Bargaining With the Devil: In Which Some Deferred Events Finally Explode
The party divided rarely triumphs against the party united. It doesn't matter whether it produces an actual split; that party will lose anyway. Of course, that split somewhat helps crystallize division. Sometimes, anyways.
The Republicans, for their part, said they simply didn't half-win. Either they lost, or they won resoundingly. It seemed like 1896 was the last time a Democrat had lost only narrowly, and Herbert Hoover had just extended that a little bit further. Maybe it was just something the Republicans told themselves to feel better after the disappointments of 1916, 1924, and 1928. But it seemed like that was what had just happened.
The story of 1928 is one of chaos. After resoundingly winning a second term, President Underwood seemed ready to tackle a repeal of Prohibition as the big legislative effort of his second term. It would be difficult, but the president was a former veteran of congressional leadership in both chambers, had arguably run on repeal as his primary platform to differentiate himself from Lowden, and the policy was increasingly unpopular anyways; with Wayne Wheeler dead, the ASL was a lot less effective, too. And then he caught a fever and died.
Well, not quite; it was actually a series of strokes, over the course of the transition period. Medical care, however iffy it was in that age, managed to aid the president somewhat, enough to get him to feebly take his second oath as president and prevent his soon-to-be successor from having to deal with questions of constitutionality over the death of a president-elect, but it was not enough; Oscar Wilder Underwood, 30th president of the United States, died March 25, 1929, making Charles W. Bryan the new president of the United States. What his older brother couldn't do in three presidential bids over two decades prior, Bryan had effectively just been handed because of his name.
Now, there is a lot of debate regarding Bryan's actions as president, but perhaps the best way to contextualize them is to note that his experience prior to serving in the presidency consisted of two years as the mayor of Lincoln and two years as Governor of Nebraska, before spending four years in the most notoriously do-nothing job in the United States that mostly consisted of breaking the ties of the 48-46-2 Senate of the second quarter of Underwood's presidency, courtesy of Samuel Ralston's death. While Underwood's administration certainly left much to be desired, the man certainly knew how to handle his party; it was how he had won the 1924 nomination, after all. Charles Bryan did not have that tact. He was his brother's brother, and already had a dicey relationship with Congress over his perceived radicalism. His decision to veto to a bill that would have partially repealed the Volstead Act and legalized beer, wine, and other low-concentration alcoholic beverages - likely intended as a precursor to a constitutional amendment to repeal the 18th Amendment and return the regulation of alcohol to the states - effectively broke the Democratic Party. To many he had just spat on the grave of his predecessor. Congress would stay hostile to President Bryan for the rest of his presidency, worsened when the Republicans finally took it back in the 1930 midterms.
When the Stock Market Crash came in April 1931 and took the wind out of an already-faltering economy, Bryan's presidency was already dead in the water. Bryan's economically interventionist policy proposals went nowhere with a Congress hostile to them. As economic calamity spread to the whole economy instead of just the Great Plains, many felt the government did nothing to save them and held Bryan, as the president, chiefly responsible. The president's popularity plummeted.
The 1932 Republican National Convention was almost jubilant with hope for taking back the White House. Several contenders, from William Borah to James Eli Watson to Charles Curtis all tried to win the nomination, but none were a match for Herbert Hoover, a well-regarded administrator who'd served in the Wilson and Harding administrations, and won national renown for his term-and-a-half as Governor of California. Using his name recognition and respect, his place as a bridge between the progressive and conservative factions of the party, and the division of his opponents, Hoover ran a "buyer's remorse" campaign as the second-placer from the 1928 convention, and wrapped up the nomination improbably quickly.
Many Republicans were confused, in turn, by the Democratic Convention. Bryan's deep unpopularity and the fault lines in the party which he had incessantly exacerbated during his presidency left very vulnerable to a nomination challenge; very few were willing to do so in a year that seemed to promise such doom for the party, however. Only Al Smith, eager to prove the electoral power of urban Catholics and still holding a grudge from the Bryans' support of McAdoo in the convention eight years prior, was willing to provide that challenge. Many were confused by the death match nature of the convention as Bryan and Smith seemed to fight over a poison chalice, but logical considerations had left that convention a long time ago. In the end Smith managed to cobble together a narrow majority of the delegates and, after a bitter fight, succeeded in getting the two-thirds rule repealed; this paved the way for him to take the nomination from Bryan, choosing his polar opposite Senate Democratic Leader Joe Robinson of Arkansas as his running mate. The president, of course, was, like his brother, not going to go down after a single fight, and managed to get the Farmer-Labor Party to nominate him as their candidate for presidency, overriding the previous candidacy of Jacob S. Coxey (of Coxey's Army fame). William Gibbs McAdoo, desperate to regain relevance after his second stint at the Treasury Department had ended in disgrace, was Bryan's questionable choice of a running mate, intended to appeal to socially conservative Southerners who liked Bryan's dry position but were more skeptical of his economic populism. So 1912 had come again - but this time for the Democrats.
The general election, obviously, was a gigantic mess. Smith's Catholicism was the target of extreme amounts of prejudice across the nation, in particular in the Solid South; indeed, Bryan, upon accepting the Farmer-Labor nomination, planned on trying to win by sweeping the South and West, where his natural constituencies were, a plan somewhat complicated by his association with the severe economic downturn. Indeed, many of the voters Bryan hoped to peel away from Smith ended up in Hoover's camp, as the California Governor, remembering Warren G. Harding's competitiveness in the region twelve years prior, remained rather content to play footsie with bigots and his campaign surrogates down South reassured the region that no, the Republican Party was not for race-mixing or whatever other racist lunacy the segregationists were going on about that particular day. Meanwhile the Farmer-Labor Party was actually rather divided on Bryan's run; most of the party's Catholics, unsurprisingly, backed Smith, but the influence of Robert M. LaFollette Jr.'s, though a Republican, albeit one the Farmer-Labor Party's faithful were very willing to listen to, decision to endorse Smith over Bryan or Hoover was critical in preventing Smith's voter base in the frequently anti-Catholic Prairies from completely collapsing; indeed, in states like North Dakota and Wisconsin, Smith pluralities were arguably enabled by Bryan siphoning votes primarily from Hoover.
Indeed, Hoover's appeal to anti-Catholicism and a Smith vote that refused to totally collapse thanks to loyalty to the old party (save in Mississippi and South Carolina, where Bryan was the official Democratic candidate and Smith was not on the ballot) allowed a Republican performance down South that harkened back to Reconstruction, this time achieved without a single Black vote (well, a few, actually, but those were few and far between and had been on their way out of the party anyways since 1912, and would only be majority-Republican for a few more cycles) and becoming the first Republican to win Texas and Georgia in history. In the Northeast, where Bryan was often a non-factor, Smith's Catholic base held, to the shock of many, both Massachusetts and Rhode Island for him, and New Hampshire, New York, and Connecticut were all closer than many Republicans were comfortable with. Utah went for Smith as a result of a complicated political brawl over tariffs between Reed Smoot and President Bryan dragging down both the Republican and Bryan vote in the state. It was, in the end, a complex result for a complex election, and many Republicans were looking at those Southern results with enthusiasm.