Follow up: Catholics and Democrats
In response to a previous post about his book, author Mark Stricherz makes the following points about changes within the Democratic Party, discovered as he researched:
1. The Democratic Catholic bosses of the post-war era were not, contra the conventional wisdom, passive observers on racial matters. They kept blacks in the Democratic coalition. The key figures were David L. Lawrence, mayor of Pittsburgh (1945-58) and governor of Pennsylvania (1958-63), and John M. Bailey, chairman of the Connecticut state Democratic party (1947-1975) and chairman of the Democratic National Committee (1961-68).
First, both Lawrence and Bailey swung their delegations behind the strong civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic convention. Second, Lawrence and Bailey created the original Democratic Party reform commission, the Lawrence Commission (1965-68). They made it possible for Southern blacks to have a say in nominating the party’s presidential nominee.
2. The key antiwar liberals on the McGovern Commission (in order, Fred Dutton, Ken Bode, Eli Segal, and Anne Wexler) did not seek to democratize the party’s presidential nominating system. They wanted to create a nomination process that would do the following:
– pound the final nail in the coffin of the FDR coalition and create a McGovern coalition (Dutton)
– ensure the nomination of an antiwar Democrat in 1972 (Bode and Segal)
– create a nominating system that empowered not just voters, but also activists (Segal, Bode, and Wexler)
The antiwar liberal accomplished those goals through the following:
– requiring informal delegate quotas for women and young people at the 1972 Democratic convention. As commission research director Bode figured out, both groups were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War. These informal quotas allowed feminist and young baby boomers to enter the Democratic coalition and become prominent players in it.
– greatly expanding the number of state caucus elections, which favor activists and college-educated voters
3. Feminist leaders Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem lobbied successfully for mandating hard quotas for female delegates, not because they wanted equal representation but because they wanted to dominate the party platform on abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment
4. Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania was excluded from speaking at the 1992 Democratic convention because he sought to give a pro-life speech. I confirmed this with one of the five Democratic officials in the position to know.
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One of the things I took away from Stricherz’s book is the importance of behind-the-scenes action. Because of one unrepresentative commission that changed party rules, the whole future was altered.
Also one can learn from the “unintended consequences” that drove people to change the commission. While some aggressive feminists did set out to install their supporters into the party leadership, they were only successful because they were joined by others fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War but who also happened to be feminists. If one can rally a coalition of the like-minded around one big issue, the other issues on which they agree will be advanced as well.
Hence the Iraq War debacle has helped energize the far left, but has boosted their other issues as well by promoting further cooperation and contacts between the partisans.
Politicians who neither cannot nor will not see that abortion is the deliberate taking of innocent human life are, in either case, unfit for public office; and Catholics who vote for them are either profoundly ignorant or damnably dishonest. There is no middle ground.
“…and Catholics who vote for them are either profoundly ignorant or damnably dishonest. ”
Since this is a matter of natural law rather than reveled doctrine, is not the same true for non-Catholics?
There is ALWAYS a middle ground! It may not be acceptable to you, but it exists for others.
The Democratic Catholic bosses of the post-war era were not, contra the conventional wisdom, passive observers on racial matters
It should also be noted that many of these urban machines, while led by mostly Catholics, were not always inclusive of other Catholics. Machines existed by sharing the “spoils” with no larger of a group than needed to stay in power, maximinzing the “spolis” for the in-group. In Massachusetts, the Irish ran the regular organization and the Italians were on the outs. Daley’s Chicago organization was opposed by the large and Catholic Polish-American community. In New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania, the regular organization was dominated by the Building Trades with the Industrial Unions cut out. In some eastern textile towns, it was the Italians and Jews in charge, against the Slavs.