A quarter of mid-century Americans believed Catholics plotted to take over America

Evidence

These suspicions took center stage a century later when the Catholic senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, ran for president of the United States. By the mid-twentieth century, almost a quarter of Americans believed Catholics would take over America. Because of growing public concerns that his Catholic faith would require him to take orders from the Vatican and oppose the separation of church and state, Kennedy gave a high-profile speech in 1960 to a group of Protestant ministers assuring Americans that his loyalty to the United States was unwavering. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 309

Categorization

• QUESTION: Would be worth chasing: how did nativist sentiment drop from Know Nothing political success in 1854 and 2.5 million APA members to only ~25% by 1960 — and how does that rate compare to modern Islamophobia polling?
• XREF: Kennedy’s 1960 loyalty speech is the canonical precedent often cited in debates about whether a Muslim candidate could or should give a similar reassurance address — the direct template for contemporary speculation. — connects to: Americans recurrently embrace religiously framed conspiracy panics about children and the Devil — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 236; Anti-Catholicism became nativist only when Catholics seemed foreign agents.; Nativists framed Catholic immigrants as a papal plot to subvert American institutions — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 39
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 309