{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02758881330309902, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.257683215130023, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Catholics in the McCarthy Era

Father Andrew Greeley has characterized a recent study of real or alleged conflict in the thirties between certain ethnic groups in New York City as an example of the "newspaper fallacy" of historical scholarship at its worst. By that he means that the book in question, which purports to show that the New York Irish and Italians in the period under discussion were the conservative or reactionary "bad guys" as contrasted with the liberal or progressive "good guys," mistakenly assumes that editorials in a few unrepresentative diocesan or ethnic newspapers are an adequate substitute for probability samples. "Quite simply," Greeley says, "there is no justification for such an assumption. It is completely invalid to assume that what is going on among 'neighbors' reflects what is said in dioesan papers, past or present." If the book that Greeley was reviewing is, for the reason he has stated, an example of shoddy scholarship at its worst, Father Donald Crosby's book, which deals with a somewhat different but related subject, is, by contrast, an example of objective and highly professional scholarship at its very best and can be recommended without qualification as the definitive study of "a most crucial chapter in the history of American religious life." Having lived through the McCarthy era and having monitored, on a day-to-day basis, the so-called Catholic aspects of the ugly phenomenon associated now and forever with Senator Joseph McCarthy's name, this reviewer can only marvel at Crosby's extraordinary success in separating the wheat of solid and verifiable fact from the chaff of liberal misconceptions about the reaction of American Catholics to the late senator from Wisconsin and his incredibly reckless anticommunist witch-hunt. "For many a frustrated American liberal engaged in the angry battle with McCarthy and the McCarthyites," Crosby notes in his preface, "it seemed that Neanderthals had captured the American Catholic church. The 'Catholic bloc' was overwhelmingly for McCarthy—or so the liberals believed." Crosby demonstrates, irenically and with scholarly objectivity, that the liberals were, on the whole, mistaken in this regard. He proves, on the basis of a wide range of factual evidence, including carefully analyzed election returns and survey data, that there was no such thing as a "Catholic bloc" to begin with and, secondly, that individual Catholics, acting on their own initiative and without instructions from their ecclesiastical leaders, reacted to McCarthy, as did Americans of other faiths, "according to their social status, their occupation, their region,