The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith today urged the nation to undertake “frank discussion of the injection of bigotry” into the 1960 election campaign. Making public a study of anti-Catholic extremist utterances in the Presidential primaries, the ADL noted that there has been a “distressing amount of bigoted expression about a Catholic in the White House.”
The report was presented by Henry Edward Schultz, national chairman of the League, to the organization’s national executive committee meeting at the Hotel Savoy Hilton. The study was made under the supervision of Arnold Forster, general counsel and League civil rights director.
Mr. Schultz asserted that “while the discussion so far has turned on the qualifications of a Catholic for President,” it should instead be centered on “why religion is on issue at all in face of the Constitutional stricture barring religion as a test for office. The League’s report found that anti-Catholic extremists today were circulating petitions on a large scale demanding of both Republican and Democratic national conventions that they nominate no Catholics for President or Vice President.
The League also published yesterday a companion study on the history of prejudice in politics written by Charles P. Taft, former Mayer of Cincinnati and one-time president of the National Council of Churches, who warned the American people to take steps to check the growth of religious bias in the coming election campaigns.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
