This day is marked in the history books as the day that preachers should remember to be careful about delivering prophetic voices about controversial things like politics about which they know very little.
On Wednesday, October 29, 1884, the United States presidential race was decided in a few seconds of the prophetic pronouncement by a New York City pastor.
The voters in that presidential election year were evenly divided. Perhaps for that reason, the 1884 presidential race became one of the most intense, and nastiest in American history. It ended up pitting religious people against each other.
Both sides looked for every little advantage in the political horserace. For that reason, the Republicans were trying to activate the pastors as a political force.
Reverend Samuel D. Buchard (1812-1891) was invited to introduce to a group of city ministers the Republican candidate for President James G. Blaine.
At that time, Buchard was a hugely respected senior pastor acting as the caretaker of Murray Hill Presbyterian Church. He had a long, popular stint as pastor of the Houston Street Presbyterian Church (which grew so much that they moved to a bigger building at 145 W. 13th Street). He was also the author of several books. In the Deep South, he had distinguished himself as a brave abolitionist before the Civil War. He served as a nurse for pandemic victims and a temperance activist. He had never published anything against Catholicism, so the Republicans thought that he would be a well-respected choice to solidify their efforts with Protestant pastors without alienating the Catholics. The party was strenuously trying to reach and connect with Catholics too.
Burchard got up in one of the parlor rooms of the Fifth Avenue Hotel to introduce the Republican candidate for president. The room was packed and filled with excitement. Burchard felt the weight of the moment. He later said that he thought he was there to speak by the Providence of God. If that was true, it was God’s providence that the Republicans be defeated, divided, and diminished.
Buchard made a tactful speech until he came to the end when he was inspired to add this ringing conclusion: “We are Republicans, and do not propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with those whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Although Blaine did not endorse these words, the damage was done. Burchard’s alliterative phrase was quoted in the next day’s issue of the New York World.
The word was then spread by fliers across the city and nation that the Republicans were anti-Catholic. The derogatory phrase became a badge of honor among those attacked.
Liquor shops even offered bottles of rum with the label “R-R-R.”
The election was decided when Grover Cleveland, a native of Buffalo and the governor of New York, won his home state by only 1,049 votes. This was an amazingly slim margin for a governor in his own state, but it probably reflected the unpopularity of the corruption of Tammany Hall. Cleveland wasn’t Catholic but probably was elected by Catholics.
In fact, the Tammany Hall candidate for mayor lost, but Cleveland won. This also shows that Catholic voters were discriminating in their votes. They didn’t blindly sell out their soul to Tammany Hall. In fact, Cleveland was not a Catholic.
Blaine came to look upon the preacher who did him in like a plague from God.
“As the Lord sent upon us an ass in the shape of a preacher and a rainstorm, to lessen our vote in New York,” wrote Republican candidate James G. Blaine two weeks after he had lost the presidential election of 1884. Blaine was not alone in feeling that he would have carried New York by ten thousand votes, insisting that “had Dr. Burchard been doing missionary work in Asia Minor or Cochin China…, the Republican would have won the presidency. “I am disposed to feel resigned to the dispensation of defeat,” Blaine concluded.
In 1910, the 13th Street Church that Burchard had done so much to build up was consolidated with several other churches to form Greenwich Presbyterian Church.
However, the pastor’s phrase “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” made an encore appearance with Calvary Baptist Church’s John Roach Straton commenting on the presidential election campaign of New York’s Governor Al Smith in 1928. The city pastor was particularly upset that Smith was in favor of repealing the Prohibition against the buying and selling of alcoholic beverages. Smith was also the first Roman Catholic to run for the presidency.
Like Buchard, Straton was a combination of human rights campaigner (Democrats campaigning for Smith in the South claimed that the New York pastor was waging war against White supremacy) and temperance preacher, who sometimes lacked political judgment. The 1929 Depression swept away Roach’s influence in favor of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who became president.
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