December 29, 2006
The Romneys of Michigan Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:10 PM EST In the Department of Tenuous Segues: Speaking of Gerald Ford, who represented Michigan in the House of Representatives for 25 years, how about Mitt Romney, the outgoing governor of Massachusetts and current GOP presidential hopeful? His father, George Romney, served as governor of Michigan in the 1960s and launched an abortive campaign for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. George Romney’s candidacy hit an insurmountable roadblock in 1967, when the governor told a Michigan television audience that “when I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.” What he meant to say was that his recent fact-finding tour had left him deeply skeptical of claims by administration officials and military leaders that America was turning the corner in southeast Asia. To most pundits, however, it sounded simply as though the would-be commander-in-chief had admitted to being brainwashed. In response, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, widely known for his acerbic wit, quipped that “a light rinse would have been sufficient.” Jokes aside, the damage was done, and Romney withdrew from the race. I conducted a quick electronic search of major newspapers (The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) and found that Romney’s religion (he was a Mormon, as is his son) provoked minimal discussion in 1967, when he was the front-runner for the GOP nomination. Insomuch as anyone suggested that a Mormon might be unqualified for high office, critics pointed to the church’s shoddy record on race relations and demanded of Romney an ironclad assurance that he would enforce America’s new civil rights laws. As a Washington Post article dated March 26, 1967, explained, “Romney is beginning to feel the heat of religious differences, perhaps not primarily directed at the Mormon Church of which he is a devout member, but bearing on the Mormon doctrine, which prevents Negroes from serving in the higher echelons of the priesthood.” More widely debated was Romney’s legal standing as a presidential aspirant. His parents were U.S. citizens who crossed the Mexican border to flee religious persecution in their native Arizona. George Romney was born in Mexico but returned to the United States as a young boy. Consequently, political commentators in 1967 wondered if he qualified as a “natural born citizen.” Fast-forward to 2006. No one has seriously suggested that Mitt Romney is unqualified to serve as President because he is a Mormon, but there has been rampant speculation that his religion might turn off a sufficient number of voters—especially evangelical Protestants, whose support is crucial for GOP primary candidates—to cost him the election. At first glance, it seems odd that religious difference is a matter of greater speculation today than it was 40 years ago. To take a Whiggish view of American history, we should be on a straight path to perfection. I suspect that the rise of the “religious right”—that loose confederation of orthodox religious groups that since the 1970s have stridently pressed their agenda in America’s courts, media, and political arena—has made religion more important in the twenty-first century than it was in the mid-twentieth. For all the public fawning that religious conservatives demand and receive, from Republicans and Democrats alike, it may just be that their influence is every bit as invidious as it is salutary. After all, what can one say of a country that didn’t bat an eyelash at the prospect of a Mormon President in 1967 but that hotly debates the prospect in 2007? Sometimes history moves in a backwards direction.
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