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Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion
Enumerated, Explained, and Extolled

by Charles A. Coulombe

     The election of 1884, which pitted Republican James Blaine against Democrat Grover Cleveland, for all that it was hard fought and nasty, is almost forgotten today—most Americans could not tell you who won. One thing remains, however, a turn of phrase coined by the Rev. Dr. Samuel D. Burchard. A week before the general election, the good minister declaimed before the Religious Bureau of the Republican National Committee that “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”
     The jibe that the reverend sir dropped on the Dems referred to that party’s opposition to Prohibition and the large number of Catholics and ex-Confederates in the Democratic voting base and leadership. While the slogan did little to affect the outcome of that election (Cleveland did in fact win), it injected “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” into the vocabulary of the nation; it still remains there, even if many of us don’t quite know what those words mean when strung together.
     Personally, I don’t see why anyone would feel that the Reverend’s words were insulting. Any political party today that came out for these three would win my vote, though neither of the two present government factions would do so. But I suppose I really should explain why these three things are not only beneficial, but absolutely required for the good of the great republic. Moreover, they are essential to the character of a Catholic gentleman.
     Let’s start with Rum. Now it may be assumed that I am biased in favor of this liquor, given that I have written a history book about it. But for both Rev. Burchard and myself, it means a lot more than mere distillates of molasses. In the 19th century, “Demon Rum” came to mean in American parlance luscious alcohols of all sorts. The Minister, Carrie Nation, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and many other folk had come to identify drink with every imaginable excess—and to be fair, in the moral vacuum after the War Between the States and during the settling of the frontier, boozing became an enormous pastime. Protestant America reacted in horror to this orgy of guzzling, and did so with the weapons of teetotalism and Prohibition of alcohol. This latter would have its final establishment with the 18th amendment to the Constitution.
     This in turn ushered in the “Noble Experiment” from 1920 to 1933, during which dry time, manufacture or sale of spirits was a crime, save for medicinal or sacramental purposes. The law of unintended consequences broke out, as Americans slaked their thirsts illegally in speakeasies, consorted with criminal bootleggers to attain the stuff, and came to have contempt for the authorities charged with enforcement—a contempt only slightly lessened for people my age and a bit older by Robert Stack in his role as Elliot Ness in The Untouchables television show. The fact that Ness and his colleagues stood out among contemporary lawmen for their incorruptibility does not speak well for Prohibition’s effect on the police.
     Prohibition also sent Americans scurrying by the thousands to Canada, the Bahamas, Cuba, Mexico, and “Beyond the Limits” booze-and-gambling ships. Given the large amount of alcohol smuggled in directly from the first two countries, Great Britain herself, and other of His Britannic Majesty’s dominions, George V won a sardonic affection from tipplers as patron and protector, as this little rhyme from the era reveals:

Sing a song of sixpence,
A case full of rye;
Four-and-twenty Yankees
Started going dry.
When the case was opened,
The yanks began to sing,
To Hell with the Stars-and-Stripes
And God save the King!

     In time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt restored the flow of healing waters to a thirsty land, one of only two measures our four-term president emplaced that I can wholeheartedly agree with (the other was the Federal Writers’ Project: whether my agreement stems from the high quality of the travel books the FWP produced, or the prospect of full-employment for freelance writers, I leave to my readers to decide). But the social damage was done: public drunkenness was almost respectable, and Mafiosi had been given entrée via their liquid wares into some of the finest houses in the country.
     Today, we have a similar movement in the anti-tobacco war. As I write these words, my pipe is in my mouth, emitting fragrant smoke from burning Prince Albert. While I still have the right to do so in private (or even, for the nonce, in the streets of Los Angeles, though not in her parks or beaches), I may not do so in restaurants, bars, private clubs, or offices, even if the management and employees would on their own want me to (or even join me!). There are a few bars that function as “smoke-easies,” where staff and patrons light up in constant fear of a police raid—these are amusing affairs, to be sure.
     Nor is it only the Golden State that is enjoying this orgy of militant respiratory health-care. New York City and State, Ireland, and many other places are jumping on the bandwagon. Where their great-grandparents waged war on John Barleycorn, the paladins of today fight Tommy Tobacco.
     Now it might well be objected that smoking does indeed pose a threat to an individual’s health, and this I cannot and will not dispute. But it must be submitted that the governments who are so interested in the health of the taxpayer on this point have interesting lacunae elsewhere. Statistically, an active participant in certain “risky” forms of behavior is far likelier to contract AIDS than a ten-pack-a-day smoker is to come down with lung cancer. Yet the Supreme Court has ruled that such behavior is a human right, and cannot be outlawed.
     By that token, one might wonder if smoking in private clubs would be protected by the constitutional “right to privacy” invented by the Court in 1973. My club in New York, the Players, tried that in State court recently. The great annual event of the Players, dating back to the 19th century, was “Pipe Night,” and it was much hoped that this hallowed happening might be protected. The court ruled that “there is no constitutional right to smoke.” This is an interesting advance in jurisprudence. Apparently our rights must be enumerated and permitted by the courts in order to exist, rather than the constitution’s claim to the contrary. Oh, well.
     One result of this judicial view is that while it is a crime to give tobacco to minors, the females among them are permitted to have abortions as soon as they are capable of breeding—eleven or twelve or thereabouts. Apparently, the children’s lungs must be carefully managed, but not their gonads; they are to have reproductive rights, but not respiratory ones.
     John Barleycorn is not free either. As we see, youth under 21 are perfectly capable of dying for their country, but not drinking in it. It has always amused me that if I seduce an 18-year-old, the law is happy with it; if, however, I give her a cocktail, I am contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Kind of tough on the poor kid, particularly if she is just back from Iraq. It must be supposed that our complete collapse in sexual mores forces the Puritanical element of our culture to repress innocent pleasures. Thus we are moralistic and amoral all at the same time.
     What is the Catholic view on these matters? Well, the love of such as Chesterton and Belloc of both smoking and drinking are very well known; it was even said by their contemporaries that the Chesterbelloc had misheard the Creed, and thought it demanded belief in “One, Holy, Catholic, and Alcoholic Church.” But in reality, the views of the Church go back to the Book of Proverbs’ injunction to give strong drink to the poor and suffering, and St. Thomas Aquinas’ dictum that one could drink ad usque hilaritatem—“to the point of hilarity.” St. Benedict in his rule ordered that each monk be given a measure of wine a day; in Medieval England, that measure was considered to be a gallon, so English monks must have been quite merry, indeed. It is no wonder that the Benedictine Dom Perignon invented champagne.
     But does that mean that a Catholic must guzzle and puff to be a good Catholic? By no means. Strict religious orders give it up save on feast days, or even all together. Many a pious Catholic has “taken the pledge,” of perpetual abstinence. But their attitude toward the stuff is totally different from that of the Puritan or the Killjoy. This was summed up for me by an elderly Irishman I met on the Chartres Pilgrimage. Declining my offer of red wine, he said, “No thanks, I’ve taken the pledge.”
     “Ah,” I said, nodding wisely, “you’re a teetotaler.”
     “I am most certainly not!” he said in great dudgeon.
     Confused, my response was, “Um, you’ve taken the pledge, but you’re not a teetotaler. How is that?”
     “Well, you see, if you take the pledge, you give up a lesser good for a greater. But teetotaling is a filthy Protestant notion, based on the idea that liquor is evil. It is, sir, the difference between celibacy—and misogyny!”
     I understood perfectly.
     Now it is certainly true that for devotion or his health’s sake, a Catholic may very well give up booze, tobacco, meat, cream sauces, or anything else. What he must not do is decide that they are evil in themselves. In the same way, whatever we give up for Lent or Advent, we must never begrudge anyone else, lest we lose whatever merit we may have accrued. It is the practice of both fasting and feasting, in due season and circumstance, that makes the Catholic way so incomprehensible to a post-Puritan society. In the face of that Society, we must stand forthrightly for Rum.
     Now for the second plank of the platform: Romanism. This, obviously, is simply a nasty word for Catholicism, originated by Protestants to deny the Church’s Catholicity. But it does have a certain truth. As St. Patrick told the Irish, “If you would be Christians, you must be Romans.” As Catholics, of whatever Rite, be it Latin, Byzantine, or Ethiopian, our capital is Rome and our sovereign is the Pope (the Holy Roman Emperor was considered his temporal equivalent, in a rather vague, medieval manner, but that is a different discussion).
     One of the most frequently hurled accusations against Catholics by their enemies, from the oh-so-aptly-named Know Nothings to the Order of the Star Spangled Banner to the Ku-Klux-Klan was that of dual loyalty. As an elegant little quatrain of the latter civic organisation had it:

I’d rather be a Klansman, in robes of snowy white,
    Than be a Roman Catholic, in robes as black as night.
For a Klansman is an American, and America is his home;
    But a Catholic owes allegiance to the dago Pope of Rome!

     On a rather more genteel level such worthies as Paul Blanshard in his landmark American Freedom and Catholic Power gravely warned that American Catholics put the teachings of their Church over the laws of their country. Quoting reams of Papal and other documents outlining the Church’s teaching, Blanshard sounded the alarm against traditional Catholic opposition to divorce, birth control, untrammeled media, and separation of Church and State. Give the Papists a chance, he declared, and they would make this a Catholic country!
     Groups like the Knights of Columbus and the National Catholic Welfare Council (before its transition into the United States Catholic Conference) angrily retorted that America’s Catholics had no such plans. They were just as committed, so the Catholic leadership maintained, to the American status quo as anyone, and had proved their devotion to things as they were by the oceans of Catholic blood shed in this country’s wars. Alas, they were right, and Blanshard was wrong.
     I say alas, because Christ ordered us to make disciples of all nations, making no special exceptions for “enlightened” nations like our own. Blanshard and the Klan alike rightly understood that there were irreconcilable differences between Roman Catholicism and the “American Way.” What they did not and did not want to understand is that personages from John Carroll through Cardinal Gibbons to Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J. had struggled mightily to create an “American Catholic Church” that would be only too happy to take its place among the country’s other denominations. Despite the best efforts of such Ultramontanes as Archbishop Corrigan of New York, Condé Pallen, Peter Paul Cahensly and the Sentinelle, this effort was successful. As Richard Brookhiser put it in his Way of the Wasp, “Of course the Catholic Church was still the one true Church. But so were all the others.”
     So things stood in the late 1950s. But the Americanists were not entirely mad. At that time, the United States were protecting the “free world” against the specter of Communism, and non-Catholic Americans shared most of the same morals as Catholics. It was easy to gloss over the things that divided us; after all, the “American Way” so beloved of Blanshard had not yet matured into abortion, shacking up, gay marriage, and women in combat.
But they have now, and as we are reminded by such paladins as Senators Barbara Boxer (who declared that “no Catholic who holds what his Church teaches on abortion should ever be made a judge”) and Arlen Specter (who demanded that Mr. Chief Justice Roberts promise not to allow his religion to influence his public life—a demand that gentleman readily assented to), the governing circles have no use for us, save as soldiers and tax-payers. As the two Senators show, this is a bi-partisan consensus, and doubtless welcome news in that sense.
     In the face of this, just what is Romanism today? First of all, it is loyalty to the Pope, and to his teachings and those of his predecessors. Where said teachings conflict with the law of our land, the former must take precedence in the realm of our consciences—even as they would in countries where polygamy or infanticide are legal. In a certain sense, our loyalty to the Church must indeed take precedence over that to our country, in every arena where the politicians or judges decide that the two must be in conflict.
     That is not to say that we should not be patriotic—quite the contrary; we must always render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, even as did those Catholic legionaries who were the best soldiers in the Roman army, yet were martyred in their thousands for refusing to worship, rather than merely serve, their emperor. Beyond that, however, just as with Catholics in India, Japan, or Sudan, it is our patriotic duty to work for the conversion of our country, even if this should result in our being ostracized, or even killed. Anything less for a Catholic is not patriotism at all. It is simply hypocrisy and self-congratulation.
     There is, however, more to Romanism than this. It is not enough to realize that we are a people apart, albeit a people that ought to be working to incorporate all of its neighbors into its “apartness.” We must also realize that we are part of a greater country that extends far beyond the boundaries of the temporal nation in which we live. The Catholic Church is simply the Kingdom of Christ on Earth, and our true fellow citizens are Catholics everywhere. Just as Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma aroused the pity and charity of Americans who had never been to the gulf coast, so should the sufferings of Catholics in Sudan, Indonesia, China, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, or wherever do with us. Not only are we obligated to pray for and contribute to their needs, we also want to make those needs (and our concern for them) known to our political leaders, the media, and the public at large. So too with the efforts of Catholics in countries traditionally belonging to the Church to fend off secularization—a secularization in large part inspired by the American example.
     Catholics in the United States have a particular responsibility to Catholics in Latin America. The reason is that American Protestants and other cults (such as the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses) funnel millions of dollars and thousands of volunteers each year into Latin America and the Philippines to seduce locals from the Church. Their efforts have borne much fruit, especially in Guatemala and Brazil. Yet American Catholics rarely think about the problem, let alone try to figure out how to resolve it. If ever we put together a campaign to help our brother Catholics down south against the inroads of the sects, we will have begun to fulfil one aspect of our duty.
     As with Catholics of other countries, so too with Catholics of other rites—Maronite, Armenian, or whatever. Study of their liturgies and history (to say nothing of present plight in their homelands) help build up a sense of true Catholicity in the individual; attendance at their ethnic fairs and so forth will expand one’s knowledge of delicious foods, at the very least.
     One important way to be Romanist is to make the Feast of Christ the King (whether the last Sunday in October, in the Traditional Calendar, or in November as in the revised) as important in one’s life as Independence Day. If that latter is the national day of the United States, then the former is so for the Church. On its original date, as ordered by Pius XI in 1926, it comes on “reformation Sunday” as celebrated in many Protestant churches. It was instituted by that Pontiff to remind Catholics and the world at large that Christ is King, not only over individual Catholics, but over societies and countries, and that real peace can only come when and if that fact is realized and accepted by earthly rulers.
     As a result, that Pope composed a special Mass and office for the feast, and ordered as well that Catholics hold processions on that day, as at Corpus Christi. The hymn for Vespers he composed, Te saeculorum Principem, explains well the meaning of the observance:

May heads of nations fear Thy name
And spread Thy honor through their lands,
Our nation’s laws, our arts proclaim
The beauty of Thy just commands.

Let kings the crown and sceptre hold
As pledge of Thy supremacy;
And Thou all lands, all tribes enfold
In one fair realm of charity.

     Moreover, even today, a partial indulgence is granted to the faithful, who “piously recite the Act of Dedication of the Human Race to Jesus Christ King. A plenary indulgence is granted, if it is recited publicly on the feast of our Lord Jesus Christ King.”
     As the website for Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Boston (home to that city’s Indult Latin Mass Community—soon to closed, alas) puts it so very well in their excellent section on the Church Year,“because the feast is less than a hundred years old, no other distinctive customs or rituals have yet accrued to its observance. This leaves a vacuum into which we can offer only the most unauthoritative suggestions. In our opinion, for example, wreath customs similar to those from the Feast of Corpus Christi would be a good way of observing the day, as a wreath betokens the supreme symbol of kingship, the crown. Likewise, a lamb dinner would hearken to the vision given in today’s Introit (there is even a blessing for lamb from the Roman ritual that could be used). In any case, the Feast should be used as an occasion for solemnly affirming Christ as the King of our heart and of our country.”One might also read and reflect on Pius XI’s encyclical, Quas Primas, that established the day and indicates so well how Catholics should feel and act in recognition of the Social Kingship of Christ. But in addition to these suggestions, since Christ the King is indeed our “national day,” one might lift things from the celebration of Independence Day—such as fireworks and pageants—even as these were adapted from the King’s Birthday celebrations of colonial America.
     It was this concept of Catholics being all one nation, wherever they might be found, that led 18,000 young men from all over the world to enroll in the Pope’s army in 1860-70 to defend his dominions from the Sardinians. Similar motivations called forth the Crusaders from all over Europe, not just to the Holy Land but to the Reconquest of Spain as well. It also brought foreign volunteers to Maximilian’s Mexican army, and to Spain during the Third Carlist War of 1873 (on the Carlist side, that is), and to Franco’s army during the Spanish Civil War. We should treasure up their memories, as well as those of the peasants who rose to defend the Church in the British Isles and Northern Europe during the Reformation, and again in France, Italy, Spain, and Tyrol during the French Revolution. Statesmen like Ecuador’s Garcia Moreno, and soldiers like Germany’s von Stauffenberg should excite our admiration, for all were heroes of Christendom, our true earthly country.
Such is Romanism.

     But what of rebellion? (What of rebellion, indeed? In the best tradition of the cliffhangers, tune in next time for the thrilling conclusion to this article. —ed.)

Charles A. Coulombe was born to actors in New York City, but shanghaied to Hollywood by his parents at an early age. Their first landlord was the prophet Criswell. The confluence of show business, the weird, the Faith and contemporary insanity have molded him. He is the author of numerous books including a history of rum and a history of the popes. We eagerly await his volume on the history of rebellion.

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