Anti-Catholic prejudice and Prohibition in 1928 America

President Smith: Your goal is to end Prohibition as We Know it. As America's first Roman Catholic President, you surely understand that Prohibition as it exists is fundamentally a form of prejudice. Through the miracle of transubstantiation, the Roman Catholic celebrates the Eucharist with wine that is the blood of Christ, exactly as Christ himself did. You obviously must know firsthand the level of anti-Catholic prejudice in this country. There were those who joked that, on the morning after election day in November 1928, that you would have to send a postcard to the Vatican to unpack, because all Catholics are under the spell of an antichrist called the Pope. There are also forms of anti-Catholic prejudice afoot that are less amusing: the newly revived Ku Klux Klan, starting in Indiana, has sworn to protect the former Confederacy from free blacks, Jews, and Roman Catholics. And it's worth noting that American society frequently associates Roman Catholic immigrants with drunkenness -- you may recall the legendarily noxious political cartoon launched by the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s, depicting a German Catholic immigrant dressed as a barrel of "Lager Bier" and an Irish Catholic immigrant dressed as a cask of "Irish Whiskey" running away with the ballot-box.[footnoteRef:0] Alcohol gave the various other religious groups of the United States a convenient rallying point to forge a kind of national Christian Temperance consensus -- but that consensus was formed out of the ugliest sorts of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment, that associate drunkenness with immigrants from Catholic countries. The only thing that got the 18th Amendment passed was the wave of anti-German hysteria that accompanied President Wilson's war. [0: [Anonymous.] Cartoon charging Irish and German immigrants with stealing elections showing a keg of Irish whiskey and a barrel of German beer running off with the ballot box, circa 1840s. Getty Images. Retrieved from: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/cartoon-charging-irish-and-german-immigrants-with-stealing-news-photo/96817567]

President Smith, you must understand that your election as a Democrat is a meaningful event in this country's history. There have been only three Democrats elected to the Presidency since the Civil War, and two of them were Grover Cleveland -- whom everyone knows would not have been elected at all were it not for the Mugwump defection from the corrupt Republican establishment, supporting Cleveland as they had previously supported Tilden, in the hopes of reforming Washington corruption.[footnoteRef:1] The only other Democrat to be elected since the Civil War was, as you know, Woodrow Wilson: and Wilson was a Southerner (just like Vice President Robinson), the son of a Presbyterian minister, and seemingly a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. Wilson's Democratic coalition included a hell of a lot of Roman Catholic voters, thanks to the urban Democratic machines, and exposed the paradoxical nature of the Democratic Party at this moment in time -- it is a coalition party that inexplicably includes Negroes and white supremacists, Catholics and Klansmen. But you must remember where Prohibition came from in the first place: it came from a persistent association from Republicans that Democratic voters were largely drunken immigrants or wine-guzzling Roman Catholics. And if you think those Roman Catholics didn't resent Wilson, I will remind you of the Congressional battle over the Treaty of Versailles -- a number of Democrats were willing to defect from Wilson's position in debate on March 17, 1919. Why? Because it was Saint Patrick's Day, and a rather cynical provision on behalf of Ireland was inserted into the ratification provisions proposed by Senator Owen of Oklahoma, to shore up his electoral base at Wilson's expense.[footnoteRef:2] Your party has a strange coalition at present, Mr. President. [1: Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition, and the Men Who Made It. New York: Vintage, 1989. p.234.] [2: Cooper, John Milton. Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. p.354.]

President Smith, you know that America is founded on principles of tolerance -- particularly religious tolerance. Look around you, Mr. President. You see here a Baptist minister, an Episcopalian Dutchman, two Jews, and two progressive Quakers from California (ironically named Nixon and Hoover). Baptists may not use wine in religious ritual, but they are aware that Catholics do. So do Episcopalians like Mr. Roosevelt, so do Jews like Mr. Moses or your trusted aide Miss Moskowitz. There is a reason, however, why I mention these facts. The difficulty you will find is that embracing a reform of the Volstead Act without repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment is most easily done on First Amendment grounds. You must issue a Presidential Directive that the definition of "intoxicating liquors" in the Eighteenth Amendment needs to be re-defined for the purposes of the Volstead Act to issue broad religious-based exemptions to the interdicted substances. Why should you approach the issue in this fashion?