1928 Presidential Election
The Presidential Election of 1928 in the United States saw Republican candidate Herbert Hoover defeat Democratic nominee Al Smith. Hoover's victory marked the continuation of Republican dominance in the White House, as he won by a significant margin. The election is notable for being the first time a Catholic, Al Smith, ran for president on a major party ticket.
5 Key excerpts on "1928 Presidential Election"
eBook - ePub- Massimo Faggioli(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Twenty-Third Publications/Bayard(Publisher)
...CHAPTER TWO Four Catholic Candidates: From Al Smith (1928) to Joe Biden (2020) 1. Al Smith in 1928: The Vatican and Anti-Catholicism in America In the presidential election of 1928, the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover, received about 21 million votes, against the 15 million of his Democratic opponent, Alfred Smith. It was a resounding defeat for Smith, who won only eight states—all in the south, except Massachusetts—of the then-forty-eight. He failed to win even New York, which he’d served as governor from 1919 to 1920 and again from 1923 to 1928. The campaign season had been marked by a clear anti-Catholic sentiment that would loom over American politics for the next three decades, up to and including the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1960. Even in 1956, Kennedy’s Catholic faith made his candidacy seem unlikely 13 ; historian Edmund Moore wrote that year, in the conclusion of his book on the 1928 election called A Catholic Runs for President, “Perhaps the next nomination of a Catholic will be for the vice-presidency rather than the presidency.” 14 Smith had been raised in near poverty. He had left school at fourteen, after his father’s death, to work and support his family. Smith’s ethnic background was representative of American Catholicism: Irish, Italian, German, and English. 15 One of New York’s great governors, a progressive politician on labor and social justice issues, Smith had supported the fight for women’s right to vote, which had led to the Nineteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in 1920. The election results of 1928 revealed the deceptiveness of the Democratic party’s optimism about the prospects of a Catholic candidate. The Democratic National Convention, held in Houston, that nominated Smith also chose as its chairman another Catholic, John J...
eBook - ePubThe American Century
A History of the United States Since the 1890s
- Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg, Nancy Woloch(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...C HAPTER F IVE 1920—1929 The New Era President and Mrs. Coolidge, with their two sons and their pet dog in 1924. (Library of Congress) Progressivism had appealed to many Americans because it promised stability to a nation experiencing rapid change. By 1920, however, the Wilsonian years had linked reform not with orderly change but with war and revolution. Consequently, Americans in the 1920s turned toward leaders who invoked traditional values and played on the widespread nostalgia for a simpler, happier past. But progressivism did not die. If anything, the decade was characterized by a quickening of those forces that were transforming American life—urban and corporate growth, racial and ethnic heterogeneity, concern for social morality, active government, and international involvement. The sharpest conflicts arose not over economic policy or foreign affairs, where something close to a consensus emerged, but over religion, ethnicity, and morality. Then, in 1929, Americans suddenly entered a chamber of economic horrors that transformed them, their world, and their progressivism. Republican Politics: Harding and Coolidge Benefiting from widespread disillusionment with Wilsonianism, Republican Warren G. Harding won a landslide victory in the 1920 election. A senator from Ohio since 1914 (and the first man ever to move directly from the Senate to the White House), Harding was jovial and expansive, a backslapper who joined as many fraternal lodges as possible. He loved to meet people, had a remarkable memory for faces, and played tennis or golf whenever he could. Harding's chief virtue was that he usually recognized his own limitations; his chief defect was that he believed in rewarding old friends with federal jobs. Many of them abused his trust by swindling the government, and when Harding died in August 1923, scandals were erupting on every side...
eBook - ePub- Gary A. Donaldson(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- The University Press of Kentucky(Publisher)
...Seeing the volatility of the postwar political world, groups in the Democratic party struggled for power, and they all seemed to move toward 1948 with a “succeed or destroy” attitude toward the party. One important theme of the 1948 election is always the deep splits in the Democratic party, but it was in the Republican party that the split was the most disastrous. The Democrats healed their wounds for one brief moment, just long enough to vote Truman into office, but the Republican left-right split produced for Truman the issue of the Eightieth Congress, and that issue carried the president right into his November victory. The election of 1948 shaped postwar politics in both parties. For the Democrats, at least through Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, the goal would be to maintain the coalition—pacify the various groups—by holding on to the party’s political center as Truman did. For the Republicans, the answer would be to heal the wounds between the left and the right—as Eisenhower would do through the 1950s—and to expand the party’s voter base, particularly into the South. The election reaffirmed the strength of the American party system, the strength of both parties, and the strength of the American electorate. The impact was great....
eBook - ePubPresidential Power
Theories and Dilemmas
- John P. Burke(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...We often think of Hoover as a curmudgeonly old man, ill-equipped to deal with the Great Depression. He certainly lacked the communicative skills of his successor, FDR. Yet, there were some signs that Hoover would have been a more successful president at another time. He came from the progressive wing of his party and was regarded as a technocrat and a reformer. Few remember it today, but Hoover was in charge of massive and successful relief efforts in post-World War I Europe and after the devastating flood of the Mississippi River in 1927. One interesting twist: sometimes presidents make choices that were considered ill-advised at the time they were made but that history eventually vindicates. The classic example is when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon shortly after Ford took office. Ford’s approval ratings declined after he issued the pardon. Had Ford not pardoned Nixon, he might have preserved his popularity and won the 1976 election. However, in my view at least, Ford did the right thing. Nixon may not have deserved a pardon, but the country deserved to avoid the distraction of a likely criminal trial and to get on with national business. These are individual cases. The challenge is to more generally understand how historical time might affect a presidency. That is, what broad historical cycles or patterns help determine or explain a president’s success or failure, and which have the greatest impact upon the exercise of presidential power? We examine these issues in this chapter, beginning with a look at two historical political trends: congressional versus presidential dominance, and divided versus unified government. We explore in depth Stephen Skowronek’s theory of political time, which argues that there are dominant political regimes in US political history, that these regimes are cyclical in nature, and that presidents located at different points within a regime cycle face very different opportunities and constraints for exercising leadership...
eBook - ePubRonald Reagan
The American Presidency
- David Mervin(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...To be an effective leader, to get bureaucrats and legislators to do what he wants them to do a president must retain the support of the public and, in the modern age, that is hardly possible without consistent command of television. THE 1980 GENERAL ELECTION Reagan’s victory in the 1980 General Election was of landslide proportions. He won 51 per cent of the popular vote against 41 per cent for Jimmy Carter and in the Electoral College led by 489 to 49. At the same election the Republicans gained twelve seats in the Senate and won control of that chamber for the first time in twenty-five years. In elections to the House of Representatives the Republicans made a gain of 33 seats and managed to defeat four incumbent committee chairmen. For Republicans this was a particularly rewarding set of results; in recent decades they had enjoyed considerable success in presidential elections, but the victories of Eisenhower and Nixon had not, with the fleeting exception of 1953–55, been flanked by success in Congressional elections. However 1980, it seemed, just might represent a genuine national shift towards conservatism thereby providing the underpinning for a new alignment of electoral forces to replace the Democratic coalition founded by Franklin Roosevelt. There are no simple explanations for complicated events like general elections, but we shall take as our starting point V. O. Key’s learned view that elections are determined largely by retrospective considerations. 37 The 1980 election, in other words, is to be seen primarily as a referendum on Jimmy Carter’s stewardship during the previous four years. For most voters, evaluations of Carter’s record turned primarily on economic matters. For many years prior to 1976, foreign policy questions had headed Gallup polls as the most important issues in presidential campaigns, but all this had changed by 1980...
