MUGGED AND BUGGED

MUGGED: RACIAL DEMAGOGUERY FROM

THE SEVENTIES TO OBAMA (New York: Sentinel, 2012)

BY ANN COULTER

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            Flaherty’s White Girl Bleed a Lot is like reading raw material, recent newspaper reports of Black racist mobs and attacks on whites printed or shown in local media, and too often, with the racial nature of the crimes purposely obscured.  Coulter’s excellent book is similar, but significantly different.  Coulter has taken the raw material from the 1960s on, boiled down the essential stories of racial crimes and criminal hoaxes, used her flavorful language to emphasize the meat of the stories, and then she tops them with sprinkles of her sharp wit.

            In this book Coulter has performed a public service.  She assembles names and events that are fading from memory, spotlighting the injustices, the insanity, the viciousness, indeed, the monstrous anti-white racism and its supporters.  Coulter avoids that phrase, but it underlies her exposes of so many crimes against whites of the past few decades, crimes in which the media, academia, judges, juries, mayors, chiefs of police, have been all too complicit.  Yet, I am bugged, annoyed, by her distorted analysis of the role of the Republican Party on many of these issues.

            The strength of Mugged  is Coulter’s summary recounts of the cases of Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Larry Davis, Lemrick Nelson, Edmund Perry, Channon Christian and Christopher Newson, Tawana Brawley, the 1972 “incident” at Minister Farrakhan’s mosque in New York City, the left-wing minister Jim Jones, Rodney King, OJ, the Duke Lacrosse team “rapes,” Bernard Goetz, and more.

            From her book I learned that the only person convicted of a felony at the OJ trial was police detective Mark Fuhrman.  As Coulter summarized it: “In 1995, Americans discovered it was considered a graver offense to use ‘the N-word’ than to cut off a woman’s head.”(127)  Fuhrman was convicted of perjury, while OJ walked free – to the cheers of racist Blacks throughout the nation.  Coulter believes that the OJ verdict wakened whites to their appeasement of Black crime, and that whites changed their attitudes, shedding their white guilt feelings thereafter.(p. 15)  Unfortunately, I see little sign of the wakening Coulter writes of.  White guilt liberalism excuses the anti-white racist policies of a failed Black President, and white guilt helped elect and re-elect him.

            I also learned about the support of Black racist terror by a leading Democratic politician.  Once the Rodney King riots erupted, a white truck driver, Reginald Denny was pulled from his truck.  “As Henry Keith Watson stood on Denny’s neck, other black thugs repeatedly kicked and stomped him, smashed his head with a claw hammer, and threw a five-point oxygenator – stolen from another bloodied white truck driver – at his head.  In a final gruesome act. Damian ‘Football’ Williams picked up a slab of concrete and heaved it directly on Denny’s head…fracturing his skull in ninety-one places.  Williams then did a victory dance around Denny’s body,…(121)  Coulter reminds us of how Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters quickly defended the actions of Williams and the other Black racist monsters, demanding that all charges against them be dropped, trying to sway public opinion in their favor.  None of those shown in this atrocity on tape were convicted of a felony, except Williams, who was convicted of causing mayhem.  Once he completed his short sentence, Rep. Waters found a job for the concrete-throwing Williams.

            Coulter might have added a few items to her assortment of horrors – like the statistics showing crime dropped dramatically on New York City subways during the quarter after Bernard Goetz shot his poised attackers.  But overall, her thumbnail sketches of the atrocities of the past decades are vivid, concise, and stinging in their cumulated impact.

            Yet I have a major disagreement with Coulter in her analysis.  In her view Republicans are the great defenders of civil rights, and Democrats the champions of segregation and discrimination.  “The entire his of civil rights consists of Republicans battling Democrats to guarantee the constitutional rights of black people.”(1)  “Not all Democrats were   segregationists, but all segregationists were Democrats.”(1)  While there is much truth in her statements, the reality was more nuanced.

            Coulter demonstrates how liberal Democratic icons like Sen. William Fulbright (Ark.), Sen. Sam Ervin (NC), and Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1952 Sen. John Sparkman (Ala.), were all staunch segregationists.  Democratic Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus had even attended a left-wing school and would become the governor who tried to prevent integration of Central High in Little Rock.  It would take Republican President Eisenhower to send troops to integrate that school, the first time since Reconstruction that troops were sent South to defend the rights of Blacks.  On a personal note, I was born and raised in what was then the largest city of the South, New Orleans; I participated and was arrested in the city’s first lunch-counter sit-in in September 1960.  Responding to our arrest, the liberal Democratic Mayor, DeLesseps Morrison officially announced that the city would not tolerate any further incidents.  We soon became convicted felons.  In November, when the first two schools were integrated, the liberal mayor did nothing to prevent harassment of those few who sent their children past the angry mothers to the newly mixed schools.

            Though I took a stand against segregation, one must not take the present politically correct position that all segregation was evil.  One of the Longs was asked to improve the lot of Blacks in Louisiana.  He agreed to do so, but warned that they might not like his method of doing so.  At a hospital, the governor spotted a white nurse with a Black male patient.  Horrors!  Governor Long assured the press he would stop such practices by hiring Black nurses.  While segregation was separate but rarely equal, it was better than no services for Blacks, the condition that often preceded the era of segregation.  Moreover, there were good segregated Black schools, even during the era of Jim Crow.  I don’t recall reading of metal detectors at the segregated Black schools of yore.

            Some Republican sought outreach to the pro-segregationist whites in the South.  Indeed, these Republicans often fought the “old guard” who might have the support the Black and Tan (the Blacks) delegations to the national GOP conventions.  Theodore Roosevelt may have invited Booker Washington to dine in the White House, but we know TR was a highly educated man.  And he shared the scientific views of the era, which were quite racist.  When he challenged William Taft for the GOP nomination in 1912, he sought to replace some of the Black and Tans with whites.  When TR lost the nomination to Taft and established his Bull Moose Progressive Party, there was no outreach to Blacks, no planks in the new party’s platform about civil rights.  When Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the 3-way election, he demonstrated his progressive and scientific approach by segregating the federal civil service.  When Quaker Hoover ran against Catholic Smith in 1928, his inroads in the South were made by many who upheld segregation (and who probably hated Catholics more than Republicans).

            In the 1930s another party rose to champion the rights of Blacks – the Communist Party.  In 1931 in Alabama two white women accused several Blacks of raping them.  In the small town of Scottsboro they were quickly found guilty and 8 of 9 were sentenced to death.  Communist won control of the case and led a two-pronged defense: 1) obtain superb lawyers for the court-room proceedings, and 2) agitate about the case outside in Scottsboro and throughout the world.  The party and its front groups gathered signatures for the Scottsboro Boys from Mms. Sun Yat Sen (China), Albert Einstein (then German), Maxim Gorki (Soviet), Nobel laureate Romain Rolland (France), Johnstone Kenyatta (later to be better known as Jomo, leader of the Mau Mau in Africa), and in the US, Chief Red Cloud, Langston Hughes, et al.  The mother of two of the accused toured Europe giving speeches on behalf of her sons.  Not since the American Civil War had the issue of the treatment of Blacks in America received such international attention.  Suddenly intellectuals were concerned about 9 young Blacks accused of rape.  The case went to the US Supreme Court twice.

            Coulter may have exposed a lie by journalist Carl Bernstein about his teenage role as a civil rights activist.  On that, she may be correct.  But Bernstein in his autobiography mentions another incident that rings true.  He wrote that as a young boy he was with his mother as they engaged in a restaurant sit-in in Baltimore sponsored the Left-wing (pro-CP) Henry Wallace Progressive Party.  Even weakened in the Cold War era, the Communists were still demonstrating for the rights of Black people.

            To prevent a Black March on Washington during WWII, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt appointed an FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Commission) with limited power to investigate racial discrimination in defense industries.  States began to consider having their own FEPC laws and committees.  The first to consider such a law was New York, a state then controlled by Republicans.  While most legislative Democrats supported the measure, many Republicans opposed, fearing it would result in the Hitlerian reign of racial and religious quotas.  It was only with the strong support of the propose law by Republican Governor Thomas Dewey that New York won its FEPC.  In other northern and western states the Democrats were more favorable to the legislation, especially with fines for discrimination.  In various states the GOP was less likely to support the proposals, and would stall, or if they must pass, make them one of negotiations rather than punishment for offending employers.  In California, it was submitted to a popular referendum; those supporting FEPC were the liberal Democrats and the Communists; opposed the anti-Communist Republicans.  FEPC lost heavily.  Republican Governor Earl Warren chose not to push the issue after the people had spoken.

            In 1948 despite Republican Gov. Dewey’s strong stand on FEPC and equal rights, most of the Black vote went for Democrat Truman.  For the first time a President spoke before the NAACP as Truman made efforts to win the Black vote.  When W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP, broke ranks and openly endorsed the Henry Wallace Progressive Party, he was fired by the NAACP.  Thereafter, the NAACP would basically become a Democratic Party front group.  After Truman won the election, his Attorney General had Du Bois arrested as a foreign agent.  One of Du Bois’s defense attorneys was a Black Republican from Mississippi.

            In 1948 the Henry Wallace campaign was an earlier version of the civil rights movement.  Wallace refused to speak at segregated facilities, and he had to fend off tomatoes and other objects.  His campaign manager, Paul Robeson visited Progressives in Louisiana, and the landlady wanted immediate eviction.  (Officials were lenient, and gave them till the end of the month).  Bull Connor in Birmingham arrested Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho, who was running for VP on the Wallace ticket.  Various supporters in the South of Henry Wallace will turn up later in the official version of the “civil rights movement.”  But under Truman and the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, those groups that supported Henry Wallace: the Civil Rights Congress, the National Negro Congress, the Council on African Affairs, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (the original snick) were all listed and collapsed by the mid-1950s.

            Coulter is so determined to distance the GOP from the Dixiecrats that she distorts.  In 1952 Republican Eisenhower’s campaign sponsored a half hour campaign program on national television.  It was carried throughout the nation –except in some southern states where Democratic Governor Robert Kennon and two other governors gave reason for them supporting Eisenhower.  (I saw only the southern version, but I suspect the northern ad emphasized different points.)  In 1952 the county that gave the highest percentage of its vote to the Republicans, about 95%, was Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.  This parish was dominated by Judge Leander Perez, a Dixiecrat.  When singer Ted Lewis played the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blue Room in New Orleans, Perez was in the audience.  As Lewis sang his “Me and My Shadow” with his Black side-kick, Perez purposely broke glasses where they were soft-shoeing, so the Black cut his foot.  The Judge had a certain reputation.  Much later, in spring 1969 Perez died and two young Blacks in that parish went to a store to purchase liquor.  They informed the owner they were going to celebrate the death of the Judge.  They were arrested and sentenced to 6-month’s hard labor.  Because Louisiana kept a States’ Rights Party on the ballot, I doubt if he supported Nixon in 1960 or 1968.

            Coulter seems embarrassed by Goldwater, who clearly did succeed in winning the Dixiecrat vote and their electoral votes when he ran for president in 1964.  Goldwater was one of the few Republicans who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Yet, before the election in the fall, the Democrats in Louisiana purchased a full-page in local newspapers urging readers to vote for Lyndon Johnson.  It warned that Goldwater had supported FEPC in Arizona, and civil rights there also.  Consider too, that Lyndon was a fellow Southerner who understood “our” way of life.  Though totally opposed to Goldwater in 1964, I did attend his massive rally at Tulane Stadium that fall.  The crowd was excited – they wanted to hear him condemn the recently passed Civil Rights Act.  They were utterly disappointed.  Goldwater spoke about government contracts with TFX planes and other more distant issues.  The crowd wanted to explosively cheer him, but Goldwater gave them no chance.  He avoided the race issue.  Goldwater did carry Louisiana and the other Dixiecrat states, but he did not embrace the Dixiecrat cause.

            Then, there is the question of Nixon.  Coulter writes: “There was never a period…when race discrimination was a Republican policy, except maybe briefly when Nixon imposed affirmative-action on the building trades doing business with the government in the 1960s, but they deserved it.  (A policy for which LBJ is showered with praise for thinking about – but never actually implementing.)” (173)

            What LBJ thought about implementing was halted because it was the end of Lyndon’s term in 1968 and Democrat Humphrey had lost the election to Republican Nixon.  Everyone assumed that the “Philadelphia Plan” of quotas for construction unions was dead because of the election.  The unexpected occurred when Nixon and his Sec. of Labor George Schultz revived and then implemented the Philadelphia Plan.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had made quotas and hiring for racial balance illegal.  Nixon and Schultz ignored this and demanded quotas by not calling them such; they were goals and timetables.  When the issue came before Congress, it appeared as if Nixon would lose on the issue.  He sent emissaries to the NAACP requesting its help.  While many Democrats and some Republicans opposed, Nixon’s quota program squeaked past on a narrow vote.

            Nixon then issued executive orders making quota-based affirmative action government policy in all federal agencies – not just Philadelphia building trades.  The notion of quota-justice had been rejected by most Americans.  It was clearly contrary to the spirit and text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  It was contrary to the dream bespoke by Martin Luther King at the 1963 March on Washington – when his children would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.  Yet, quotas first became national policy under Republican Richard Nixon.

            Of course, Nixon could not transform America alone.  The EEOC had been working toward quotas for several years.  Many courts opposed this un-American, racist concept.  But when the issue finally reached the US Supreme Court under the new Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, the Civil Rights Act was turned on its head.  Its clear language banning quotas and hiring for racial balance became requirement for racial balance and quotas by other names.  As late as 2003 when affirmative action again reached the US Supreme Court in major cases, it was Republican Reagan appointee, Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the decision for the majority of the court upholding the use of race in effect to achieve quota-based affirmative action.

            And even before Burger, we had the Warren Court!  Earl Warren, California official most responsible for the round-up of Japanese during WWII (Republicans are always for civil rights??), Earl Warren, the man who would be VP when Gov. Dewey won the Presidency in 1948, Gov. Warren would have a career change with Dewey’s defeat.   President Eisenhower appointed him Chief Justice in 1953 and the Warren Court proceeded to follow many ideas on crime that Coulter decries.  The alleged criminal would soon have more rights with the Warren Court’s rulings.  And later Warren gave his presence to the Warren Report on the murder of President Kennedy.  I have written elsewhere criticizing various aspects of that report.  (Indeed, the first book in which I was mentioned was vol. 26 of the findings, but the index was so poorly done, I had no idea of that until the mid-70s.  Mark Lane may have been a Left-winger, but he provided access to information covered up by the government.)

            Coulter rightly condemns the Kerner Report of 1969 on the riots of the late 1960s in America.  It “decided that instead of punishing black rioters, we should hear them out and lavish black neighborhoods with…government programs.”(256)  She notes that part of the Kerner Report was written by New York City Mayor John Lindsay.  Lindsay would not switch to the Democratic Party until 1971, so he was still nominally a Republican when he wrote those views.  Lindsay was a liberal, and elected for his second term as mayor, not on the Republican ticket, but only on the Liberal line.  Still, he was a Republican and a liberal.

            In many ways Nixon was also a Republican and a liberal.  EPA, OSHA, and other liberal legislation came under Nixon’s watch.  Most importantly for this paper, Nixon’s racial quota policy was expanded to Hispanics, women, this group and that, and the quota commissars entered the personnel offices of every government agency and then every private corporation.  No longer were people hired and promoted according to merit, it was by quota, for goals and time tables, or now, for diversity.  No longer hire the best qualified, but the “basically” qualified, or even the unqualified to fill the quota and avoid heavy government imposed fines if the government finds lack of racial balance in the workplace.  Individual merit no longer counts; count only by race and gender.

            Under Republican President Reagan some urged him to rescind with his pen the executive orders requiring affirmative action.  Reagan did not do so.  Under Reagan when employment tests were administered, knowing Blacks and Hispanics could not perform as well as whites, but determined to have racial balance, Hispanics were granted an extra 10% on the exams; Black were granted even more.  Employers were not informed about the cheating done by Reagan’s government to insure hiring of lesser qualified Blacks and Hispanics.

            Reagan never rescinded the affirmative action executive order.  Neither did Bush I, who even signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, providing the first legal justification for quotas.  Affirmative action continued under Clinton and Bush II.

            Interestingly, in the 2012 Presidential campaign President Obama often declared, “It is our policy to have all the people play by the same rules.  That is just.  That is fair.”  In reality, that is the last thing Obama wants.  Obama supports the double standards of quotas and affirmative action.  His Administration seeks to expand it, even suing school districts which suspend and expel a higher percentage of Black student than whites (though they never want to know if the Blacks are a higher percentage disrupting classes, cursing, fighting, etc.).  The Left wants justice though quotas.  Yet, in most cases, quotas are inherently unjust.

            What was interesting in the campaign is that Republican Romney never called Obama out on this issue.  What do you mean, we all play by the same rules when Blacks with lower scores than whites are admitted to university, granted scholarships, given jobs, promoted, etc.?  Affirmative action is institutionalized to prevent us from playing by the same rules.  It is cheating on behalf of pet groups.  It is legalized institutional racism against whites.  It became national policy under Republican Nixon and has continued under every Republican President since – and the Democrats too.

            With the quota mentality, one has a warped view of justice.  Why is the percentage of Blacks in jail so much higher than whites?  They should be out.  They should be given all the liberal welfare Coulter condemns.  But this is the result of Republican like Warren, Burger, Nixon, Schultz, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Romney.  Coulter’s paragraph on Nixon and the building trades distorts the role of the GOP in institutionalizing anti-white racism, which then amplifies to justify anti-white crime.

            Mugged is a good book, but Coulter’s analysis of the GOP is warped.                     

THE REPUBLICANS, PROTESTANTS, AND CHANGE IN AMERICA By Hugh Murray

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.