Cycloptichorn wrote:unless Catholicism was a hell of a lot more unpopular than it is today back then.
It most certainly was.
Today, Catholics are pretty much as accepted as Protestants. But this was not true in previous times. It was a true breakthrough when JFK became the first Catholic president of the US ever, and it was at the time still a serious risk for a party to nominate a Catholic, rather than a WASP.
The first time a major party even dared to do so was in 1928, when the Democrats (again the first to break precedents of bigotry) nominated Al Smith. He was soundly defeated by Herbert Hoover (58% to 40%), in a campaign with a generous share of Catholic-bashing. A pity - we all know how the Hoover presidency worked out..
Wait, let me look up some online source rather than just go on my memory. Here:
Wikipedia summarily explains how the 1928 elections were in fact a watershed of sorts. Some fourty years before the great electoral change in which the South finally shifted from Dem to Rep, it was the decision to put up a Catholic that first lost the Dems several Southern states. It also had them losing significantly in rural areas, where Smith's opposition to Prohibition didnt go down too well either, while it had them pick up the then still traditionally Republican Massachusetts and win a majority of large cities for the first time, thanks to the mobilisation of Catholic urban immigrants. All precedents for how the political landscape was to change soon, and drastically.
The online edition of
Edmund A. Moore; A Catholic Runs for President: The Campaign of 1928 from 1956 (link via Wikipedia) looks like it has lots of juicy details, though unfortunately you can only read the first page of each chapter without taking out a trial subscription. But that's enough to get this:
Quote:For millions of Democrats in the more rural parts of the United States, however, harmony and a possible Democratic victory would be a dreadful thing if the price were victory for "Al (cohol)" Smith and his Tammany, Catholic, liquor, New York crowd, to use some of the milder characterizations. In the South most Democratic leaders opposed Smith's nomination. In this they were in harmony with the collective moral judgment of the dry, Protestant church members
And, for some couleur locale:
Quote:CHAPTER SIX Anti-Catholicism at Flood Stage
...the relations between Catholics and Protestants in this country are a scandal and an offense against Christian charity. 1
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"...Watch the trains!" The Pope may arrive in person, perhaps on the "north-bound train tomorrow!" So cried a Klansman to a crowd at North Manchester, Indiana. The next day's "north-bound" was met by "some fifteen hundred persons." One hapless passenger looking rather like a cleric had great difficulty in persuading the assembled multitude that he was not in fact the Pope. It is not important whether the details of this episode can be verified. There is no reason to impeach its narrator's conclusion that prejudices which made such Klan appeals politically profitable were "rampant in fully a tenth of Indiana's white, Gentile, Protestant native-born people." Though the Klan's political hold on Indiana was exceeded nowhere, Hoosiers were not altogether different from other Americans.
