DEMOCRAT: AL SMITH Al Smith was the polar opposite of Hoover, a politician born and bred within New York’s Tammany Hall system. Smith loved meeting people and pressing the flesh. Going into 1928, he was the four-time governor of New York strengthened by a national following and the support of up-and-coming political stars like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor. Al had two problems, however, and they were big ones. He supported the repeal of Prohibition, and he was America’s first Catholic presidential candidate.
THE CAMPAIGN
Neither party was hurting for money in the election of 1928, which may explain why things became so nasty. The Republicans would ultimately spend $9.4 million, the Democrats $7.1 million (the Democrats also ponied up $500,000 on radio time, at the rate of $10,000 an hour for a coast-to-coast hookup).
Republican ads underscored the prosperity Americans were feeling. “Hoover and Happiness or Smith and Soup Houses,” or, even more effective, “A Chicken in Every Pot—Vote for Hoover.” The message, as one Republican pamphlet put it, was “Your Vote Versus the Spectacle of Idleness and Ruin.”
Hoover’s handlers often filmed him romping with a large dog to loosen up his image a bit, but he was a man who always wore a full suit and stiff collar, who read his speeches in a perfunctory monotone. (“I can only make so many speeches,” he once said. “I only have so much to say.”) During interviews he would restrict himself to answering questions without elaborating, and when he was finished, he looked at the questioner blankly, “like a machine that has run down,” as one startled reporter put it.
Hoover wisely stayed away from debating the more colorful Smith (he would not even mention his opponent’s name) and presented himself as a smart businessman who would run the government like an efficient corporation.
But the election soon took a sickening turn. The Ku Klux Klan continued to be a powerful force in America, with a membership that historians now estimate as high as two to four million. When Smith’s campaign train headed West, it was met by burning crosses on the hills and explosions from dynamite charges echoing across the prairies. Klansmen and other religious bigots swayed ignorant voters by telling them that the Catholic Smith, having supposedly sworn fealty to the pope, would turn the United States over to “Romanism and Ruin.” Protestant ministers told their congregations that if Smith became president, all non-Catholic marriages would be annulled and all children of these marriages declared illegitimate. Preachers even warned their congregations that if they voted for Al Smith, they would go straight to hell.
Hoover officially proclaimed that his opponent’s religion had no bearing on his ability to be president, but even Hoover’s wife, Lou, whispered that people had a right to vote against Smith because of his faith. She and many other Republicans spread rumors of Smith’s alcoholism, which were already rampant because he favored the repeal of Prohibition or, at least, the right of states to choose for themselves. Republicans sneeringly referred to him as “Alcoholic Smith,” told of drunken public behavior, and claimed that he had already secretly promised to appoint a bootlegger as secretary of the treasury.
In truth, Smith was a moderate drinker who enjoyed a cocktail in the evening from legal, pre-Prohibition stock. But as we’ve seen, truth rarely factors into presidential campaigns.
THE WINNER: HERBERT HOOVER
Herbert Hoover won in a landslide that included five states from the usually Democratic South, beating Smith 21,437,227 votes to 15,007,698. A joke went around New York that on the day after the election, Smith wired the pope a one-word telegram: “Unpack!”
HOW BAD WERE THE ANTI-CATHOLIC SLURS? Consider the following: At the time of the election, New York’s Holland Tunnel was just being completed. Republicans circulated pictures of Al Smith at the mouth of the tunnel, declaring that it really led 3,500 miles under the Atlantic Ocean to Rome—to the basement of the Vatican.
In Daytona Beach, Florida, the school board instructed that a note be placed in every child’s lunch pail that read: “We must prevent the election of Alfred E. Smith to the presidency. If he is chosen president, you will not be allowed to read or have a bible.”
And this lovely poem spread in leaflets in upstate New York during the summer of 1928:
When Catholics rule the United States
And the Jew grows a Christian nose on his face
When Pope Pius is head of the Ku Klux Klan
In the land of Uncle Sam
Then Al Smith will be our president
And the country not worth a damn.
THE BABE Smith was lucky enough to have the endorsement of the country’s biggest sports hero, Babe Ruth. After the Yankees’ victory in the World Series of 1928, Babe Ruth stumped for Smith from the back of a train carrying the team home from St. Louis. Unfortunately, Ruth wasn’t the most dependable spokesman. He would sometimes appear in his undershirt, holding a mug of beer in one hand and a sparerib in the other. Worse, if he met with any dissent while praising Smith, he would snarl, “If that’s the way you feel, the hell with you!” and stagger back inside.
NUDE ART AND GREYHOUND RACING? THE HORROR! When people got tired of attacking Smith for his religion, there were other fruitful areas for invective. One Protestant minister railed against Smith for dancing and accused him of doing the “bunny hug, turkey trot, hesitation, tango, Texas Tommy, the hug-me-tight, foxtrot, shimmy-dance … and skunk-waltz.” Another minister claimed that Smith indulged in “card-playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, divorces, novels, stuffy rooms, evolution … nude art, prize-fighting, actors, greyhound racing, and modernism.”
MR. AND MRS. SMITH Al Smith met his wife, Kate, when they were both growing up in Tammany’s impoverished Fourth Ward on New York City’s Lower East Side. She and Smith shared a deep love, but Kate was anything but sophisticated. During the 1928 campaign, she was slammed with barely disguised anti-Irish bigotry by prominent Republican women. They claimed that with Kate as first lady, the White House would smell of “corned beef, cabbage, and home brew.” Mrs. Florence T. Griswold, Republican national committeewoman, made a speech in which she said, “Can you imagine an aristocratic foreign ambassador saying to her, ‘What a charming gown,’ and the reply, ‘Youse said a mouthful!’ ” Her audience roared with laughter.
RADIOHEADS By 1928, radio networks like the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) extended nationwide—any major political address could expect to reach forty million listeners.
Although Herbert Hoover was a far worse stump speaker than Al Smith, he was much better at talking in a studio, where the speaker had to stand very still, exactly ten inches away from the large “pie” microphone, to reduce distortion and extraneous noise. (It was not something Hoover liked, however. When someone asked him if he got a thrill out of speaking over the radio, he snapped: “The same thrill I get when I rehearse an address to a doorknob!”)
Smith, far better at campaigning in person, had a much worse time on the radio. No matter how much he tried, he could not refrain from moving around, which caused his voice to fade in and out. And his thick New York accent (“rad-deeo” for radio, “foist” for first) alienated many listeners in rural America. Campaign strategists in both parties would make a note for future elections.
Republicans warned that Roman Catholic candidate Al Smith was secretly plotting with the pope—and that the Holland Tunnel had a secret passageway leading to the Vatican!
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
VS. HERBERT HOOVER
What a difference four years can make. The stock market crash of 1929 sent America reeling into the hangover of the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis the country has ever faced. Twenty-three hundred banks collapsed in 1931 alone. By 1932, more than 300,000 children were forced out of bankrupt school systems. The Depression steadily worsened until millions of Americans were out of work. The name Hoover became synonymous with desperation and poverty—Hoovervilles were shantytowns, Hoover blankets were newspapers, and Hoover
Pullmans were boxcars in which, by some counts, 200,000 starving Americans rode throughout the country seeking jobs.
You know things are bad when Time magazine calls you “President Reject,” but the Republicans were stuck with Hoover, even though he had started making Marie Antoinette-ish statements, such as “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.” Hoover ran partnered by his vice president, Charles Curtis, who was seventy-two years old and whose main claim to fame was having Native American blood. Before he gave a campaign speech, Curtis would always have an Indian “maiden” recite Longfellow’s poem “Hiawatha.”
The Democrats had far more exciting prospects with their nominee, fifty-year-old New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Although he had been crippled by a bout of polio in 1921, he possessed indefatigable reserves of energy as well as the not inconsiderable political gift of being able to tell people exactly what they wanted to hear. Roosevelt’s vice-presidential candidate was “Cactus Jack” Garner, hard-drinking Texan and Speaker of the House.
THE CAMPAIGN It’s possible that almost any Democrat could have beaten Hoover in 1932, but Roosevelt’s well-oiled political machine left nothing to chance. Through radio, pamphlets, speeches, and direct-mail campaigns, Roosevelt reminded people of empty Hoover promises, namely “prosperity is just around the corner” and “the worst has passed.” Of course, most Americans hadn’t forgotten these promises, and they were still holding a grudge. Hoover had become so unpopular in America that the Secret Service warned him not to leave the White House. At a campaign stop in Kansas, voters threw tomatoes at his train, and a few people were arrested for pulling up spikes from the tracks. Mounted riot police had to break up a demonstration against Hoover in Detroit (tone-deaf as always to the country’s mood, Hoover was traveling in a limousine procession provided by Henry Ford). Marchers demanded that Hoover be lynched. At one point, he broke down and said to his aides, “I can’t go on with it anymore.” In his final campaign appearance in New York City, he was surrounded by crowds screaming, “We want bread!”
Roosevelt—who had broken with long tradition to become the first presidential candidate to accept his party’s nomination in person at the convention—traveled the country, spoke of his “new deal for the American people,” and was continuously upbeat.
THE WINNER: FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT In a triumph that was almost literally a reversal of 1928, Roosevelt beat Hoover 22,829,501 votes to 15,760,684 and destroyed him in the Electoral College, 472 to 59. In fact, Roosevelt took 42 out of 48 states. Hoover, even a sympathetic biographer has written, was not just beaten, “he was excommunicated.” And a powerful new era in American history was about to begin.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
VS. ALFRED “ALF” LANDON
After declaring in his inaugural address that the only thing Americans had to fear was “fear itself,” Roosevelt sent his “brain trust” of advisors to Congress, desperate to stem the disastrous inroads of the depression. In record time, he had established the Works Projects Administration (WPA) to give work to jobless Americans, the Social Security Act to provide unemployment and old-age insurance, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to harness the power of the Tennessee River and provide electricity to seven southern states, and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to send young urban men into rural areas to plant trees and fight forest fires.
These measures had an immediate effect on the nation’s recovery, but naturally Roosevelt’s political enemies didn’t like them. Conservatives thought the president was flirting with communism, while progressives claimed the New Deal didn’t go far enough. Nevertheless, Roosevelt easily won his party’s nomination in 1936. He was the most popular Democratic president in memory, holding twice-weekly, easygoing press conferences in his office and making national radio addresses in his satiny, reassuring voice.
Faced with Roosevelt’s star power, the Republicans did the best they could. They nominated Kansas Governor Alf Landon, who presented himself as the everyday American. He embarked on a “holy crusade” against the excesses of the New Deal, which, according to Landon, had centralized government too radically in Washington and gave too much power to labor.
THE CAMPAIGN One of Alf Landon’s problems was that he never seemed terribly presidential. Even his first name had a rumpled, doggy quality to it. Republicans hired a film director named Ted Bohn—a forerunner of modern political candidate-groomers—to teach Landon not to smile with his mouth hanging open, to walk slightly ahead when in a group in order to dominate pictures, and to shake hands with his chin up to give the impression of firmness. The training did little good.
Roosevelt—who privately referred to Landon as “the White Mouse who wants to live in the White House”—didn’t have to do much campaigning. But when he did, he was met by vast throngs of Americans, as many as 100,000 during some speeches, who voiced their approval for his policies. Desperate, the Republicans tried to manipulate the media, asking the Associated Press to always identify Landon in its stories with the tag “budget-balancer.” (The AP said it would, but only if it could tag Roosevelt as “humanity’s savior.”)
THE WINNER: FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT Despite the fact that the Republicans spent nearly nine million dollars on the campaign, Roosevelt kicked butt, big time. He beat Landon 27,757,333 votes to 16,684,231, the biggest voter plurality until 1964, with a stupendous 523 to 8 margin in the Electoral College.
The 1936 election brought a harbinger of dirty campaign tricks to come. Republicans had prepared a powerful radio ad called “Liberty at the Crossroads,” which took the form of a short drama in which a marriage license clerk reminds a prospective bridegroom that he would, in the future, have to deal with a large national debt created by Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.
“Someone’s giving us a dirty deal,” the bridegroom whines. “It’s a low-down mean trick.” And a dark voiceover (marked in the script as “The Voice of Doom”) intones: “And the debts, like the sins of the fathers, shall be visited upon the children, aye, even unto the third and fourth generations.”
Neither NBC nor CBS, the two largest radio networks, would air this ad—claiming that it was unethical to “dramatize” real-life politics—but plenty of smaller stations with unsold air time quickly snapped it up. They knew a good political soap opera when they saw it, and so did the more than sixty million people who now had access to radios. “Liberty at the Crossroads” was ahead of its time in its dramatizing (and manipulating) people’s fears—you can trace a direct line from it to Lyndon Johnson’s notorious “Daisy” ad in the presidential campaign of 1964.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
VS.
WENDELL WILLKIE
“We can’t have any of our principal speakers refer to it, but the people way down the line can get it out. I mean the Congress speakers, and state speakers, and so forth. They can use the raw material. She’s an extremely attractive little tart.”
—President Franklin Roosevelt musing aloud on how to smear Wendell Willkie by making news of his mistress public
Did Franklin Delano Roosevelt want a third term as president? Of course not. Who was he to break with powerful tradition and aspire to something even Washington and Jefferson never had? People would say he suffered from unreasonable ambition. It was time the country stood on its own two feet, with a new leader to guide the way. No, sir, Roosevelt told an aide, he was “violently and vividly” opposed to another term.
All of this meant—if you understood anything about Franklin Roosevelt—that he was almost certainly going to run for an unprecedented third term in 1940.
When members of his cabinet, including Postmaster General Jim Farley and Roosevelt’s vice president, John Garner, lined up for Roosevelt’s job, Roosevelt smiled but quietly sabotaged their plans. Farley was a brilliant ward politician, but he knew too little about the international scene. And Garner had turned virulently antilabor—perhaps the $200,000 dollars he “won at poker” from industrialists and coal m
ine owners had something to do with it—making him an embarrassment to Roosevelt’s liberal administration.
America was emerging from the depression but seemed to be heading directly into another war. By the spring of 1940, the Nazis had sliced through France like butter and were poised to invade England. In private, FDR began to muse that perhaps his country still needed him. When the Democratic Convention started on July 15, he demonstrated his political brilliance by telling the chairman, “I have not had today and have never had any wish or purpose to remain in the office of president … after next January.” At the same time, Roosevelt dispatched his close aide, Harry Hopkins, to Chicago with a private message to Democratic bosses, such as Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly: He would accept the nomination, but only on the first ballot and only if he won by more than 150 votes.
The next night, the convention chairman read Roosevelt’s message declining the nomination to the assembled Democratic delegates, and they reacted with an uproarious, deafening demonstration in favor of Roosevelt (all secretly prepared in advance by Mayor Kelly). One evening later, Roosevelt was nominated for president in one ballot, beating both Farley and Garner. Roosevelt then immediately ousted Garner, and made Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace his running mate.
THE CANDIDATES
Anything for a Vote Page 15