Describe a Hughes-Cox-Davis-Hoover voter

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

Pro-League of Nations/Dry Republican

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

Anglophile, liberal but racist Southerner who was very intervention and against Smith due to seeing Catholic influence as theocratic.

Possibly a northerner also given the Hughes vote. I could actually see this being HP Lovecraft's voting record.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

OP if forced to choose major-party candidates?

Explanation: Democrat, anti-racist, anti-papist.

Davis got the racist vote.

Something like 98% of white voters in 1924 were racist. If you mean in terms of "racist even for the times" then obviously Davis cleaned up with them in the south but in the north they probably went for Coolidge given that he signed the Johnson-Reed Act in the midst of the campaign while Davis vocally denounced the Klan.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

OP if forced to choose major-party candidates?

Explanation: Democrat, anti-racist, anti-papist.

Davis got the racist vote.

All Democrats in that era got the racist vote.

Not so much in the north, see above

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

OP if forced to choose major-party candidates?

Explanation: Democrat, anti-racist, anti-papist.

Davis got the racist vote.

All Democrats in that era got the racist vote.

Not so much in the north, see above

I totally agree with what you wrote above actually. I was just refuting the idea that a Davis voter was *especially* racist.

oh makes sense

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

Anglophile, liberal but racist Southerner who was very intervention and against Smith due to seeing Catholic influence as theocratic.

Possibly a northerner also given the Hughes vote. I could actually see this being HP Lovecraft's voting record.

Lovecraft was very Republican before the 1930s. Definitely would have favoured a fellow Yankee like Coolidge

Good point, come to think of it that'd be the ultimate identity politics election for him

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

OP if forced to choose major-party candidates?

Explanation: Democrat, anti-racist, anti-papist.

Actually I think I'd be a Hughes-Harding-Coolidge-Smith voter (Debs in 1920 and LaFollette in 1924 if third-parties allowed). Since anti-Catholicism in the 1920s came mostly from the Klan rather than Northeasterners, I would've firmly opposed it.

Actually I had no doubts your voting preferences would be exactly like that, but you know I like to trigger you.

By the way, what kind of voter would have feared Al Smith's Catholicism only because of possible ties to Mussolini and Primo de Rivera? It sounds absurd.

A liberal intellectual voter, as I said, who paid close attention to international affairs. It may sound absurd, but at that point the Catholic Church was still a profoundly illiberal institution in bed with reactionaries and dictators across the world. It wasn't just bigoted Southerners or the Klan who feared that a Catholic in power would bring in theocracy or take orders from the Pope, but secular Northern liberals too. In that spirit the National Liberal League had supported the Blaine Amendment some 50 years earlier. Here's a passage from The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism on just that:

The membership of this movement, largely well-to-do and well educated, came from the old Puritan regions in New England and from the areas of the Puritan diaspora in the upper Middle West, and they had important friends in Congress and even the White House. (President Ulysses S. Grant had made separation part of the Republican agenda.) The Liberals, or "total separationists," as I will call them to distinguish them from the earlier anti-Catholics, were in some respects heterogeneous. Some were atheists, some were Jews, others called themselves agnostics, and still others experimented with various forms of non-Christian "spiritualism" in vogue at the time. None of them saw any reason the United States should have any connection with Christianity, and they girded themselves to battle for "the absolute separation of church and state."

Liberals, then, rejected Christianity--but not Protestant religiosity.

[...]

At first glance, it is startling to see an unapolgetically anti-Christian movement flourish in a nation whose traditions and public institutions were steeped in Protestant Christianity. Yet a closer look would show that the Liberals were really located at the far end of a Protestant continuum [...] Even the Liberals, who disliked all forms of Christianity, could easily agree with the often-voiced Protestant view that Catholics did not think for themselves but took orders from a foreign power. In the campaign to pass the Blaine Amendment, Liberals formed a close working relationship with many pious Protestants. They were able to achieve this kind of working ecumenism because there was a broad Protestant consensus, at least in the North.

Also, somewhat tangentially I remember reading that in 1896 Mark Hanna courted Catholic voters as a winnable bloc for McKinley against the pietist Bryan because he saw the Catholic Church as a global force for conservatism. Furthermore that greatest of classical liberals, William Ewart Gladstone, strongly opposed Catholicism because of its innate conservatism.

That doesn't change the fact that voting against somebody for no other reason then their religion if they've offered no indication that their religious beliefs would guide how they govern is straight up bigotry and immigrant hating xenophobia. This reminds me of Sam Harris type Atheists who make similar arguments to justify their hatred of Muslims.