National Affairs: THE DEFEAT OF THE HAPPY WARRIOR

In the 1960 debate over a Roman Catholic’s chances of winning the presidency, many an argument is cinched with a reference to Al Smith’s campaign of 1928. But many a 1960 crystal ball is clouded by a clouded memory of what really happened in 1928. This was it:

CAREFREE 1928 was a year of peace, prosperity, bootleg booze and “whoopee.” Commander Richard E. Byrd set out on his first Antarctic expedition, and Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly the Atlantic. Thornton Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Warner Brothers released the first all-talking picture, The Lights of New York, and Walt Disney produced his first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy. In the World Series, the New York Yankees walloped the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight, with Babe Ruth hitting three home runs in the final game. In August at Paris, the U.S. and 14 other nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, solemnly renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. And in November, Alfred E. Smith, the only Roman Catholic ever nominated for President by a major U.S. political party, lost to Herbert Hoover in a landslide.

The 1928 campaign was fought out against a background of widespread public contentment with U.S. history’s most remarkable stretch of prosperity—prosperity for which the Republicans doggedly claimed credit. From 1921 to the end of 1928, under Republican Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, real per capita national income had climbed by a heady 30%.*In June 1928 the Republican Convention in Kansas City chose a nominee who seemed superbly equipped to carry on the Republican prosperity: Secretary of Commerce Herbert Clark Hoover, 53, a self-made, wealthy, Iowa-born engineer who was the most admired member of Coolidge’s drab Cabinet.

Hoover had going for him not only the Republican record of prosperity but also a deep split in the Democratic Party between I) the rural, Protestant, Prohibitionist bloc that William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, had led until his death in 1925, and 2) the urban bloc, largely Catholic and “wet,” mainly concentrated in the East, which Bryan had called “the enemy’s country.” In their intense suspicion of each other, the two wrangling camps had taken 44 ballots to nominate a compromise presidential candidate in 1920, and an exhausting 103 ballots in 1924. Having lost badly with both compromises, Ohio Publisher-Politician James M. Cox in 1920 and West Virginia Lawyer John W. Davis in 1924, the Democrats in 1928 turned to a man who unmistakably spoke for the Eastern big-city wets. At the Democratic Convention in Houston, held a fortnight after the Republican Convention, Al Smith won the nomination on the first ballot.

Alfred Emanuel Smith, 54, was a living exemplar of the American Dream, big-city version. A laborer’s son, he was born and raised in a shabby Irish neighborhood in Manhattan’s decaying Lower East Side, left school for good at 14, a month short of completing the eighth grade, to work for a carting firm as a $3-a-week dispatcher’s helper. Industrious, personable, and gifted with a flair for oratory, he early caught the eye of the Fourth Ward’s Democratic political chieftains, fellow Irishmen all. When he was 21, a Fourth Ward politico got him a job in the office of the commissioner of jurors, serving jury duty summonses, and from there the ladder of politics led upward. Elected to the state assembly in 1903 at 29, he became speaker of the assembly in 1913. In 1918 he won the first of his four two-year terms as Governor of New York. An energetic and dedicated Governor, he reorganized the state administrative structure, overcame the Governor v. legislature impasse that had bogged down previous administrations, pushed through a series of social-welfare measures, notably school construction, public housing and child-labor restrictions.

By 1924 Smith was a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. Picked to make the speech nominating Smith at the 1924 convention, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been the party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1920, and was recovering from his polio attack, applied to him a tag that stuck for the rest of Smith’s life. Quoting from an 1807 poem by William Wordsworth, Roosevelt wound up the speech with:

This is the Happy Warrior; this is he That every man in arms should wish to be.*

For millions of big-city workers, children and grandchildren of immigrants, Happy Warrior Smith, grandson of immigrants, was a symbol of hopes and aspirations, living proof that in America a boy born to poverty, a member of ethnic and religious minorities, could nevertheless rise very high. Smith’s opposition to Prohibition appealed to the big-city minority groups, who looked upon the 18th Amendment as an imposition by the Protestant majority. But the very aspects of Al Smith that endeared him to big-city working-class Americans of Irish, Latin, Slavic and Jewish origins tended to repel older-stock Protestant Americans, some who were dedicated to Prohibition with religious fervor, and some who opposed Prohibition but joined in looking with dislike—or at least distrust—upon big cities, foreign accents and the Roman Catholic Church.

Even minor details about Al Smith and his campaign—his dudish brown derby, his Sidewalks of New York campaign song, the Bowery touches in his speech (“raddio,” “horspital,” etc.)—grated on Americans west of the Hudson River, emphasizing for them his alien, big-city background. Kansas’ William Allen White, widely heeded editor of the Emporia Gazette, expressed the fears and suspicions of a broad, bipartisan segment of the U.S. when he wrote that the “whole puritan civilization, which has built a sturdy, orderly nation, is threatened by Smith.”

A subdued forenote of what was ahead for Al Smith in the 1928 campaign sounded in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1927, more than a year before the nominating convention. In an “open letter” to Governor Smith, an Episcopal New York lawyer named Charles C. Marshall challenged him to explain how his loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church could be reconciled with the “American constitutional principles” separating church and state. Smith replied in the next issue. “I believe in the absolute separation of church and state,” he said, “and in the strict enforcement of the provisions of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. I believe that no tribunal of any church has any power to make any decree of any force in the law of the land, other than to establish the status of its own communicants within its own church.”

In the Protestant attack on Smith after his nomination, opposition to him as a Catholic and opposition to him as a wet were inextricably entangled. People who were intensely hostile toward Catholicism were usually fervent drys. Since American traditions tended to inhibit direct assaults on religion, hostility to Smith’s Catholicism was often expressed in denunciations of him as a servant of the Demon Rum.

The dry-Protestant campaign against Smith showed a ferocity that would be impossible in the more homogenized U.S. of 1960. He was referred to as “Alcohol) Smith.” Widely circulated stories reported him so drunk at public functions that cronies had to support him to keep him from falling down. The Ku Klux Klan issued a “Klarion Kail for a Krusade” against him, attacked him repeatedly in the Klan publication, Fellowship Forum. A typical Forum cartoon showed what a Cabinet meeting would be like if Smith got elected: the Pope and a dozen fat priests sitting happily around the table, with Smith, in bellboy livery, serving them liquor. Out in the boondocks. Smith haters showed audiences a photograph of Governor Smith at the inauguration of New York City’s Holland Tunnel in 1927, warned that he was planning to extend the tunnel to the basement of the Vatican if he got elected President.

Protestant clergymen openly joined in the attack. New York Baptist Minister John Roach Straton, a leader of the nationwide Fundamentalist movement, denounced Smith as “the deadliest foe in America today of the forces of moral progress.” Virginia’s Methodist Bishop James Cannon Jr. thundered at Smith in sermons and pamphlets, organized a South-wide movement of drys dedicated to his defeat. Moderator Hugh K. Walker of the Presbyterian General Assembly called upon all Protestant churchmen to “fight to the bitter end the election of Alfred E. Smith.”

In a speech in Oklahoma City in September, Al Smith fired back, denounced the efforts to “inject bigotry, hatred, intolerance and un-American sectarian division” into the campaign. “Let the people of this country decide this election upon the great and real issues of the campaign,” he cried, “and upon nothing else.”

Smith tried hard to wage a campaign of issues—waterways development, tariff revision, easing of immigration restrictions, etc.—but in prosperous, whoopee-minded 1928 it was all but ‘ impossible to stir up any public fervor about these matters. Smith’s effort to appeal to farm-belt discontent in his one major farm speech failed to dent the farmers’ instinctive mistrust of a derby-wearing New Yorker. Hoover, who endeared himself to the drys by calling Prohibition “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive,” kept slugging away at the single issue of prosperity.

So lopsided was Smith’s defeat in November that to many of his partisans it seemed to call for some special explanation. In electoral votes, losing by 87 to 444, Smith made a worse showing than Cox in 1920 or Davis in 1924. Cox had captured eleven states, Davis twelve; Smith carried only eight: six in the Deep South, plus Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He lost four Solid South states—Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas—that had unfailingly returned Democratic majorities since 1876.

Smith himself blamed his defeat on anti-Catholic bigotry. Through repetition over the years, this idea hardened into an axiom, often called the “unwritten law” of U.S. politics: no Roman Catholic can get elected President of the U.S. But Smith had special personal handicaps in his Bowery accent, his Tammany background. Moreover, it is highly doubtful that any Democrat—Catholic or Protestant, wet or dry, big-city or small-town—could have beaten Hoover in 1928. In addition to the prosperity claim, the Republicans had the enormous advantage of being, unlike the G.O.P. in 1960, the nation’s majority party. Since 1860, the G.O.P.’s grip on the White House had been broken only under special circumstances: depression (Cleveland in 1884), third-party split-offs (Cleveland in 1892, Wilson in 1912) or war (Wilson in 1916).

In 1920 and again in 1924, the Democratic presidential candidate had failed to carry a single state outside the Solid South and the border states. In the off-year congressional elections of 1926, the G.O.P. preserved its majorities in both houses, a sure sign of contentment. In view of the feeble Democratic showings in 1920, 1924 and 1926, Franklin Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1927 that it seemed impossible for any Democrat to win the presidency in 1928 if “the present undoubted general prosperity of the country continues.” And continue it did—until seven months after Hoover’s inauguration.

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Perhaps the remarkable fact about Smith’s showing in the election of 1928 was not that he ran so poorly in the South but that he ran so well in the North. He gathered 40.8% of the popular vote as against Cox’s 34.1% in 1920 and Davis’ 28.8% in 1924 (when the Progressive revolt under Wisconsin’s Senator Robert La Follette took votes from both parties, but more from the Republicans than from the Democrats). In the nation’s twelve biggest cities, which collectively had long returned a G.O.P. plurality in presidential elections, Smith won a net plurality of 38,000 votes as against a net of 1,252,000 for Coolidge in the same cities in 1924. Smith lost his own New York State, but, except for 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote, it had not gone Democratic since 1892. And, except for 1912, the two Northern states that Smith did carry—Massachusetts and Rhode Island—had voted Republican consistently since 1860.

What happened in 1928 was that Smith’s Catholicism and his opposition to Prohibition 1) lost him the votes of many Bryan Democrats, and 2) won him the votes of many city dwellers who had voted Republican in earlier years, or who had never before voted in a presidential election. The two-way shift showed up neatly in the Pennsylvania results: Smith lost the three traditionally Democratic rural counties that Cox and Davis had carried, but he won three traditionally Republican industrial counties.

It may be that Smith’s Catholicism, to the extent that it can be disentangled from the Prohibition issue, gained him more votes than it lost him. If he had been a Protestant and nonetheless Al Smith in all other respects, the South might have remained solid (though he would still have lost many Southern votes as a big-city wet). But a Protestant Smith could not have carried heavily Catholic Massachusetts or Rhode Island, or racked up a net plurality in the twelve biggest cities. It may be true that no Roman Catholic can get elected President of the U.S., but the election of 1928 did not prove it.

*Estimated increase during the Eisenhower era, 1953-60: 12%. *Whether or not the tag helped Smith, it did help Roosevelt: he became known as the man who called Al Smith the Happy Warrior. But Roosevelt deserved little credit. The Wordsworth couplet (from the poem that was read at Grover Cleveland’s funeral in 1908) was written into the nominating speech by its principal ghostwriter, New York Judge Joseph M. Proskauer. Roosevelt accepted the idea reluctantly, argued that the flourish was too literary for hardheaded convention delegates.