Here’s a pop quiz for a rainy Thanksgiving morning: how many Catholics have received a major-party nomination for president?
The question is inspired by the subject of today’s #stampoftheday, a 1945 stamp, issued on November 26, 1945, honoring Al Smith, the “happy warrior” who was the Democratic nominee in 1928 when Herbert Hoover won the presidency in a landslide.
A native New Yorker who had to drop out of school when he was 14 to support his family after his father died, Smith had built up an impressive reform record as the four-time governor of New York State. Serving at a time when business interested dominated national policymaking, he instituted forceful industrial safety and work-hour regulations, broadened workers’ compensation and widows’ pensions, increased investment in maternal and infant health, expanded the state’s park system and hospital construction program, and orchestrated a nine-fold increase in state funding for public education – all while streamlining state administration and modernizing government finances.
Despite his record, his presidential campaign couldn’t overcome what Frederick William Wile famously called “the three P’s: Prohibition, Prejudice and Prosperity.” The economy was booming so Hoover, who was quite popular, could present himself as the best successor to President Calvin Coolidge, who chose not to run for a second term.
To make matters more challenging, Smith’s opponents seized on the fact that Smith was Catholic, had a thick New York accent, and openly opposed Prohibition. For example, James Cannon, Jr., a Methodist bishop who was the Virginia political boss and the new spokesman for the powerful Anti-Saloon League, flooded the South with tracts and pamphlets that not only falsely charged that Smith was a drunk and would be the “cocktail president” but also denounced his Catholic faith as “the Mother of ignorance, superstition, intolerance and sin” and dismissed his supporters as the “kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of New York.”
As the returns came in and made it clear that Smith had lost badly, he supposedly said, “well, the time just hasn’t come yet when a man can say his beads in the White House.” This was the conventional wisdom for more than three decades. In a March 1958 review of a Smith biography written by none other than Oscar Handlin, historian James McGregor Burns, noted that Smith had refused suggestions that he learn to speak with less of a thick New York accent because he feared that doing so would “be turning his back upon the people among whom he had grown up, be untrue to himself and to them. No amount of votes was worth it.”
This Burns notes, was “a brave gesture-but one that does not help us to say whether a Catholic of a very different, less Bowery stamp can win the Presidency, at least today. [Handlin] concludes that as late as 1944, the year of Smith’s death, no Catholic or Jew could aspire to be President. It is wholly possible that a Catholic with a different background and in a different era could win the Presidency.” (This, of course, is exactly what happened in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was elected president.)
But Smith, complete with his accent, did activate the urban, ethic working-class base that became the base of the Democratic Party’s mid-20th century successes. The late Pete Hamill, for example, once observed: ” His accent, he was great. He made me want to weep when I heard the voice. He was a terminal New Yorker, if you listened to him talking, because there’s not many people who speak like that anymore.”
Although he was known as a progressive governor, Smith became a bitter critic of the New Deal policies carried out by Franklin Roosevelt, a one-time ally who had succeeded him as governor and then beat out Smith for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932. The two, however, apparently reconciled in the early 1940s, when Smith, who had been a sharp critic of Nazi Germany, strongly supported Roosevelt’s efforts to aid the British and prepare the US for its likely entry to the war.
His death in 1944 was a major event. The New York Times, for example, reported that more than 160,000 people passed by his bier at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Times also printed a full page of excerpts from tributes that had poured in from a variety of luminaries. Several months later, the Times also printed a long essay by Robert Moses, who first became widely known in the 1920s, when Smith tapped him for several important jobs, most notably heading the then-new Long Island State Park Commission, which, among other things, built Jones Beach State Park.
At the end of the essay, Moses notes that there would be a statue of Smith in a new state-funded housing project in the Lower East Side neighborhood where Smith had lived for his entire life. The statue, Moses wrote, “is in the midst of living people, in a playground approached by steps on which children can play….Anyone can mount the steps. The Governor will be as accessible as he was in life. Here the children who were his special concern will feel the protective presence of one whose life was full of little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness to them.”
Be well, stay safe, make “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness,” fight for justice and work for peace.
PS: Four Catholics, all of them Democrats, have gotten major-party nominations for president: Smith, Kennedy, Joe Biden and John Kerry.