Hoover had every reason to be satisfied with his Mississippi rescue: it would stand for decades as the model of how to deal with a national emergency. The medical attention received by refugees, including an antimalarial campaign and vaccinations against typhoid and smallpox, was the best many of them would see in their lifetimes. Hoover had made his case for a national role in the management of American waterways. Coolidge would shortly sign off on the most expensive single public works projects authorized by Congress, the landmark 1928 Flood Control Act, which reengineered levees, diversion works, and outlets along both the Mississippi and Sacramento rivers.
Still, Hoover could not refrain from habitual exaggeration in his claims for the effectiveness of the relief, maintaining that there had been no more than half a dozen deaths in the basin since he was assigned to the crisis. He certainly deserves credit for a great reduction in the death rate and for preventing any catastrophic spread of disease, but it appears that more than eighty lives were lost under his supervision. He also overemphasized the voluntary nature of the relief as he had done in his previous career as food czar. The public’s response was impressive: more than thirty thousand people lent a hand, and fund-raising events were held in almost every theater in America, but much of what had been accomplished was due to the federal contribution of boats and aircraft, guardsmen, food, and provisions.1
Another set of mixed results never fully acknowledged by Hoover flowed from his encounter with southern poverty and racism. He had little experience of the South. He was touched by the penury of the region, the squalid primitive lives of poor whites and black sharecroppers. He at first disbelieved and then grew offended at reports that African Americans were being mistreated by white leaders in refugee camps and in several instances being forced to work on the levees at gunpoint. As his mind inevitably turned from crisis management to rehabilitation of the flooded states, he envisioned an opportunity to use the crisis to reengineer the delta along more equitable lines. Hoover arranged for the distribution of vegetable seeds in the tent cities to give the mostly black refugees something besides cotton to grow on their return. He had agriculturalists provide instruction on how to improve their self-sufficiency by raising chickens and preserving fruit. He spoke with African American leaders about using relief funds to purchase unused lands for sharecroppers to become individual farmers, and he browbeat northern business leaders into funding a reconstruction corporation that would lend money to southern planters wiped out by the floods. Sincere in these initiatives and tending to give people the benefit of the doubt, Hoover underestimated the obstinacy of southern ways and overestimated the interest of the rest of the country in helping out. The South’s economy was little altered by the disaster. White planters, dependent on cheap black labor, frustrated change. Most of the pledges of northern industrialists were never realized. When the Colored Advisory Commission formed by Hoover to investigate conditions in refugee camps found substantial evidence of racial abuse, he kept its report out of the newspapers with further and largely unmet promises of reform.
It remained one of the perversities of Hoover’s personality, rooted in his lifelong insecurities and constant need to prove his worth, that he could not admit setbacks even when the sum total of his efforts was a resounding success.
Hoover took a well-deserved break in the summer of 1927, starting with a shopping trip for fishing tackle with Edgar Rickard, who noted that his friend was in a fine mood and very pleased with himself. Toward the end of July, three Hoovers, Bert, Lou and Allan, were once again traveling along single-lane back roads through the hills of California and Nevada in their Cadillac. They fished by day, cooked meals at the water’s edge, and spent most nights at inns and roadhouses. As usual, wrote Lou, “they got so many more mosquito bites than trout bites.” From this welcome family time, Hoover headed at the beginning of August to what was becoming for him an annual retreat at Bohemian Grove amid the California redwoods.2
The Coolidges were meanwhile lodged high among the pines of the Black Hills in a rustic chalet that served as the summer White House. It was an unpleasant time for the president. Restless and irritable, he fished without joy or success, and visited a Sioux community in nearby Deadwood to pose scowling under a ceremonial war bonnet. He caused a scene by forcing the transfer of a Secret Service agent who had disappeared for a long walk in the woods with Mrs. Coolidge. On August 2, the fourth anniversary of his ascent to the presidency, he rode in a short motorcade to a small schoolhouse in Rapid City that served as his executive office and at 11:40 a.m. asked members of the presidential press corps to line up single file. He handed each a small slip of paper reading, “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty eight.” With no further comment, he drove back up into the hills.3
Bohemian Grove was a ruling-class campground on the Russian River amid 2,700 acres of California redwoods. Founded in the late nineteenth century by genuine bohemians, mostly writers and musicians, the males-only club invited its members to “shake off your sorrows with the City’s dust and scatter to the winds the cares of life.” It adopted as its motto a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Weaving Spiders, come not here.” The camp opened every year with an elaborate torchlight parade through the forest, men in red hoods and robes carrying a large wooden coffin containing the body of Worldly Care to the water’s edge for cremation in a giant bonfire.4
By Hoover’s time, the bohemians had given way to a mostly Republican commercial and cultural elite, but the ceremonies endured. Members set themselves up in encampments, many of them built at considerable expense, and spent their days fishing, hiking, and listening to speeches, while in the evenings they attended skits and concerts. Hoover passed his time in Caveman Camp, a neighborhood dominated by members of Stanford’s inaugural class. He relished his time at the Grove. He found it in equal parts restful and stimulating. On inviting Mark Sullivan to join him there in 1925, he wrote, “I do not believe you have ever attended the encampment of the Bohemian Club….This has now become the greatest men’s party in the world.”5
He had scarcely arrived under the redwoods in August 1927 when an AP wire report was handed him in the middle of an afternoon. He and his intimates were shocked and confused by news of Coolidge’s apparent resignation. Like so many weaving spiders, they gathered in camp to spin out theories as to what Coolidge meant by his statement. Was he through with politics? Was he putting the onus on his party to enlist him for another term? Was there some connotation to the phrase “I do not choose” that only New Englanders understood?6
Whatever the intended message, it was agreed in the shade of the Grove that a new political dynamic was afoot. Hoover was soon on his way back east, and in the days following Coolidge’s announcement, his name was high on the slate of potential Republican leaders bruited in the press. Perennial candidate Charles Evans Hughes was also mentioned, along with Illinois favorite Frank Lowden and Vice President Dawes. Unsure of Coolidge’s intentions, Hoover moved cautiously. He professed loyalty to the president and remained at his cabinet post, refusing to declare a candidacy or hire a campaign team. True to form, he admitted no interest in the job he so desperately wanted.
Behind the scenes, often at his apartment in New York, he met with his stealth campaign team. Its members had started rounding up endorsements and delegates across the country in the event that Coolidge was indeed finished. Hoover’s choice of lieutenants was shrewd and surprisingly strong given his otherwise weak connections to the Republican machine. Hubert Work, his de facto campaign chair, had served in the Harding and Coolidge cabinets and was a respected party elder. Will H. Hayes, a lobbyist for the motion picture industry and a powerful figure on the West Coast, was a former chair of the Republican National Committee. Senator Reed Smoot was a veteran of five Republican conventions and chair of the Senate Finance Committee. The team’s deep roots in the mainstream of the party helped their man overcome pockets of opposition to his candidacy: the old-guard Republicans who remembered Hoover’s connections to Wilson and every instance when, as an advocate of a professionalized public service, he had failed to appoint a loyal partisan as a steamboat inspector or radio commissioner; also the insurgent Republicans from agricultural states who remembered Hoover’s hostility to the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Act.
There was also concern in some quarters that Hoover was not the most magnetic figure available for the nomination, although few regarded this as fatal to his chances. The Republicans had come to see themselves as the natural governing party of the United States. Leaving aside the Cleveland and Wilson accidents, they had been in power since Grant’s day. If Republican delegates declared an uncharismatic Hoover worthy of the presidency, voters were unlikely to argue. Coolidge, after all, had won in a landslide.
On the whole, Hoover was an easy sale within the party. His stellar performance in the cabinet, his outsized media profile, his relentless travel and speech making, his deep connections with chambers of commerce and professional organizations across the land, not to mention his recent triumph in the South, had gained him a stature none but the president could match. He was the picture of competence, progress, and prosperity. He continued to use his Commerce pulpit to burnish his reputation, going so far in December 1927 as to preempt Coolidge’s State of the Union with his own year-end report on the nation’s outstanding economic growth.7
The front-runner from the very outset of the nomination race, Hoover held that position over the eleven months between Coolidge’s Black Hills announcement and the GOP convention of 1928. Hughes declared himself unavailable early in the contest. Lowden failed to register as anything more than a regional force. Dawes, unimpressive in his term as vice president, never got off the ground. Although he remained an undeclared candidate through most of this time, Hoover worked relentlessly on his campaign. Rickard would drop by 2300 S Street for breakfast or dinner and find the house crawling with political men and even more chaotic than usual: “[Hoover] is so completely absorbed in winning the nomination….I am sorry to see how completely this dominates his every action.”8
Rickard’s disappointment was due to his lingering sense of his friend as a disinterested public servant. Part of him wanted to believe Hoover’s claims that he was without ambition, that he was being pulled by forces beyond his control up Washington’s greasy pole. Lou, too, seems to have believed in her husband’s immaculate ascent or, at least, she wanted the rest of the family to believe in it. She wrote her sons that “affairs are going with uncanny rapidity towards making your Daddy President. Even he is perfectly amazed at it, and sometimes says it just does not seem possible that this can all be happening on its own impetus, and practically without any effort on his part.” This delusion was facilitated by Bert’s abruptly moving the conversation away from politics when Lou entered the room.9
As the nomination contest advanced, the only man who retained the power to unsettle the Hoover organization was Calvin Coolidge. Was he really out of the race? If the party were to draft him before or during the convention, would he accept renomination? Hoover knew that he could not win a fight with a popular sitting president. He visited Coolidge twice in the fall of 1927 asking for direction, both times saying that he was being urged by supporters to seek the nomination, and both times professing that he would prefer to direct his efforts to renominating Coolidge if the president would give some indication of his receptivity to a draft. Both times Coolidge told Hoover not to discourage his friends. As for his own intentions, the president was silent.10
It was Coolidge’s turn to play the diva. He made a speech on December 6 to the Republican National Committee in which he encouraged the party to seek a new leader. While most observers took his words as evidence that he was retiring, some noticed that he did not say that he was certain the party would find a new leader, or that he would refuse a draft. This kept the curtain up on his own career.11
Hoover, keenly studying Coolidge’s remarks, and unable to satisfy himself that anything conclusive had been said in the President’s December speech, made an anxious return to the White House in February. He plotted his approach carefully. He did not want to ask the obvious question: Would Coolidge refuse renomination in any circumstance? That might have cleared the air, but any hesitation, any dodge, any answer short of a definitive “yes” would have obliged Hoover to shelve his ambitions. He instead informed the president that Hoover supporters in Ohio wanted to draft him into the crucial state primary which by law required a nominee’s permission. He asked if Coolidge had any intentions of entering the race. On hearing a no, Hoover asked if the president had any objections to his answering the call of his friends in Ohio. “Why not?” said Coolidge. This gave Hoover the permission he wanted to take his candidacy public. He entered Ohio. Still uncertain as to Coolidge’s game, he hastened to add he would not participate in the campaign to see himself nominated, preoccupied as he was with “the great objectives of President Coolidge’s policies.”12
The president was in a miserable state of mind as the convention approached. His bouts of rage were more frequent. His doctor saw signs of “mental disturbance” and diagnosed a “temperamental derangement.” While his unhappiness undoubtedly owed more to the loss of his son than any other factor, it did not help that Hoover was elbowing him toward the wing. The Coolidge cruel streak, customarily expressed in public ridicule of his wife’s cooking or practical jokes on White House staff, now targeted the commerce secretary. He began scorning Hoover as “the wonder boy.” That man, he complained to a friend, “has offered me unsolicited advice every day for six years, all of it bad.” How can you like someone, he asked another, “who is always trying to get your job?” He relished the fact that his enigmatic statements were keeping Hoover off balance.13
Always susceptible to catastrophic possibilities, Hoover could not keep his mind from the president. He invented scenarios that would invite Coolidge to another term: if, for instance, Hoover failed to win on the first ballot, an anybody-but-Hoover alliance could deadlock the convention and push delegates toward the tidy solution of begging Coolidge’s return. The prospect of failing so tortured Hoover that with a month to go before delegates arrived in Kansas City he played the supplicant one final time, visiting the president and reporting that he had already signed up 400 of an expected 1,100 delegates. He offered to pull his own name from consideration and throw all of his support to a Coolidge candidacy. It was a short conversation. Coolidge rebuffed the offer and, quite aware what Hoover really wanted to know, once more refused to categorically rule himself out and relieve his secretary’s torment.14
Notwithstanding the great Coolidge question, which loomed larger in his own mind than anywhere else, Hoover’s candidacy had gained an air of inevitability by the time delegates boarded trains for Kansas City and the convention’s opening day, June 12. Crucial Republican constituencies, including corporate America and a growing women’s vote, were lined up behind him. The Saturday Evening Post hailed him as a man to whom “the incredible is forever happening,” the kind of man whom the fates like to challenge in order to watch him answer. “It is no wonder that the big, broad-gauged men of the country…are his staunchest supporters.”15
Hoover entered eleven primaries in all, winning Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Michigan, California, and Oregon. As if to confirm the Hoover narrative of predestination, Senator Frank Willis, who as a native son was his most dangerous opponent in Ohio, died at a fund-raising event days before the state primary.
It suited the Hooverites to feel their candidate’s triumph was written in the stars, as opposed to admitting that it was due, in part, to the bare-knuckled tactics they would swear were beneath him. Just how much the Firm had learned since the debacle of 1920 was evident in Hoover’s southern campaign. The Mississippi flood had aligned Hoover with reformers who sought through such political channels as the Republican Party to improve the lot of African Americans. Hoover had made elaborate promises about a redistribution of power in the region and an end to black peonage. But when it came time to collect delegates, Hoover organizers stormed the southern states looking for support wherever they could buy it by generously defraying the travel expenses of delegates. With a third of the ballots required to elect a nominee at the convention cast by southerners, they left nothing to chance. Common cause was found with racist “lily-white” organizers in some states and with racially tolerant organizers in others. Taking for granted that both parties played dirty in the lowest states, the Baltimore Sun nonetheless cited Hoover’s organization for an “extremely smelly” southern campaign.*1, 16
The candidate chose not to travel to Kansas City. It would have been unbecoming of a man who had refused to campaign for the nomination to suddenly appear interested on the eve of victory. Rickard wandered over to 2300 S Street early on June 8 to find Hoover shaving, dressing, and obsessing over Coolidge. The scenario racking him that morning was that an initiative to draft Coolidge would rise from the floor and stampede delegates to the president. It would be very difficult, thought Hoover, to get his supporters back on board even if Coolidge were to decline.17
Hoover bunked out for the duration of the convention in his Commerce offices, which had been wired at his expense with extra telephones so that twenty to thirty people could take calls and record voting results at any given time. The lines sizzled all week with intelligence from the floor and backrooms of Kansas City. Hoover smoked his pipe and paced the floors uneasily, Coolidge still haunting his thoughts. What might the president do to foil him? Another nightmare scenario: Coolidge would at the last minute throw his might behind Charles Curtis, a conservative senator from Kansas. That might steal just enough Hoover support to deadlock the nomination and invite Coolidge back to center stage.
The Hoover headquarters was in Kansas City’s St. Francis Hotel, where all the carpets and furniture had been removed from a stately ballroom, and supporters and delegates milled beneath the enormous posters of Mr. and Mrs. Hoover that draped the walls. Speechmakers and a brass band kept the energy high until late in the evenings. On the sidewalks outside, delegates wore elephant pins and elephant costumes and took pamphlets from Hoover boosters sweating between sandwich boards.18
Events at Convention Hall, the main venue, opened every morning with a prayer. The hall was crowded and overheated throughout the proceedings, so much so that many delegates preferred to stand outside in the shade and listen to the speeches over radio amplifiers. Hoover’s organization manhandled events on the floor, seating all of its delegates, winning the chairmanship of the Republican National Convention for Hubert Work and directing the construction of the party platform. John McNab of San Francisco made a relatively short nominating speech for Hoover. At the first mention of the candidate’s name, an ovation erupted and held for thirty-one minutes. The roll call began with Alabama casting fifteen votes for Hoover, followed by nine from Arizona, and all the way through the alphabet to victory.19
Hoover had always been confident that 1928 was a Republican year, meaning that whoever took the party’s nomination was more or less assured the White House regardless of who the Democrats put forth. By his logic, news arriving over the radio that he had gathered 837 votes for an easy first-ballot win in Kansas City was cause for celebration. Yet Hoover, alone among the crowd of friends and family at his Commerce offices, was not visibly affected by the outcome. He calmly shook hands all around and at the earliest available moment sat down at a table with a handful of staffers and began analyzing delegate totals and potential electoral votes in the farm states.20
Later in the day, he posed for photographers on the front steps at 2300 S Street and waved to the carloads of beholders who jammed his street until well past midnight. Otherwise it was a quiet day, as was the next, spent answering congratulatory messages and exchanging pleasantries with Coolidge. The president was vacationing in Wisconsin. When told by his Secret Service agent of Hoover’s triumph, his face went hard and he ordered a bottle of whiskey.21
Hoover’s restraint at his nomination set the tone for the Republican campaign of 1928. It was a Republican year in a Republican country, with prosperity a fact, the stock market soaring, and even farm prices, for the first time since 1920, rising to respectable levels. There were no acute domestic or international issues. Hoover’s task was to carry his party to November 6 without distracting voters from the appreciation of their good fortune, and without alerting them to the deep concerns he had about certain aspects of the nation’s economic performance.22
This approach suited Hoover, who had many aversions to campaigns and elections. Some of these were political. It was part of his appeal to appear above the partisan fray, and he was so weak an electoral horse that it made sense to keep him in the barn for long stretches of time. Other aversions were customary. Notwithstanding the cross-country antics of William Jennings Bryan in successive Democratic campaigns, it was still considered proper form for an American presidential candidate to delegate his promotion. And then there were Hoover’s high-minded aversions. Hoover retained the progressive’s distaste for the clubby and sometimes corrupt dealings of party grandees and regional bosses with their systems of vote pledging and patronage. He viewed intense partisanship as an unprofessional waste of resources unlikely to lead to optimal managerial outcomes, and he thought the theater of retail politics foolish and inherently dishonest, a notion that permitted him to make a principle of having no skill at it.
The deepest of Hoover’s aversions to campaigning were psychological. He was too diffident, too uncertain of how to put himself across, and too afraid of rejection to push himself as a candidate. Much better to be courted, he felt, than to court, and much better to pretend the whole process of office getting was an irritation forced upon him by an admiring public rather than his life’s ambition. Of the many rules he laid down for the conduct of his campaign, the best honored were those protecting his dignity. “I’ll not kiss any babies,” he insisted. Nor would he dress in local costume: he had been disgusted at photographs of Coolidge in cowboy outfits and war bonnets. He would make a minimum of speeches, and he would write them all in his own dense, careful, pallid prose.23
With Hoover striking his pose of Olympian indifference, the chore of vote chasing was undertaken on his behalf by Hubert Work, members of the now captive Republican National Committee, friendly senators such as George Moses and William Borah, and the party’s vice-presidential nominee, Kansas senator Charles Curtis.
Hoover’s opponent in 1928, Democratic nominee Alfred E. Smith, was something new in the annals of U.S. presidential races. He was of German, Italian, and Irish blood, up from a murky bottom, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. With a long, unhandsome face and a short rubescent wife, he spoke nonstop through his prominent nose in an accent—woik, raddio, youse people—alien to most of the country. A failed amateur actor, he wore the brown derby and flashy waistcoats of a Broadway star. He boasted of never having read a book, giving as his alma mater the Fulton Fish Market, where he had worked in his teens to support his fatherless family. He was faithful to the Catholic Church and the notorious Society of St. Tammany. He loathed Prohibition, delighting in nothing more than an afternoon with his foot on the saloon rail, blowing foam off his beer and swapping stories.24
Smith was in many respects an anti-Hoover: gregarious, combative, and never embarrassed. He lived in public and loved it, reveling in the experience of his own charisma. He typically spoke extemporaneously, using emotion more than speechcraft to hold and move a crowd. He had deep political experience, serving four terms as governor of New York despite the general Republican ascendancy in that state, and despite the opposition of the mighty Hearst, whom he mocked and outmaneuvered at every turn. On the strength of his public appeal, and despite legislative minorities, Smith had wrestled from the Albany statehouse an impressive array of educational and health reforms and improved working conditions for women and children. He was as effective as any working politician in America.25
Smith, like Hoover, had a relatively easy ride to his party’s nomination, winning on the second ballot at the Democratic convention in Houston. To balance the ticket, Arkansas senator Joseph T. Robinson, a dry Protestant, was chosen as his running mate. The fact that the two parties devised platforms that, as Lippmann said, “contain no difference which would be called an issue,” let the campaign focus on the personal qualities of the candidates. Each represented an important force in twenties politics.26
Smith was of a new strain of charismatic Democrat. Like William Jennings Bryan before him, he led by force of personality, but the Great Commoner had been for the people, while Smith, along with Louisiana’s mesmerizing new governor Huey Long, was of the people in speech, manner, and tastes. Both men had powerful local bases and national aspirations.
Hoover typified the technocrats, a new breed of public-spirited professional. Like Vice President Dawes, a lawyer, banker, and diplomat, and Owen D. Young, founder of RCA and future presidential aspirant, he had a global outlook, broad experience, policy expertise, a way of moving effortlessly between the public and private sectors, and a difficult time putting himself across to ordinary people.
The inevitable contrasts with Smith were dangerous to Hoover, who seemed more stooped, sullen, and mechanical next to the “happy warrior,” as Franklin Roosevelt christened his fellow Democrat. Some reporters claimed Hoover had overcome his tendencies to look a man in the vest buttons and to scowl his way through interviews, but the writer Henry Pringle was closer to the mark when he described him as “abnormally shy, abnormally sensitive, [and] filled with an impassioned pride in his personal integrity.” Before a podium, Hoover could still strike a phrase “in so prosaic, so uninspired, and so mumbling a fashion that it is completely lost on nine out of ten of his auditors.”27
Smith’s charisma joined Hoover’s political aversions as another reason for his team to run a low-availability campaign. There were doubts, in some circles, that the approach would work. Theodore Roosevelt may have avoided the stump in 1904, but at all other times he had done everything in his power to forge a personal bond with the American public, making of himself, he admitted, a kind of circus performer to encourage among people the “feeling that the President was their man and symbolized their government, and that they had a proprietary interest in him…and that they hoped he embodied their aspirations and their best thought.” A president, Roosevelt said on another occasion, needs to know “how to play the popular hero and shoot a bear.”28
In place of a bear hunter in 1928, the Republicans were selling a conception. Hoover was the omnicompetent engineer, humanitarian, and public servant, the “most useful American citizen now alive,” according to his clippings. He was an almost supernatural figure, said Charles Michelson, a Democratic journalist, “whose wisdom encompassed all branches, whose judgment was never at fault, who knew the answers to all questions, and who could see in the dark.”29
Time magazine was incredulous at the Hoover campaign’s reliance on its candidate’s résumé: “In a society of temperate, industrious, unspectacular beavers, such a beaver-man would make an ideal King-beaver. But humans are different.” What gave confidence to the Hoover team was its knowledge that his candidacy would be produced, packaged, and advertised like no other in history. George Akerson had lined up leading minds on Madison Avenue to sell Hoover to the masses. Bruce Barton of BBDO, already celebrated in communications circles for naming General Motors and inventing Betty Crocker, would help with public relations. Henry Sell, a leading practitioner of the nascent art of polling, would probe the wants and responses of the people. Hoover’s college chum, the author Will Irwin, was writing a book and making a film about Hoover’s achievements to supplement the bales of promotional literature set to land on every main street in America. So long as the candidate could stand as the embodiment of a Republican prosperity that had supplied “A Chicken for Every Pot,” his personal shortcomings were surmountable.30
While the methods of Madison Avenue had never before been tried in a national campaign, most observers were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was, after all, an age of packaging. A society that found innumerable uses for such new materials as Bakelite, cellophane, and aluminum could surely employ slogans, billboards, newsreels, and radio spots to make Hoover presentable.
Smith started a distant second and failed to close the gap at any point in the race. He could not make his geniality and charisma work at scale. The stories and mannerisms that had slayed them in the five boroughs seemed oddly foreign to a national audience. With endearing allegiance but questionable political judgment, he played “The Sidewalks of New York” as an anthem at every campaign stop. What’s more, the few issues that arose during the campaign tended to work against Smith, starting with Prohibition.31
Since the 1919 ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forbidding the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors, national leaders of the major parties had sidestepped the Prohibition issue in campaigns. The teetotalers had won their epic fight to banish the saloon. The Volstead Act, setting out guidelines for enforcement of Prohibition, was the law of the land. The dry faith that a new age of reduced drunkenness, crime, poverty, and disease was dawning in America remained reasonably firm through the midtwenties. Except in the wettest states, any politician voicing misgivings about Prohibition or its enforceability could expect a merciless challenge come voting time from the well-drilled troops of the Anti-Saloon League. Most leaders, including limited-government zealots like Calvin Coolidge, found it advisable to at least pay lip service to the law.32
Dodging the issue had become more difficult by 1928, however. It was obvious to all that something was amiss in America’s war on booze. However popular the dry laws, they had not stopped people from drinking. A great market had developed for illegal alcohol, and enterprising smugglers were competing to fill it. A high-proof flood of bootleg liquor was flowing over the long and mostly unguarded U.S. border with Canada. Rum runners were dumping small mountains of kegs and casks at myriad select points along the East and West Coasts. These imports competed with the abundant beer, moonshine, and bathtub gin produced by illicit domestic operations. Customers who recoiled from traffic with criminals could usually find a sympathetic doctor willing to write a prescription for whatever libation good health required. In backrooms, speakeasies, private homes, and private clubs, on campuses, in small towns, and in big cities, wets were having their way. “It was absolutely impossible to get a drink in Detroit,” wrote one newspaperman, “unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy bartender what you wanted in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar.”33
People were able to keep drinking not only because they were thirsty but because enforcement of the dry laws was poor. Federal responsibility rested in the Treasury Department, overseen by Secretary Andrew Mellon, a former distillery owner and unapologetic wet who considered the Volstead Act a gross infringement on personal liberties. His Prohibition Bureau, underfunded and indifferently staffed, was woefully inadequate to policing an entire nation with thousands of miles of borders and coastlines.
Coolidge, who had said so little about the Eighteenth Amendment, publicly and privately, that Hoover could not be certain where he stood, was as averse to spending money on enforcement as he was on everything else. The states, given concurrent responsibility for enforcement under the Eighteenth Amendment, were doing no better. An overwhelming majority of governors professed to be dry, yet more than two-thirds of them, whether out of fiscal rectitude or indifference to the law, had refused to provide a nickel for enforcement. In all, the states spent six times more upholding fish and game laws than they did on Prohibition. Many municipal police forces had meanwhile succumbed, in whole or in part, to the millions of dollars in kickbacks and bribes available to officials willing to abet the illegal trade or at least to look the other way. Sixty percent of Chicago’s police squad was estimated to be active in the liquor business.34
In this disorderly atmosphere, with billions of untaxed dollars at stake, law breaking flourished. Criminal syndicates sprang up across the land and in a short period of time acquired a scale and sophistication that corporate America might envy. Lines of supply were secured. Territories were carved up. Logistics were streamlined. Profits were reinvested in new lines of vice. Risk was managed through the systematic corruption of cops, judges, and politicians. The likes of Meyer Lansky, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Longie Zwillman, and Detroit’s Purple Gang were applying techniques of scientific management to the lucrative market for contraband spirits. With each passing year they grew bolder and richer, and more violent. Chicago saw two hundred gang-style murders in a three-year period, a shocking total at the time. The criminals operated with such impunity and contempt for authority that Washington was shamed into rousing itself lest the entire legal system fall into disrepute. Both party platforms called for more rigorous enforcement of Prohibition in 1928.
Hoover had no objection to the Republican plank on the Eighteenth Amendment. He had no passion for it, either. Moral crusades were not his thing. Lippmann was probably right in saying that Hoover regarded “both Wets and Drys as substantially insane.” He was a moderate drinker who had built a decent wine cellar before Prohibition, purchasing part of the late Senator Stanford’s collection. It has often been claimed that Lou drained the cellar when the Volstead Act went into effect, but a decade later, on instructing Allan to look for some papers in a cupboard under the stairs of their Palo Alto home, she gave flimsy alibis for the port and champagne he might find there, showing her household to be as hypocritical as any other in America.35
Hoover’s ambivalence about Prohibition permitted him to drink occasionally in Washington. He did not keep liquor at 2300 S Street, but he had a habit of stopping by the exempted Belgian embassy for cocktails after work. At the same time, he supported the notion, common in Washington, that Prohibition was good for other people, liable to improve the health, welfare, and personal finances of the masses, not to mention the productivity of the economy. He was genuinely concerned about escalating crime rates and what he perceived as popular indifference to the rule of law. If pushed, he identified more closely with the God-fearing dry tribe, a hangover from several generations of temperance activists in his maternal line. He would not want to be the man who crushed their abstemious vision of America, yet politically, he saw no reason to alienate either side by taking a firm stand. He delayed saying anything substantive on the subject for as long as possible.
It was William Borah, the influential dry senator from Idaho, who forced Hoover’s hand during the nomination process. Borah demanded a written statement on Prohibition of the various candidates clamoring for his support. Hoover agonized for weeks over what to say before settling on a Hardingesque straddle that declared the Eighteenth Amendment “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” It worked. Wets took encouragement from his use of the equivocal word experiment. Drys did not like that word but were pleased with everything else. Borah accepted Hoover as a suitable champion of temperance and gave his endorsement.36
Al Smith had fewer options. Whatever the Democratic platform said, there was no shaking his wet reputation. He had openly served highballs at the executive mansion in Albany, and he had repealed New York State’s Prohibition enforcement statute. He considered the great experiment crazy and doomed to fail, as did most voters in New York City and other major urban centers. That was sufficient to make Smith anathema to drys in the Democratic Party, many of whom, especially in the South and Midwest, were driven into Republican arms.
Smith’s problems were further aggravated by his ethnicity. It was not an accident that the exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924 had come hard on the heels of the Eighteenth Amendment; Prohibition and nativism were fellow travelers. A cocktail of anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and anti-saloon sentiment had helped the Ku Klux Klan break out of its southern confines in the twenties, finding support in every corner of the land. Even with the Klan now in remission, a victim of its own excesses and internal corruption, the prejudices that had sustained it survived.
Smith, as the first Roman Catholic nominated for the presidency by a major party, ran headlong into a virulent strain of anti-Catholic sentiment in American life. There were at least a hundred anti-Catholic journals in publication in 1928, including the Klan’s Fellowship Forum, as well as the Rail Splitter, America’s “oldest, most resourceful, and most reliable Anti-Papal publishing house.” The latter was chief promulgator of the charge that Jesuits had assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Anti-Catholicism in these years cut across regional lines, the urban-rural divide, income and educational levels, and party lines. Serious men in Smith’s own party worried that a Catholic president would owe allegiance to Rome ahead of the Constitution and the United States. Religion joined liquor as a major factor behind the growth of a Democrats-for-Hoover movement across the country.37
As the Quaker son of German immigrants who traced their American roots to prerevolutionary times, Hoover was spared the indignities faced by Smith. At the outset, at least, he was offended on his opponent’s behalf. He viewed freedom of conscience as fundamental to the American experience. At the first opportunity, in his acceptance speech to a lively crowd in the Stanford Stadium on August 11, he made an unambiguous and eloquent appeal to his party and the American people to disregard faith in the campaign:
I come of Quaker stock. My ancestors were persecuted for their beliefs. Here they sought and found religious freedom. By blood and conviction I stand for religious tolerance both in act and in spirit. The glory of our American ideals is the right of every man to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience.38
This statement was consistent with Hoover’s oft-repeated message on equality of opportunity as the foundation of American life and “the right of every American—rich or poor, foreign or native-born, irrespective of faith or color.” He presented himself to voters as the beneficiary of this same right: “In no other land, could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with un-bounded hope.”39
Hoover and his official campaign team were reasonably successful in avoiding religion throughout the contest of 1928. Inevitably, given the virulence of anti-Catholic sentiment, not all in his party followed his example. Pockets of Republican activists, including at least one attached to the national committee, were caught in the act of papal scaremongering. The flow of anti-Catholic literature increased markedly throughout the country as the race intensified. Shown evidence of a Virginia campaign manager prophesying Rum and Romanism in America if Smith was elected, Hoover publicly denounced the speaker, and toward the end of the campaign he reiterated his call for tolerance.40
As far as Smith and the Democrats were concerned, Hoover’s response to the prejudice unleashed in his service was wanting. In an emotional address in Oklahoma City on September 20, Smith accused “Republicans high in the councils of the party” of having countenanced bigotry. They may not have actively promoted it, he said, but “a sin of omission is some times as grievous as a sin of commission.”41
Hoover believed he had said his piece at the start of the campaign, and as a practical matter, he had nothing to gain by addressing religion and authenticating Smith’s victimhood. Republicans were campaigning on prosperity, and it was a winning issue. Intolerance was a Democratic theme, used by Smith to raise money and rally his vote. The Democrat nevertheless had a point about sins of omission. Hoover, despite his calls for religious tolerance, told reporters that Smith’s Oklahoma speech would only fan the flames of intolerance and that reticence was the best policy. The notion that Hoover might have been inclined to take his points in the Electoral College instead of heaven would have offended his followers, but his contempt for political opportunism was not absolute. He knew where his interest lay in the campaign against Smith. The acerbic journalist Oswald Garrison Villard was correct in saying that Hoover had all the qualities one required of a presidential candidate: “the ability to play politics, to compromise, at times to deceive oneself and the general public…to defend the Golden Rule and the Commandments against all comers…and then to keep silent in the presence of national sin.”42
The oddest aspect of Hoover’s response to the religious issue was his conviction that he suffered as much as, if not more than, Smith from mudslinging. He was heard to give slur-by-slur accounts of all the malicious rumors and personal attacks aimed at him during the campaign: that he had been a war profiteer, that he was implicated in the Harding scandals, that he was racist, or too friendly with African Americans. He was especially aggrieved that the Democrats tried to challenge his eligibility for the presidency on the grounds that he had been absent from the United States for most of his adult life. He was so touchy on the subject that, far in advance of the campaign, he had commissioned a legal opinion in support of his eligibility using unnecessarily exaggerated and distorted facts to strengthen his case.*2, 43
Hoover drew large and admiring crowds everywhere he appeared during the campaign, apart from Boston, where Catholics threw rocks at his car. His few phlegmatic, fact-choked speeches were safe and predictable. He located himself rather robotically as the son of pioneering Americans in West Branch, as a supporter of labor in New Jersey, a friend of manufacturers in New England, a champion of financiers in New York, and the best hope of southern voters in Elizabethton, Tennessee.
The narrative of Republican prosperity was the unifying factor in all of his addresses. It went like this: Republicans had in seven years taken a war-ravaged national economy and through far-sighted management built it into a marvel that grew the national income from $30 billion a year to more than $45 billion, that built 3.5 million new homes, that equipped 9 million more homes with electricity, 6 million with telephones, 7 million with radio sets, and put into service another 14 million automobiles. Every region of the country had seen the development of new office buildings, highways, parks, and medical facilities. The number of students enrolled in high schools had increased 66 percent, the number in institutions of higher learning 75 percent. Wise government policies, including the protective tariff, restrictive immigration, fiscal responsibility, and the pursuit of peace had permitted spending on social goods unknown to most of the rest of the world. “Fear of poverty has been reduced,” said Hoover. “Fear of loss of employment has been lessened by stability. Fear of old age and for the future of the family has been lessened.”44
Hoover tried not to push the story too far. His rosy pictures were almost always qualified. His comment that “we are nearer today to the ideal of the abolition of poverty and fear from the lives of men and women than ever before” was placed “in the context of 150 years of American history.” While the statement was true, he was tempting fate, given his own private misgivings about the economy.45
Hoover was perhaps the only participant in the election of 1928 capable of refuting or at least challenging the Republican prosperity message. He had doubts about its sustainability, and the stock market was once again the focus of his concern. Share prices had held steady throughout 1926 and the first half of 1927 until Benjamin Strong, his health terminally ravaged by tuberculosis, his policy still preoccupied with Great Britain’s struggles to return to gold, dropped the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s rediscount rate back down to 3.5 percent. The broader U.S. economy, he believed, was not so hot that looser credit would create problems, and, in any event, he was willing to live with the risk of a stock market bubble. The activities of gamblers, he insisted once again, should not stand in the way of the needs of the broader economy.
Hoover had been wrestling the Mississippi when Strong made this move. On his return from the flood, noting a substantial increase in the volume of brokers’ loans on Wall Street, a measure of speculative activity, he shot a missive to the Federal Reserve Board arguing that “inflation of credit is not the answer” to Europe’s troubles and that an increase in speculation “can only land us on the shores of depression.” He tried, unsuccessfully, to rally Coolidge and Mellon to step in on the matter. Indeed, Coolidge told the press that the volume of brokers’ loans merely reflected the economic health of the country. Hoover, shown the president’s statement, had to read it twice. “Did that man say that?” he gasped.46
Coolidge and Mellon continued to make optimistic statements on the conditions of business and the reasonableness of stock prices through the last months of the year, tacitly endorsing Strong’s direction and sending share prices higher. By the end of 1928, Hoover’s fears were realized. The Fed rate cut had triggered a massive speculation: money was flowing in amounts large and small from every corner of the nation to Wall Street. Share prices hit dizzying levels. The Dow Jones Industrial Average leapt almost 20 percent in the last quarter without any corresponding increase in fundamental values. All this despite Strong belatedly lifting the Fed rate, in stages, back up to 5 percent in the course of the year. When the NYSE confirmed that an increase in brokers’ loans was fueling price rises, Coolidge reassured the nation that brokerage lending was no cause for alarm, and the market careened ahead. Veteran traders could not recall any chief executive ever pronouncing on technical trading matters.47
The stock market was the greatest but not the only economic problem that weighed on Hoover in the course of the campaign. The now higher interest rates at home were repatriating money from overseas loans, freezing large parts of the European economy. Spending on home construction in the United States had been dropping since 1926, as had auto production, indicating that purchasing power was under pressure. These facts, combined with Hoover’s predisposition to pessimism, were more than sufficient to start him worrying that the economy was headed down a primrose path to disaster. Still, he soldiered on with his promise of a new era of Republican prosperity.48
While Hoover never came close to relinquishing his lead in the campaign of 1928, he could not be convinced that his team had matters in hand. He fretted over every move by the Smith camp. He was compulsive in his attentions to the temper of editorial opinion. It was his anxieties, his talent for taking the gloomiest view of things, which led him in the final days to make his most questionable and consequential decision of the contest.
William Borah, the powerful Idaho senator who had blessed Hoover’s prohibition stance, was a man of great personal magnetism, political cunning, and independent spirit. He owed his vast influence in the Senate in large part to his oratorical gifts, which were once described as “something between the technique of Cicero and the Swiss bell ringers.” A champion of agricultural issues and a leading dry, he had been instrumental in shaping the Republican platform despite the fact that he qualified as an insurgent. Borah, said Lippmann, was “about as warmly attached to the Republican Party as the Irish Free State is to the United Kingdom.” As an insurgent, Borah’s relations with Republican presidents had been antagonistic and, for his chief executives, painful. Coolidge, hearing talk of Borah on horseback, expressed surprise that the senator and his mount could ride in the same direction.49
Nevertheless, in this electoral season Borah had been among the first leading Republicans to fall in behind Herbert Hoover. Before and after the Kansas City convention, he had been in close contact with the commerce secretary. They were aligned on important matters of policy, including Prohibition, farm relief via the protective tariff, and the pursuit of international peace. Hoover accepted Charles Curtis on his ticket largely at Borah’s insistence. The senator helped Hoover keep the expensive McNary-Haugen agricultural price-support initiative out of the platform and after the convention defended his nominee not only as a friend of the farmer, but as someone who could actually cure what ailed agriculture. To an audience of twelve thousand in Minneapolis:
Bear in mind that Mr. Hoover stated in his acceptance speech that it is the most imminent problem before the American people today. Bear in mind that he pledges himself to the solution of the problem. Then bear in mind that Herbert Hoover has never set himself to the solution of any kind of an economic problem that he has not made good.50
Borah emerged as Hoover’s leading supporter and as the most effective voice for either party in the campaign. He stumped the Midwest ridiculing Smith’s views on Prohibition. He insulated the Hoover camp from accusations of intolerance by canceling a speech at a Methodist conference in Peoria after a minister said that Smith’s candidacy should be denounced on religious grounds from every Methodist pulpit in America. He took his show to the South, where his views on states’ rights had made him a popular figure and sold Hoover to great crowds in Nashville, Tulsa, Chattanooga, and Richmond.
Some observers wondered if Hoover’s alliance with Borah, a man known to serve “only that he may later betray,” would last the campaign. In fact, Borah was entirely sincere in his admiration of the nominee, telling friends that he was not at all uneasy about the kind of administration Hoover would bring. He viewed Hoover as the man who would make Republicanism safe again for progressives, reuniting the insurgents with the flock.51
Hoover was thrilled at Borah’s unexpected warmth and dedication to the mainstream Republican cause. On October 20, he encouraged the senator by wire to tour Baltimore and the Northeast. The following day, speaking in Tennessee, Borah suggested that Hoover, if elected, should call an extraordinary session of Congress in the spring to pass legislation for agricultural relief. As a statement of policy, this comment was consistent with the Republican platform: farmers needed urgent assistance. However, the idea that the agricultural situation was too desperate to wait a year for the next regular session of Congress was Borah’s improvisation.
That it was not a fleeting inspiration became apparent on October 26 when the senator stopped in Washington to discuss over lunch with Hoover his touring schedule and the progress of the campaign. Borah brought welcome news of unexpected Republican strength in such Democratic strongholds as Texas and Tennessee, and he offered to make a second trip to North Carolina, where he saw promise of a Hoover breakthrough. He warned the candidate that the declaration for Al Smith by another contrary-minded Republican insurgent, Nebraska senator George Norris, threatened their campaign in the farm belt. He suggested that Hoover blunt Norris by announcing a special session to pass agricultural aid. Borah walked out of the meeting and told reporters that while nothing had been firmly decided, he himself was “thoroughly in favor of an extra session.”52
There were obvious attractions to Borah’s proposal. Hoover was averse to leaving votes on the table, and he understood that his relationship with farmers and the insurgents could make or break his success with Congress in the years ahead. There were also reasons to balk. The race was almost over and Hoover’s victory was reasonably assured. Extra sessions had a way of running away on a president, and the idea that meeting Borah’s demand would buy any degree of loyalty from the insurgents ran contrary to all congressional experience. “Turmoil,” said William Allen White, “was their meat and drink.”53
Hoover announced the extra session the next day: “There are a number of questions, particularly agricultural relief, which urgently require solution and should not be delayed for a whole year. It is our most urgent economic problem.” Borah bolted off to shake the rafters in Baltimore, Boston, and Utica.54
At 1:45 p.m. on November 5, five thousand people, including a delegation of Stanford alumni, the Stanford marching band, and schoolchildren from as far away as San Jose, yelled and cheered and waved tiny American flags behind cordons of uniformed policemen who moments before had cleared them to either side of the tracks at Southern Pacific Station so that a special presidential train could roll on schedule to a grinding, jerking, belching halt and deliver from its caboose on the eve of the 1928 election a bare-headed Herbert Hoover, wearing an unaccustomed smile.
It was not much of a smile. His head was tilted down and his eyes barely lifted to meet the surge of beaming faces that blocked his view in every direction. Yet it was enough of a smile to show a warm and genuine appreciation and reciprocation of his public’s affection. Lou followed him off the train and said with a wide gap-tooth grin what her husband felt and could not express.
That he had learned something in the ten-week campaign was evident in Hoover’s next move. He took Lou’s arm with purpose, marched a few quick steps up the platform, stopped, squared up, and presented the Republican Party’s first couple in a distinguished pose for the convenience of those photographers and newsreel cameras able to keep their balance in the melee.
A motorcycle escort helped the Hoover party to its vehicles and guided them down Palm Drive toward campus. The route was lined with still more rejoicing Californians. Classes had been suspended for the day. Flags billowed out of fraternity houses and classrooms. An informal convoy of students formed behind the Hoover fleet. They leaned out of car windows wearing red Stanford caps, or rode on fenders and radiators, or ran alongside. Overhead, an airplane wrote “Welcome Home” in the sky.55
Before disappearing into their hilltop home, the Hoovers, all seven of them, gathered for more pictures on their front step with the strong sun in their eyes. Lou, giddy, beamed under her cloche hat. Her tall and slender sons stood as bookends to the party, Herbert Jr. with his right hand in his suit jacket pocket like a proper English gentleman, Allan, genial and relaxed, holding his father’s hat. Daughter-in-law Margaret wrestled with a squirming Herbert III. The candidate carried his beloved granddaughter Peggy Ann in the crook of his right arm like a bag of groceries, another smile, less bashful than the last, crossing his face.
Hoover gave his last campaign address that night from his study, a simple, nonpolitical message carried across the nation by radio, urging Americans to get out and vote. It was considered a superb performance. Wrote the New York Times:
Mr. Hoover, it was found, had a splendid radio voice, and, as he remained immobile during the delivery of his speeches, he always talked directly into the microphone. Radio listeners thus heard a clear, even voice that always made a favorable impression. The restraint of his delivery, the absence of gestures and flights of eloquence and rhetoric did not serve as handicaps.56
The next morning at 10 a.m. Hoover voted at a polling station in the Stanford University Women’s Club building. He spent most of the rest of the day in his study, reading telegrams and smoking cigars. He got down on the floor to amuse his grandson with an empty cigar box and a pet kitten. Late in the afternoon he took a yardstick and on two large blackboards that Allan and some Stanford friends had erected in the living room calmly listed the states alphabetically and drew beside them columns for electoral votes and total precincts. He assigned the boys to fill in the blanks. At the far right of the boards were columns reserved for Republican and Democratic totals. Six telegraph lines had been rigged into the basement to provide the newswire returns that would fill these spaces.
Hoover sat down to dinner with Lou at his customary hour of 7 p.m. while the Stanford boys bolted up and down the stairs with the early returns. By the time he stood up from the table, around 7:20 p.m., the numbers indicated that all was unfolding as expected. Just before 8 p.m. he was standing with one hand in his pocket, a sheaf of returns in the other, watching the boards and nodding to the 150 guests who had been invited for an evening of fruit punch, sandwiches, and vote counting. At the top of the hour, the New York Times declared Virginia and Smith’s home state of New York for Hoover, virtually deciding the election. A large cheer went up in the living room, and a quizzical smile crossed the victor’s face. “I am happy,” he said, before quickly retreating to his study.57
He came back into the living room not long afterward as a series of moving pictures from the campaign were played for his visitors. He sat embarrassed, puffing his pipe, rubbing his forehead, eyes to the floor, as the projector whirred. He endured more applause around 10 p.m. when Al Smith’s telegram of concession and congratulations was read aloud. Hoover sat still and smiled and tried not to look too pleased. A voice called for a speech. “No speeches,” said Hoover, too self-conscious even to thank his supporters. A woman sat down at his piano and played “America.” They all stood and sang in tones more reverent than jubilant.58
As the piano played in the Hoover living room, a torchlight parade was advancing up the hill toward the house. Thousands of students were marching and singing in the cool night air behind the baton of the old bandmaster John Philip Sousa. On reaching the Hoover home, they stopped under the motion picture klieg lights erected on the street, unleashed their college yells, and demanded the appearance of the president-elect.59
He came out to his balcony with Lou and the rest of the family and treated the students to a wave. Sousa responded with a series of patriotic numbers, after which the students requested something livelier and a dance party broke out on Hoover’s lawn. At a break in the action, Hoover said, “I thank you for coming up tonight and giving us this greeting. I do appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.” Sousa closed with the Stanford hymn, “Hail, Stanford, Hail.” Hoover’s eyes glistened as he joined the singing.60
They would all wake up in the morning to learn that Hoover had won resoundingly, taking 444 Electoral College votes to Smith’s 87, and 58 percent of the popular vote to the Democrat’s 41 percent. He carried forty states, including five in the formerly solid Democratic South.
*1 It may have been true, as his loyalists claimed, that Hoover was not aware of the tactics employed on his behalf. His managers kept him in the dark about certain payments to delegates while he went around insisting that none of his support had been bought. It may also be that Hoover knew enough to not want to know more.
*2 Among other misleading statements, the opinion asserts that the candidate had “maintained his base of operations” in the United States from the time he graduated from college until the outbreak of the Great War. At best, he had merely owned property in the United States through most of that period. Regardless, Hoover did meet the constitutional requirement of having been a resident within the United States for fourteen years.