21 set 1923 ano - Election of 1928

Descrição:

Conflicts over race, religion, and ethnicity created the climate for a stormy presidential election in 1928. Democrats had traditionally drawn strength from white voters in the South and immigrants in the North, but these groups divided over prohibition, immigration restriction, and the Klan. By 1928, the party’s urban wing gained firm control. Democrats nominated Governor Al Smith of New York, the first presidential candidate to reflect the aspirations of the urban working class. A grandson of Irish peasants, Smith had risen through New York City’s Democratic machine to become a dynamic reformer. But he offended many small-town and rural Americans with his heavy New York accent and brown derby hat, which highlighted his ethnic working-class origins. Middle-class reformers questioned Smith’s ties to Tammany Hall, the notorious Democratic political machine that controlled the city, and temperance advocates opposed him as a “wet.” But the governor’s greatest electoral handicap was his religion. Although Smith insisted that his Catholic beliefs would not affect his duties as president, many Protestants opposed him. “No Governor can kiss the papal ring and get within gunshot of the White House,” vowed one Methodist bishop.

Smith proved no match for the Republican nominee, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. An organizational genius and a dedicated public servant, Hoover won fame during World War I for successfully managing huge food relief and refugee projects before energizing and reorganizing the Treasury Department as secretary of commerce under President Harding. Hoover ran on eight years of Republican prosperity, giving business credit for the country’s rising affluence and embracing the American tradition of individualism. He won overwhelmingly, with 444 electoral votes to Smith’s 87 (Map 21.1). Because many southern Protestants refused to vote for a Catholic, Hoover carried five ex-Confederate states, breaking the Democratic “Solid South” for the first time since Reconstruction. Smith, though, carried industrialized Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as the nation’s twelve largest cities, showing how urban voters were moving into the Democrats’ camp.

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