Anti-Catholic conspiracy rhetoric in 1928 prefigured the 2008 Obama Muslim smear

Evidence

The Klan also accused Catholics of conspiring with Jews to take over America. In opposing the 1928 presidential candidate Al Smith, a Catholic, the Klan claimed that Smith’s selection of Jewish Belle Moskowitz as his adviser was proof of a conspiracy against Protestants. It was alleged that with Moskowitz’s help, Smith would build a palace in Washington, DC, from which he would allow the papacy to take over America. Other nativist elements contributed to a whisper campaign comprising pamphlets, editorials, and sermons warning Americans to beware of a Catholic president whose loyalty would be to the pope in Rome, not to the US government. Islamophobes led a similar campaign in 2008 alleging that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim who would nefariously Islamicize America from the White House. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 304

Categorization

• XREF: The same conspiracy template — ‘minority adviser pulls the candidate’s strings to let an external power take over’ — later replayed with Obama and, in different form, in anti-Semitic tropes about advisers.
• SHARE: The specific parallel of a White-House-palace conspiracy claim in 1928 (Al Smith) and 2008 (Obama) is a tight two-bird analogy a colleague working on nativism or religion-and-politics would enjoy.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘the candidate’s secret loyalty oath’ as a recurring American campaign genre — pope in 1928, Muslim in 2008 — and what the persistence of the template says about nativism’s stability across targets.