IN AMERICA, OLD WOUNDS HEAL: NOTHING IS STATIC IN THE FLUX OF POLITICAL EVOLUTION

"We Negroes, Jews, and Catholics had better stick together or else the white man will run us out of town." So spoke a young black man at a Washington University anti-Klan rally seventy years ago. To be sure, the main target of the Klan was black people, but a secondary Klan focus was on Catholics and Jews.

The Klan was strongest in the South, Southwest and part of the Midwest. It relied on fear and intimidation, with some supportive fulmination from some fundamentalist, tub-thumping preachers capable of exciting the faithful. A political climax of sorts occurred at the 1924 Democratic Convention when anti-Klan forces backed New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic and a wet, against soft-on-Klan, anti-Pope, dry forces represented by Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo. It was an updated version of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." The party was ripped apart in a snarling 103 ballot deadlock that resulted in a lackluster compromise nominee and a devastating November defeat.

The vision of the Pope sitting in the White House no longer excites the passions of most voters. All these years later, the fundamentalist/Catholic ideological schism has seemingly been mostly bridged. The fundamentalists and the Catholics are no longer at each other's political throats.

In New York City, the fundamentalists and the Catholics have merged their political efforts to support a slate of candidates in next week's school board elections. Campaign strategy is formulated out of the New York Catholic Archdiocese office on First Avenue, says spokesman John Zwilling. The dominant issues are: ensuring that schools teach that abstinence is the most effective means of avoiding sexually transmitted diseases; opposition to the availability of condoms in the public schools; opposition to AIDS education for students; and prohibiting schools from teaching tolerance of homosexuals. These were the issues that constituted the basis for the recent, acrimonious ouster of New York City Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez. The school board elections will be used to establish a mandate to bind Fernandez's successor with respect to the same or related issues.

Pat Robertson is the fundamentalist part of the coalition and the celebrity spokesman for the campaign. His principal tactical effort will be the distribution throughout the City of New York or 500,000 pamphlets prepared by his Christian Coalition. Robertson will use hundreds of Catholic and Protestant Churches as points of distribution. The pamphlets will stop short of making precise endorsements so as not to jeopardize any tax-exempt status, but it will be clear which of the hundreds of candidates running for seats in the 32 school districts in New York City are "right" on the issues.

Robertson has informed his television listeners of his efforts in New York and has, from time to time, made it clear that he has other things on his mind for the public schools of the United States: teaching creationism, school prayer, parental right to review of school book content and elimination of all sex education.

In America, old wounds seem to heal and new sores develop. Enemies become friends. Friends divide. Nothing is static in the flux of political evolution.