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WHILE CAMPAIGNING FOR CATHOLIC VOTES, TRUMP ECHOES THE KLAN  
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Harold Meyerson
September 24, 2024
The American Prospect [[link removed]]


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_ He’ll speak at the Al Smith Dinner, while reviving the same
hateful attacks that were levied against Smith. _

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump waves
to supporters as he arrives for a town hall event at the Dort
Financial Center, September 17, 2024, in Flint, Michigan., Evan
Vucci/AP Photo

 

A SMALL-SIZED KERFUFFLE HAS BROKEN OUT about this year’s Al Smith
Dinner, an event hosted by the New York Archdiocese of the Catholic
Church, to be held on October 17th. Every four years, the event
usually features the two presidential candidates delivering humorous
speeches, though there have been years when only one of those
candidates appears. This is one of those years, as Kamala Harris’s
campaign said she’ll not be attending, though Donald Trump has
announced he’ll be there
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Harris’s campaign said the event conflicts with her swing-state
schedule, though there’s clearly more to it than that. New York
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, one of Pope Benedict’s Dark Ages
appointees, who’ll preside over the dinner, has been a vociferous
critic of the Democratic Party for quite some time, even penning a
_Wall Street Journal_ op-ed headlined "The Democrats Abandon
Catholics." As this is the first Al Smith dinner since the Supreme
Court revoked American women’s right to an abortion, Harris likely
concluded that the better part of valor was to steer clear.

But Trump’s appearance at the dinner is a complete outrage, though
the Benedictine Dolan is surely too benighted to realize it.

The dinner is named after Al Smith—as the Democratic presidential
nominee in 1928, the first Catholic to run for president. Smith was
the son of immigrants; he was half Irish, one-quarter Italian, and
one-quarter German. Raised in Manhattan’s impoverished Lower East
Side, Smith’s secondary education took place not at a high school
(for economic reasons, he had to drop out) but rather at the Fulton
Fish Market. (When he served in New York’s legislature, where
Republican leaders often called on their fellow Republicans to speak
by introducing them with their university degrees [LLB, e.g.],
Smith’s colleagues introduced him with the honorific "FFM.") A
product of Tammany Hall, though himself scrupulously honest, Smith
rose to become Assembly Speaker and then New York’s governor for
most of the 1920s, where he amassed a notably progressive record.

But he was Catholic, in a country that four years earlier had banned
immigration from those European nations that weren’t predominantly
Protestant. He was Catholic at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was at its
greatest height, and when its focus was more anti-Catholic and
antisemitic than it was anti-Black (which reflected its growth outside
the South). He was not only Catholic but a staunch defender of
equality for Blacks and Jews and every imaginable race, religion,
nationality, and ethnic group that populated his beloved New York. And
as he campaigned across the nation in the fall of 1928, the Klan
burned crosses in the towns and cities he visited.

A TYPICAL ATTACK ON SMITH THAT FALL was that of South Carolina
Protestant pastor Bob Jones Sr., who, referring to Smith’s
opposition to Prohibition, nonetheless said
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"I'll tell you, brother, that the big issue we’ve got to face
ain’t the liquor question. I’d rather see a saloon on every corner
of the South than see the foreigners elect Al Smith president."

"Foreigners." Immigrants from undesirable countries who had become
citizens and dared to vote.

Smith responded to these attacks by extolling the unique strengths of
what then was called a "melting pot" nation and excoriating the
bigotry that was driving historically Democratic Southern whites to
vote Republican (i.e., for Herbert Hoover). In his speech
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accepting his nomination, he said:
 

The rugged qualities of our immigrants have helped to develop our
country, and their children have taken their places high in the annals
of American history.
 
Every race has made its contribution to the betterment of America.
While I stand squarely on our platform declaration that the laws which
limit immigration must be preserved in full force and effect, I am
heartily in favor of removing from the immigration law the harsh
provision which separates families, and I am opposed to the principle
of restriction based upon the figures of immigrant population
contained in a census thirty-eight years old. I believe this is
designed to discriminate against certain nationalities, and is an
unwise policy.

(In his speech, Smith also decried U.S. military intervention in
Nicaragua, and assailed corporate concentration, noting that
"one-twentieth of one per cent of the 430,000 corporations in this
country earned 40 per cent of their profits. Prosperity to the extent
that we have it," he continued, "is unduly concentrated and has not
equitably touched the lives of the farmer, the wage-earner and the
individual business man." Smith’s speech, that is, prefigured much
of the New Deal.)

Facing a huge nativist backlash, Smith was soundly defeated by Hoover.

So, consider the spectacle of Donald Trump speaking with the
archbishop’s blessing at a dinner named in honor of Al Smith. It’s
hard to imagine a greater antithesis to Smith’s values than
Trump’s, who, along with his mini-me JD Vance, is centering his
campaign on the very same nativist and bigoted appeals that Smith was
victim to and that he condemned day after day. The 1928 antecedent for
Trump isn’t Smith’s campaign; it’s the KKK’s.

(By the way, if you want to hear Smith’s paean to the strengths that
immigrants bring to America, here’s a radio broadcast
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he delivered in 1943, shortly before his death. It’s also a
wonderful display of the classic white working-class New York accent
that has since all but disappeared.) Harold Meyerson

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* Al Smith; New York Catholic Diocese; Donald Trump;
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