Report # 5 - David Carlin's Book, Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?

Report # 5 on David Carlin’s Book
Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?
September 5, 2007
The following is the gist of Chapter 1, The Great Transformation, Part 1: Demise of the Political Machines: # 1 of 2, p. 5-15, Almost all of it in David Carlin’s own words.

“In the 1930’s and 40’s the Catholic community in the United States, was made up of immigrants and their children and grandchildren who were predominately working class and proudly patriotic….
“The New Deal Democratic Party had a social and economic philosophy that largely coincided with the social teachings of the Church, as found in the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) of Leo Xlll & Quadrigensimo Anno (1931) of Pius XI.
“Just after the death of Roosevelt, Harry Truman and other New Dealers transformed the Democratic Party, which during the war had been a great anti-fascist and anti-Nazi party, into a great anti-Communist party. The popes, of course, had always been intensely anti-Communist. What more could a Catholic want?...
`` “Until the years just after World War II, political “machines” and their “bosses” controlled many of America’s cities. In the Democratic Party especially, these machines were singularly powerful, the avenues through which virtually all political influence had to pass….
“Nobody in my town doubted that the local Democratic machine, dominated by Irish-Catholics, was corrupt. Nor is it likely that the corrupt Catholic politicians themselves had strong feelings of guilt. They went following the American Way. They went to church on Sundays….
“But after World War II, the golden age of these Democratic machines, which had just elected Franklin Roosevelt four times to the White House, was over. For one reason, the ethnic base of the machines was changing….
“Unfortunately, for machine politicians, Americans who are educated and middle-class have a rather low level of tolerance for local political corruption…. The GI Bill opened college education to those from lower socioeconomic groups who before the war would never have dreamed of going to college….
“The last hurrah of the machines came at the 1968 Democratic Convention, held in Chicago, where the new-feeble but surviving machine bosses were able to deliver a presidential nomination for one last time, to Hubert Humphrey….
“Humphrey was narrowly defeated by Nixon in November and in the aftermath of the aftermath of the election, the national Democratic Party acting through the so-called McGovern Commission (nicknamed for its chair, U.S. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota), concluded that the presidential nomination process could no longer be a boss-dominated thing…. Nixon trounced McGovern in 1972 in a landside comparable to the FDR triumph over Alf Landon in 1936….
“The years between 1968 and 1972 brought forward three distinct kinds of liberals battling for the control of the Democratic Party. 1) FDR liberals: A great proportion of these New Deal liberals were themselves labor-union leaders. 2) Civil-rights liberals: They were the liberals of the black civil-rights movement: black and their white sympathizers who held that the most pressing domestic problems of that day was the long and shameful American heritage of anti-black racism that went back through Jim Crow and slavery to the early decades of the seventeenth century. 3) Moral/cultural liberals: The enthusiastic supporters of McGovern had come of age during the cultural revolution of the 1960’s…. Moral liberals were especially concerned with issues of individual freedom in particular, sexual freedom.” To be continued
George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish.