# Al Smith **Alfred E. Smith** (December 30, 1873 – October 4, 1944) was the four-term Democratic governor of New York and, in 1928, the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party. The KB tracks him for three reasons: the anti-Catholic, Klan-backed campaign against him set the template for religious-identity mobilization in presidential politics; his big-city vote began the realignment behind the New Deal coalition; and his break with Franklin Roosevelt made him the best-known Democrat in the [[American Liberty League]], the first organized business campaign against the [[New Deal]]. ## Tammany to Albany A Lower East Side product of [[Tammany Hall]], Smith rose through the state assembly to the governorship (1919–1920, 1923–1928) as a progressive reformer. At the 1924 Democratic convention Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated him as "the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield," but the convention deadlocked between Smith and William McAdoo and took 103 ballots to settle on John W. Davis. ## 1928: the Catholic candidate | | [[Herbert Hoover]] (R) | Al Smith (D) | |---|---|---| | Popular vote | 58.2% | 40.8% (15,015,464) | | Electoral votes | 444 | 87 | | States | 40 | 8 | Smith was Catholic, a machine politician and a "wet" opponent of Prohibition ([[Eighteenth Amendment]]), and the campaign against him fused all three. Protestant ministers warned he would take orders from the Pope, counterfeit Catholic "oaths" circulated, and the [[Second Ku Klux Klan]] and dry organizations campaigned openly. When his train entered Oklahoma in September 1928 a Klan cross burned beside the tracks, and in Oklahoma City he answered with a speech against religious bigotry, saying he did not want any Catholic to vote for him on religious grounds. Hoover won in a landslide and broke the Solid South, carrying Texas for the first time ever and North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and Tennessee; Smith held only the five Deep South states, Arkansas, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and narrowly lost New York. In North Carolina, Senator [[Furnifold Simmons]] backed Hoover over Smith; party leaders treated it as betrayal, and Simmons lost his seat to Josiah Bailey in 1930. ## The urban realignment Smith was the first Democratic nominee of the 20th century to win a majority of the twelve largest cities. Boston's Democratic share rose from 35.5% in 1924 to 66.8%; Milwaukee's from 9.7% to 53.7%. Catholic and immigrant-stock voters in Northern cities came into the Democratic Party in 1928, and the Depression then delivered the rest of the coalition in the [[1932 Presidential Election]] (see [[Party Realignment]]). ## Against Roosevelt The American Liberty League was founded August 22, 1934, with Smith on its executive committee alongside John W. Davis and Irénée du Pont; former DNC chairman John J. Raskob was the moving spirit, and the du Pont family supplied about 30% of national-level funds in 1935. On January 25, 1936, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, Smith accused Roosevelt of betraying the 1932 platform: "There can be only one Capitol – Washington or Moscow." He endorsed the Republican Alf Landon in 1936 and [[Wendell Willkie]] in 1940. The League faded after Roosevelt's 1936 landslide ([[1936 Presidential Election]]) and dissolved in 1940; its pairing of corporate money with "liberty" language is an early version of a pattern the KB follows through later business-funded movements. ## Legacy Out of office, Smith headed the Empire State Building project; the building opened May 1, 1931. The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, first held in 1945 and hosted by the Archbishop of New York, raises money for Catholic children's charities. In 1960 both nominees, [[John F. Kennedy]] and [[Richard Nixon]], attended for the first time, the same year Kennedy became the first Catholic elected president ([[1960 Presidential Election]]). ## See Also - [[1928 Presidential Election]] · [[1960 Presidential Election]] · [[Party Realignment]] · [[Democratic Party]] - [[Second Ku Klux Klan]] · [[Catholicism]] · [[Nativism]] · [[Tammany Hall]] - [[American Liberty League]] · [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] · [[New Deal]] · [[Business Plot]]