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.