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| Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Hoover/Curtis, Blue denotes those won by Smith/Robinson. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The United States presidential election of 1928 pitted Republican Herbert Hoover against Democrat Al Smith. The Republicans were identified with the booming economy of the 1920s, whereas Smith, a Roman Catholic, suffered politically from Anti-Catholic prejudice, his anti-prohibitionist stance, and the legacy of corruption of Tammany Hall, with which he was associated. Hoover won a landslide victory.
Contents |
Republican candidates:
With President Coolidge choosing not to enter the race, the race for the nomination was wide open. The leading candidates were Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, former Illinois Governor Frank Orren Lowden and Senate Majority Leader Charles Curtis. A draft-Coolidge movement failed to gain traction with party insiders and failed to persuade Coolidge himself.[1][2]
In the few primaries that mattered, Hoover did not perform as well as expected, and it was thought that the president or Vice-President Charles G. Dawes might accept a draft in case of a deadlock, but Lowden withdrew just as the convention was about to start, paving the way for a Hoover victory.[3]
The Republican Convention, held in Kansas City, Missouri from June 12 to June 15, nominated Hoover on the first ballot. With Hoover disinclined to interfere in the selection of his running mate, the party leaders were at first partial to giving Dawes a shot at a second term, but when this information leaked, Coolidge sent an angry telegram saying that he would consider a second nomination for Dawes, whom he hated, a "personal affront."[4] To attract votes from farmers concerned about Hoover's pro-business orientation, it was instead offered to Senator Curtis, who accepted. He was nominated overwhelmingly on the first ballot.[5]
In his acceptance speech a week after the convention ended, Secretary Hoover said: "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of this land... We shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this land."[6]
| Presidential Ballot | Vice Presidential Ballot | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Herbert Hoover | 837 | Charles Curtis | 1,052 |
| Frank Orren Lowden | 74 | Herman Ekern | 19 |
| Charles Curtis | 64 | Charles G. Dawes | 13 |
| James Eli Watson | 45 | Hanford MacNider | 2 |
| George W. Norris | 24 | ||
| Guy D. Goff | 18 | ||
| Calvin Coolidge | 17 | ||
| Charles G. Dawes | 4 | ||
| Charles Evans Hughes | 1 |
Democratic candidates:
With the memory of the Teapot Dome scandal rapidly fading, and the current state of prosperity making that year's presidential nomination not worth all that much, most of the major Democratic leaders, such as William Gibbs McAdoo, were content to sit this one out. One who did not was New York Governor Al Smith, who had tried twice before.[9]
The 1928 Democratic National Convention was held in Houston, Texas on June 26 to June 28, and Smith became the candidate on the first ballot.
The leadership asked the delegates to nominate Sen. Joseph Taylor Robinson of Arkansas, who was in many ways Smith's political polar opposite, to be his running mate, and he was nominated for vice-president.[10][11]
Smith was the first Roman Catholic to gain a major party's nomination for president, and his religion became an issue during the campaign. Many Protestants feared that Smith would take orders from church leaders in Rome in making decisions affecting the country.[12][13]
| Presidential Ballot | Vice Presidential Ballot | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Al Smith | 849.17 | Joseph Taylor Robinson | 1,035.17 |
| Cordell Hull | 71.84 | Alben W. Barkley | 77 |
| Walter F. George | 52.5 | Nellie Tayloe Ross | 31 |
| James A. Reed | 52 | Henry Tureman Allen | 28 |
| Atlee Pomerene | 47 | George L. Berry | 17.5 |
| Jesse H. Jones | 43 | Dan Moody | 9.33 |
| Evans Woollen | 32 | Duncan U. Fletcher | 7 |
| Pat Harrison | 20 | John H. Taylor | 6 |
| William A. Ayres | 20 | Lewis Stevenson | 4 |
| Richard C. Watts | 18 | Evans Woollen | 2 |
| Gilbert Hitchcock | 16 | Joseph Patrick Tumulty | 1 |
| A. Victor Donahey | 5 | ||
| Houston Thompson | 2 | ||
| Theodore G. Bilbo | 1 |
Source: US President - D Convention. Our Campaigns. (March 10, 2011).
The Prohibition Convention was held in Chicago from July 10 through July 12. Smith openly opposed Prohibition.[14] Some members of the Prohibition Party wanted to throw their support to Hoover, thinking that their candidate would not win and that they didn't want their candidate to provide the margin by which Smith would win. Nonetheless, William F. Varney was nominated for president over Hoover by a margin of 68–45.
The election was held on November 6, 1928.
Republican candidate Herbert Hoover won election by a wide margin on pledges to continue the economic boom of the Coolidge years. Smith won the electoral votes only of the traditionally Democratic Southern United States and two New England states with a large proportion of Catholic voters (Massachusetts and Rhode Island). Hoover even triumphed in Smith's home state of New York by a narrow margin. The inroads made by the Republican ticket in the South were indeed rather stunning. Texas had never been carried by a Republican before, whereas the electoral votes of North Carolina and Virginia had not been awarded to a Republican since 1872, nor those of Florida since 1876. In all, Smith carried only six of the eleven states of the former Confederacy.
Anti-Catholicism was a significant problem for Smith's campaign. Protestant ministers warned that he would take orders from the pope who, many Americans sincerely believed, would move to the United States to rule the country from a Washington, D.C., fortress if Smith won. According to a popular joke, after the election he sent a one-word telegram advising Pope Pius XI to "Unpack".[15] Beyond the conspiracy theories, a survey of 8,500 Southern Methodist Church ministers found only four who supported Smith, and the northern Methodists, Southern Baptists, and Disciples of Christ were similar in their opposition. Many Americans who sincerely rejected bigotry and the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan justified their opposition to Smith on their belief that the Catholic Church as an "un-American", "alien culture" that opposed freedom and democracy.[16]:309-312,317
An example was a statement issued in September 1928 by the National Lutheran Editors' and Managers' Association that opposed Smith's election. The manifesto, written by Dr. Clarence Reinhold Tappert, warned about "the peculiar relation in which a faithful Catholic stands and the absolute allegiance he owes to a 'foreign sovereign' who does not only 'claim' supremacy also in secular affairs as a matter of principle and theory but who, time and again, has endeavored to put this claim into practical operation." The Catholic Church, the manifesto asserted, was hostile to American principles of separation of church and state and of religious toleration.[17] Smith's opposition to Prohibition, a key reform promoted by Protestants, also lost him votes, as did his association with Tammany Hall. Because many anti-Catholics used these issues as a cover for their religious prejudices, Smith's campaign had difficulty denouncing anti-Catholicism as bigotry without offending others who favored Prohibition or disliked Tammany's corruption.[16]:312-313
Due to these issues, Smith lost several states that had been members of the Solid South since Reconstruction.[18] However, in many southern states with sizable African American populations (and where the vast majority of African Americans could not vote at the time), many believed that Hoover supported integration, or at least was not committed to maintaining segregation, which in turn overcame opposition to Smith's campaign. During the race, Mississippi Governor Theodore G. Bilbo claimed that Hoover had met with a black member of the Republican National Committee and danced with her; Hoover's campaign quickly denied the "untruthful and ignoble assertion".[19] Smith's religion helped him with New England immigrants, which may explain his narrow victories in traditionally Republican Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as his narrow loss in New York (which previous Democratic presidential candidates lost by double digits, but which Smith only lost by 2%).[20]
| Presidential candidate | Party | Home state | Popular vote | Electoral vote |
Running mate | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Pct | Vice-presidential candidate | Home state | Elect. vote | ||||
| Herbert Hoover | Republican | California | 21,427,123 | 58.2% | 444 | Charles Curtis | Kansas | 444 |
| Al Smith | Democratic | New York | 15,015,464 | 40.8% | 87 | Joseph Taylor Robinson | Arkansas | 87 |
| Norman Thomas | Socialist | New York | 267,478 | 0.7% | 0 | James H. Maurer | Pennsylvania | 0 |
| William Z. Foster | Communist | Illinois | 48,551 | 0.1% | 0 | Benjamin Gitlow | New York | 0 |
| Other | 48,396 | 0.1% | — | Other | — | |||
| Total | 36,807,012 | 100% | 531 | 531 | ||||
| Needed to win | 266 | 266 | ||||||
Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. 1928 Presidential Election Results. Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (July 28, 2005).
Source (Electoral Vote): Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives. (July 28, 2005).
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