Report of the County Chairman Page 9

  “Curiously enough your letter asking me to see what I could do to persuade Jack Kennedy to soft-pedal the religious issue was one of two I received that day from men high in the councils of the Republican party, and from what I can see here in Bucks County, we would all be wise to get both parties off this Thirty-Years’-War kick. Right now it looks to lots of us as if it were going to hurt the Republicans grievously, because people around here credit them with having launched the whole affair and then crying quits when the going got rough. Whether that reflects the truth or not I cannot say, but it does seem to me that after the Peale-Poling fiasco, and the miserable manner in which those Republican apologists have tried to climb down, the Republicans can only lose votes from here on in, and I would not like to see our side win merely because of the old Rum-Romanism-Rebellion error which once before won us an election.”

  So far I have written as if the religious prejudices of our county were restricted to the rural northern areas, but that is not true and I must now correct faulty impressions. Much of the most virulent religious progaganda circulated only in the industrial areas of the southern end, but here its impact was fortunately diminished by the Fair Campaign Practices Committee, which had been called into being partially as a result of the racial fires that had some years before ravaged this area.

  The committee was headed by an unusual young man, John J. Malloy, who taught philosophy at La Salle, a Catholic college in Philadelphia. I suppose that Professor Malloy was a Democrat, but he was energetically supported by Republican associates who worked to keep our election free from the grosser forms of abuse. I say that Malloy was unusual because at first glance he was a strait-laced, serious young student who weighed his words cautiously and seemed even a little ponderous; but as any evening wore on he displayed a riotous sense of humor, and one of the reasons why we were able to keep the religious fury under some kind of control was that Professor Malloy could always be counted upon to report in detail his latest outrageous experience.

  “We were called into Bristol the other day to check on a woman who was peddling the worst pamphlet we’ve seen so far. The cover showed ‘Protestant’ on a medieval rack, his arms broken, fire applied to his feet, and his intestines being unrolled onto a wheel. Smiling evilly was a mitred figure called ‘Catholic.’ The text was worse than the illustration and proved that positively hellish things would happen if anyone dared to vote for Kennedy.

  “Our problem was, ‘How can we get copies of the pamphlet from the woman herself?’ I solved it by dressing inconspicuously and finding out where she was peddling the stuff. I sidled up and asked, ‘You got any more of those Catholic books?’ She smiled warmly and said, ‘Take one. It may save our nation.’ When I had it safely in my hands I said, ‘Madam, I’m chairman of the Fair Campaign Practices Committee, and we’re trying to see that this is a clean election.’

  “The woman grabbed me by the arm and said eagerly, ‘You’re doing a wonderful job, young man. Keep it up. The one thing we all want is a good clean election.’

  “I told her, ‘You don’t seem to understand. We want to see religion kept out of politics.’

  “Again she grabbed me enthusiastically and said, ‘So do I! That’s why I can’t understand how these damned Catholics have the nerve to run one of their men for President.’ ”

  A more serious case developed when a distraught woman came to Malloy’s headquarters and said, “I need guidance. My husband and I are fighting over the election.’ Professor Malloy explained, “We’re not allowed to go into family problems, or political ones either. My assistant here likes one of the candidates and I like the other, but we work together harmoniously. You and your husband ought …”

  “You don’t understand,” the woman said. “My minister warned us in church last Sunday that if we voted for John Kennedy we would live to see the day when Protestants were crucified in Levittown shopping center. And my husband says that if I vote for Nixon we’ll all starve. What am I going to do?”

  The men in the office laughed and said, “Under the circumstances, you better just not vote.”

  “But I have to,” she said. “I’m already registered.”

  Malloy and his assistant again laughed at the irrational story, then asked out of curiosity, “Who told you about Protestants’ being crucified?”

  “Our minister,” she repeated firmly.

  “You certainly didn’t hear any minister say that,” Malloy pressed.

  “In his sermon,” the woman insisted. “Last Sunday.”

  She took Malloy to the parsonage, where she introduced him to a perfectly normal, college-educated clergyman of one of the great standard sects. When the woman had left, Malloy asked the clergyman, “Certainly, Reverend, you didn’t tell your congregation that if John Kennedy is elected President, Protestants will be crucified in Levittown plaza.”

  “Of course I did,” the clergyman replied.

  “You don’t believe it, do you?” Malloy probed.

  “Why, of course. It says so right here in the book,” and the minister produced a real horror, composed of old wood cuts, lurid text, and quotations from long-forgotten Catholic prelates. It was a terrifying document, which assured its readers that rack and pinion were just around the corner waiting to be presided over by fat and ghoulish priests who were lusting for Protestant blood.

  “Now really, Reverend,” Malloy pleaded, “you can’t believe this nonsense.”

  “It all happened,” the minister argued.

  “Yes, but this incident took place in 1350 and this one in the 1500’s,” Malloy pointed out. “You’re not using those events as evidence for today, are you?”

  “It happened,” the minister repeated stubbornly. “I preach only the truth.”

  “Do you remember that it was the Protestant church that hanged the witches in America? Do you suppose that if Nixon is elected, the Protestants will hang witches in Levittown plaza?”

  The minister pondered this for a moment, then said brightly, “Ah yes, but the Protestants didn’t hang their people for political reasons.” To the end of the campaign, this minister continued preaching in his weekly sermons that if John Kennedy were elected, there would be public crucifixions throughout Bucks County, and there was no legal agency that could stop him.

  Malloy says, “But the big day in our committee’s history came when one of our Republican members rushed in triumphantly and threw a handbill down on my desk. ‘Hooray!’ he shouted. ‘Now we’ve caught the Democrats doing it too!’ The offensive handbill, crudely printed by some means that was never determined, said simply, ‘Nix on Nixon. He’s a Quaker.’ And a phrase was added to imply that all Quakers were communists. The handbill had been widely distributed and was a clear infraction of federal law in that it bore no identification of its source.

  “We never did find out who issued it,” Malloy reported. “And of all the hate literature we saw in this campaign, this was the only piece that broke any law. All the rest bore some indication of origin and were thus legal.”

  The file of filthy material that Malloy assembled is shocking. It had enormous circulation and apparently a good deal of influence. The reason its poison was not even more effective was that Malloy and his people tracked down all individuals who were distributing it in the lower end of the county and tried to dissuade them from doing so. Even more important, Malloy, instead of ranting about the menacing stuff, laughed at it, and in the end he had all of us laughing at it, too.

  During the campaign I was much impressed by the sequence of newspaper stories seeking to prove that in the 1928 campaign the religious issue had not played a major role in the defeat of Al Smith. These writers argued that no Democrat could have defeated Hoover in 1928, that Smith’s stand on Prohibition condemned him to certain defeat, and that the man’s uncouth habits made him totally unpalatable. Of the major reasons for his loss, argued these pundits, his religion was the least important.

  Challenged by these articles, I kept careful record of the
impact of religion on the election in my county, and in the last chapter I shall record my conclusions. Here I need only say that the religious issue permeated every meeting I conducted. It influenced Republicans and Democrats alike. Ministers preached politics publicly and churches distributed the most vicious electioneering materials. Practically no one I met escaped the pressure of this overriding problem and, in my county at least, both parties were ultimately forced to make their major calculations with the religious question a foremost consideration. From what I could see, no man among us was clever enough to have judged accurately at the beginning what the ultimate effect of the religious question was going to be.

  I can, however, recall what I thought from week to week, because I spent long hours arguing the question both in private meetings and in public sessions, and the record of my confusion probably reflects the national norm.

  Before any of the primaries, I judged that the religious question would not be too important and that the bigots on one fringe would exactly counterbalance the bigots on the other. After the Wisconsin primary I thought there was some evidence that in a national election Kennedy might be helped slightly by an unusually large Catholic vote. After the West Virginia primary I was convinced that the religious question had been magnified out of proportion, a position which I held almost into September.

  Just before the campaign began, my talks with Miss Omwake and Mrs. Dale showed me how wrong my earlier calculations had been; but even so, when the flood of anti-Catholic literature began to reach my desk, I was unprepared for its magnitude and virulence. I then found that hundreds of Democrats in Bucks County, if not thousands, were going to vote against Kennedy, and for a while I thought this trend, magnified across the nation, would lose us the election.

  The Peale-Poling fiasco proved that there were counter-measures that could be taken and that in the long run the religious issue might hurt the Republicans more than the Democrats. In October, talks I had with leaders in other states made me think that the large cities were going to turn in unusually high Democratic majorities partially because the Catholics had been made fighting mad.

  In the first week of November, as I shall explain later, I was repelled by the religious bigotry I saw operating in one part of the United States far from my own county, and for a while I feared that it might cost Kennedy the election. No one could underestimate the effect of the religious hatred that I experienced that night.

  But on the evening before the election I thought that Senator Kennedy’s utilization of the television film taken of his confrontation with the Baptist ministers in Texas was superb electioneering. Somehow those few feet of film wrapped up the whole religious issue and enabled the Democrats to salvage at least something from the wreckage.

  If, thirty years from now, all of this can be explained away in clever articles which prove that religion played no significant role in the 1960 election, it seems to me that the writers of that age will have to blind themselves to what actually happened.

  The 1960 campaign began poorly for the Democrats. The conspicuous advantages with which Vice President Nixon started as a result of the Chicago convention grew when the rump session of Congress flatly rejected most of the Democratic program. My friends all considered the Democratic setback rather more seriously than I did. They pointed out that the Republicans could cry to the nation, “See! Johnson was in control of the Senate and Rayburn of the House, yet Kennedy was able to accomplish nothing. It proves he’s only a boy.” They felt that these charges would be damaging.

  I saw it rather differently. I saw John Kennedy battling for some very progressive legislation. I saw him making speeches that looked fine on the record. And I saw him frustrated at every move by the threat of a Republican Presidential veto. It seemed to me that it was he, and not Nixon, who was making points to be used in the forthcoming campaign. It is true that he did not stand forth as a successful leader, and it is true that he was defeated on each major point, often by Democratic votes, but he did appear as a gallant fighter and after the session ended no one could be in doubt as to where he stood. I can’t speak for the other Democratic county chairmen, but I am certain that insofar as I was concerned, he made my job infinitely easier. After the Congressional showing I was able to use as my constant peroration: “The only important difference between these two good men is this. If you want better health bills, vote for Kennedy. He has proved that he will recommend such bills to Congress and that he will sign them when they’re passed. If you don’t want health measures, vote for the Republicans. They’ve proved that they’ll veto them.” Down the long list of necessary legislative measures I went, one by one, and in every instance there was on the record the fact that John Kennedy favored such bills, plus the supposition that he would sign them if President, and there was likewise the record and the supposition that a Republican President would veto them. I believe that such arguments won many undecided voters to the Democratic column.

  Since the structure of my county made it inevitable that the majority of people in any audience I addressed would have to be Republicans, it was only sensible for me to avoid attacking their candidate. Again and again I admitted that Richard Nixon was a good man, that people who really hated the Catholic Church had a right to vote Republican, that the slippage in our foreign reputation started ten or twelve years ago and was thus not chargeable only to the Eisenhower regime, and that if the President were free to run again, he would surely be reëlected. Of course, I was entitled to needle the opposition on this last point, always explaining that only the petty vengeance of men who hated Roosevelt had produced the law that prohibited President Eisenhower from seeking and winning a third term. “But since we can’t have Mr. Eisenhower, we are forced to choose between two younger men, and between these two I really think almost every sensible criterion favors Senator Kennedy.” When pressed about his lack of experience as contrasted to Richard Nixon’s, I always replied, “Senator Kennedy has had more experience in Congress than Abraham Lincoln had when he was elected. And fourteen years more than General Eisenhower had when he was made President.” I am not sure that these were the best answers, but they were the best I could think of.

  From the first day of September until Election Day I made no fewer than three speeches every day. I toured my county from one end to another, and often I limped at nine or ten o’clock at night into some cold hall where eight Democrats were gathered. At times it seemed foolish to be wasting my energies in this fruitless task, but the next night I would report to another hall where nine hundred people were waiting, most of them Republicans, eager to talk politics, and I would sit very quiet as I was being introduced, hoping that I might have something fresh to say.

  I don’t believe that one should write about American politics until he has had this humbling experience of actually beating the backwoods for votes, for in pursuing people one comes face to face with the ultimate problems of American life. Believe me, the people I met knew what questions they wanted answered, and in the course of my travels I suppose I was asked about every single plank in the Democratic platform. I had started out in September not knowing very much about it; by November, I was a walking expert.

  As the weeks rolled by, with twenty and sometimes thirty meetings each week, I fell into a kind of stupor built upon unrolling highways down which my car traveled of its own accord, cold dinners at which I arrived late, faces bursting with probing queries and question-and-answer periods that sometimes extended for three hours. In the mornings my wife and I conducted coffee hours, at which all were invited to discuss the campaign; and dulled as my senses were, I always seemed to revive whenever we could get together a handful of people who really wanted to exchange ideas.

  Up and down the county I tried to be rock-bottom honest in my replies. I confessed always how close I thought the popular vote would be; there must be many thousands of people in eastern Pennsylvania who heard me argue, “We are not looking for mass conversions here. We do not expect at the end of this mee
ting that Nixon people will storm out into the lobby, tear off their buttons and jump on them. If you stand at the door when this meeting ends and ask the first ninety-nine visitors what they thought of the talk and if these ninety-nine say, ‘He didn’t impress me a bit,’ I won’t be embarrassed at all. For if you asked the hundredth and he says, ‘What he said makes sense. I may vote for Kennedy,’ then this meeting has been a tremendous success. Because if that one man shifts from Nixon to Kennedy he represents one percent of the vote, and I assure you that one percent of the vote is going to win this election. So get out and win that one percent.”

  I lost my voice and spoke like a rattle, and the results we were getting were so pitifully inadequate that I began to wonder why I was wasting my time. A special burden which all Democratic speakers had to bear in this early period of the campaign was the member of the audience who jumped to his feet in the question-and-answer period to say in a loud clear voice, “I’m a Stevenson man, and frankly I can’t see John Kennedy. I don’t know whether to vote for Nixon or just stay home.”

  When I had heard this about a hundred times, for Philadelphia had been the only major city that went for Stevenson in 1956, I had a private meeting with my wife, who remained the most ardent Stevenson admirer I knew. She counseled, “Remember what you told me a year ago. Don’t fight these people. They’ve got to make three distinct jumps before they’ll be any help to us. First they threaten, ‘I’ll vote for Nixon,’ and if they do, they cost us two votes. A little later they’ll say, ‘I’ll stay home.’ This is a lot better, because although we lose their vote, they don’t penalize us double. Later they’ll come around to, ‘I’ll vote for Kennedy, but I won’t work for him.’ Well, that’s as much as you can hope for. But some, like me, will ultimately say, ‘Of course Kennedy’s the better man. I’ll help.’ Let’s try to lead them step by step to the light, just as you said.”