The Klan and the Catholics

BRIAN: In 1960, Americans elected the nation’s first Catholic president, but John F. Kennedy was not the first Catholic to run for the White House. That distinction belongs to Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1928.

ED: Unlike Kennedy, Smith didn’t go to Harvard. He didn’t go to high school. He dropped out of school to help support his family, working at the Fulton Fish Market in Brooklyn. While Al Smith lacked formal education, he was a gifted politician. Historian and Smith biographer Robert Slayton recounts a famous story from Smith’s time in the New York State legislature, where he served 1904 to 1915.

ROBERT SLAYTON: And he’s in the middle of a debate, and suddenly another legislator comes in and interrupts. He says, boys, boys, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Cornell just one the big boat race. And a legislator on the other side of the aisle says, well, it doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m an NYU man. And another one says, well, I’m U of Michigan.

And condescendingly they say, wow we hope we’re not putting you down or anything, Al. And he says, no problem. I’m an FFM man, myself. And they say, FFM? What’s that? What school is that? Fulton Fish Market. Now can we get on with the debate?

ED: So he’s kind of a salty guy, and, sort of, unabashed working class background then?

ROBERT SLAYTON: Exactly.

ED: And so how did he work his way up from that background into politics?

ROBERT SLAYTON: He started literally running errands for Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party machine in Manhattan. And he stays up every night reading every bill. He’s the only guy who actually reads every bill to come before them, and he becomes a master of the legislature as a result of that, totally self-taught.

ED: The Democratic Party nominated Al Smith for president 1928. He seemed like a logical choice to face then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Smith was a popular and highly effective governor of New York, serving four terms. Like many of his urban constituents, Smith was a practicing Catholic. His religious identity was never an issue when he ran for office in New York. But Slayton says once he began campaigning for president, it soon became apparent that his Catholicism did matter to voters outside of New York, especially the one group on the rise in the 1920s.

ROBERT SLAYTON: There are three Ku Klux Klans. The first is during Reconstruction, after 1865. The second is the 1920s, and the third is 1950s and ’60s to oppose the Civil Rights Movement.

The one in the 1920s is far and away the largest. There are millions and millions of American members. The state in the 1920s with the largest Klan population is Indiana. So this is really a national movement. The reason they react to Catholics is because that is the great threat. Immigrants are pouring in. And the nativists are going, my God, we are being flooded. They are terrified not of blacks. Blacks are dealt with by the horrendous Jim Crow laws. Immigrants are not being stopped. We damn well better stop them, and hooded sheets are the way to do it.

ED: And a lot of those immigrants are Catholic.

ROBERT SLAYTON: There are lot more Catholics than Jews, so they are at the top of the list. And you’ve got the perfect demon. He’s called the Pope.

ED: And Al Smith then comes to embody this whole constellation of things that the old America, as they would have thought themselves, the real America is frightened of.

ROBERT SLAYTON: Exactly. It was his faith. It was the fact that he was from the biggest and darkest city in the United States. He had a thick accent. We’re talking to you on what Al Smith referred to as the rah-dio. That was how he pronounced it. And when he was campaigning, and he would say, it’s a pleasure to talk to you here on the rah-dio. That didn’t go over in Nebraska. So there were just a whole bunch of ways he personified a whole change going on in America.

ED: So, with all this new American identity, what kind of response does he get?

ROBERT SLAYTON: Horrible. Absolutely horrible. In Daytona Beach, Florida, the school board had every child bring home a letter from the school. And you know impressive that is to the parents, oh my God, it’s a letter from the school. And it says, if Al Smith is elected president, you will not be able to have or read a Bible.

ED: They didn’t realize that Catholics also read the Bible?

ROBERT SLAYTON: Different Bible. Oh, big wars over that. Different Bible altogether. That’s not the Protestant Bible. Oh no, no, no.

ED: Oh, you mean the Bible.

ROBERT SLAYTON: Their Bible. You will not be allowed to have a Protestant Bible. Smith was actually quite naive. For all of his brilliance, his background was extremely limited. He doesn’t get much out of– forget New York– just lower Manhattan part of New York.

I tried to track down his impression of America. He was devoted to the Declaration of Independence and the US constitution. He thought everybody lived by those principles. And when he finds out otherwise, he’s very disillusioned. He becomes very, very bitter that America is not what he thought it was.

The episode, I think, that is a real turning point comes when he’s got a campaign stop in Oklahoma City. And he crosses the Oklahoma line, coming from the state just north of it, and they burn crosses where his train is coming through. And he tries to joke it off at first, but he gets into Oklahoma City, and he’s mad.

He’s actually– at this point he said, this is wrong. And he drops a speech, and he gives a different speech, and he says, basically, you can’t do this. You just can’t do this. You want to oppose me. You want to disagree with my positions. That’s fine. But you can’t just dismiss me because of my religion. That’s just not the American way. I will stand on my record. And you want to not agree with that, that’s fine. But you can’t just dismiss me or any other person just because of who they are. And that’s still a speech that speaks to America today.

ED: Do people rise to his defense?

ROBERT SLAYTON: No. No, he loses terribly. He loses terribly. Which is, it’s not quite a landslide on the level of the 1936 election, but he loses badly to Herbert Hoover, absolutely. And what is particularly bitter for Smith is that his beloved New York State actually votes for Hoover. That kills him.

ED: So what’s the moral of the story, do you think? What should we take away from the experience of the rise and near triumph of Al Smith?

ROBERT SLAYTON: That America is a great country but it doesn’t get that way quickly or easily. In the long run, though, the new America of any period cannot be denied. It just can’t be. It’s just the reality. The numbers are there, and we have a democracy, and sooner or later it’s going to out.

ED: It seems to be a long time, then, before the Democrats put forward another Catholic, in 1960 with John Kennedy. What sort of resonances do you see between the 1928 experience and the 1960 experience?

ROBERT SLAYTON: 1960 was very different, in part because of Al Smith, in part because of other factors. A couple of things about John Kennedy. First of all, he had one bona fide the Smith never did. And that was John Kennedy was a real war hero. We have all– I remember when he ran, we all read about PT 109.

ED: I remember that great movie.

ROBERT SLAYTON: Great movie. He really was a legitimate war hero. Secondly, because of Smith, John Kennedy knew it could be a problem. And unlike Smith, he was not going to ignore this.

There’s the famous meeting with the Baptists where he says, I know you have qualms about me being a Catholic. I want to assure you, it has nothing– my personal religion has nothing to do with my policies. It has nothing to do with how I plan to be president of the United States. So he expected it, he knew about it, he defused it as best he could beforehand. Smith never did anything like that, because he didn’t expect it to be a problem.

ED: So did the United States sort of need an Al Smith, somebody to break the glass, so that somebody else could follow and succeed?

ROBERT SLAYTON: Smith broke the glass for a lot of things, not just Catholics, but the whole notion of ethnics and city people being accepted as Americans, which even now, is not totally the case. But Smith, in a way, he’s the pioneer for what we’re facing now. He’s saying, yes, all these new voters are Americans.

[MUSIC – UNCLE DAVE MACON, “GOVERNOR AL SMITH”]

ED: Robert Slayton is a historian at Chapman University, and the author of Empire Statesman The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith.