Almost President

by Scott Farris

  Smith was also acutely aware that Prohibition was targeted especially at urban immigrants, like himself and his neighbors, for whom beer, wine, and whiskey were components of their traditions and customs. Many “drys” expressed that prejudice openly. American Methodist bishop James Cannon, a leading dry cleric, said, “Governor Smith wants the Italians, the Sicilians, the Poles, and the Russian Jews. . . . We shut the door to them. But Smith says, ‘Give me that kind of people.’ He wants the kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of New York.” For his part, Smith observed that it was “curious” that reformers who pushed Prohibition as an important cure for the country’s social ills “never took much interest in social legislation such as the Factory Code, workmen’s compensation, pensions for widowed mothers, public health or parks.”

  The unintended consequence of Smith’s opposition to Prohibition was that it gave cover to many who opposed Smith on religious grounds but who could not bring themselves to say so publicly. Josephus Daniels, the North Carolina newspaper editor who had served as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the Navy, said Southerners were weary of being accused of religious bigotry because they opposed Smith’s candidacy when “nearly all of it is based upon . . . his attitude against Prohibition.” Some insisted Smith’s anti-Prohibition stance was political suicide. Virginia senator Carter Glass said, “Any one is a fool who thinks the Eighteenth Amendment will be repealed in the next hundred years.” Prohibition was repealed five years later.

  But others stated with great clarity that the nature of their opposition to Smith was due to religion, not policy. The most rabid anti-Catholic in Congress, Alabama senator Tom Heflin, said that God himself had “raised up this great patriotic organization [the Klan] to unmask popery.” A Klan leader who identified himself only as “The Human Dynamo” told a Presbyterian Church congregation in New York City itself that “there are six million people in the United States who have pledged their lives that no son of the pope in Rome will ever sit in the presidential chair.”

  In the early stages of the 1928 campaign, this seemed all bluster. Primary elections to decide a party nominee were still relatively new, but Smith won the handful of Democratic primaries in place in 1928 with ease, including the critical California primary that clinched his nomination. Smith even charmed audiences in the South, trying to meld his Lower East Side accent with a Southern drawl by telling a group in Asheville, North Carolina, that he hoped to “meet yez-all personally.”

  Smith also hoped he had put the religious issue behind him the year before when the Atlantic Monthly mischievously asked a prominent Episcopalian attorney named Charles Marshall to address the issue of whether Smith, were he president, could be both a loyal Catholic and a loyal American. In a dry scholarly article filled with quotes from an array of papal bulls, encyclicals, and other church documents, Marshall made the case that “there is conflict between authoritative Roman Catholic claims on one side and our constitutional law and principles on the other.” The Atlantic then invited Smith to reply.

  Smith was reluctant at first. While a regular Mass attendee, he was hardly a theologian. He had once been photographed kissing the ring of a papal legate visiting the country while he was governor, but he was not a church insider interested in Catholic apologetics. As Frances Perkins noted, “He knew religion, and that was all that he needed. And he took it . . . simply and naturally.” After reading Marshall’s turgid article, Smith admitted he did not understand most of it and reportedly asked his staff, “What the hell is an encyclical, anyhow?” But Marshall’s article was front- page news all over the country, and upon reflection, and with the help both of Father Francis Duffy, the famed World War I chaplain, and one of Smith’s Jewish aides, Judge Joseph Proskauer, Smith penned a response.

  Smith noted that he had been in public life for twenty-five years, had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution nineteen times, and had never found an occasion where his religion interfered with his public duties. Nor could such a thing ever happen, Smith said, noting, in language that would likely appall modern secularists, that “the essence of my faith is built upon the Commandments of God. The law of the land is built upon the Commandments of God. There can be no conflict between them.” He concluded with the hopeful plea that “never again in this land will any public servant be challenged because of the faith in which he has tried to walk humbly with his God.”

  Smith’s strong and laudable response simply pushed the issue underground for a while. The New York World observed, “The opposition to Smith has identified him so thoroughly with the principles of religious tolerance, personal liberty and social equality that a refusal to nominate him would be . . . a rejection of these principles.” But there were ominous signs in Houston where the Democrats held their convention and nominated Smith on the first ballot. Delegations from eight Southern states declined to take the traditional step and switch their allegiance to Smith to make his nomination symbolically unanimous. When the convention demonstration for Smith began, most Southern delegates stayed in their seats in disgust. A Texas delegate complained that when he watched the procession for Smith pass by “the faces I saw . . . were not American faces. I wondered, where were the Americans?”

  The face of America was changing. The 1920 census was the first in which America counted more citizens living in cities than on farms and in rural areas. Many found this shift unsettling, and the Catholic journal Commonweal at first guessed that Smith’s biggest hurdle was that he was an unabashed urban dweller when every previous president had some connection to the country. Even Theodore Roosevelt liked to emphasize his rather brief experience as a rancher in the North Dakota Badlands despite being, like Smith, a Manhattanite. Having country roots seemed key to fulfilling the American myth of what a president should be.

  Because Southern delegates did not actually bolt the convention, some observers, including Commonweal’s chief political reporter, Charles Willis Thompson, mistakenly thought the religious issue, at least within the Democratic Party, had been resolved. Thompson even opined that with two high quality candidates in Smith and Hoover, 1928 would prove to be “a campaign conducted honestly and without humbug.” It took a very short time to prove that assessment wrong.

  While one Catholic historian called the “campaign of vilification” against Smith “even more ridiculous than it was malicious,” Smith biographer Robert A. Slayton is closer to the mark when he called the 1928 presidential campaign “arguably the strangest and sickest in American history.”

  There were certainly elements of the ridiculous. A photograph of Smith dedicating the opening of the Lincoln Tunnel was described in many publications as the opening of a direct tunnel to the Vatican. The school board in Daytona Beach, Florida, sent a postcard home with every student, warning that if Smith were elected, no one would be allowed to own or read a Bible. There were other charges that a Catholic president would end the public school system, annul all Protestant marriages, and sterilize Protestant women.

  It speaks to the credulousness of the American public that American Catholics felt the need to respond to such nonsense. At one point, Catholics asked prominent members of the Masons, a primarily Protestant service club, to investigate and refute rumors that members of the Catholic service club the Knights of Columbus took secret oaths to cheat, spy on, or even kill Protestants if ever given the order to do so by the pope. The Masons concluded in a public letter that such charges were “scurrilous, wicked, and libellous.”

  But mixed with the ridiculous was the dangerous. In its publications, the Klan described Smith as “the AntiChrist” and Klan membership, which had been declining since 1924 due to a series of scandals involving Klan leaders, was increasing once again. In a campaign stop in Billings, Montana, Smith was greeted not only with burning crosses on a ridge overlooking the city, but also several explosions of dynamite in the city. There were burning crosses and threats of violence in Oklahoma, where a
crowd of ten thousand filled an Oklahoma City auditorium to hear the pastor of the state’s largest Baptist congregation warn that Smith was leading “the forces of Hell” and that anyone who voted for Smith would be “voting against Christ and . . . be damned.”

  More disturbing than the ridiculous and the dangerous was the respectable anti-Catholicism. One of the nation’s most renowned journalists, William Allen White, editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, charged that Smith was the candidate of “the saloon, prostitution, and gambling,” and seriously fretted that “the whole Puritan civilization which has built a sturdy, orderly nation is threatened by Smith.” A Methodist newspaper in Georgia called Catholicism “a degenerate type of Christianity,” while a Baptist newspaper warned that Smith, if elected, would close down all Protestant churches and end not only freedom of worship but freedom of the press as well.

  Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who had been an assistant attorney general in the Harding administration charged with overseeing Prohibition enforcement, addressed a gathering of twenty-five hundred Methodist ministers in Ohio and urged them to denounce Smith from their pulpits in order to swing the election to Hoover. Many obliged. A high-ranking Methodist bishop was quoted as calling Smith “utterly un-American,” while a survey of eighty-five hundred Southern Methodist ministers found exactly four who intended to vote for Smith.

  Several Republicans, most notably Robert Taft, urged Willebrandt to keep quiet before she cost Hoover the election, and Hoover, himself a Quaker, avoided any comment on Smith’s religion. His campaign issued pro forma denunciations of the slanders against Smith’s religion as “vicious and beyond the pale of decent political campaigning.” However, a reporter working undercover discovered that the Republican National Committee routinely referred inquiries for information about Smith to the Ku Klux Klan, and the Klan co-hosted a number of events with state and local Republican parties. And while Hoover himself avoided the ugliness, his wife, Lou, defended Protestants who chose to vote against Smith because he was a Catholic. “There are many people of intense Protestant faith to whom Catholicism is a grievous sin,” Mrs. Hoover wrote a friend. “And they have as much right to vote against a man for public office because of that belief” as any other, adding, “That is not persecution.”

  Silent on religion since his 1927 Atlantic article, Smith could not let such open bigotry go unanswered, and he decided to address the issue in the Klan stronghold of Oklahoma City. Smith had drafted his remarks on the train, which had been greeted with burning crosses, and he had jotted down some notes for his speech in the margins of a letter he had been sent from the Klan’s Grand Dragon in Arkansas. He brought some in the crowd to tears when, his voice low and solemn, Smith declared, “The world knows no greater mockery than the use of the blazing cross, the cross upon which Christ died, as a symbol to install into the hearts of men a hatred of their brethren, while Christ preached and died for the love and brotherhood of man.”

  Smith concluded that he hoped no one would vote for him because he was Catholic and no one should vote against him because he was Catholic. Rather, the election should be judged on who the voters believed would make the best president. “Let us debate it on the level . . . bring it out in the open, have the record consulted, and the platforms scrutinized,” and if the voters made their choice based on those criteria, then Smith would be satisfied with the result.

  That is not how the election was prosecuted, and the results on November 6, 1928, satisfied neither Smith nor his fellow Catholics. He had drawn enormous and emotional crowds—two hundred thousand in St. Louis, four hundred thousand in Boston—that gave him false hope that his campaign would succeed. While he did earn fifteen million votes—more than any Democratic candidate had ever received—it still represented barely 40 percent of the popular vote.

  He had lost in a landslide, the size of which was devastating to Smith personally, but perhaps even more so to Catholics in general. It was not that Smith had simply been defeated—Hoover was a formidable candidate running in ideal conditions—but that he had been humiliated, and Catholics attributed this level of humiliation to American antipathy toward Smith’s (and their) religion.

  “What shall the Catholic do?” Commonweal asked in an editorial a few months after the election. Smith’s campaign had increased interest in the Catholic faith, and priests nationwide were reporting conversions in record numbers, even including one of Hoover’s campaign chairmen. But generally, Catholic leaders had been dismayed during 1928 to find that many Catholics were unable to defend their faith from attack because, like Smith, they had no idea what a papal encyclical was or even the basic tenets of their religion. Catholics and non-Catholics needed to be educated about the reality of the faith.

  As a direct result of the Smith campaign, the National Conference of Catholic Men began in March 1930 to broadcast the Catholic Hour radio program Sunday evenings on the NBC radio network. NCCM executive director Edward J. Heffron said the goal of the show was to “set before the radio audience, in their true light, the teachings and practices of the Catholic Church, hoping only that this will create better understanding and overcome prejudice.” Originally broadcast on twenty-two stations in seventeen states, by 1940 the Catholic Hour was heard on ninety-four stations in forty-one states. One of the hosts of the Catholic Hour was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who later made an effective transition into television, where his program on ABC, Life Is Worth Living, was the highest-rated regular religious program in television history with an estimated thirty million weekly viewers during its five-year run in the 1950s.

  The most popular figure on radio during the 1930s was a Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin, whose weekly audience was estimated at forty million at its peak. Coughlin began broadcasting in 1926 when a local radio station invited him to solicit funds on air after the Klan had burned down his Detroit-area church. Coughlin’s early sermons were simple homilies on religious themes, but as the Depression worsened, he turned to more political fare. Initially a New Deal supporter, Coughlin became more radical, more anti-Semitic and more aggressive in attacking Roosevelt, and his popularity waned.

  Despite the broad-based popularity of Catholic personalities like Coughlin and Sheen, Catholics were under no illusion that Protestant America was ready to fully embrace them into their institutions, so another response to the Smith debacle was to create vigorous parallel Catholic institutions. Every diocese began to print its own Catholic newspaper, and the general-interest Catholic Digest was begun as an alternative to the Protestant-oriented Reader’s Digest. The Catholic Youth Organization gave Catholic children a place to play other than the Protestant YMCA. There were now bar associations for Catholic lawyers and medical associations for Catholic physicians, not to mention an American Catholic Sociological Society, a Catholic Poetry Society of America, a Catholic Economic Association, a Catholic Anthropological Society, a National Council of Catholic Nurses, and an Association of Catholic Trade Unionists that would soon be a force in the rise of the CIO.

  But many Catholics argued that establishing parallel institutions outside the dominant Protestant culture was not the answer. “How then can one transform America into a Catholic country (or at least relatively, by the infiltration of principles and ideals) by declining all invitations to take root in the American mind?” a Commonweal editorial asked. Instead, they intended to “Catholicize” American culture.

  The most important invitation accepted by Catholics was to help “clean up” Hollywood and the motion picture industry. Prior to World War II, no better mechanism than motion pictures existed to change American attitudes. During the 1930s, eighty million Americans—65 percent of the entire population—attended movies weekly. Films became infused with Catholic ideals, which took root in the public consciousness through the most popular entertainment medium in the nation, and which changed Catholicism from the strange to the familiar—even to the ideal.

  The impact of mot
ion pictures upon the nation’s morals had been a concern for many Americans from the first filmed kiss in 1896, but the scandal surrounding the popular comedian Fatty Arbuckle in 1922 (even though Arbuckle was cleared of responsibility in the death of a young woman at an Arbuckle party) led studio executives to ask President Harding’s postmaster general Will Hays to head up the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to develop standards on and off set. As film content became even more prurient, however, the MPAA invited two Catholics, Father Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest, and Martin Quigley, who edited the influential distributors’ journal Motion Picture Herald, to develop a new Production Code, which was adopted by the MPAA in 1930.

  The Production Code, as one scholar of this era in Hollywood, Thomas Doherty, has noted, was “deeply Catholic in tone and outlook,” especially reflecting “the intellectual lineage of Ignatius Loyola.” The code demanded that filmmakers show deference to civil and religious authority, insist that characters accept personal responsibility for their actions, demonstrate a belief that suffering has value as a step toward salvation, resist the glorification of sin, and never depict the ultimate triumph of evil over good. The code was written with a confidence that non-Catholics would agree with the Catholic view of what was right and what was wrong, what was proper and what was improper. In essence, Catholic philosophy would now guide the production of the most popular entertainment form in the United States, and this was at least partially the result of the penance the country had decided to accept for the way Smith was treated.

  But Hollywood did not immediately and fully conform to the Production Code. For several more years, Hollywood continued to churn out a slew of provocative films that ignored the code, including Blonde Crazy, Divorcee, Night Nurse, Baby Face, Bombshell, and Other Men’s Women. A few filmmakers, most notably Cecil B. DeMille, were clever enough to insert nudity, orgies, and other licentious fare into biblical epics in order to make it difficult for clergy to condemn the films. The Catholic hierarchy, however, had had enough of Hollywood ignoring the code, especially a code written by Catholics. “We believed we were dealing with moral gentlemen. We were mistaken,” said George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago.