AHC: More Catholic vs. Quaker presidential contests

It is no doubt nothing more than a coincidence that the first two times (1928 and 1960) the Democrats nominated a Roman Catholic for president (Al Smith and John F. Kennedy) he was opposed by a Republican Quaker (Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon). Still, the fact was occasionally remarked upon in 1960. North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges (later to become JFK's Secretary of Commerce) reminded an audience in Virginia that in 1928 voters had chosen a Quaker over a Catholic and had lived to regret it, and that "if you vote for a Quaker this time, you'll regret it horribly." https://books.google.com/books?id=V5aZBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA96

Challenge: what are other cases in which one party might plausibly nominate a Catholic and the other a Quaker?

(1) 1920: The Democrats could plausibly have nominated the "fighting Quaker" A. Mitchell Palmer for President, but it's hard to think of a plausible Republican Catholic nominee. (Maybe Charles Bonaparte, though he didn't have long to live? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Bonaparte Very unlikely, but you can never tell what a deadlocked convention will do...)

(2) 1920: Two deadlocked conventions produce two surprise choices--Pennsylvania Governor William Sproul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cameron_Sproul for the Republicans and New York Governor Al Smith for the Democrats. (Yes, I know it's probably too early for Al Smith.) Or Hoover just might have gotten the GOP nomination in 1920 instead of 1928. (He was of course also spoken of as a possible Democratic candidate.)

(3) "In 1920, Sproul was offered the nomination to become the presidential running mate of Warren G. Harding, but he declined. Had Sproul accepted a role as vice president, it is probable he would have become president of the United States assuming Harding had still died in office. Instead, Calvin Coolidge stepped into that role." http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/governors/1876-1951/william-sproul.html So 1924 witnesses Sproul versus Al Smith or Thomas J. Walsh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Walsh (Walsh, who was chairman of the Democratic national convention in 1924, started to be seriously spoken of as a compromise nominee as the deadlock dragged on. McAdoo indicated a willingness to accept him because, though a Catholic, he was a westerner, an economic progressive, a supporter of Prohibition, and untied to urban machines. But Walsh made it clear he would not be a candidate. )

(4) Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Capper was a Quaker. I suppose that if something happened to Hoover, Capper could have been the GOP nominee against Smith or Walsh in 1928.

(5) Or maybe Coolidge chooses California governor Friend Richardson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_Richardson as his running mate in 1924 and Richardson is the GOP presidential nominee in 1928. (I like the idea of a Quaker nominee named "Friend"...)

(6) 1952: Paul Douglas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Douglas vs. Joe McCarthy! (OK, now I'm really stretching things...)

(7) A lot of things would have to change but a 2016 race between John Hickenlooper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hickenlooper and Paul Ryan is conceivable.

(In 2004 the Democrats finally nominated a Catholic again--John Kerry. But I don't see GW Bush converting to Quakerism...)
 

FBKampfer

Banned
Kick
Well, first we could somehow insert modern material safety standards into 1900. Half a century without routine exposure to materials known to cause mental degradation should cause more people to give less of a fuck about what religion their leaders are.


Or alternatively, a new crusade in 1900, only its between protestants and quakers in the NE and numbers of both sides are drastically reduced, causing more catholics by default.
 
. . . Half a century without routine exposure to materials known to cause mental degradation . . .
I welcome earlier environmental movements, both very sensible ones and quirky ones.

However, I have a hard time thinking, for example, that exposure to lead in gasoline causes more than a 5 point drop in IQ scores for the average person. And yes, maybe more for the EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient) aspect. And yes, per Howard Gardner and others, there are most probably multiple types of intelligence.

Now, individual kids in older buildings with deteriorating lead paint, or lead paint dust from window sills, etc. Or kids whose parents work in certain industries and come home with lead dust on clothes, these are the types of cases in which an individual person can get a higher dose.
 
Well, first we could somehow insert modern material safety standards into 1900. Half a century without routine exposure to materials known to cause mental degradation should cause more people to give less of a fuck about what religion their leaders are.


Or alternatively, a new crusade in 1900, only its between protestants and quakers in the NE and numbers of both sides are drastically reduced, causing more catholics by default.


Suggesting that only mentally impaired people are religious is way below this site’s standards for civility.

Kicked for a week.
 
Suggesting that only mentally impaired people are religious is way below this site’s standards for civility.

Kicked for a week.

I'm not sure whether he's saying that only mentally impaired people are religious or that only mentally impaired people care what religion their president is--not the same thing. (One could after all be a religious Protestant and still be indifferent to whether the president is a Protestant or a Catholic.)

However, even if what he is saying is that only a mentally impaired person could object to a Catholic president, he is still wrong. Allen J. Lichtman's study of the 1928 election, Prejudice and the Old Politics shows that anti-Catholic sentiment against Smith was as strong among wealthy, well-educated Episcopalians as among poorly educated Baptists and Methodists. The fact is that many intellectuals were anti-Catholic. As late as the 1950's, Paul Blanshard was warning about the danger of Catholic power to American democracy and comparing the Vatican to the Kremlin. https://archive.org/stream/communismdemocra009480mbp#page/n13 (It is true, though, that Blanshard was willing to make an exception for Al Smith--but only, he thought, because Smith did not understand his own church's doctrines! https://archive.org/stream/communismdemocra009480mbp#page/n233) But the lawyer Charles C. Marshall, to whom Smith was replying https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...etter-to-the-honorable-alfred-e-smith/306523/ was certainly not a stupid man. (His mistake was to think that the anti-liberal doctrines in 19th and early 20th century encyclicals, etc., would make any difference in the actual behavior of US Catholic politicians like Smith.)
 
So, the two Quaker presidents, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon, are generally viewed as crappy presidents.

Simply bad luck?

In Hoover's case, I think generally yes. In fact, someone wrote the timeline:
AHC: Exactly flip Roosevelt and Hoover
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/ahc-exactly-flip-roosevelt-and-hoover.390876/

And yes, we certainly could write the timeline in which FDR gets elected in 1928 and is the hidebound bureaucrat worried about the federal deficit, and Hoover elected in '32 is the bold experiment who is as successful rebuilding the U.S. economy as he was rebuilding Europe after the First World War , although perhaps not as known for his ebullience as Roosevelt was ;)

With Nixon, I think he has been somewhat correctly perceived as having a character flaw. Now, Nixon just was different, and marched to his own drummer, and was often somewhat excluded because of this. This wasn't a character flaw. In fact, this was unfair of other people toward Nixon. The character flaw came in that Nixon often overreacted and/or overperceived this.
 
With Catholics, obviously, anti-Catholic prejudice has been one reason there were so few Catholic presidential nominees, and none before 1928. With Quakers, I don't think there was much anti-Quaker prejudice; the small number of Quaker nominees just reflects the relatively small number of Quakers in the US: http://www.quakerinfo.com/memb2000.shtml
 
Here's a rough list of all sorts of well-known Quakers, including politicians.

- William Penn - founder of Pennsylvania
- Herbert Hoover - 31st president of the United States
- Richard Nixon - 37st president of the United States
- Daniel Boone - frontiersman and early organizer of Kentucky
- Joseph Pease - In 1832 he became the first Quaker member of British Parliament
- John Bright (1811-1889) - British politician and orator; founder of the Anti-Corn Law League (1839)
- Philip Noel-Baker - British politician; helped create League of Nations and United Nations; received Nobel Peace Prize in 1959
- Rush Holt - New Jersey Congressman (Dem., 1998-?)
- Paul H. Douglas - U.S. Senator from Illinois, 1949-67
- Charles F. Brannan - U.S. Secretary of Agriculture 1948-53
- Noah H. Swayne - Noah Haynes Swayne was a U.S. Supreme Court justice (1862-1881)
- William H. "Bud" Walker - apple farmer; ran for U.S. House of Representatives from New York
- Kenneth T. Bosley - farmer, rocket engineer; ran for U.S. House of Representatives from Maryland
- Jean Parvin Bordewich - technical writer; ran for U.S. House of Representatives from New York
- David Levering - professor; Democratic candidate for U.S. House from California's 28th District in 1996

Early American Patriots:
- Betsy Ross - sewed the first American flag
- Thomas Paine - author and American revolutionary (raised as a Quaker)
- Dolley Madison - First Lady, wife of President James Madison
 
Best to go to the link though; I could see Smedley Butler getting into politics--though actually he was not very successful at it OTL, but it is conceivable to me if he learned and applied certain lessons he might do better at the polls. Anyway I was pretty astonished to see a list of well-known Quakers without his name on it somewhere, as few were better known than him.

His father was a long time big shot, high seniority Congressman who sat on the committee, perhaps chairing it, that oversaw Naval affairs. By long term I mean over decades--this was a generation that had not imposed term limits! I wonder what it would have taken to shake the elder Butler from his seat in Congress and set him to aim higher, maybe run for Governor of Pennsylvania and wind up in a White House race. But then it would be tricky to time a Catholic positioned to oppose him, and we would still be stuck with Quaker Republican versus Catholic Democrat.

Seeing as the includes this woman, "Daisy Douglas Barr - Quaker pastor; influential Ku Klux Klan leader":eek: in the category of "religious leaders," I suppose it is plain there were some Southern Quakers...no, wait, I was looking for evidence of Southern (therefore, Democratic) Quakers but...

Daisy Douglas Barr was Imperial Empress of the Indiana Women's Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s and an active member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
--I didn't actually click into the Wikipedia article, this is just the capsule description the Google search page offered me. So examining the list extensively, I find positive evidence of a handful of Friends below the Mason-Dixon line...of course some of these are quite major figures, such as Dolly Madison (married a Virginian) or Daniel Boone. Eventually there were lists including one or two from South Carolina, but it does seem more of them settled in the border states or Midwest, so by the time we get to eras recent enough for there to be a strong Catholic of any party to contend with given national bigotry
(which we should note had some basis, as someone noted above, in people reading very clear Papal rants against liberalism in general and democratic republicanism in particular--it would not surprise me if some authoritative Papal or other Curia pronouncement named the USA as such as an enemy of the Faith--a lot of anti-Catholicism was just plain old fashioned bigotry of the usual type but boy did the hierarchy hand them plenty of plausible deniability, and thus presumably some of it was by well meaning people who just thought there was probable cause for suspicion)
I suppose the vast majority of Quaker communities were committed to the Republican Party by both persuasion and sheer regional habit.

Quite a few famous Quakers are listed as "lapsed;" since I don't know who makes this list or what their authority is for determining that (many of these people would have openly avowed not being a believer any more, but the Society of Friends is pretty open in its interpretations of what is acceptable in doctrine so I am not sure if anyone is keeping lists of who is and isn't in or out on behalf of the Society itself) I don't know how meaningful that is. Meanwhile the Catholic Church has some pretty strict criteria and being held to be excommunicated or apostate is a serious thing to people from a Catholic background, at least if they seek to keep up ties to the non-lapsed relatives and other community members. We can expand the pool of "Catholics" if we include plainly apostate ones. I am not sure if Ignatius Donnelly counts...I checked, he sure does. I was not sure if it was his parents who converted (obviously not until after he was named!) but no, it was his own thing some time in the 1850s; he was never again associated with any particular denomination, but his rejection of Catholicism was definitive. He comes vaguely near meeting the challenge in that he was the People's Party candidate for Vice President in 1900. He had an earlier career as a mid-ranking Radical Republican, and an unsuccessful attempt at Congress later under the Democratic banner, so we are sort of vaguely in the zone of a Catholic Republican if we include apostates. I think if we do that there would probably be quite a few candidates, some of whom might even have been Vice Presidents OTL maybe? Then all we need is a POD to put them in office when their leading partner dies ATL, and then to come up with a Quaker Democrat somehow or other.

Or lapsing back to "Quakers are Republican, the (lapsed) Catholic is a Democrat", I think we have pretty much opened up the entire 19th century. I think an avowed atheist might have had more luck then than even a Catholic with impeccable liberal credentials, but a former Catholic who adhered to some respectable Protestant faith might have the best shot. If we aren't angling for a Democratic Quaker just for the edginess of it (in the pre-1960 era anyway) I think Quakers make up for small numbers by being pretty highly placed on the class scale and quite activist--they may be few but they are quite visible even so, and any time in our history is a probable time for a Quaker to become a Presidential candidate.

After the 1960s when the parties were undergoing realignment in sociological and ideological terms, or rather both began a process of purging themselves gradually of opposite elements--Democrats disassociating themselves from Jim Crow and white supremacy among Dixiecrats, former Dixiecrats eventually crossing the party line (disavowing white supremacy of course--verbally anyway) while the once major faction of liberal Republicans either faded out in the face of draining support within their own party and the rise of Democratic rivals, or those who held out switched sides themselves for the most part, we have a period of some chaos in which anyone could be from either party and later in which a typically liberal Quaker would surely identify as and run as a Democrat. While liberal Catholics remain more prominent and are known as Democrats, we've seen plenty of right wing Catholic Republicans on the rise as well. So after 1970 or so one might well come up with a Republican Catholic facing off against a Democratic Quaker though the reverse is almost as likely still.

And we can have real fun with third parties that really mix things up, any time we can justify the third party rising to a position where it can plausibly contend for the Presidency at all. Note that the last time a President was elected outside the two party system, it was one whose party was particularly dedicated to anti-Catholicism!
 
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