The Protestant religious revivals of the early 19th century had a profound impact on shaping the moral values of the affected voters, pushing them into moralistic political programs, such as opposition to slavery and calling for prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
[2] In the midst of shifts in theology and church polity, American Christians began progressive movements to reform society during this period.
As a result, local churches saw their roles in society in purifying the world through the individuals to whom they could bring salvation and through changes in the law and the creation of institutions.
Regarding themselves as the elect and just in a world rife with sin, air, and corruption, they felt a strong moral obligation to define and enforce standards of community and personal behavior....
This pietistic worldview was substantially shared by British, Scandinavian, Swiss, English-Canadian and Dutch Reformed immigrants, as well as by German Protestants and many of the Forty-Eighters.
Southern and eastern European immigrants generally leaned more toward the Germanic view of things, while modernization, industrialization, and urbanization modified nearly everyone's sense of individual economic responsibility and put a premium on organization, political involvement, and education.
In sharp contrast, liturgical groups, especially the Catholics, Episcopalians, and German Lutherans, looked to the Democratic Party for protection from pietistic moralism, especially Prohibition.
When Prohibition was on the ballot, the Germans voted solidly against it since they strongly distrusted moralistic crusaders, whom they called "Puritans," including the temperance reformers and many Populists.
The German community strongly opposed Free Silver and voted heavily against the crusader William Jennings Bryan in 1896.
William Gienapp argues that the great realignment of the 1850s began before the Whig party collapse, and was caused not by politicians but by voters at the local level.
The central forces were ethno-cultural, involving tensions between pietistic Protestants versus liturgical Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians regarding Catholicism, prohibition, and nativism.
The Know-Nothing party embodied the social forces at work, but its weak leadership was unable to solidify its organization, and the Republicans picked it apart.
Nativism was so powerful that the Republicans could not avoid it, but they did minimize it and turn voter wrath against the threat that slave owners would buy up the good farm lands wherever slavery was allowed.
[18] Most pietistic Protestants were "dries" who advocated prohibition as a solution to social problems; they included Methodists, Congregationalists, Disciples, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Scandinavian Lutherans.
In the South, the Baptist and Methodist churches played a major role in forcing the Democratic Party to support prohibition.
In the 1920s, however, the sudden, unexpected outburst of big city crime associated with bootlegging undermined support for prohibition, and the Democrats took up the cause for repeal, finally succeeding in 1932.
German Americans by 1910 typically had only weak ties to Germany; however, they were fearful of negative treatment they might receive if the United States entered the war (such mistreatment was already happening to German-descent citizens in Canada and Australia).
As more nations were drawn into the conflict, however, the English-languages press increasingly supporting Britain, while the German-American media called for neutrality while also defending Germany's position.
[25] Once war started they were harassed in so many ways that historian Carl Wittke noted in 1936, it was "one of the most difficult and humiliating experiences suffered by an ethnic group in American history.
Although some businesses opposed restrictions because they wanted a continued flow of unskilled workers, support was widespread with the exception of the Jewish community.
The Klan signed up millions of white Protestant men on the basis that American society needed a moral purification against the immoral power of the Catholic Church, Jews, organized crime, speakeasies, and local adulterers.
Liberal and Catholic elements fought against the Klan primarily inside the Democratic Party, where a motion to repudiate it by name was defeated by one vote at the national convention of 1924.
Historians in recent decades have totally revised the traditional interpretation of the second KKK as a terrorist group or one based on frustrated marginal elements.
The final factor was New York City, a locale deeply distrusted by many rural Americans for its unsavory reputation regarding organized crime.
Protestant ministers warned that he would take orders from the pope who, many Americans sincerely believed, would move to the United States to rule the country from a fortress in Washington, if Smith won.
[36] Franklin D. Roosevelt led the Democratic Party to a landslide victory in 1932 and set up his New Deal in 1933 and forged a coalition of labor unions, liberals, religious, ethnic and racial minorities (Catholics, Jews and Blacks), Southern whites, poor people and those on relief.
[37] The organizational heft was provided by Big City machines, which gained access to millions of relief jobs and billions of dollars in spending projects.