Hoover wins the presidential election

On 6 November 1928 Americans elected Herbert Hoover President: Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, a mining engineer who during and after the First World War had directed food relief for millions of starving people in Europe. He won the election decisively, taking 58 per cent of the vote and 444 of the 531 electoral votes. His rival, the Democratic Governor of New York Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for President by one of the major parties, received just under 41 per cent and 87 electoral votes. On the same day, by a margin of barely a few tens of thousands of votes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected Governor of New York – the man who four years later would take the White House from Hoover.

A candidate from outside politics

Hoover had never before stood for any elective office, apart from an unsuccessful attempt to win the Republican nomination in 1920. Born in 1874 into a Quaker family in Iowa and orphaned early, he studied geology at the newly opened Stanford University and worked as a mining engineer in Australia, China and London, amassing a large fortune. The war made him famous. From the autumn of 1914 he headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which fed millions of people in occupied Belgium and northern France, and after the United States entered the war, the federal Food Administration. After the Armistice his American Relief Administration delivered food to Central and Eastern Europe. In reborn Poland it fed more than a million children, and in 1921–1923 it came to the aid of the victims of the great famine in Russia, at its peak feeding more than ten million people a day. In America he was therefore seen as the embodiment of the effective expert and philanthropist above party, a man who solved problems rather than made speeches.

America at the height of prosperity

The Republicans had been in power since 1921, after the Harding–Coolidge ticket routed the Democrats in the 1920 election. After Harding’s death in August 1923 Calvin Coolidge became President, and in 1924 he won the election in his own right. The 1920s were a time of unprecedented prosperity in the United States. Production of cars, radio sets and household appliances grew, the cities were electrified and the New York Stock Exchange broke record after record. Share prices drifted ever further from companies’ results, because millions of Americans were buying securities on credit. Beneath the surface, problems were mounting: agriculture had been stuck in a crisis of overproduction since 1920, and incomes were becoming ever more unequal. Few people in 1928, however, listened to the warnings.

The United States had not joined the League of Nations, but it had not shut itself off from the world. It convened the conference at which the Washington Naval Treaty limiting navies was signed, and American bankers and diplomats helped to devise the Dawes Plan, which regulated German reparations and opened the way to large American loans to Germany. At the end of August 1928 the Kellogg–Briand Pact was signed in Paris, co-authored by the Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg. American money circulated around Europe: loans flowed to Germany, Germany used them to pay reparations to France and Britain, and they in turn repaid their war debts to America.

“I do not choose to run”

On 2 August 1927 Coolidge surprised the country with a brief statement that he did “not choose to run” in 1928. Hoover proved to be the natural successor. He was the best-known member of the Cabinet, of whom it was said that he was “Secretary of Commerce and Under-Secretary of all other departments”. He dealt with everything, from the standardisation of products and the regulation of radio and aviation to the building of a great dam on the Colorado River. In the spring of 1927 he directed the relief effort during the Great Mississippi Flood, which drove some one and a half million people from their homes. It brought him fame, although at the same time reports of the mistreatment of Black Americans in the flood refugee camps were covered up. Coolidge had little liking for him. He is said to have remarked that Hoover had been giving him unsolicited advice for six years, “all of it bad”. But he made no attempt to stop him.

The Republican convention in Kansas City nominated Hoover in mid-June 1928 on the first ballot. The vice-presidential candidate was the Senate Majority Leader, Charles Curtis of Kansas, who was partly of Native American descent. The sitting Vice President, Charles Dawes, was passed over, because Coolidge regarded his candidacy as a “personal affront”. The Democrats, meeting in Houston at the end of June, likewise chose Smith on the first ballot, with Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas as his running mate. The nominating speech for Smith, known as the “Happy Warrior”, was delivered, as four years earlier, by Roosevelt.

A Catholic from New York

In many respects Smith was Hoover’s opposite. The grandson of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Germany, brought up on New York’s poor Lower East Side, he never finished school and made his career in the Democratic party machine of Tammany Hall. As four-time Governor of New York he carried out serious social and administrative reforms. He was also an open opponent of Prohibition, the ban on the sale of alcohol in force since 1920. Hoover called it a “great social and economic experiment, noble in motive”.

The campaign was one of the most vicious in American history, although Hoover himself avoided the subject of religion. Protestant clergy warned that Smith would take orders from Pope Pius XI. There were rumours that the Pope would move to Washington, and after the election a joke went round that Smith had sent the Vatican a one-word telegram: “Unpack”. The anti-Catholic campaign revived the already declining Ku Klux Klan. Smith was also hurt by his ties to Tammany Hall and by his New York accent, which on the radio – used in a campaign on such a scale for the first time – sounded alien to voters in the provinces. Hoover gave only seven major speeches. He promised continued prosperity. On 11 August, accepting the nomination in the Stanford University stadium, he said that America was “nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before”. In the autumn, in New York, he contrasted American “rugged individualism” with European “paternalism and state socialism”. Republican advertisements promised “a chicken in every pot”.

The result

About 36.8 million Americans voted, almost eight million more than in 1924. Hoover won some 21.4 million votes, Smith 15 million. The Republican carried 40 of the 48 states, including New York, his rival’s home state. For the first time since Reconstruction he broke the “Solid South”, winning Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas and Tennessee, where many white Protestants voted against a Catholic and an opponent of Prohibition. Smith won only six Southern states and – a sign of things to come – Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He also won in several of the country’s largest cities, where Catholic immigrants and their children voted for him. A few years later these votes became the foundation of the coalition on which Roosevelt built his presidency.

Roosevelt had not wanted to run for governor. He was undergoing treatment at Warm Springs in Georgia and feared that the Republican tide would sweep away any Democrat. Smith and party officials, however, persuaded him that only he could hold New York. He beat the Republican Albert Ottinger by a margin of about 25,000 votes out of more than four million cast. Hoover, who as President-elect set off on a goodwill tour of Latin America, took office on 4 March 1929. “Given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation,” he had said during the campaign.

Significance

Seven and a half months after Hoover’s inauguration, in October 1929, the New York stock market crashed, and the American economy, followed by the world economy, sank into the Great Depression. The President, convinced that relief for the unemployed was a matter for the states, local communities and charity rather than the federal government, for a long time responded too feebly. In June 1930 he signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs and provoked retaliation by other countries, shrinking world trade still further. The crisis hit hardest in Germany, which lived on American credit. When the loans stopped flowing, unemployment in Germany ran into the millions and voters turned away from the Weimar parties. In June 1931 Hoover announced a one-year moratorium on war debt and reparation payments, but it did not save German democracy. The Depression paved the way to power for Adolf Hitler, and in Japan it strengthened the military, who in September 1931 seized Manchuria. Hoover’s administration responded only with the Stimson Doctrine, a declaration that gains won by force would not be recognised.

The 1928 election was the Republicans’ last great victory before a long Democratic era. In 1932 Hoover lost to Roosevelt in 42 of the 48 states. It was Roosevelt, elected Governor of New York on the same day as Hoover won the presidency, who led the United States through the Depression and the Second World War, while Hoover, as a former President, became one of the sharpest critics of his foreign policy.