What happened to anti-Catholicism and anti-Irish/anti-Italian xenophobia?

[darklordoftech]

In 1928 it was an issue, but then it faded away. What happened?

[Sumner 1868]

The party that pushed it spent a decade and a half in the wilderness.

[AtorBoltox]

Anti-Catholicism was an important issue in the 1960 election, albeit to a much lesser extent than 1928

[Blue3]

Even in the 1990's and early 2000's people would still make a big deal out of if you were a Catholic or not.

[Roemerista]

Anti-Catholicism is still alive and well. See Senator Harris.

[Blue3]

Anti-Catholicism is still alive and well. See Senator Harris.

:eyeroll:

[Orser67]

Anti-Catholicism was one of the major ideological throughlines of American history between the 17th century and the mid-20th century, and it took a confluence of different factors to get us to the point where Newt Gingrich, arguably the (pre-Trump) culture-warrior-in-chief, converted to Catholicism in 2009.

The first and most obvious thing that happened was that the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s removed the salience of anti-Catholicism, as the share of foreign-born population declined from about 15% to about 5%. In the 1940s, World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany tended to discredit racism everywhere, and with the onset of the Cold War, left-wing groups and atheists became more suspect than Catholics (who generally were not attracted to far-left movements, e.g. Henry Wallace had relatively little appeal to working class Catholics).

During this same period, Catholics became part of the New Deal Coalition, which generally dominated politics from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Democratic Party continued to, like it always had, serve as a key path for the assimilation of immigrants. But this period differed from the period from 1860 to 1930 in that Democrats became competitive or even dominant in most places in the country. With this political power came economic opportunities and, ultimately, acceptance and opportunity, culminating to some extent with the election of JFK in 1960. Meanwhile, without a constant stream of new immigrants, many previously-insular communities within U.S. cities increasingly assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture.

Following the election of JFK, and with the onset of the culture wars later in the 1960s, anti-Catholicism increasingly receded as an issue. Often economically liberal yet culturally conservative (as we tend to think of it on Atlas), Catholics emerged as important swing voters and helped deliver huge landslides to Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1980.