[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]
Three ways
that the 1924 election foreshadowed future political events.
1)
Progressive programs: I don’t want to repeat
too much of where I ended yesterday’s post, but I don’t think it’s possible to
overstate the significance of La Follette’s third-party run and success.
Coolidge’s win was due in large part to perceptions that the economy was booming—but
five years before the stock market crash, La Follette’s success reflected a
sizeable contingent of Americans for whom things weren’t going so well, and a
desire for a government that could support and help those folks. Less than a
decade later, the federal government would dedicate itself to doing so in ways
that would extend into at least the
1960s and in many ways the rest of the century.
2)
Catholic candidates: A major reason for the
ridiculous deadlock at the 1924
Democratic National Convention was that one of the two leading contenders for
the nomination, New York Governor Al Smith, was
Catholic, and thus the target of the same longstanding anti-Catholic
prejudices I highlighted in this
post a couple months back. If Smith did not ultimately break through those
prejudices in 1924, however, he was able to do so just four years later, winning the Democratic nomination
at the also-contested 1928 Democratic National Convention in Houston. Smith lost
to Herbert Hoover in November, and there’s no doubt that his
Catholicism played a role; but progress is progress, and I believe Smith’s
progress in the 1920s absolutely foreshadowed Kennedy’s
election in 1960 (as well as the non-issue that Biden’s Catholicism has
been in our current moment).
3)
Right-wing extremism in New York: Both of
those were genuine and positive legacies of the 1924 election, and I don’t want
to minimize them by ending on a darker note. But the presence and influence of
the Ku Klux Klan at the Democratic Convention in New York City was a powerful moment
of foreshadowing in its own right, and I’m not talking here about the immigration
restrictions and exclusions I highlighted in Wednesday’s post. Instead, I’m thinking
about another, even more extreme right-wing
gathering in Madison Square Garden fifteen years later, one that truly
reflected the presence
of such American extremists. I think it’s fair to say we’re still dealing
with that presence lo these 100 years later.
2024
election reflections this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other crazy elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one
you’d share?
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