Catholic America.(The American Catholic Voter: 200 Years of Political Impact)(Book Review)

The American Catholic Voter: 200 Years of Political Impact By George Marlin St. Augustine's Press, 420 pages, $30

Catholics remain a swing group no politician can afford to ignore, which is why both Presidential candidates should study The American Catholic Voter, a rollicking ride through the history of Catholics in America by Brooklyn-born, Irish-bred banker and sometime-pol George Marlin.

The book begins with Protestant-Catholic conflict in seventeenth-century Britain, sketched in Michael Barone's meaty introduction, and ends with 2004 headlines depicting Washington's Cardinal McCarrick hemming and hawing over whether to deny Holy Communion to the first Catholic Presidential candidate in 44 years.

Chronicling the shifting allegiances of his co-religionists, Marlin skillfully balances the larger issues affecting elections with the backroom maneuvering in which the Emerald Isle's sons have long excelled. While never dry, Marlin's text is sturdily supported with statistics and citations from a broad bibliography. His heroes are the poor, hard-working Irish, German, Italian, and Slavic immigrants who climbed their way up the American ladder with help from local parishes and political machines.

As the American Revolution began, Catholics were less than 1 percent of the population. By 1800, Catholic voters (aka "wild Irishmen") were both attacked and wooed by office-seekers. The Federalists warned against allowing this rabble to vote, while the rabble's votes were eagerly sought by the Democratic-Republicans (as the Democratic Party was first known) led by Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson. Burr was a masterful pol and made good use of New York City's Tammany Society, established in 1787.

In the years leading to the Civil War, heavy immigration boosted Catholics to 12 percent of the nation's population, and their concentration in big cities increased their political heft. As early as 1838, a New York governor courted Catholics with talk of state support for parochial schools. But such talk inflamed nativists, and they and their Catholic foes were juggled by the various political parties from mid-century onward.

The new Republican Party bobbed and weaved with Catholics and nativists, but chose Abraham Lincoln as its 1860 standard-bearer in part because he had not been anti-immigrant; in return, German Catholic immigrants may well "have provided his margin of victory" Barone observes.