THE DEFEAT OF THE HAPPY WARRIOR

(4 of 5)

Smith tried hard to wage a campaign of issues—waterways development, tariff revision, easing of immigration restrictions, etc.—but in prosperous, whoopee-minded 1928 it was all but ' impossible to stir up any public fervor about these matters. Smith's effort to appeal to farm-belt discontent in his one major farm speech failed to dent the farmers' instinctive mistrust of a derby-wearing New Yorker. Hoover, who endeared himself to the drys by calling Prohibition "a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive," kept slugging away at the single issue of prosperity.

So lopsided was Smith's defeat in November that to many of his partisans it seemed to call for some special explanation. In electoral votes, losing by 87 to 444, Smith made a worse showing than Cox in 1920 or Davis in 1924. Cox had captured eleven states, Davis twelve; Smith carried only eight: six in the Deep South, plus Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He lost four Solid South states—Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas—that had unfailingly returned Democratic majorities since 1876.

Smith himself blamed his defeat on anti-Catholic bigotry. Through repetition over the years, this idea hardened into an axiom, often called the "unwritten law" of U.S. politics: no Roman Catholic can get elected President of the U.S. But Smith had special personal handicaps in his Bowery accent, his Tammany background. Moreover, it is highly doubtful that any Democrat—Catholic or Protestant, wet or dry, big-city or small-town—could have beaten Hoover in 1928. In addition to the prosperity claim, the Republicans had the enormous advantage of being, unlike the G.O.P. in 1960, the nation's majority party. Since 1860, the G.O.P.'s grip on the White House had been broken only under special circumstances: depression (Cleveland in 1884), third-party split-offs (Cleveland in 1892, Wilson in 1912) or war (Wilson in 1916).

In 1920 and again in 1924, the Democratic presidential candidate had failed to carry a single state outside the Solid South and the border states. In the off-year congressional elections of 1926, the G.O.P. preserved its majorities in both houses, a sure sign of contentment. In view of the feeble Democratic showings in 1920, 1924 and 1926, Franklin Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1927 that it seemed impossible for any Democrat to win the presidency in 1928 if "the present undoubted general prosperity of the country continues." And continue it did—until seven months after Hoover's inauguration.

-