THE END OF A BIGOT

New Zealand Tablet, 25 August 1921, Page 19

THE END OF A BIGOT

"The Rev. S. J. Catts, elected Governor of Florida, ' to redeem the State ' in 1916, on a sectarian and prohibition platform, is a fugitive from justice. He is indicted by a State jury for granting pardons on a cash basis. A federal jury indicts him for getting negroes out of prison, then working them on his farm as slaves, under ' peonage.' "

The above item, taken from an editorial in a Sail Francisco paper of May 20, will be of particular interest to New Zealand because of the similarity in the political rise of this gentleman Catts and a certain calumnymonger of New Zealand.

Catts was put forward many years ago by more important citizens, who wanted to utilize a sectarian cry against Catholics as a possible means of election by the sparse white population of Florida. This State, apart from its two famous winter resorts and their touristpopulation, is unusually backward and little educated for an American State.

After a time, as men of his type invariably do, the desire for power and publicity made him resolve to be one of the masters instead of being simply their agent—their tool. Ho contested one election after another, always using his anti-Catholic cry and attacks on Catholic schools and, "nunneries," combining with it a Prohibition plank which was popular in a State where blacks were many. Finally he became Governor, the goal at which he had aimed, and is known as the father of an act of legislation that empowered his minions to search convents at their own pleasure.

This brought out a storm of protest all over the south, not from Catholics only, nor from the illiterate descendants of the carpet-baggers who helped to put Catts in power, but from southern Protestant gentlemen of the old school, whose own womenfolk and friends had been educated at convents and who knew what angels of mercy the hospital nuns had been on the battlefields of the Civil War. So the Catts Act became practically inoperative, and the name of Catts synonymous with anti-Catholic bigotry and political narrowness.

To-day he stands exposed, as men of that type do sooner or later, in their true colors. '