Paul Blanshard was an American clergyman, writer, and lawyer. He also served as editor of The Nation magazine.
Background
Paul Blanshard was born on August 27, 1892, in Fredericksburg, Ohio, United States, one of two children of Francis George Blanshard, a Congregational minister, and Emily Coulter. His mother was burned to death in an accident at her parents' farm a year after Paul's birth. His twin brother, Brand, became one of the nation's leading philosophers and had a distinguished teaching career at Yale.
Education
Paul Blanshard was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a B. A. at the University of Michigan (1914) and did graduate study at Harvard, Columbia, and Union Theological Seminary. In 1937 he received an LL. B. from Brooklyn Law School.
Career
In the tumultuous strike-torn year that followed World War I, when wartime protections for labor were lifted, Blanshard worked initially as a labor organizer. From 1920 to 1924 he was educational director for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in Rochester, New York, and in 1925 he became field secretary of the League for Industrial Democracy, a position he held until 1933. In 1923, Blanshard published his first book, An Outline of the British Labor Movement. During this period, he began his relationship with Norman Thomas and the Socialist party and took an active role in Thomas's unsuccessful campaign for the presidency of the United States in 1928.
As the 1930's began, Blanshard turned his attention from labor and socialism to urban reform. From 1930 to 1933 he served as executive director of the City Affairs Committee, a good-government group in New York City. His investigations on behalf of the committee led to a second book, What's the Matter with New York, which he coauthored with Norman Thomas in 1932. The book attacked Tammany Hall and old-line government as the principal source of the city's corruption. In the mayoral campaign the following year, Blanshard gave his support to Fiorello H. La Guardia, the reform candidate who pledged to implement the recommendations of the Seabury Commission, which in 1931 had revealed widespread corruption in the municipal court system and elsewhere. La Guardia made Blanshard commissioner of accounts and gave him a broad mandate to clean up city hall, a charge that eventually led to the conviction, dismissal, or resignation of 122 holdovers from the Tammany-driven administration of James ("Jimmy") Walker.
By 1937, Blanshard's relationship with La Guardia had cooled. Calling the mayor "a temperamental and ruthless taskmaster, " Blanshard resigned his commissioner's office to complete his third book, Investigating City Government (1937), and to take up a private law practice after admission to the New York bar in 1938. Three years later he moved to Washington, D. C. , as an economic analyst and consultant to the Caribbean Commission of the Department of State, leaving that post in 1946 to become a full-time writer. His Democracy and Empire in the Caribbean appeared the next year to mixed reviews. By then, he was the Vatican correspondent for the Nation and, in the spring of 1948, produced a series of twelve articles on the political role of the Roman Catholic Church in the modern world.
Attacked by Catholic critics as the herald of the "New Nativism, " applauded by Protestants for striking "valiant blows" for freedom, banned for a time, along with the Nation, in the New York public schools, American Freedom and Catholic Power was premised on Blanshard's conviction that the Roman Catholic Church was institutionally antithetical to democracy and politically antagonistic to American pluralism and individual liberty. His quarrel, Blanshard wrote, was not with doctrine or belief; it was directed toward the Church's hierarchy, the policies of which, he wrote, were nothing more than the "medieval prejudices of an inflexible, authoritarian ecclesiastical system, " which, having entered the American political and social arena, was seeking to control "foreign affairs, social hygiene, public education and modern science. " The Church, operating on orders from Rome, had become "more and more aggressive in extending the frontiers of Catholic authority. " Citing the Church's historic opposition to birth control and divorce, its demand for public funds to support its schools, its censorship of books and movies, and the pressure-group tactics it applied to its critics in the media or in business, Blanshard argued that the Roman Catholic Church was out of touch with the realities of modern America and with the Constitution and posed a clear danger to American life.
Blanshard repeated variations on that argument in a half-dozen titles over the next fifteen years. Communism, Democracy and Catholic Power (1951), The Right to Read (1955), The Irish and Catholic Power (1953), God and Man in Washington (1960), Freedom and Catholic Power in Spain and Portugal (1962), and Religion and the Schools: The Great Controversy (1963) all carried the message of American Freedom and Catholic Power, but without its impact on public discussion. His final assessment came in Paul Blanshard on Vatican II in 1966, when he wrote that while the Church was no longer "a monolithic glacier of reactionary thought, " the Vatican II conference was only a beginning and that most of the institutional policies that made freedom anathema to the Church continued unchanged. His last book, Classics of Free Thought, was published in 1977. He died three years later in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he had been a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, until just before his death.
Ordained a Congregational minister in 1917, Blanshard served for one year as pastor of the First Church in Tampa, Florida, but he soon became disillusioned with his role as a clergyman and with institutional religion in general. From then on, if pressed, he would list his church affiliation as Unitarian, but at a conference late in his life he said, "I have come to the conclusion that Christianity is so full of fraud that any honest man should repudiate the whole shebang and espouse atheism. " By then (1972), he had become a highly vocal critic of the Roman Catholic Church, whose politics and hierarchy he believed represented a threat to fundamental freedoms both in the United States and around the world. At the end of 1918, Blanshard left the ministry for the trade union movement.
Politics
Blanshard was a member of the Socialist Party for 19 years.
Connections
Blanshard married three times. His first wife was Julia Anderson, a journalist, whom he wed in 1915. They had two children before her death in 1934. The next year he married Mary W. Hillyer, who died in 1965. His third wife was Beatrice Enselman Mayer, whom he married in 1965.