The Election: Camelot II

The world seems to be agog over the election of 47 year old Barack Obama as president of the United States because, in addition to being a young, handsome, charismatic Senator from Illinois, and the son of an immigrant, he is also black.

According to the chattering classes, nothing this astounding has ever happened in the history of the Republic. They appear to believe that Obama’s election actually represents redemption for the nation’s past sins; and even beyond that, the whole world has changed forever and has been born again. This is quite a mantle to lay upon the shoulders of a man whom some regard as little more than a silver tongued politician from the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine. But, the truth is, his fans and supporters need to cool their jets because America already has seen something pretty similar, and not that long ago.

On November 8, 1960, 43 year old John F. Kennedy, a young, handsome and charismatic Senator from Massachusetts, and the grandson of an immigrant, was elected president of the United States in the closest election since 1916, winning 49.7% of the popular vote beating his Republican rival, Richard Nixon, by less than one tenth of a percent. But what really made his narrow victory remarkable was his religion because John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic elected to that office in a country that had always considered itself to be Protestant.

By 1960 the ashes from the bitter and bloody conflagration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries known as the Reformation may have grown cold in the United States, but they had not gone out. Until 1880, the American people had been overwhelmingly Protestant, and while official statistics are not available, reliable estimates place the religious preference of Americans at that time at about 80% Protestant. That all began to change after 1880 when a new wave of immigrants began to arrive in the United States, coming this time from central and southern Europe where the population was predominantly Roman Catholic. Prior to this time, most immigrants had arrived from northern and western Europe where the population tended to be Protestant, with the notable exception of Ireland, the ancestral home of the Kennedys.

Assimilating the new immigrants had been a rough and tumble affair and not always a pretty sight, but the process was completed, for the most part, in time for the presidential election of 1960. There had been three milestones along the way: the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of new immigrants allowed to enter in a year and heavily favored those from northern and western Europe, the Second Vatican Council, which was under way at the time of the election, and the presidential election of 1928, which pitted the Democratic nominee, New York governor, Al Smith, against the Republican nominee, Herbert Hoover.

Herbert Hoover won the election in a landslide by promising to implement “good government” policies that would continue the economic prosperity of the Roaring Twenties. Along with all this, he shrewdly threw a bone to his conservative supporters by promising continued support for prohibition even though public opinion had begun to turn against the noble experiment. But what really turned this campaign into a watershed, rather than just another “hum-drum” American presidential election, was that Hoover was a Quaker from California and Smith was a Catholic from New York City.

Hoover, whose immediate two predecessors had been wildly popular Republicans, had a “righteous wind” at his back and it’s doubtful any Democrat could have won, but the received wisdom at the time was that Smith’s religion had cost him and the Democrats dearly. If the truth be told, however, it may have been the other way around; because, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 victory, a majority of Catholics had drifted into the Democratic Party where they became a crucial block in the New Deal coalition. But, even with all that voting power, for the next thirty-two years it was an article of the American political faith that no Catholic could ever be elected president. All that would change when John Kennedy decided to run.

Kennedy figured that he had the Catholic vote wrapped up, but needed to attract Protestant voters throughout the heartland to win the election. Astutely, he campaigned early in heavily Protestant parts of the country where he did surprisingly well. In part, it may have been a sign of the times. Given the assimilation of the new immigrants following the 1924 Immigration Act coupled with the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, much of the old animus towards Catholics had begun to dissipate. Kennedy’s constant pledge that he “wouldn’t take orders from the Pope” sounded sincere and reassured many of the more skeptical voters. And in part, the Democrats ran a smooth as silk campaign that outperformed the disorganized and unfocused Republicans.

There were charges of voter fraud, and that the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine, controlled by Mayor Richard Daley, had delivered Illinois by delivering up the dead to vote for Kennedy. And if that’s not enough, Richard Nixon was a Quaker from California. In the years following that election, Catholic voters, put off by the growing permissive liberalism of the Democrats, began to drift into the Republican Party. And remember Joe Biden? Does anyone know or care about the religion of the man who’s only a heartbeat away from the presidency? He’s Catholic.