Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame the Republican Party for Nominating Herbert Hoover for President in 1928

November 6, 1928: Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover is elected President, with a whopping 58 percent of the vote, and 444 Electoral Votes. The Democrats had nominated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, the 1st Catholic ever nominated by a major party. He won just 40.8 percent, a figure exceeded by all but 2 Democratic nominees since (George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984), and took just 8 States, worth 87 Electoral Votes.

In his nationally-syndicated newspaper column, humorist Will Rogers wrote that Smith's supporters "are going to be shocked at how much of the country lives west of the Hudson River." He was right, as Smith was too New Yorky for the rest of the country, including most of New York State.

Indeed, New York was not 1 of the 8 States he won. He won the 2 most Catholic States in the nation, Massachusetts and Rhode Island; and 6 "Solid South" States that, at the time, would never go for a Republican, still thought of as "the Party of Lincoln": South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Smith didn't even get the entire South: Hoover won Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Texas.

Had Smith been a Protestant, from a small town rather than the biggest city, with a pleasant voice instead of a N'Yawk accent, in favor of keeping Prohibition rather than repealing it, and not connected to the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine that dominated New York State and especially New York City, he still would have lost, as Hoover rode the Republican prosperity of the Roaring Twenties.

Despite the Hoover landslide, Franklin D. Roosevelt, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1920 Democratic nominee for Vice President, and cousin of the late former President Theodore Roosevelt, is narrowly elected to succeed Smith as Governor.

Someone asked Smith if FDR, one of his biggest backers, was going to be a rival that would prevent him from getting the Democratic nomination again in 1932. Smith, noting that Roosevelt had been dealing with the effects of polio since 1921, said, "No, he will be dead within a year."

Within a year of the 1928 election, FDR was still alive, the stock market had crashed, and, barring a major scandal, the Democratic nominee was going to win in 1932. Smith tried for that nomination. He lost it. To FDR. FDR became President. Smith became one of his fiercest critics. And, in the end, in spite of FDR's health difficulties, Smith died 6 months before he did.

Sounds like nominating Hoover was a bad idea. Right? Right?

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame the Republican Party for Nominating Herbert Hoover for President in 1928

5. Calvin Coolidge. On August 2, 1927, 10 months before the next Republican Convention, President Calvin Coolidge was on vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. At the time, it was presumed that he would run for a 2nd full term as President. Instead, he announced, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928."

Coolidge at the 1924 World Series in Washington.

He didn't like baseball, but his wife, Grace, loved it.

That's her in the white hat.

Without the incumbent available, and unwilling to draft him, the Republican Party needed to turn to someone else.

4. They Were Going to Win Anyway. Coolidge's removal of himself from the race did nothing to curtail the good economic times, which were being called "the Coolidge Prosperity." It didn't matter how good a candidate the Democratic Party nominated: As James Carville would later say, the election was going to be decided on "the economy, stupid."

The fact that the Democrats nominated Al Smith, whose negatives were more glaring than his positives, made it even likelier that the Republicans would win.

Alfred E. Smith

So the Republicans knew that they might as well nominate someone who is qualified, and fits the profile that they're looking for.

3. He Fit the Profile. Herbert Hoover was a born Midwesterner: Born in 1874 in West Branch, Iowa, outside Iowa City. He was a nearly lifelong Westerner: Between the ages of 9 and 17, he lived in Newburg, Oregon; went to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, outside San Francisco; got his first job in a mine in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California; and, while serving in the federal government, maintained his permanent residence on the Stanford campus.

He was a lifelong small-towner: While he lived near big cities, he didn't live in them, and thus avoided the corruption that rural Americans going back to Thomas Jefferson have said are endemic to cities. He was a highly successful businessman. And he had public office experience, appointive if not elective:

2. His Political Experience. It is true that he had never run for office before 1928. But he served as Director of the United States Food Administration in 1917 and 1918, getting food to refugees from World War I.

This, alone, not only earned him the nickname "The Great Humanitarian," but was enough to make both parties consider him as a Presidential nominee in 1920. No less than the man who ended up the Democratic nominee for Vice President that year said, "There couldn't be a better one." His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

By Inauguration Day, March 4, 1933,

any mutual admiration had long since dissolved.

And Hoover served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge for 7 1/2 years, before resigning the office to accept the Presidential nomination. His service as such, when other Harding Cabinet men had to resign due to scandal, only raised his profile.

Today, the D.C. headquarters of the U.S. Department of Commerce is named the Herbert C. Hoover Building. Given that his time in the White House is considered disastrous, the name may be more a reflection of how well he did the job of Secretary of Commerce than the fact that he is the only man to have held that job and also become President.

And, given that he went on to be appointed by President Harry Truman to repeat his World War I European refugee-feeding activities in World War II, makes it ironic that, to this day, Hoover is best remembered not for feeding people, but for people going hungry on his watch.

1. His Crossover Appeal. The Democrats who admired him enough to consider him for President in 1920 did not stop admiring him until after the Crash of 1929. Many people who would ordinarily have voted for the Democratic nominee no matter what chose to vote for him, including some Catholics who were concerned about a backlash in the event that Smith was elected.

And his work on relief from the Mississippi River flood of 1927, helping black people as well as white people, made him popular among black Americans. Many of them stuck with him in 1932: It wasn't until 1936, when the New Deal was proven to help blacks as well as whites, that black voters embraced FDR.

VERDICT: Not Guilty. Viewing Hoover's nomination from the perspective of November 2020, or even from that of November 1932, it looks like a dumb move. But in November 1928, and even as late as early October 1929, it looked like a great idea.