230 pp. $16.95.

This is a remarkable book, and one which will form something of a landmark in the literature covering the recent history of American Catholicism. It examines American Catholic intellectual life in the 1920s and 1930s and does so in a way that casts new light on a much-traversed subject. In fact, it will force historians of the American

527 - The Survival of American Innocence: Catholicism in an Era of Disillusionment, 1920-1940

Catholic experience to take a new look at some long-accepted notions about Catholic life in this period.

The prevailing thesis, first enunciated by John Tracy Ellis and Thomas O'Day in the late 1950s, holds that Catholic intellectual life went into the deep freeze following the papal condemnation of Americanism in 1899, and it remained there until the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent upheavals of the '60s. (Ironically, Ellis himself has contributed a highly laudatory foreward to Halsey's book.) To be sure, Halsey lends further support to this traditional doctrine. His own thesis is that World War I left American Catholics largely untouched by the bitter disillusionment that followed the conflict. Motivated above all by a desire to appear as traditionally American as any of the Americans, Catholic intellectuals developed a system of philosophy and a life of letters that stood four-square for the American traditions of optimism, confidence in humanity and conservative law and morality. It mattered little to them that these beliefs no longer held sway on the American intellectual scene.

Thus Catholics enthusiastically attacked the prevailing despair of the period, condemning the irrationalism and skepticism of the literature of the twenties, the relativism of the new science, and the discovery of a darkened subconscious in the human psyche. Catholics held tenaciously to the traditional American beliefs, defending convictions which had earlier been indispensable dogmas in traditional American belief: the conviction that the cosmos was rational and predictable, that there are discoverable moral laws existing in the universe, and that works of culture ought to express humankind's hopes and feelings in a "genteel" manner (that is to say, authors ought to write "decent" and "wholesome" books, and painters ought to pain pictures at once socially acceptable and immediately accessible to the masses). Undergirding this renewed burst of Catholic intellectual activity was the revival of Thomism; one wonders if the thirteenth-century Aquinas would have recognized the many promiscuous uses to which his thought would be put by Catholics in the twentieth century.

The tragedy is that all of these activities served effectively to isolate American Catholic intellectuals from the rest of American thought, since they gave American Catholicism an air of smugness, formalism, conservatism, and naive optimism. In a world without answers, Catholics had an answer for everything, including answers for questions no longer being asked. To revive a cliche happily no longer much in vogue, Catholics lived in a ghetto, and they liked it enough to want to stay there. Catholics did not begin to flee the ghetto in great numbers until the 1960s, when, with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, they suddenly learned that almost anything could mean almost anything else. Their world of "innocence" had vanished.

If some of this sounds vaguely familiar, it is due to the pioneering work of Ellis and O'Day in the 1950s, as well as later authors such as David O'Brien and Daniel Callahan. While Halsey has found new

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support for the general outlines of their argument, he has also forced discussion of pre-Vatican IIAmerican Catholicism to move in a somewhat different direction. Some of his findings are eye-opening; Catholic intellectual life between the wars did not stop or even slow down, but rather it accelerated in tempo, though it never lost its optimistic temper. Much of this Catholic intellectualism was creative, scholarly, and academically serious. Some thoughtful Catholics even found kind words for the enemy-the non-Catholic intellectual of the John Dewey variety; a conspicuous example was that gracious Catholic man of letters, George N. Shuster, who would surely recognize the essential outlines of his thought, as Halsey has so accurately delineated them here. Some of the same Catholic writers loudly criticized American Catholics themselves, warning especially against their complacent self-confidence, their granite-faced refusal to encounter contemporary science and philosophy, and their staid fondness for abstractionism and sterile exercises in logic.

Halsey has thus given us a new perspective on American Catholic life during the interwar years, one which was long and badly needed. This is a book which abounds in new insights for the careful reader. His analysis of the neo-Thomist revival is especially fine, showing both the European sources of the movement and the modifications it underwent at the hands of Catholic Americans. His description of Fulton J. Sheen is also timely, giving us a new vision of that much overrated preacher and theological popularizer. Halsey deftly sums up Sheen as one whose "reputation passed rapidly from perhaps an American Jacques Maritain to a clerical G. K. Chesterton and then finally rested as the Catholic counterpart of Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham" (p. 156).

Few readers, however, will find this an easy book to read. While the author occasionally snaps off an incisive phrase or two, his prose seldom flows as easily as one might hope, and on occasion it falters badly. Thus we read that "the strenuous effort to sanitize life forced them [the Thomists] to blink at its complexities; to facilely construe a benign intelligibility operating in reality" (p. 167). The subject matter is also uncommonly challenging, and Halsey makes no effort to simplify it, nor should he. He might, however, have provided a better index than the skimpy one that appears here, one with better cross indexing, more entries, and above all one which accounts for the major intellectual themes of his work, such as formalism, naturalism, materialism, secularism, etc.

Finally, Halsey too easily assumes that Catholic intellectuals and the larger Catholic laity stood together as one body, with Catholic intellectuals experiencing little sense of alienation from the greater Catholic community (p. 6). He needed to provide much fuller documentation for this thesis than he has given here. It is possible, in fact, that the Catholic elite went one way, while the masses of Catholics blithely moved in quite another direction. Still, the strengths of this book far outweigh its

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weaknesses. The Catholic intellectuals whom Halsey studies emerge in these pages in strong, firm colors; they are neither the bright-winged heralds of a new era nor creaky troglodytes remaining from an earlier one. They are what they are, say what they say, and do what they do. Special pleading has no place in a discussion like this one, and I do not find it here.

To my mind, this is the best work on American Catholicism since David O'Brien's memorable American Catholics and Social Reform: The New Deal Years (1968), and it may well be the best book ever written on American Catholic intellectual life. It is a landmark in the historiography of North American Catholicism, and is essential reading not only for students of American intellectual and religious history, but for other educated readers as well.

Donald F. Crosby
University of Santa Clara
Santa Clara, California