One of my favorite and clearest examples, though, is this Thomas Nast drawing that was widely circulated at the time:
You can find a larger copy of that image and there's a lot of interesting stuff in the details.
I also like the one that portrays Catholic Bishops as alligators coming ashore to prey on innocent school children who are in Catholic schools because their parents choose their school:
Without the voucher system, so the theory went, all children would end up in public schools. In reality, Catholic families made absolutely incredible sacrifices to send their kids to Catholic schools even after the voucher system was ended.
When I first heard of all this when I was a kid and a neighbor's dad told us about it. I didn't think much about it back when I was ten, so it languished among cobwebs and old canned goods at the back of my brain until I started reading up on the history of this sort of things just a few years ago. Then I looked for something about Republicans wanting to end Catholic schools and found a good bit.
I'm not sure whether the country was caught up in this because Republicans pushed it, or it was the Republicans who got caught up in it because it was popular. I do know how Catholic old folks who I've talked with saw things at the time and I also know how democrat propaganda fostered that outlook.
One thing for sure, I never heard of Republicans working very hard to overcome the accusations of anti-Catholic bigotry until this past election season, and even that effort was far from universal.
Regards