No mystery attends today's West Virginia primary, which Hillary Clinton will win by roughly a gazillion percent, and which is too late and too small to matter in this year's Democratic presidential selection process.
Demographically -- and in this year's Clinton-Obama contest, demography is destiny -- West Virginia could not be more Clinton-friendly if Mark Penn had micro-designed it. African Americans comprise 3.5 percent of the state's population, Hispanics 1 percent, Asians less than 1 percent, and non-Hispanic whites 95 percent -- the vast majority of them working-class. West Virginia ranks last among the states in the percentage of foreign-born residents (1 percent, again), and last again in the percentage of residents who speak a language other than English in the home.
Nor is the white population notably diverse. None of the great waves of immigration that have shaped the United States in the past 160 or so years -- the Irish flight from the Potato Famine, the great migration from Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century, the 20th-century move of African Americans from the South to the North and West, the current wave of immigration from Latin America and Asia -- have touched West Virginia. The state got some refugees from the failed German revolution of 1848; other than that, the Scots-Irish dominate. The old industrial economy generated mining jobs that paid little and began to be mechanized shortly after World War II. The post-industrial economy has yet to arrive.
The fact that Barack Obama is not only bi-racial but the most cosmopolitan candidate ever to seek the presidency makes him the most alien candidate, demographically and culturally, that stoutly provincial West Virginia has ever had to consider. But in the 1960 Democratic primary, John Kennedy went into West Virginia as a demographic alien, too. He was Catholic; West Virginia was overwhelmingly Protestant. That, in fact, is why he contested West Virginia in the first place.
In 1960, the nomination process was still controlled by the political organizations that dominated the various state convention delegations (that didn't change until the convention of 1972). Only 16 states had primaries in 1960, and many of those, West Virginia's included, were beauty contests, with no binding effect on the state's delegates. Candidates entered presidential primaries -- and usually, just a handful of them -- for one reason only, and that was to impress upon the political bosses who controlled the nomination process that they were, in fact, electable.
Three of the five Democratic presidential possibilities that year -- Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson, and Stuart Symington -- didn't even enter the primaries. Only Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey did -- Humphrey, to demonstrate that he could be elected despite his liberalism; Kennedy, to demonstrate that he could be elected despite his Catholicism. Many of the bosses were themselves Catholic, but the only previous Catholic presidential nominee, New York Governor Al Smith in 1928, had carried just eight states, and West Virginia hadn't been one of them. The bosses weren't notably eager to test whether American had become more religiously tolerant in the 32 years since.
The first of the year's primaries that mattered had been in Wisconsin in April -- a progressive state abutting Humphrey's own progressive Minnesota, but a state where Kennedy had outspent and out-campaigned Humphrey and come away with 56 percent of the vote. But Kennedy's victories had come in the more Catholic, Eastern and urban part of the state, while Humphrey had won the Protestant (and Minnesota-adjacent) western part. Humphrey could have dropped out after failing to win the neighboring state but, since he beat the media point-spread, he elected to continue on to West Virginia, which held its primary on May 10, four weeks after Wisconsin. The press reported that Kennedy would have a tough time there, on religious grounds, but Humphrey's decision to push on created the possibility that a Kennedy victory would convince case to the bosses that he could win a general election. The state was just 5 percent Catholic and (then as now) just 4 percent black.
Early polling showed Kennedy, who received much the most (and frequently most fawning) press coverage of any candidate early in the campaign, leading in West Virginia, but that was before voters discovered his religion. His campaign's young pollster, Lou Harris, reported that Kennedy's 70-to-30 percent lead in Kanawha County (which includes the state capital, Charleston) before Wisconsin fell to a 60-to-40 percent deficit afterwards.
The Kennedy campaign in West Virginia proceeded along two fronts. The first was money, which Kennedy had in abundance and Humphrey had barely at all. (Many of the unions that had funded Humphrey ceased their funding after Wisconsin. He had been their first choice, but they saw no chance for Humphrey in Wisconsin's wake, and believed that by staying in, he was hurting their second choice, Kennedy, and thereby helping Johnson, whom they feared would be more conservative.) Kennedy traveled around West Virginia on a private plane; Humphrey, on an old and battered bus.
The money enabled Kennedy to put together a first-class organization, run by his organizing genius, Larry O'Brien. It also enabled him to turn out the vote by other means as well. The great chronicler of the 1960 election, Theodore H. White, in his seminal The Making of the President 1960 (the book from which all subsequent American political journalism flows, just as all Russian literature, as Dostoevsky said, came out of Gogol's Overcoat), lumped West Virginia "among those states whose politics ? are the most squalid, corrupt and despicable ?" West Virginia, White continued, was so continually depressed, so dependent on jobs doled out by county officials, that contesting factions turned out their vote by any means possible, and money was much the preferred means. White, who put the label "Camelot" on Kennedy's presidency, doesn't go so far as to say that the Kennedy people bought votes, but the emphasis he puts on the Kennedy campaign's willingness and ability to play by West Virginia rules certainly seems crafted to convey that impression.
But Kennedy had to dispel the religion issue as well, and convince West Virginia voters that he would not be taking orders from Rome. Today, we are familiar with the speech on religion he gave much later that year, in September, to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, but we've lost, but for White's own transcription, his televised remarks, on a show he paid for, to the residents of West Virginia the Sunday before the primary. Kennedy, White wrote, took nearly 12 minutes out of a half-hour show to answer the question about his religion posed by the show's moderator, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. (a Kennedy supporter who played big in West Virginia). He talked about the separation of church and state, and finished with this:
So when any man stands on the steps of the Capitol and takes the oath of office of President, he is swearing to support the separation of church and state; he puts one hand on the Bible and raises the other hand to God as he takes the oath. And if he breaks the oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which Congress can impeach him -- and should impeach him -- but he is committing a sin against God.
White then wrote, "Here, Kennedy raised his hand from an imaginary Bible, as if lifting it to God, and repeating softly, said, 'A sin against God, for he has sworn on the Bible.'"
That did it. Kennedy essentially had recast the separation of church and state as one of God's commandments, and positioned himself not just as a loyal American but as a faithful servant of the Almighty as well. Two days later, Kennedy carried the state by a 61-to-39 margin. Humphrey dropped out, the bosses were impressed, and Kennedy won the nomination that summer at the convention.
What Kennedy forged in West Virginia by asserting both his American-ness and his Christianity was a common bond with voters who had viewed him up till then as a Catholic "other." Obama faces a similar challenge this year's race -- but West Virginia's primary won't be the contest in which he surmounts it.
