Most colorful presidential candidate of 1920s?

Answer 1

There is an argument for Alfred E. Smith, the Democrat who was elected governor of New York four times, but lost the 1928 presidential election in a landslide to Republican Herbert Hoover. He also was the first Roman Catholic to win a presidential nomination.

Known as "The Happy Warrior," Smith was a progressive governor who sought to make government as efficient as possible. He sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1924 (he was nominated at the party's convention by a rising politician named Franklin Delano Roosevelt). But Smith lost the nomination to former congressman and diplomat John W. Davis, who went on to be defeated by incumbent Republican president Calvin Coolidge.

Smith tried again for the Democratic nomination four years later and succeeded. Unfortunately for him, the tides of political fortune were against him. For one thing, the country had enjoyed years of prosperity under post-World War I Republican administrations. For another, Smith was against Prohibition, the Constitutional amendment that banned the sale and distribution of alcohol in the United States.

Then there was the matter of his Catholicism at a time when many parts of the country were anti-Catholic. Many voters feared that a Catholic president might be controlled or heavily influenced by the Vatican. As it happened, no Catholic would win a presidential nomination for another 32 years, when U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts became the 1960 Democratic nominee and eventual winner of the presidency.

Smith also railed against lynching and racial violence during a time when some sections of the country were beset by Ku Klux Klan activity.

Although he drew large crowds during the campaign, Smith was roundly defeated in the presidential election on Nov. 6, 1928. Hoover, Coolidge's Secretary of Commerce, won 444 electoral votes and carried 40 states. Smith captured 87 electoral votes and carried only Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the North, and Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina in the South. He failed to win his own state by 103,000 votes.

After his defeat, Smith entered the private sector and became instrumental in the construction of the Empire State Building during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

He died on Oct. 4, 1944.