We have been here before. Part III

I became somewhat distracted yesterday by the Cruz/Trump feud, it is just so delicious that two of the most despicable "politicians" in America have finally found each other and started doing the only thing conservatives [sic] do well, destroy everything. So, to return to the 1928 presidential campaign between Al Smith and Herbert Hoover we also return to detailing the city/rural clash. (pp. 229-232)

Until the 1920s, city and rural values had not clashed head-on in the national political arena. For more than a century, American politics had been dominated by the country; no asset was greater than that of birth in a log cabin. Even when, in the years after the Civil War, the United States moved rapidly from an agrarian to an industrial nation, its chief political figures were cut from the familiar mold. They were farm boys, or men from the small town, or, if they came from the city, they had not cut their ties with rural America and were as acceptable to the crossroads town as to the metropolis. In the 1920s, for the first time, a man who was unmistakably of the city made a bid for national power; in the career of Alfred E. Smith and the campaign of 1928 all the tensions between rural and urban America reached their highest pitch. "For the first time," wrote the New Republic, "a representative of the unpedigreed, foreign-born, city-bred, many-tongued recent arrivals on the American scene has knocked on the door and aspired seriously to the presiding seat in the national Council Chamber."

Born in 1873 in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, Smith lived the life of a boy in a great city. Instead of currying his pony or shooting squirrels on a smokey October afternoon, Al climbed among packing crates and boxes along the waterfront. Instead of playing one o'cat in the old apple orchard, he cuffed handballs against a warehouse wall.... 

Smith personified the desire of the sons of urban immigrants to make a place for themselves in the world, and politics was one of the few avenues of social mobility open to them. Smith was not the first to discover this. He was part of a tradition at least as old as the election of the German immigrant John Peter Altgeld to the governorship of Illinois in 1892, a tradition that embraced in the early years of the century Irish boys like David I. Walsh in Massachusetts and Joe Tumulty in New Jersey. But he was the first to ask acceptance by the people for the highest office in the land. It was for this reason that Smith was taken to heart by the Irish of the Northeast; he was a test case of how far an Irish Catholic boy from the big city could go, and how soon. "Al Smith," wrote William Allen White, "must rise or fall in our national life, if ever he should enter it, as our first urbanite."

One of the ablest state officers in American history, a man with an impressive record of electoral success, four times chose governor of the most populous state in the country, Smith was the logical candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1928. Despite lingering bitterness over the Madison Square Garden convention, even many of the old McAdoo supporters recognized that if Smith could not win in 1928, no Democrat could....

 When Coolidge announced laconically, "I do not choose to run," the Republicans turned to Herbert Hoover, born in Iowa, as their presidential candidate and named Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas as his running mate. For the first time in history, both candidates of a major party hailed from west of the Mississippi. After a rewarding career as a mining engineer and promoter in every corner of the earth, Hoover had first caught national attention in the war years as Food Administrator and administrator of Belgian relief. John Maynard Keynes observed that he was "the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation," while Justice Brandeis remarked that he was "the biggest figure injected into Washington life by the war." As Secretary of Commerce, Hoover epitomized the new capitalism, with its emphasis on efficiency, distribution, co-operation, and "service." Smith could make the appeal of a humanitarian and a friend of business interests at the same time; it was his misfortune to run against a man in 1928 who could make precisely the same claims and did not have Smith's liabilities.

The Democratic party faced a dilemma. If it attempted to compete with the Republicans by showing it was just as conservative, it had little chance of success, because the GOP had established itself too firmly as the party of business. On the other hand, if it attempted to take a more radical line, it ran smack against the circumspect mood of the decade. Either way, it was licked. It could hope for success only through a change in the national temper, something it could not bring about on it's own.

What can we make of this excerpt? To start, we have our own tradition of the country dominating the city in the spirit of outsiders coming to Washington to mess with the establishment. Since at least Jimmy Carter's improbable rise to the Democratic nomination in 1976, the narrative has been of a white knight riding in from the provinces to tame the nest of vipers in the Capitol. And governors have been the prime farm team for the parties to out provincial the other side. It was only the extraordinary circumstances of 2008, when both candidates were sitting Senators, that the mold was somewhat broken. But even then Barack Obama was a first term Senator and many commentators framed his rise to contrast that of Hillary Clinton as a man in touch with the people.

And like the raucous campaign of 2008, the back and forth increasingly dirty exchange between Obama and Clinton, the Democratic Party was a chaotic mess in the 1920s. The Democrats were divided on how to be a national party, who's interests it should represent, what the ideal party leader looked like, and what the platform should be. The Republicans were, as Leuchtenburg notes, the party of business and therefore could put up any successful businessman and remind the voters that they were the grownups who did not represent the crazies down south and would not lead the country on a foolish, idealistic crusade like Woodrow Wilson. The actual status quo was pretty good for the people who were the base of the GOP, the only people in America who were suffering during the Twenties were immigrants, minorities, women, farmers, workers, and so on. Not "us" so they could be ignored and disregarded.

Al Smith may have been as close to the ideal spokesman for the city, and for the beginnings of the more diverse America that grew steadily into the present and beyond. But Smith was not good for anywhere else, and without a platform that could really differentiate him and his party for the voters, they were "licked." Today the disproportionate electoral power of rural America is an annoyance that the minority GOP has used to great affect, but in the Twenties the battle was still being waged. The Democrats of that era had nothing like the gerrymandering, messaging, or sheer audacity to abuse public offices for partisan gain. Sure, they may have been just as corrupt but without manipulating districts and voters the way today's conservatives do, combined with the fact that government did much less that could be sabotaged or stolen, meant that the minority party of the past was simply that, the minority party whose ideas rarely had a chance to shine. This story will be continued as we learn more about the key this election will be played in. The way that present rhymes with the past is cloudy, certain elements may look relevant now and be meaningless in a few months.