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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.