For some, the label “Brooklyn Irish Catholic” is a point of pride; for others, it evokes images of aggressive, confrontational characters, militant in their ethnic and religious loyalties, and intolerant of divergent views.

In a 1947 survey of American life, John Gunther described Brooklyn as “a world in itself,” with “a fierce local nationalism, the Dodgers, the Bush Terminal, Coney Island, and the Tablet, one of the most reactionary Catholic papers in the country.”

In his 1950 study of Brooklyn’s ethnic groups, Ralph Foster Weld made reference to Brooklynites “whose consciousness of their Irishness is acute and ever-present.”

A young Patrick F. Scanlan

During the 1930s, Dorothy Day complained about the Brooklyn Irish “who went around with a chip on their shoulder being ‘militant Catholics.’”

In 1947 Father William J. Smith, S.J., who directed a Brooklyn labor school from 1938 to 1952, described the Brooklyn Irish as “belligerent” and “willing to fight at the drop of a hat,” but not so easy to organize.

Perhaps no individual epitomized the pugnacious Brooklyn Irish Catholic more than Patrick F. (“Pat”) Scanlan, who served as Managing Editor of The Tablet, from September, 1917, to June, 1968.

James T. Fisher writes that under Scanlan’s leadership, The Tablet’s influence extended far beyond Brooklyn’s boundaries, becoming America’s “most influential diocesan paper.” Few diocesan organs, the late James Hennesey notes, “had the spice of The Brooklyn Tablet,” a factor he attributes to Scanlan’s aggressive editorial style.

Esther Yolles Feldblum writes that Scanlan was practically a “one-man Anti-Defamation League.” Scanlan’s successor, Don Zirkel, described him as “Catholic journalism with its sleeves rolled up.”

In his capacity as editor, Scanlan never hid his opinions on subjects of importance to him: the resurgence of anti-Catholicism in 1920s America; the growth of federal power during the New Deal; the threat of domestic and international Communism during the early Cold War; the breakdown of traditional Catholic life in the postconciliar era.

Scanlan’s career provides a valuable overview of an era’s beginning and end. A few weeks after he began writing for The Tablet, the American hierarchy established the National Catholic War Council (NCWC), an event Jay Dolan sees as emblematic of a new aura of collective Catholic confidence. When he retired a half century later, both consensus and confidence had broken down as Catholics split on a variety of issues: sex, Vietnam, race, and the nature of authority within the Church.

The widespread closing of Catholic schools, the mass exodus from the priesthood and religious life coupled with a radical drop in vocations, the breakdown of respect for ecclesiastical authority, signaled for many the end of an era, or what Philip Gleason calls the “disintegration of unity.”

In 1917, Scanlan’s audience was a predominantly urban, working-class population not far removed from the immigrant experience, with a solidarity manifested in close-knit communities. By 1968, however, Catholics had moved into both the mainstream and the suburbs. They were less likely than their parents to belong to exclusively Catholic groups, more likely to have a college degree, and less likely to send their children to Catholic schools.

David O’Brien notes that post-war prosperity and upward mobility, coupled with John F. Kennedy’s election and Vatican II’s call for a positive dialogue with modernity, “shattered forever the social and psychological bases of ghetto Catholicism.”

At the start of his career, Scanlan represented the mainstream Catholic apologist, but by the summer of 1968 his combative brand of apologetics (not to mention the word itself) had become a thing of the past. Few editors mourned the decline of the Catholic ghetto more than Patrick F. Scanlan.

The son of an Irish immigrant whose grocery business frequently carried him back and forth between New York and Philadephia, Patrick Francis Scanlan was born in Manhattan on Oct. 7, 1894. Although he spent his childhood in Philadelphia, Scanlan’s family identified itself with New York. Three of his brothers were ordained priests for the New York Archdiocese. Arthur Scanlan, the eldest, served as Rector of St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, during the 1930s, and became one of the most prominent pastors in the Archdiocese. After graduating from the Jesuit-run St. Joseph’s College, Philadelphia (now St. Joseph’s University) in 1914, Patrick Scanlan followed his brothers to Dunwoodie.

Scanlan left Dunwoodie after two years, but he continued to work for Catholic institutions his entire life. In 1916, he took a teaching position at a Catholic high school on Staten Island. In 1917, he moved to Brooklyn, where he enrolled in a public speaking course taught by Joseph Timmes, the first Managing Editor of The Tablet, who was impressed by the young Scanlan’s forceful personality.

When the paper’s managing editor, Joseph Cummings, left to join the U.S. Army, Timmes recommended Scanlan to Bishop Charles E. McDonnell as a replacement. On Sept. 17, 1917, Scanlan began his editorial career. After Cummings’ death of pneumonia in March, 1918, the position became permanent.

Although Scanlan assumed his new position without any journalistic experience, it should be noted that few Catholic editors had any kind of professional training. The main requirements were a strong faith, a strong institutional loyalty, and the ability to write fairly well. For Bishop McDonnell, who founded the paper in 1908, the ideal applicant was a man “with love for his faith, a proper scholastic background; young enough to accept a challenge and old enough to exercise judgment in meeting it.” It soon became clear that Pat Scanlan met these requirements.

As Protestantism celebrated its 400th anniversary, Scanlan wrote to the New York Times in October, 1917, that such an event offered little cause for celebration. Protestantism, he contended, did not hold up as a religion because it “dispensed with all the hitherto and even now generally accepted means for avoiding sin, such as prayer, penance, works of charity and mercy, recognition of guilt, [and] self-abasement.”

In September, 1918, responding to the news of Brooklyn’s first Mormon congregation, Scanlan regretted that he was unable to extend a welcome, since “the Church cannot take up cudgels with heretics.” Furthermore, he added:

“The Catholic Church, as befits the ‘Rock of Peter,’ will fight alone against the doctrines of the new-comers, and will pray for their conversion. When there is a question of our loyalty to Christ, there must be no half-measures. He who is not with Him is against Him. Non-Catholics may not understand our attitude, but at least they must do us the justice to acknowledge that we have the courage of our convictions.”

At age 23, Scanlan came to his work with a well-formed ecclesiology that featured a Church besieged by the forces of modernity, a factor he attributed to the disruption of Christendom in the 16th century. In a December, 1918, editorial, he offered readers his analysis of world history since the Reformation. Arguing that Protestantism had lost “the spirit of true religion,” Scanlan went on to blame Luther for the growth of secularism, materialism, and liberalism. He assured his readers, however, that they could take consolation in “the promise of Christ that He will be with them until the end of time. The Goths failed, the Huns failed, the ‘Reformers’ failed, the atheists failed, the Pope-baiters of today will fail.”

Scanlan’s relations with his Jewish neighbors, however, were marked more by socio-economic rather than theological tensions. In his study of Depression-era New York, Ronald Bayor notes that The Tablet was a major voice of the city’s predominantly Catholic Irish community. Although it was “ostensibly a Catholic newspaper,” Bayor writes, “it actually represented a mainly Irish viewpoint.”

Bayor notes that while the majority of Irish immigrants came to New York in the mid-19th century, many of their descendants remained at the lower middle-class level two to three generations later.

During Scanlan’s early years as editor, a resurgent anti-Catholicism swept the nation. John Higham notes that the 1920s saw the last powerful expression of organized anti-Catholicism with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, attempts to outlaw Catholic schools in Oregon, and the intense opposition to Alfred E. Smith’s presidential campaign. Higham writes that the Roman Catholic had replaced both the German and the Communist as the subversive threat to the “American way of life.” One Mississippi constituent typified this attitude when he wrote to his senator, asking: “Are the Bolsheviks any worse than the Irish?”

Like many Catholics, Scanlan had expected better treatment after the First World War, so the resurgence of anti-Catholicism discouraged him. Of particular concern was the Klan, which had gained a notable following on Long Island, particularly in the still more sparsely populated Nassau and Suffolk counties.

For Scanlan, true Americanism had nothing to do with “Nordic supremacy.” Anti-Catholics, he noted, had been notoriously silent during the war when there was a need for Catholic manpower. He also called for Catholics to take a tougher stand against the Klan, rather than “dumbly allowing a coterie of high-brow bigots to relegate us to a position of civic inferiority.”

On April 14, 1923, Scanlan and members of his Knights of Columbus council infiltrated a Klan meeting in Floral Park. Scanlan approached the scheduled speaker, Dr. John H. Moore, a Baptist minister, and offered to serve as master of ceremonies. Moore, assuming Scanlan to be a Klansman, accepted the offer. At the end of his speech, Scanlan delivered, much to Moore’s surprise, a condemnation of the Klan, followed by similar speeches from his fellow Knights.

A Knight in the audience then introduced a resolution declaring that the Klan was un-American and should have no place in Floral Park. It was passed by a vote of 480 to 30, and the Klan received a surprising “comeuppance.”

Throughout the 1920s, Scanlan continued to express concerns over Klan activity. In May 1927, on Jamaica Ave. in Queens, Klansmen disrupted a Memorial Day parade from which they had been banned. After fights broke out with local Catholics, a Queens County Grand Jury found the predominantly Irish policemen guilty of using excessive force in removing the Klansmen.

Scanlan was distressed at the New York World’s contention that the police rather than the Klansmen were to blame for the riot, which he saw as yet another example of anti-Catholic bias in the secular press.
Scanlan’s aggressive writing style attracted attention beyond Catholic circles. In 1921, he was offered a position with the Hearst Corporation at $100 a week, as opposed to his $25 a week Tablet salary. He refused the job, which was offered again on several occasions. Scanlan later said that he turned down these offers because he was “happier in the non-secular field.” He felt that the secular press had a strong tendency toward anti-Catholicism, and that it operated on no principle but greedy opportunism.

In September, 1918, he wrote:

“Today’s definition of a newspaper is that it isn’t. It is owned and controlled by those powerful enough, through money, to own and control it. Those on its payroll… are hirelings, in the worst sense of that word. It prints what are its directorate’s views. More than ever today does it stand revealed as… shamed, though shameless, sham, specious lie. It is supposed to have a heart – of the workable sob-stuff kind. It has no conscience.”

The Catholic Press, however, he explained operated on a higher plane, because it had “a sacred message to unfold.”

Scanlan was especially embittered by the 1928 presidential campaign and its blatant anti-Catholicism.

The race pitted Herbert Hoover against New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic presidential nominee.

“The Hoover campaign,” he wrote after the election, “was conducted on the very lowest and most degrading plane of politics and religious bigotry imaginable.”

The 1928 campaign reaffirmed for Scanlan the belief that Catholics were still outsiders in America, and must remain militantly united against a hostile Protestant establishment.

In September, 1929 he wrote: “Between the Church and a successful football team there is an analogy. Both have to fight.”

Throughout his career Scanlan displayed an acute consciousness of anti-Catholicism in American life that even John F. Kennedy’s election could not fully abate.

Few scholars would deny that the Great Depression served as the primary catalyst for the growth of American radicalism. “The 1930’s,” writes Harvey Klehr, “marked the height of Communist influence in America.” Beginning in 1930, American Communists organized unemployment rallies in New York and other cities. They became early Civil Rights activists through the legal aid they provided in the Scottsboro Case and their organizing work in Harlem. As the National Industrial Recovery Act protected labor’s right to organize, Communist Party members entered the unionization drive as successful organizers. Joshua B. Freeman, in his study of New York’s Transport Workers Union, suggests that their popularity was due to organizational ability rather than ideology.

During the 1920s, Communism was an issue that failed to interest the American public. In the following decade, however, worldwide economic unrest and the rise of Totalitarianism forced Americans to pay closer attention. The rise of domestic radicalism became a greater concern than was previously true.

Patrick F. Scanlan at The Tablet’s offices at One Hanson Pl.

Communism was always an ideological bête noir for Catholics, but its growth as a social movement and political force heightened their concerns. From pope to the local parish priest, warnings against the “Red Menace” permeated Catholic life. Communists in politics, labor, schools and popular movements were presented as manifestations of a worldwide malady.

In June 1930, Scanlan wrote: “We have often had periods of unemployment in this country, but this is the first one we ever heard of them given as an excuse for communism.”

Over the next four decades, nearly every Tablet issue warned readers of Communist expansion abroad as well as Communist infiltration into local government, labor, politics, and education.

For Scanlan, Communism was the apotheosis of a secularism he saw creeping into modern life since the Reformation. As scholars beginning with Richard Hoftsadter have noted, anti-communism also gave Catholics the chance to prove their patriotism to those who had so recently challenged it.

In March 1933, Scanlan expressed his support for the Roosevelt administration’s attempt to alleviate the nation’s economic distress. He wrote:

“It is far better, in these critical times, to do something, even if it does not pan out fully, than to sit by idly by moaning softly. We respect a man who does; we have little confidence in a man who is scared… Each venture thus far clearly shows that the philosophy of the new government is correct… The Government is being given back to the people.”