Hibernian Chronicle: Hoover trounces (Smith Last of three parts)

Having risen from the mean streets of Manhattan to the Governor’s Mansion in Albany, he was by the late 1920s one of the most effective and highly regarded politicians of the 1920s.
He’d nearly won the Democratic nomination for President in 1924 and four years later he was even more popular. When the convention gathered in the summer of 1928, there was no denying him the honor.
Few decades in American history have been so characterized by prosperity and optimism as the 1920s. Irish Americans, with rising levels of education, income, and membership in the professions, enjoyed the good times as much as any other group.
For many of them, the man who embodied their rising fortunes was Al Smith. When he won the Democratic nomination for President in 1928 — a first for a Catholic by a major party — many Irish Americans thought it signaled a new era. Maybe America was finally ready to see them as fully American.
Unfortunately for Smith and his supporters, they were about to discover that while the economy of the Twenties was indeed Roaring, it’s politics were decidedly Reactionary. This was the same decade, after all, of the Red Scare (1919-20), immigration restriction (1924), the Scopes “Monkey Trial” (1925), and the Sacco and Vanzetti affair (1927).
More broadly, it was a decade that saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. No longer confined to the Deep South, the organization had broadened its message of hate to include Catholics and Jews as well as African Americans. By the mid-1920s the Klan boasted a nationwide membership of nearly five million and, as Smith discovered at the 1924 Democratic convention, it enjoyed wielded enormous political clout.
Smith also faced a larger problem: 1928 belonged to the Republicans. The popular image of Herbert Hoover as the grim man in the grey suit presiding over the onset of the Great Depression obscures the fact that in 1928 he was one of the nation’s most accomplished and respected public servants. The public also identified his party with prosperity.
Why, many asked, change horses now?
But if any Democratic nominee was destined to lose in 1928, they were not destined to lose in the manner that Al Smith did. Optimistic and jovial by nature, Smith was stunned by the vicious editorials and speeches spewed by anti-Catholic demagogues.
He got his first taste of it in the spring of 1927 when the prestigious Atlantic Monthly published “An Open Letter to the Honorable Alfred E. Smith.” Written by Charles C. Marshall, a highly respected lawyer and member of the Episcopal Church, it drew upon 19th-century papal encyclicals condemning separation of church and state and freedom of religion to suggest that it was impossible for a faithful Catholic to adhere to the Constitution and uphold the oath of office as President.
Smith called upon Fr. Francis Duffy, the famed former chaplain to the New York 69th Regiment, to help him craft a reply which appeared in the magazine’s next issue under the title, “Catholic and Patriot: Governor Smith Replies” Smith dismissed Marshall’s accusation, arguing that the 19th century encyclicals he referenced were obsolete, ancient teachings that no longer applied to the modern world of the 20th century.
“I and all my children went to a parochial school,” he added caustically. “I never heard of any such stuff being taught or of anybody who claimed that it was.”
Most agreed that Smith won the argument, but he would soon find that millions of Americans clung to Marshall’s essential notion that a Catholic could not be trusted in the White House. Out on the campaign trail outside the big cities, especially in the Midwest and West, he was greeted by throngs of admirers, but also burning crosses and hostile bigots.
Political cartoons showed him kneeling to kiss the Pope’s ring. Fantastic rumors circulated claiming that a large mansion under construction in Washington, D.C. was intended as the Pope’s residence. Try as he might to offer reasonable statements on the separation between private religious faith and public office, Smith made no headway against his critics.
The man urban Americans saw as the epitome of the self-made man and big-hearted public official was viewed by the heartland’s evangelical Protestants, prohibitionists, and anti-Catholics as the representative of big city corruption, immorality, and papal intrigue.
Smith didn’t lose the election of 1928 because he was Irish Catholic, but he lost ugly and lost big because of it.
Hoover garnered 58 percent of the popular vote (444 electoral votes) to Smith’s 41 percent (87 electoral votes). Even his home state of New York went for Hoover, leaving Smith with victories in only Massachusetts and six deep South states. His partial success in the South had nothing to do with his policies and everything to do with the fact that sixty-three years after Lee surrendered to Grant, most Southerners still couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Republican.
Just as Smith’s nomination in the summer of 1928 had thrilled Irish Americans, so his crushing defeat in November left them stunned and disillusioned. Maybe, many wondered, we haven’t arrived after all. It was a bitter experience many Irish Americans did not soon forget.
Novelist Peter Quinn, in the 1996 PBS documentary “Long Journey Home: The Irish in America,” says his father told him of an Irish immigrant neighbor who, following the election, took down the American flag he’d always flown in front of his house and never took it out again.
Over the next few years Smith’s hopes for a political comeback rose as the nation plunged into the Great Depression and public approval of Hoover sank. He kept his name in the headlines as President of the Empire State Building Corporation that erected the famed skyscraper in 1931.
But in a classic political irony, 1932 turned out to be the year of one of Smith’s prot