Vanquished Warrior: Reconsidering Al Smith’s 1928 New York Defeat

Abstract

Vanquished Warrior: Reconsidering Al Smith’s 1928 New York Defeat Robert Chiles (bio) In 1928, New York Governor Alfred E. Smith not only lost the presidential election in a landslide, he also lost his home state by a slim margin—a particularly heartbreaking end to a political career that had included four statewide triumphs in the preceding ten years. Historians have reflexively ascribed this outcome to traditional upstate/downstate divides—especially anti-Catholic and anti-urban voting by rural New Yorkers. It is a story, we have been told, about regional political identity. Yet closer scrutiny of statewide voting patterns undercuts such explanations.1 County-level voting trends from the 1920s reveal that Smith’s 1928 defeat in New York State was not the result of a surge in anti-Catholic rural voting. Instead, the man Franklin D. Roosevelt dubbed “the Happy Warrior” was thwarted by an inability to garner the sort of overwhelming support in New York City that had allowed him to overcome upstate Republican strength in the past—particularly in 1924, when he was reelected governor despite a Republican presidential landslide in the Empire State. Furthermore, voting patterns in New York City—particularly in the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, where Smith’s performance was markedly weaker than during his gubernatorial bids—suggest that Smith’s inability to retain the allegiance of progressive New York City Republicans played an important role in his 1928 defeat. From the national and presidential perspective, Al Smith’s 1928 sweep of New York City, especially his large margins in Brooklyn and the Bronx, was unprecedented for a Democratic nominee and augured a new voting pattern with the potential to yield regular Democratic statewide pluralities. [End Page 90] Yet Smith’s success in the five boroughs was obviously not personally unprecedented, for he had always carried New York City by spectacular margins. Therefore, historians have assumed that his defeat in New York State in 1928 was delivered largely by upstate voters, many of whom had never supported the Happy Warrior, and others of whom evidently considered the notion of having a Roman Catholic Tammany man from Manhattan’s Lower East Side move onto Pennsylvania Avenue less tolerable than that of having such a character reside on Eagle Street. “Upstate nativists and antisaloon advocates came out in droves to keep the wet Catholic out of the White House,” affirmed Terry Golway in a recent history of Tammany Hall; while Smith biographer Robert Slayton has concluded: “In New York State, outside the city . . . voters could not accept the vision of this kind of man in the White House, despite his record as their governor.”2 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. 1928 two-party presidential vote Upstate and in New York City. A closer inspection of statewide voting statistics complicates this narrative. Smith lost New York State in 1928 by just over 103,000 votes, 51 percent to 49 percent. He carried New York City by a margin of nearly 454,000, and lost outside of the city by over 557,000. All of which seems to comport with the argument that it was “upstate” (along with on Long Island) where Smith was defeated.3 Yet Al Smith had won four statewide [End Page 91] races in his career, never having carried the upstate vote. The difference in 1928 was that his success in New York City was not enough to overcome his deficit north of the Bronx and east of Queens. Trends and Precedents Al Smith had lost New York State once before—in 1920, when his first attempt at gubernatorial reelection was narrowly thwarted by Judge Nathan Miller of Syracuse in a result that historians have always attributed to national politics and the concomitant increase in upstate turnout and Republican presidential enthusiasm.4 In that election, Smith won New York City by nearly 320,000 and lost outside the five boroughs by 396,700. This election was much closer than the 1928 presidential contest—the margin of defeat in 1920 was a little more than half that of 1928. Yet Smith’s percentage outside of New York City was nearly the same (in fact it was...