The Catholic Voter in American Politics: The Passing of the Democratic Monolith (review)

The Catholic Voter in American Politics: The Passing of the Democratic Monolith. By William B. Prendergast. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 260. $35.00.)

Between the printing of this book and its official publication date, William B. Prendergast died. Mr. Prendergast, who served in the Defense Department and taught political science at the U.S. Naval Academy, The Catholic University of America, and the Johns Hopkins University, helped write four Republican national platforms and directed research for the National Republican Committee. The product of that long experience in government and electoral politics as well as in the university, this book opens with a sweeping, single-chapter "historical profile" of American Catholicism and then provides a close reading of the role of Catholics and Catholicism in every presidential election from 1844 to 1996.

The book has a thesis, expressed in the subtitle but argued with considerable nuance: After the 1880's Catholics repeatedly drifted from their strong Democratic loyalties, only to have the drift repeatedly reversed--by Al Smith's candidacy in 1928, for instance, and the accompanying anti-Catholic backlash; again by John F. Kennedy's successful race for the presidency in 1960; to a lesser extent by Watergate and the lackluster races of George Bush and Robert Dole. But with each cycle the Catholic vote has become less and less distinguishable from the national average, no longer reliably Democratic in presidential or even Congressional preferences but without becoming reliably Republican either.

Prendergast has mobilized an impressive array of data in support of this thesis, but even readers not quite convinced or wishing to qualify it even further will find this a useful and readable synthesis of much secondary literature. The steady rhythm of presidential elections and the relentless rain of numbers and percentages occasionally induce drowsiness, but Prendergast knew the power of a good story, a colorful character, a memorable quote, or an apt example to put flesh and blood onto the election returns.

Here and there the perspectives of a Republican strategist make themselves felt, especially in characterizations of the 1960's and more recent elections. Prendergast also liked to think that the liberal half of the American bishops' political agenda was developed by their staff members without episcopal oversight, a contemporary version of "if the king only knew . . ." that can only be amusing to those who know the process firsthand.

But overall Prendergast's account avoids partisanship of a kind frequently found in far less politically active scholars. If his commitments have shaped his history in a major way, it is in the attention he pays to Republican failures rather than to either Democratic failures or successes. Catholic historical memory, in part retrojecting New Deal attitudes into the previous century, has tended to attribute Catholic affinities for the Democratic Party to the needs of a struggling urban immigrant population. Prendergast emphatically reminds readers of the nativist, anti-Catholic strains in the Whig-Republican lineage. Catholics were not only drawn to the Democratic Party; they were driven there.

Books are hardly ever error free, but it is curious that the publisher did not prevent a few obvious ones. It is George Weigel, not Weigle, whose insights the author acknowledges on page xiii and the Kerner, not Koerner, Commission whose warning about America becoming "two societies, one black and one white," is quoted on page 149.

Catholics, the author concludes, constitute a major swing vote in American politics, free-floating, volatile, untethered from the Democrats without being tethered to the Republicans. That suggests a lot of open questions about Catholic voting, at the local level in the past and at all levels in the future. Prendergast's timely and lively book does not answer them all, but it is an extraordinarily valuable point of departure.

Peter Steinfels
Georgetown University

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