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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."