1928 United States presidential election

Nominations

Republican Party nomination

With President Calvin Coolidge choosing not to seek re-election, 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 movement to draft Coolidge failed to gain traction with party insiders or even persuade Coolidge himself.

In the few primaries that mattered, Hoover did not perform as well as expected, leaving him with fewer than half the number of pledged delegates that he needed to win the nomination. Lowden in turn only had half the number of delegates that Hoover did, leaving it looking unlikely that the first rounds of voting would produce a majority for any candidate. Attempts were made to sound out Coolidge and Vice President Charles G. Dawes as to whether they would be willing to enter the race and break a potential deadlock between Hoover and Lowden, but both Coolidge and Dawes remained aloof. The matter was unexpectedly resolved when the convention voted to adopt a platform that repudiated the McNary–Haugen Farm Relief Bill, in turn causing Lowden to withdraw his candidacy in protest, and leaving no obvious challenger to Hoover. The only real competition that remained came from Senator Curtis, whose campaign was left with far too little time to win over the Lowden supporters.

The Republican Convention was held in Kansas City, Missouri from June 12 to 15 and 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 that information leaked, Coolidge sent an angry telegram that said that he would consider a second nomination for Dawes, whom he hated, a "personal affront". To attract votes from farmers who were concerned about Hoover's pro-business orientation, the nomination was instead offered to Curtis. He accepted and was nominated overwhelmingly on the first ballot. Curtis was the first candidate of Native American ancestry nominated by a major party for national office.

In his acceptance speech eight weeks after the convention ended, 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." That sentence would haunt Hoover during the Great Depression.

Democratic Party nomination

Owing to the economic prosperity in the country and rapidly fading public memory of the Teapot Dome scandal, the Democratic Party's prospects looked dim. New York Governor Al Smith had previously made two attempts to secure the Democratic nomination.

The 1928 Democratic National Convention was held in Houston, Texas, on June 26 to 28, and Smith became the candidate on the first ballot.

The leadership asked the delegates to nominate Senator Joseph Taylor Robinson of Arkansas, in many ways Smith's political polar opposite, to be his running mate, and Robinson was nominated for vice-president.

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 the Vatican in making decisions affecting the country.

Other candidates

Held in the Finnish Socialist Hall in New York City, the eighth Socialist Party Convention met on April 13. James Maurer, a former State Representative, President of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor and then Councilman for the city of Reading, was widely considered the frontrunner in the months before the convention met. For his boomers however, Maurer stood that his duties as councilman precluded the possibility of any national tour that would be required of his nomination for the presidency, and this declination was made definitive on the tenth of April. Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister who had been one of Maurer's boomers and had himself made it known that he was not a candidate for the Socialist nomination rather swiftly became the new frontrunner, and plans were made for a draft effort. Thomas and Maurer were nominated unanimously for president and vice president respectively, with both men accepting their nominations.

Held in the Mecca Temple in New York City, the second Workers Party Convention met on the twenty-fifth of May. Jay Lovestone served as the convention's keynote speaker, denouncing the Democratic, Republican and Socialist Parties and claiming that the Communists would turn the next "imperialist war" into a civil war. Party Chair William Foster was named as the party's candidate for the presidency while Benjamin Gitlow, a former opponent of Foster's within the party, was named as its candidate for vice president. Scott Nearing was also considered a possible contender for either position on ticket. A platform was adopted which, in addition to calling for American workers to overthrow the capitalistic system of government, also demanded the enactment of social insurance, the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, a five-hour workday, the withdrawal of troops from Nicaragua and China, and the recognition of the Soviet Union.

Held in New York City, the tenth Socialist Labor Party Convention met on the twelfth of May. Initially the ticket was a duplicate of the one nominated four years prior, Frank Johns of Oregon for the presidency and Verne Reynolds of Michigan for Vice President; however Johns, while campaigning in Bend, Oregon, died while attempting to rescue a young boy who had fallen into the river shortly after one of his opening campaign events. With their standard-bearer having passed, the executive committee of the party tendered the presidential nomination to Reynolds, with the place of vice presidential nominee being filled by Jeremiah Crowley of New York. Speaking of the "decay of the Capitalistic System", Reynolds campaigned on the idea of Industrial democracy.

General election

Fall campaign

Anti-Catholicism was a significant burden for Smith's campaign. Protestant ministers warned that he would take orders from the Pope, whom many Americans sincerely believed would move to the United States to rule the country from a fortress in Washington, DC. A popular joke of the time was that Smith sent a one-word telegram after the election to Pope Pius XI saying, "Unpack." 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 voters who rejected the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, which had declined from its peak in the mid 1920s until the 1928 campaign partially revived it, justified their opposition to Smith on their belief that the Catholic Church was an "un-American" and "alien culture" that opposed freedom and democracy.

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. Groups circulated a million copies of a counterfeit oath, claiming that fourth-degree Knights of Columbus members swore to exterminate Freemasons and Protestants and to commit violence against anyone if the church ordered. 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 the issues to cover for their religious prejudices, Smith's campaign had difficulty denouncing anti-Catholicism as bigotry without offending others who favored Prohibition or disliked Tammany corruption.

Contemporary Prohibition activists said that their main problem with the Democratic candidate was his faith and not any political view. Bob Jones Sr., a prominent Protestant pastor in South Carolina, said: "I'll tell you, brother, that the big issue we've got to face ain't the liquor question. I'd rather see a saloon on every corner of the South than see the foreigners elect Al Smith president". A Methodist newspaper in Georgia called Catholicism "a degenerate type of Christianity," while Southern Baptist churches ordered their followers to vote against Smith, claiming that he would close down Protestant churches, end freedom of worship and prohibit reading the Bible. Charles Hillman Fountain, a Protestant writer, insisted that Catholics should be barred from holding any office. Farris states that "More disturbing than the ridiculous and the dangerous was the respectable anti-Catholicism", as contemporary newspapers and Protestant churches tried to mask their anti-Catholicism as genuine concern. Protestant activists insisted that Catholicism represented an alien culture and medieval mentality, claiming that Catholicism was incompatible with American democracy and institutions. Catholics were portrayed as reactionary despite being more left-wing than mainstream American Protestant congregations at the time. William Allen White, a renowned newspaper editor, warned that Catholicism would erode the moral standards of America, saying that "the whole Puritan civilization which has built a sturdy, orderly nation is threatened by Smith." While Herbert Hoover avoided raising the issue of Catholicism on the campaign trail, he defended the Protestant actions in a private letter:

Results

The total vote exceeded that of 1924 by nearly eight million, which was nearly twice the vote cast in 1916 and nearly three times that of 1896. Every section in the Union increased its vote although the Mountain, East South Central and West South Central States did so least of all. The greatest increases were in the heavily populated (Northeastern) Mid-Atlantic and East North Central States, where more than 4,250,000 more votes were cast, more than half of the nationwide increase. There was an increase of over a million each in New York and Pennsylvania.

Much of the increase could be attributed to women voting in ever increasing numbers since gaining the national vote in 1920.

Hoover won 200 counties in the Southern United States while Smith won 122 traditionally Republican counties in the Northern United States, with 77 of those counties being majority Catholic. Warren G. Harding had won in all twelve cities with populations above 500,000 in the 1920 election, but Smith won in Cleveland, Milwaukee, New York City, San Francisco, and St. Louis, and lost in Baltimore and Pittsburgh by less than 10,000 votes. Hoover won in the traditionally Democratic Birmingham, Dallas, and Houston. Smith was the first Democratic nominee in the 20th century to win a majority of the twelve largest cities in the country. The net vote totals in the twelve largest cities shifted from Republican to Democratic with Harding having won by 1,540,000 in 1920, Coolidge by 1,308,000 in 1924, while Smith won by 210,000. Samuel Lubell wrote in The Future of American Politics that Franklin D. Roosevelt's victory in the 1932 election was preceded by Smith's increased vote totals in urban areas.

Smith's results in the cities in the election improved upon John W. Davis' results in the 1924 election. The Democratic vote in Boston rose from 35.5% to 66.8%, in Milwaukee from 9.7% to 53.7%, in Saint Paul, Minnesota from 10.1% to 51.2%, San Francisco from 6.4% to 49.4%, in Cleveland from 9.1% to 45.6%, in Chicago from 20.3% to 46.5%, in Pittsburgh from 8.7% to 42.4%, in Philadelphia from 12.1% to 39.5%, in Minneapolis from 6.3% to 38.8%, in Detroit from 7.1% to 36.8%, and in Seattle from 6.6% to 31.9%. In the boroughs of New York City the vote percentages rose from 33.6% to 67.7% in The Bronx, 39.6% to 60.8% in Manhattan, 31.9% to 59.5% in Brooklyn, 31% to 53.4% in Queens, and 42% to 53.4% in Staten Island. He improved in all of those cities from James M. Cox's results in 1920.

Results by state

Source:

Florida

North Carolina

Oklahoma

Tennessee

Texas

Virginia

Wisconsin

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

Margin of victory less than 1% (5 electoral votes):

Rhode Island, 0.61% (1,451 votes)

Margin of victory less than 5% (95 electoral votes):

Massachusetts, 1.09% (17,192 votes)

New York, 2.35% (103,481 votes)

Alabama, 2.84% (7,072 votes)

Texas, 3.67% (26,004 votes)

Margin of victory between 5% and 10% (60 electoral votes):

Utah, 7.72% (13,633 votes)

Tennessee, 7.72% (28,045 votes)

Virginia, 8.01% (24,463 votes)

Connecticut, 8.06% (44,574 votes)

Wisconsin, 9.24% (93,946 votes)

North Carolina, 9.87% (62,696 votes)

Tipping point state: