Watching the GOP Presidential debate on CNN tonight (26 Jan. 2012) I was suddenly struck by the change in the Republican Party and also the US. The Republican Party was established in the 1850s as a party opposed to slavery (and in some cases, opposed to the slaves too). To some extent it grew out of the Whig Party, and then the Know-Nothing or American Party, which tended to be anti-Catholic. The Republican Party was basically the party of Northern Protestants, and perhaps some of the small Northern Black population.
In the South, the Republican Party did not exist. Lincoln did not receive a single recorded vote from the South in the Presidential election of 1860. Neither slaves nor free Blacks could vote. In the South there were few Catholics – Louisiana being the exception; and fewer Jews, though Louisiana elected to the national Senate the first Jewish member, Judah Benjamin.
While war against the South was popular in some areas of the North, not all shared the hostility to slavery. New York City had a large Catholic population, many of whom were poor Irish who did not relish fighting in a war to free Blacks who might then compete with them for the same lowly jobs if slavery were abolished. When the Lincoln Administration resorted to conscription to fill army ranks, an anti-draft riot was sparked in New York, with many blaming Blacks for the draft and the war; the angry mob even burned a Black orphanage. The Democrats retained many Catholics in their ranks. Some even suggested that New York City also secede from the Union, for then none would be drafted. Meanwhile, General Grant’s order expelling Jews from his theater of war also tended to push Jews into the Democratic Party. By contrast, in the South, Pres. Davis’ Cabinet member Judah Benjamin was sometimes referred to as “the brains of the Confederacy.”
After the defeat of the Confederacy, the victorious Northern Republicans feared that as the Southern States were restored into the Union, they would reelect their old rebel leaders, and indeed, some of the leaders of the rebellion now sought their old seats in the national Congress. For the Republicans, it became imperative to allow Blacks to vote in the South so the anti-rebel party, the Republicans might stand a chance. Almost all the Blacks were Protestants, except in Louisiana, and they voted the Republican ticket. The Democrats demonstrated where they stood by making their national campaign song , “We Are the White Man’s Party.”
By the 1870s the pattern was developed: generally in the South, Blacks (mainly Protestant) voted Republican, and whites (also mainly Protestant) voted Democrat. By 1900, however, few Blacks in the South were still permitted to vote.
In the North, the Republican Party remained the party of Protestants. New immigrants, often Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, German, Hungarian, etc., might end in the Democratic fold, which also had some Protestants.
The racist views of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson tended to reduce even more the role of Blacks in the US political sphere. Entry into WWI roused new hatreds: of the Hun, the Red, the slacker, the Kraut, the radical. A new Puritanism seemed to pervade both parties. Sacrifice for the war! And the drunken German-Americans and the anti-British Irish-Americans had to be punished. Their beer gardens and saloons would vanish. Victory in WWI and then Prohibition. The Republicans could then enjoy the prosperity of the Harding- Coolidge years. In 1928 the Democrats rejected their KuKlux candidate, whose appeal was not limited to the South, and spit at their white robes by nominating New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic. While Smith carried Massachusetts and Rhode Island, he lost many states of what had been the “solid South” to Republican Herbert Hoover, the humanitarian, Quaker, engineer who had organized relief to starving people in Europe.
The Great Depression and massive unemployment altered the image of Hoover, and another New York Governor was chosen by the Democrats in 1932, the aristocratic Franklin Roosevelt. Simultaneously, Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor in Germany. As the 1930s wore on, foreign policy grew in importance. Many progressive Republicans, aware of how the media had fooled Americans into believing anti-German atrocity propaganda in 1914, were determined not to be duped into another foreign war. Roosevelt, though speaking of peace, was determined to support Britain, as had been Wilson before him. American Jews were moving even more solidly into the Democratic fold (except 1939-41) when some were neutral in the anti-imperialist war against Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium, conducted by Germany with its ally, the USSR. Both Col. Charles Lindburgh and Paul Robeson could try to keep America out of war in 1940. America First had a powerful ring in much of middle America. Many German-. Italian-, Irisn- and other Americans began to question their allegiance to the Democrats. But others did not like what they saw on Movietone News in the theaters – the rape of Nanking, the marching German armies into Austria, Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, and finally into Poland. FDR was conducting a small, undeclared war against Germany, when the Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Overnight, the America First organization disbanded. Most Americans went along with the war; some with more enthusiasm than others.
With victory against the Axis and imperial Japan, America suddenly faced a new threat – the Soviet Union. Now German-Americans were determined to show how patriotic they were, and became active anti-Communist Republicans. Meanwhile, many Jews, who had been delighted by the effort to smite Nazism, were less enthusiastic about the new crusade. Indeed, some were members of the main anti-fascist movement as they saw it, and they joined the Communist Party. It was not only the Rosenbergs who were Jewish and who sent American atomic secrets to the Soviets. For example, the espionage of physicist Theodore Hall, who worked on the Manhattan Project, was not discovered until the 1990s. Hall was born Theodore Holtzberg.
By the 1950s it was clear that Republicans could once again construct a winning majority. The Democrats were on the defensive, and the far Left was crumbling as its members, its unions, its fraternal organization, were blacklisted and isolated.
But in the mid-1950s the initial steps were taken to transform America. In part, it was a revolution from above; in part, from below. From above, the US sought to take its place in the sun, not in the manner of Pres. McKinley, going to war against Spain in the Philippines “to Christianize them,” (they were mainly Roman Catholics), but to bring them freedom and democracy. In the Cold War, the Communists could readily spotlight the hypocrisy of Americans who spoke of freedom, while denying the vote to Blacks in the South, segregating them into separate schools and other institutions. Aware of how segregation damaged the image of America as freedom’s bulwark, there was demand for change, from above. In 1948 Pres. Truman ordered the integration of the armed services, and in 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools. From below, in 1955 Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a public bus to a white man, and the Montgomery bus boycott ensued. From this boycott Rev. Martin Luther King emerged as a leader. In 1960 the sit-in began, in 1961 the Freedom Rides, in 1964 Mississippi’s Freedom Summer. Change was demanded from above and below.
With the integration struggle in the South, over time white Protestants often abandoned the Democratic Party for the Republicans. And the few Blacks who had been voting, were now suddenly swept up with the large numbers of new Black voters into the Democratic Party. Both Blacks and whites remained mostly Protestant, but now they were switching parties.
Northern Blacks had often been Democrats since the 1920s, but the percentage voting Democrat reached landslide proportions. Most were Protestants. With Black demonstrations of the early 1960s, and then riots, and the rise in crime, and anti-white racism, many ethnics groups in the North began to seek refuge in the Republican Party. The change in immigration laws in the 1960s also led to large-scale numbers from Latin nations, and many of them joined the Democratic coalition. Rural white America, shrinking in influence, remained a mainstay of the Republicans.
In 1952 Republicans nominated Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who had been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, but who had left that church. He joined the Presbyterians when elected President. His opponent, Democrat Adlai Stevenson, had been a Unitarian. The Democrats nominated Catholic John Kennedy for President in 1960, and he won, and he won even in many southern states. In 1984 the Democrats nominated Walter Mondale for President and a Catholic woman, Geraldine Ferraro, for Vice-President. In 1988 the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, was Greek Orthodox, and his wife Kitty was Jewish. The Bush family included in-laws who came from a wealthy Mexican family. In 2000 the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, was a Jew. In 2008 the Republicans chose Sarah Palin, a woman for the #2 place on the ticket; the Democrats nominated Barack Hussein Obama, for President. Obama had a foster father who was a Muslim, and he himself was Black.
Generally, the Republican Party was the Protestant party in the US. Some may have been on the edge, like Quakers Hoover and Nixon, or a Unitarian like Taft, but overall it was the Protestant Party. Protestants are still, barely, the majority religion in the US.
In the Republican debate prior to the South Carolina GOP primary in January 2012, four candidates stood on the stage – Rick Santorum, a dedicated Roman Catholic who has had links to the extreme Opus Dei organization; Newt Gingrich, a convert to Roman Catholicism; Mitt Romney, a Mormon; and Ron Paul, a Baptist, is the only Protestant. Yet, Paul is the least likely to win the Republican nomination.
Perhaps more telling in the illustrating change in America – the US Supreme Court is compose of nine members. Today, six are Roman Catholics and three are Jews. The majority religion is not at all represented on the highest court in the land.
