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.
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, "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 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 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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