The Also-Ran

THE ALSO-RAN Interpreting the 1928 Outcome After taking his wife and family aside to tell them how the presidential vote was going, Al Smith went to bed on election night in 1928 knowing that his bid for the White House had failed. As the campaign had progressed Smith had come to expect this result, but now he seemed stunned by how thoroughly the voters had rejected him. Within a day or so, the full extent of his defeat was known. Nearly 21,400,000 persons had voted for Herbert Hoover, while only about 15,016,000 had opted for Smith. This translated into 444 Electoral College votes for the Republican ticket and just 87 for the Democratic standard-bearers – 49 fewer than the 136 electoral votes John W. Davis had garnered four years earlier. This lopsided outcome, and also the sizeable margin of Hoover’s victory in the popular vote (58.8% to 41.2% of the two-party vote) qualified as a landslide in the Republican’s favor. The totals also confirmed that the 1928 presidential election had aroused a high degree of interest and participation in the country. The voter registration, which was not far below the record number, had increased considerably from 1924 (it went from just over half of the eligible voters in that year to over three-quarters of those eligible in 1928); nearly 37,000,000 persons in all had voted for a presidential nominee on November 6, 1928.1 Especially noticeable was the increased turnout in the Northeast, where there had been 1 In 1928, the turnout for Congressional races (nationally) lagged behind that for the presidential contest the most of any presidential election year between 1880 and 1948, which would seem consistent with a sharply elevated interest in the presidential race. the greatest declines in 1920 and 1924.2 The causes and effects of this higher voter participation were not immediately clear to those who were reading the returns. Was it mainly attributable to the increase in the country’s population since 1920? Had more women voted in 1928 than in 1920 and 1924, the first two opportunities all American women had to cast ballots? Had the bulk of the new voters – men or women – preferred the Republicans or the Democrats in 1928? Would the first-time voters that year continue to take part in future presidential elections? On the face of it, the strategy the Democratic Party had devised at the outset of the presidential campaign had failed. The party’s renowned “Solid South” had been reduced in 1928 to only five states in the deepest South, plus the vice-presidential nominee’s home state (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina); Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia had all defected to the Republicans after having voted for Davis in 1924. The Midwest, seemingly ripe for at least some defections in 1928, had instead remained entirely loyal to the G.O.P. In the Northeast, Smith’s apparent deep suit, only Massachusetts and Rhode Island had given him their electoral votes: even his home state of New York had gone to Hoover because Smith’s downstate totals could not overcome Hoover’s votes elsewhere in the state. Finally, Smith’s reliance on his unique personality had not turned the tide and secured his victory. Although his showing in the popular vote was significantly better than that of Davis (who had received just 28.9% of the three-party vote in 1924), it was still a 2 Later, the 1928 increase would be viewed as part of a multi-election trend evident that could be detected earlier in the 1920s in some areas and that extended into the following decade. 2 disappointment – especially as Hoover’s share of the total popular vote had also significantly bettered that of his predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, in 1924. What had gone wrong for Smith? Pundits and politicians alike, as always eager to make sense of the results and to second-guess the candidates’ strategies and mistakes, studied the 1928 returns and offered their analyses of the election’s outcome. As with any election, there were disagreements about what the results showed, as well as about how well the parties and their nominees had done in the recent contest. In 1928, moreover, analysts of elections had little in the way of statistical data and tools. There were no scientific polling techniques and no exit interviews. Information about the characteristics of voting districts and their populations remained rudimentary at best, and there were no computers to assist in manipulating data. With no subsequent elections to add perspective to the one just concluded, long-term trends of which the 1928 presidential contest would in time be a part could only be guessed at. Numerous local variations also complicated the picture for those commenting on the results as they saw them. All of this made unraveling exactly why Hoover won and Smith lost in 1928 somewhat problematic. Making sense today of the contemporary analyses, therefore, is somewhat chancy and remains essentially an impressionistic exercise. “Unfortunately for the historian,” as one historian wrote, “elections are not run as experiments in the social sciences.” Support for almost any interpretation – and contradictory opinions about almost every potential causal factor in 1928 – can be found in the words of those who were looking back on 3 what was for them the recent election.3 (Later scholars, with much more in the way of data and tools available to them, have continued to disagree on the particulars of how and why Smith lost.) It is possible, though, to discern a broad contemporary consensus about many aspects of what had been decided on November 6, 1928. There are few surprises in the analyses that emerged soon after the election, and generally speaking they still seem close to the target. Throughout the South, there had been more Democratic defections than almost anyone had expected, except perhaps for the most fervent anti-Smith leaders. The combination of Smith’s wetness, Catholicism, urbanism, and Tammany Hall membership had (it was thought) proved to be insurmountable hurdles for many Southern voters. It seemed likely that Arkansas would have been among the losses had it not been for the presence of Senator Robinson on the national ticket. Some analysts wondered if Southerners might have resented the apparent attitude of the Democratic headquarters in New York that the region could be taken for granted in 1928. Certainly Smith had offered little to attract Southern voters, except perhaps the prospect of development of water power in the region. Even his efforts to address the issue of farm relief had been focused on the states that produced wheat and corn, rather than the ones where cotton was still a major crop. Some astute commentators also pointed to changes in the South’s economy and demography as a factor. Hoover had done well in many areas where urbanization, industrialization, and the influx of Yankee newcomers might have tipped the balance in his favor; in this “new New South,” the Republicans presumably had greater appeal than 3 A good example can be found in the commentaries that ascribed motivations to men and women voters. 4 the Democrats did. In several states – Virginia and North Carolina, for example – there were already strong Republican state parties that were competitive with the Democrats, so it did not take many more votes to produce a plurality for Hoover. Given this changed economy in parts of the South, perhaps one Smith opponent was correct when he asserted before the election that a good many Democrats had been just waiting for “a justifiable excuse to vote the Republican ticket.” In retrospect, the 1928 election represented one more step along the arc from a solid Democratic South before 1920 to a nearly solid Republican South later in the 20th century. Contemporary observers of course could not know that, but some of them suspected that troubled times were coming for the Democratic Party in the South. After all, as one writer put it, “Bolting is like kissing. Once done, it is a habit.” Particularly interesting was the agreement among most observers that had it not been for the Democratic Party’s sometimes-desperate appeals to party loyalty, and to the race issue in general, Smith might have lost in the South even more badly than he did. The New York World was among the first to notice a correlation in Southern states between the vote for Smith and the proportions of blacks and white inhabitants: Smith generally did better in counties where the former constituted 50% or more of the population. The post-election analyses concluded from this correlation that in these areas white voters did not feel that they could abandon their traditional party, even if Al Smith were the Democratic nominee, whereas in counties where whites were safely in the majority they felt that they could vote their instincts on such issues as prohibition and Smith’s Roman Catholicism. Of 191 counties with black majorities, 184 went for Smith; conversely, of 5 226 counties with black populations below 5% of the total, Smith won only 79 (and 21 of these were in the home state of his running mate, Robinson). The issue that would dominate Southern politics during the next several decades thus seems to have played an important role already in 1928. As for the Midwest, the consensus was that voters here had shared the South’s concerns about Smith – his urban outlook, his wetness, and his religious affiliation, but these apprehensions were less pronounced and less decisive than they were below Mason and Dixon’s Line.

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