Vocaboly.com

[Richard Bollard]

I was going to add this to the thread about Simon Schama's article in
the Guardian but the thread has drifted.

I sent the link to my brother (who is only a few short steps from
becoming anointed a fair dinkum historian) and he had some interesting
comments that I thought might provoke some discussion here.

To wit:

.... I'm surprised that no-one seems to have noticed the interesting
parallels with the Presidential election of 1928. In 1924 there had
been a record low turnout and the Republicans, high on the crest of
the conservativism and prosperity of the 1920s, had trounced the
Democrats. In 1928 Hoover beat the Dem. candidate Al Smith, the Irish
Catholic mayor of New York. Smith had raised Democrat hopes by
forging a new alliance of Irish and immigrant (and some black) voters
in the north, to add to the traditional Democratic southern rump. The
turnout was massive and the Democrat vote doubled from 1924. But in
the Republican heartlands of the mid-west and the far west, where
earlier in the decade there had been a revival of the Klu Klux Klan
(based primarialy, not in the South, but in states like Indiana and
Illinois), there was an even more massive turnout, fueled by sectarian
horror at the idea of a Catholic President.
What happened next, of course, was the Depression, and while we may
not be heading for one of those, it's still interesting that in both
cases a trivial wedge issue enabled the Republicans to prevail. The
fear of Catholics became irrelevant when the Depression wiped all
other issues of the map. It doesn't appear to be support for the war
in Iraq which mostly mobilised the heartland for Bush this time. All
the evidence from polling suggests that `moral issues' (read the
beat-up about gay marriage) was the determining factor. If Iraq
continues to be a mess, or gets worse, then four years from now it
will be harder for the Republicans to pull a rabbit-sized wedge out of
the bag. ...

[He wasn't writing with AUE in mind, so forgive any stylistic
misdemeanors.]
--
Richard Bollard
Canberra, Australia