THE
WAVE OF THE FUTURE
The
Democratic candidate was crushed. An urban, ethnic liberal from
the Northeast, he had been caught flatfooted by the waves of vitriolic
attacks that smeared his background, his years of dedicated public
service, the character of his beloved wife—even his religious
beliefs and cultural values. The heartland and even the traditionally
Democratic South had turned against him in unprecedented numbers,
and Republicans would continue to control not only the White House,
but also both houses of congress and the Supreme Court for the
forseeable future.
The
Democratic candidate I’m referring to, of course, was Al
Smith, who lost his run for the presidency by a much larger margin
than John Kerry lost the most recent election. Yet within four
years, millions of the same Southerners and Midwesterners who
had voted against Smith were running into the New Deal coalition
that would dominate American politics for most of the ensuing
half-century. The moral of the story is that Democrats today,
already engaged in an orgy of self-recrimination and self-reflection,
might be better off simply sitting on their hands rather than
wringing them. In America, shifts in power rarely occur without
some significant outside event. And anticipating just what this
event will be—war, recessions, scandal—is impossible.
“This
was the greatest vote, the greatest margin and the greatest percentage
(61 percent) that any President had ever drawn from the American
people; we shall live long before we see its like again,”
the inventor of the modern campaign chronicle, Theodore H. White,
wrote after Lyndon Johnson’s lopsided triumph over Barry
Goldwater in 1964.
In
fact, we would see its like again twice in the next twenty years,
and from the Republican side, as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan
swamped their opponents in 1972 and 1984, respectively. Nor was
White alone in his nearsightedness.
“The result was one of the great landslides of American
political history, raising ominous question marks for the future
of the Republican Party,” opined that young, wild-eyed liberal,
Robert Novak after Goldwater’s defeat.
This is why we historians love having the benefit of perfect hindsight.
It saves us from having to make the sort of hasty, hip-shooting
predictions that can be roundly mocked afterwards (usually by
historians).
Some
issues in our history have simmered for years, arising predictably
in one campaign after another. Slavery (and later, civil rights)
was certainly one. The plight of American farmers and the question
of “hard” or “soft” money was another,
playing a major role again and again in elections from the end
of the Civil War into the 1930s. The same could be said for the
Cold War, or crime, in recent decades.
But
just as often, presidential elections have been decided by issues
and events that no one dreamed would have been so important four
years earlier. How many people, for instance, would have predicted
in the wake of LBJ’s romp that Vietnam would dominate the
1968 campaign—and force him out of the race by that March?
Who could have guessed (before 1950) that the 1952 election would
hinge on a war on the Korean peninsula? Or that an obscure, Georgia
governor would have been risen to the presidency in 1976 thanks
to “a third-rate burglary”? Or that four years later
he would be deposed by a hostage crisis in Tehran? Or that, in
perhaps the most bizarre irruption in American political history,
the Anti-Masons would take the state of Vermont in 1832, and outpoll
Andrew Jackson in Massachusetts behind their candidate, William
Wirt (who actually was a Mason himself, though that’s another
story)?
In
our media age, of course, political handlers have learned how
to manufacture such abrupt changes in the national dialogue. Bush
family retainers seem to possess a singular knack for this; perhaps
it is not so surprising to see how much of the 2004 election revolved
around gay marriage when one considers how mired the 1988 race
was in Boston Harbor.
Al
Smith fell victim to the Jazz Age version of a media blitz. Smith
was something very new in our presidential politics, and something
not really seen since—an unabashedly urban, working-class
candidate. Just 13 when his father died, Al had been forced to
drop out of school—later joking that he had received his
“FFM,” for Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market, where
he earned twelve dollars a week for sweeping up and hauling fish.
Breaking into politics through Tammany Hall, he was indisputably
of the machine, but he also came to transcend it—and even
to sew the seeds of its demise—with the series of vital
social legislation he pushed through as leader of the New York
State Assembly. Graduated to governor for an unprecedented four
terms, he ran a progressive administration almost universally
admired for its honesty, efficiency, and innovation.
For all that, Al Smith was simply not what most Americans thought
of as a president. Pot-bellied, large-nosed, sporting his trademark,
brown derby; his voice dripping with the intonations of his native
Lower East Side; an avowed opponent of Prohibition who was never
unreasonably opposed to lifting a glass himself—and above
all, a Catholic—Smith was as alien to many “heartland”
voters then as latte drinkers supposedly are today. By the time
he finally secured the Democratic nomination he had little chance
to win in any case, running as he was in a year of peace and general
prosperity against an immensely popular, progressive Republican
candidate, Herbert Hoover.
Yet
it was the way he lost that was to leave Smith permanently scarred.
The attacks started even before the 1928 race was underway, with
most of them targeting his faith. The Ku Klux Klan, still powerful
in much of the South and Midwest, issued some ten million pieces
of “literature” that repeated all of the ancient calumnies
against the Catholic Church, and accused Smith of fronting a plot
by the “Pope of Rome” to take control of the United
States.
Nor,
shamefully, was the Klan alone in this absurd fearmongering. The
Methodist Bishop of Buffalo warned that “No governor can
kiss the papal ring and get within gunshot of the White House.”
He was joined by many Protestant clerics. Rev. John Roach Straton,
one of the earliest broadcast evangelists, used his popular radio
show to claim, in the words of historian Lawrence H. Fuchs, that
“the election of Smith [would be] a boost for card playing,
cocktail drinking, divorce, dancing, Clarence Darrow, nude art,
prize fighting, and even greyhound racing.” No less than
William Allen White, the legendary, independent minded editor
of the Emporia Gazette, took it upon himself to serve as a sort
of one-man “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” repeatedly
smearing Smith for having supposedly protected saloons, gambling,
and prostitution; proclaiming, “The whole Puritan civilization
which has built a sturdy, orderly nation is threatened by Smith.”
Herbert
Hoover chose mostly to hover above the fray, even intoning sanctimoniously—and
irrelevantly—about how his own, Quaker faith had occasionally
been ostracized for its pacifism. Meanwhile, Republican party
operatives quietly funded some of the worst attacks on Smith,
and Mabel Willebrandt, assistant attorney general in charge of
Prohibition enforcement, toured the country urging Protestant
ministers to speak out against Smith from their pulpits. In a
truly Rove-ian piece of political jujitsu, leading Republicans
actually criticized Smith for bringing religion into politics,
when he responded to his attackers.
And
respond he did. Contrary to popular belief, Al met the campaign
of slander head-on. He affirmed explicitly in the Atlantic
Monthly that “I believe in the absolute separation
of church and state” and—anticipating John F. Kennedy
by 32 years—took his case right into the heart of hostile
territory. Traveling to Oklahoma City, a town then all but dominated
by the Klan, he gave a national radio address before an audience
that included Straton and other, anti-Catholic evangelicals. In
a bold speech, brimming with barely contained fury, Smith reiterated
his belief in the separation of church and state, and condemned
all attempts “to inject bigotry, hatred, intolerance and
un-American sectarian division into a campaign…”
“Nothing
could be so out of line with the spirit of America,” he
thundered. “Nothing could be so foreign to the teachings
of Jefferson. Nothing could be so contradictory of our whole history.”
It
was to no avail. Smith’s train into Oklahoma had been greeted
with a burning cross. Another one appeared near Billings, Montana.
Cops assigned to protect him in Louisville insulted him to his
face. Vicious new whispering campaigns claimed that Smith was
an alcoholic, and mocked Katie, the matronly, shy wife he was
devoted to, for her weight, how she dressed, the jewelry she wore.
For
once, Al’s keen political ear had failed him. The animosity
directed toward him went beyond fears of papal-ring kissing, or
greyhound racing, and it would not be soothed by declarations
of his fealty to Jefferson, or the constitution. The 1920s in
America were characterized throughout by a deeply emotional backlash
against the previous decades of ethnic immigration; by a hatred
of the urban other that no rational appeals could assuage.
Then
as now, all the “negative” campaigning that we supposedly
despise produced a record turnout at the polls—and for Al
Smith, the verdict was crushing. He received less than 42 percent
of the popular vote and carried only eight states. For the first
time since Reconstruction, much of the South went Republican.
So did Smith’s beloved New York. In the 1920s, the Klan
held parades on Long Island, too.
Al
never got over the venom that had been directed at him. He would
be further embittered by the fact that, in 1932, three years into
the Great Depression, he lost the Democratic nomination to Franklin
Roosevelt—a man he had viewed as his political protégé—in
a year when America really might have been desperate enough to
vote for a Catholic New Yorker.
Yet
for historians, it is now clear that Al Smith was actually the
wave of the future. His campaign scored solid victories in cities
from New York to San Francisco, Boston to San Antonio, and made
serious inroads in such traditionally Republican citadels such
as Philadelphia, and Detroit. Once the shock of the Wall Street
Crash and the Great Depression brought Midwestern farmers and
Protestant Southerners into the fold, the New Deal coalition was
complete.
Those
currently gripped by both despair and runaway triumphalism over
the 2004 election might want to reflect on how quickly, and unforseeably,
political fortunes have changed in the past. As to just what the
next catalytic shock will be, and how it will affect the 2008
election, I would be happy to make my own predictions. Just come
and see me twenty or thirty years from now.
