To understand social processes in history or today, how far is it useful to think in terms of phases, cycles, or curves of learning or growth? Professional historians have been distinctly cool in answering: “The individual emerges as being more highly conditioned by history than prima facie we had imagined”; there are group forces at work, and the study of these forces can tell us something of what individuals are and are not likely to do. So much can be admitted. But to trace a pattern in the longer processes and wider sweep of events is another matter, and a much more doubtful one.

The concepts with which man registers the reality around him and with which he does his thinking carry within them the record of their own history. Thus our ordinary ways of conceiving of the world which lies around and ahead of us, the world of the postnationalist age, seem inevitably to perpetuate the concept of nationalism. To get beyond nationalism, we commonly think of internationalism or postnationalism or transnationalism, conceiving of what is not nationalism in terms of nationalism itself. The difficulty here is of course unavoidable, for the next age will have emerged from nationalism, and our concept of it, too, must perpetuate the realities of history.

Appraisals of the pontificate of Pope Pius XII have pictured him as a democratic-minded person who did his best to modernize a tradition-bound, authoritarian-minded institution with not completely satisfactory results. In the words of one author, “Pacelli, a modern man set down in a dank maze of dusty dogma, musty custom, dark superstition, and moss-grown standpattism, may very well have done all that one man can do to let in light and air.” Comments of this type are, obviously, mixed compliments, the laudatory references to the late pope and his personal achievements being counterbalanced by less favorable epithets for the Church. It is not the purpose of this article to consider the alleged stand-pattism, dustiness, mustiness, or totalitarian-mindedness of the Church. Its object is to present a study of some of the political teaching of Pius XII, and to inquire whether any of his doctrines are of a modernizing nature and to what extent they “let in light and air.”

European socialists at the beginning of the twentieth century often expressed amazement at the fact that the United States, although one of the most advanced industrial nations in the world, also had one of the weakest socialist movements, as well as a trade union movement bent on avoiding any hard and fast political commitments. Yet, only a few short years before, it appeared as though the American working class had at last arrived at political maturity and was putting its potential voting strength to good advantage. In the elections of 1886, for example, labor tickets in the Northeast and Middle West polled substantial proportions of the vote and won some startling victories. In New York City, Henry George, running with labor and socialist backing, lost out in his race for mayor by only 22,000 votes, while in Chicago and Milwaukee a number of labor candidates swept to victory.

The title chosen for this paper1 is to some extent misleading. This is not to be another exercise in clearing the history of the 1930's of the myths that encrust it. Professor Toscano, Professor Wiskemann, and Sir Lewis Namier, more senior and more experienced hands than mine have already performed this task for the Axis. It would be presumptuous to attempt to improve on their work.

Racialism maintains that the hereditary character of physiological and psychological traits of groups of persons explains and consequently determines the historical and cultural fate of these groups. Nature predominates over nurture, whether nature is conceived in terms of biology or human spirit or in terms of both. The inherited characteristics of body and soul defy human manipulation to the extent that if you counteract the laws of racial uniqueness, the deterioration of group capacities will be inevitable. The effects of breaking the laws of racial causality attest to their validity; so do the results of the intentional effort to keep the race pure or improve it by opposite cross-breeding.