The 1928 Thread in American Politics:
The Culture War of the Twenties and
its Legacy
Herbert Hoover, 1928 Republican
Nominee For President:
Beneficiary of the 1920s Culture Wars
Warren G. Harding (Republican)
Years in office: 1921-1923
Calvin Coolidge (Republican)
Years in office: 1923-1929
Al Smith, 1928 Democratic Nominee
for President
Al Smith (1873-1944) was a
Democrat who served as
Governor of New York during the
1920s, and was a known
Progressive. He was a so-called
Wet Democrat in that he opposed
Prohibition. He was also a Roman
Catholic in an era of widespread
Anti-Catholicism.
In 1928, Smith was popular
among Catholics, immigrants, and
many urban voters. Smith was
unpopular with many rural
voters, and Protestants such as
Southern Baptists and Lutherans.
Culture War and the 1928 Election:
The Otherness of Democrat Al Smith
A Catholic and an opponent of
Prohibition, Al Smith was
effectively demonized by his
Republican opponents as being
un-American and disloyal,
campaign tactics that Republican
would use effectively against
Democrats in coming decades.
In 1928,for example, it was
rumored that, were Al Smith to
win, the Pope would end up
ruling the United States.
The Pro-Ku Klux Klan publication
at right pictures Al Smith as a
candidate completely controlled
by the Catholic Pope.
.
1928: Herbert Hoover and the Slow
Rise of the Republican Party in the
South
In a sense, the presidential
election of 1928 began a
slow process of party realignment in the South.
From 1928 on, the
Republican Party slowly
became an increasingly
conservative party with
increasing appeal in the
conservative South.
Conversely, the Democratic
Party evolved in a more
liberal direction, and by the
mid-1960s, the once solid
Democratic South was a
concept that was all but
dead.
Background to 1928:
The Democratic Solid South in 1924
In 1924, the Democrats (shown below in blue) carried all eleven of the former
Confederate states.
The Political Importance of the South,
the Nation’s most Conservative Region
Since the American Civil War, the South has
typically been the most conservative region of
the country, particularly in matters of religion,
traditional values, and resistance to social
change.
From the end of Reconstruction in the late
1870s to the mid-1960s, white Southern voters
and politicians were generally among the most
conservative in the nation. As such, because the
South remained predominantly Democratic until
the 1960s, the Democratic Party therefore had a
conservative wing with much of its membership
being Southern.
But from 1928 on, the white South found itself
increasingly at odds with the increasing liberalism
of the Democratic Party at the national level.
This, in turn, created the possibility of mass
defections of white southern voters away from
the Democrats and into the Republican Party.
Such a regional voter re-alignment, however,
would likely influence the Republican Party
towards becoming a much more conservative
party. Let us now turn to see if that happened.
1928: Al Smith defeated by the
Three P’s:
Prohibition, Prejudice, and Prosperity
Pictured below is a KKK Flyer denouncing the Catholic Democrat, Al Smith
Reporter Frederick William Wile famously quipped that
Democrat Al Smith was defeated by the “three P’s of
Prohibition, Prejudice, and Prosperity.”
In many respects, the 1928 election was a signature
event in that the winning Republican candidate
benefitted from the American culture war, and
moreover, allowed the Republican Party to make
significant inroads into the South for the first time since
Reconstruction. Twenty years later, American culture
wars would re-ignite with the ultimate long-term
effects of making the Republican Party dominant in the
South.
Background to 1928
The Culture Wars of the Twenties:
The Prohibition of Demon Rum
In 1919, with the passage of the
18th Amendment and the
Volstead Act, Alcoholic beverages
became illegal throughout the
United States.
Prohibition enjoyed widespread
support among Protest
Evangelical Christians who, for the
most part, were opposed to
Roman Catholicism both
religiously and culturally.
Background to 1928
The Culture Wars of the Twenties:
Anti-Immigration
In the wake of WWI, American
public opinion turned against
immigration. In 1924, Calvin
Coolidge signed the JohnsonReed Act into law, a statute that
greatly limited new immigration
into the United States.
American anti-immigration
sentiment overlapped with the
anti-alcohol and anti-Catholic
sentiment of the 1920s.
Background to 1928
The Culture Wars of the 1920s:
Anti-Evolution Crusades
In addition to a broad-based anti-Catholicism, many
traditional Protestants (Evangelicals and Fundamentalists)
were deeply opposed to some of the new teachings of
modern science, particularly the teachings of Charles
Darwin and his Theory of Evolution.
In the mid-1920s, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in
Dayton, Tennessee became a cause celebre in which a
public school teacher went on trial for teaching
evolution, an action in violation of state law.
Secular lawyer Clarence Darrow famously made William
Jennings Bryan (a religiously devout Democrat) look
foolish during the trial, and Bryan died shortly after.
But opposition to evolution survived in much of rural
America, particularly the South.
Background to 1928
The Culture Wars of the 1920s:
The Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan on parade
in Washington, D.C. in 1928
Revived in 1915, the Ku Klux
Klansmen served as activists and
shock troops on behalf 100%
Americanism. The KKK advocated
white supremacy, Protestant
Christianity, Anti-Catholicism, AntiSemitism, and Prohibition.
During the twenties, the KKK
possessed national strength and
marched on Washington more
than once.
The Great Depression, the New Deal,
and the Two-Party System
When the Great Depression
hit the U.S. in 1929,
President Hoover and the
Republican Party took the
blame. In the 1930 midterm
elections the Republicans
lost many seats in Congress.
Moreover, conservative
Republican economic
policies fell into disfavor.
Politically, Hoover was a
dead man walking by 1932.
When the FDR and the
Democrats took power in
1933, the U.S. was ready for
a New Deal of government
economic activism.
The Culture War Suspended…sort of,
1929-1945
In 1933, Prohibition was repealed with the ratification of the 21st Amendment. To a
certain extent, the Culture War was suspended during the Age of Roosevelt, particularly
the cultural issues that animated the 1920s. After the Great Depression and WWII,
however, the Culture War returned with great vigor, particularly in the South.
FDR and the South: Dixie Returns to
the Democratic Fold (1932-1944)
In 1932, during the depths of the Great
Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York,
the Democratic candidate for president easily
defeated Republican Herbert Hoover.
1932 was the biggest party re-alignment
election since the Republicans became the
majority party in the wake of the 1860 elections.
As a result of the 1932 Democratic tidal wave,
FDR’s Democratic Party took the reins of the
Presidency, Congress, and much of state and
local government. FDR was re-elected in 1936,
1940, and 1944. In four straight elections, FDR
carried all eleven of the former Confederate
states. For the most part, white southern voters
either supported or made peace with FDR’s New
Deal.
Harry Truman and the Rebirth of the
Culture Wars
On April 12, 1945 President Franklin D.
Roosevelt died. In turn, Vice President Harry S.
Truman of Missouri became the President of the
United States in the waning months of WWII. In
1948, Truman defeated Republican Thomas
Dewey, and served four years more.
During the Truman years American culture wars
re-ignited on two major fronts: Anti-Communism
and Civil Rights. In 1950, Republican Senator Joe
McCarthy began making accusations that, under
Democratic rule, the federal government had
become saturated with Pro-Soviet Communists.
An underlying theme of McCarthyism was that
American liberal Democrats were unfit to hold
power. The rise of McCarthyism coincided with
growing southern resistance to Civil Rights
initiatives. In time, opponents of Civil Rights
would voice many of their arguments in the
context of anti-communism.
The Democratic Party and Civil Rights:
The Southern Revolt of the late 1940s
In 1948, Democratic President Harry S. Truman (who
had assumed the presidency in 1945 after the death
of FDR) ended racial segregation, by executive order,
in the U.S. military. With this action, President
Truman began the slow process of aligning the
national Democratic Party with the larger agenda of
securing legal and social equality for AfricanAmericans, i.e. civil rights. For many conservative
southern Democrats in the South, this was a threat to
their traditional way of life. A revolt, in turn began to
brew among some southern Democrats.
At the 1948 Democratic Convention, northern
liberal Democrats succeeded in having a pro-civil
rights plank added to the party platform. This
sparked a walk-out by certain Southern convention
delegates. The Dixiecrat Revolt had started.
The 1948 “Dixiecrat” Ticket
Did the Republicans Conquer Dixie, or
did Dixie Conquer the Republicans?
J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina
Thurmond was a Democrat who
became a “Dixiecrat” in 1948, and
led a Southern Revolt against the
Democratic Party. In 1964, after
Democratic President Lyndon
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of
1964 into law, Senator Strom
Thurmond became a Republican.
Thurmond continued to serve as a
senior conservative Republican
senator until he died in 2003.
1948 and the Dixiecrat Revolt
The Dixiecrat revolt of 1948 cracked the Solid South on behalf of white supremacy.
McCarthyism, Anti-Communism, and
the Liberal-Conservative Culture War
In 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, a littleknown Republican senator, Joe McCarthy of
Wisconsin claimed in a dramatic speech that he
possessed a list of names of Communists within
the U.S. government. McCarthy continued his
anti-Communist crusade via congressional
hearings.
McCarthy was not the first Republican to use
“Red-baiting” political weapon against liberal
Democrats. Richard Nixon, in fact, has mastered
this art well before McCarthy did. Nor was antiCommunist Red-baiting an exclusively Republican
tactic.
But Republicans like Congressman Nixon and
Senator McCarthy proved particularly skilled at
linking communism and liberalism, particularly
the liberalism of Democrats.
While the anti-Catholicism had been jettisoned
(McCarthy himself was Catholic), aspects of
McCarthyism harkened back to the antiimmigrant and 100% Americanism movements of
the 1920s. In short, the 1928 Thread was quite
intact in the period known as McCarthyism.
“I Like Ike”:
The Age of Eisenhower, 1953-1961
In 1952, the Republican Party won the presidency for
the first time in 20 years, the first time since the Herbert
Hoover administration.
In the 1952 election, former WWII general, Dwight D.
Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, and
would do so again in 1956. While “Ike” was a moderate
Republican in both ideology and temperament, his Vice
President, Richard M. Nixon, was a master of the 1928
Style of conservative campaigning, and was a “serial
collector of resentments.” In 1968, Nixon would
capitalize on white voter anxieties and win the
presidency in his own right.
But for the most part, the Eisenhower presidency was
characterized by prosperity and political moderation,
both in campaigning and governing. Moreover, both the
Democratic and Republican parties each had liberal and
conservative wings in their respective parties. In short,
during the 1950s, and for much of the 1960s, the two
major parties were not yet neatly aligned on either side
of the liberal-conservative cultural divide. For the time
being, the center held.
But below the surface, among many in the American
public, resentment and anxiety was building, particularly
among small town whites, and even more particularly
among whites in the South.
May 17, 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
In the spring of 1954, under the leadership of
Chief Justice Earl Warren, a liberal Republican,
the United States Supreme Court issued a 9 to 0
decision striking down racial segregation in public
schools.
The Brown decision put the traditional Southern
way of life in jeopardy, and recalcitrant white
Southerners mobilized for massive resistance to
the Supreme Court and the growing Civil Rights
Movement.
For the time being, segregationists focused
their rage against Republican Earl Warren’s
Supreme Court. In 1957 Republican President
Dwight Eisenhower enforced the integration of
Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. For
the time being, the Democratic Party did not
suffer a massive exodus of white Southern voters.
This would begin to change when President
John F. Kennedy (1961-1963), a Democrat, slowly
moved his administration towards support of a
broad-based elimination of Jim Crow racial
segregation
1961-1963:
John F. Kennedy and Civil Rights
Though something of a late-comer to the Civil Rights
issue prior to becoming president, JFK and his brother,
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, threw
administration support behind the Civil Rights
movement, on behalf the the 1961 Freedom Riders, on
the behalf of integrating the University of Mississippi in
1962, and on behalf of integrating the University of
Alabama in 1963.
Coinciding with the civil rights showdown at the
University of Alabama, JFK made a televised address to
the nation on June 11, 1963. In this message Kennedy
called for the end of Jim Crow racial segregation and the
passage of a comprehensive civil rights bill that would
end segregation in most areas of life. In doing so, JFK put
the national Democratic Party explicitly on the side of
ending what many conservative white southerners
considered to be the “Southern way of life.”
Along with liberal and moderate Republicans, the
national Democratic Party had aligned itself inextricably
with the Civil Rights movement and a call for significant
social change.
This continued to set the stage for mass defections of
Southern white voters out of the Democratic Party, and
into an increasingly conservative Republican Party.
Lyndon B. Johnson and the Civil Rights
Act of 1964
On November 22, 1963, President
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas,
Texas. In turn, Vice President Lyndon B.
Johnson became President. A former
Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, LBJ
made the passage of JFK’s agenda a high
priority.
In the summer of 1964, LBJ secured a
coalition of liberal and moderate
Democrats and Republicans in Congress
to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law
that outlawed, among other things, racial
segregation in public accommodations.
LBJ signed the bill into law on July 4,
1964.
LBJ reported quipped that the
Democratic Party had now “lost the
South for a generation.” History would
prove that LBJ was largely correct.
1964: In a landslide loss, conservative
Republican Barry Goldwater won five
Deep South states
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did much
to remove white Southern voters
from the Democratic camp.
In the Presidential election of 1964,
Republican Senator Barry Goldwater,
an opponent of the civil rights bill,
lost 44 states. But he won 5 states in
the Deep South (Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and
South Carolina). In short, as the
Republican Party became more
conservative, the South became
more Republican.
Segregationist Alabama Governor
George C. Wallace
In 1962 George C. Wallace of Alabama
ran for governor on a staunch platform of
racial segregation. In 1963, he “stood in
the schoolhouse door” at the University of
Alabama in defense of racial segregation.
In 1964, Wallace made a minor run for
president as a Democrat, but as an
opponent to the liberal wing of the
Democratic Party
In 1968, however, Wallace ran for
President as an independent and carried
five southern states. Nixon carried five
other southern states.
In short, Wallace did much break away
white southern voters from the
Democratic Party.
Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney,
and the Decline of the Liberal
Republicans
During the 1950s and 1960s there still
existed a moderate/liberal wing of the
Republican Party. In fact, without the support
of moderate and liberal Republicans (and the
leadership of Republican senator, Everett
Dirksen of Illinois, the Civil Rights Act of 1964
would not have passed the Senate, and would
not have become law.
During that period two prominent
Republicans embodied the liberal wing of the
Republican Party, those being Governor
Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Governor
George Romney of Michigan.
In 2012, George Romney’s son, Mitt,
became the presumptive Republican
nominee for president. By the early 21st
century, Republicans like Rockefeller and
George Romney, however, were largely extinct
In 2012, Mitt Romney was a new breed.
Richard Nixon and the Southern
Strategy
In 1968, Richard
Nixon campaigned
on a platform of
“law and order,” a
message tailored,
in part, to
disaffected
Southern whites.
The strategy paid
off in both 1968
and 1972, and
Nixon enjoyed
great popularity in
Dixie until nearly
the end of his
presidency in 1974.
1973: Roe v. Wade and the Expansion
of the Culture War
In January 1973, coinciding with the death of
former Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson,
the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Roe v. Wade
that early stage abortions are constitutionally
protected.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the abortion
issue became one of the dividing line matters in
the expanded liberal-conservative culture war. By
the early 1980s, the Republican Party platform
explicitly called for the overturning of Roe v.
Wade while, in turn, the Democratic Party
explicitly called for continuation of abortion
rights for women.
The Catholic Church and many conservative
Protestant religious groups sided with the
Republicans, and increasingly made their camps
there.
By 1980, as it did in 1928, the presidential
election took on a religious tenor with the rise of
the Religious Right. This time, however, it was not
Catholic versus Protestant, but instead was more
religious conservatives versus secular liberal &
religious liberal.
The Fall of Richard Nixon and the
Caretaker Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
In 1968 and 1972, Richard M. Nixon proved quite skilled
at exploiting the resentments of white Middle America
voters, voters who disliked much of the 1960s counterculture, particularly the Anti-War Movement and the
increasingly radical Civil Rights Movement.
In 1972, Nixon effectively portrayed his Democratic
opponent, George McGovern, as a coddler of social
deviance. As in 1928, the Republicans benefitted from
the perception that the Democratic presidential nominee
was unfit to be president, and was on the wrong side of
the culture war.
But in 1973-74, the Watergate Scandal (a scandal born
in the Nixon effort to fight a culture war) resulted in the
death of Nixon’s presidency. In August 1974, Nixon
resigned.
As such Vice President Gerald R. Ford (who had
recently replaced the resigned Spiro Agnew) became
president. He served out the remainder of Nixon’s
second term. As president, Gerald Ford governed as a
moderate, and avoided the cultural cleavages that Nixon
exploited so skillfully.
1976: Democratic Jimmy Carter Wins
but Fails to Hold the South
In the 1974 midterm elections, only 3 months removed
from Nixon’s resignation, the Democratic Party picked up
congressional seats and were poised for a big
presidential win in 1976.
As it turned out, the Democrats did win, but by a close
margin. The Democratic victor was former governor
Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Campaigning largely on a
platform of restoring trust, Carter defeated President
Gerald Ford in a close election. In doing so, Carter carried
10 Southern states, though this was due in part, to
widespread Black voting in the South.
Carter’s presidency, however, was plagued with a bad
domestic economy at home, and foreign policy stumbles
abroad. In 1980, Carter lost 10 of the former
Confederate states to Republican Ronald Reagan. The
four year interregnum was over. Dixie was back in the
Republican fold, and since 1976, no Republican
presidential candidate has done poorly in the South.
In short, after 1976, the South has remained a
conservative electoral anchor for the Republican Party
during presidential elections.
The Reagan-Bush Era
1981-1993
In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory over
President Jimmy Carter, and for the first time since the 1950s, the
Republicans took over the U.S. Senate, though the Democrats still
controlled the House of Representatives.
In 1984, Reagan carried 49 states versus Democrat Walter
Mondale, and won all eleven former Confederate States.
Already a conservative icon, Reagan’s presidency was oriented
around a conservative agenda, albeit a nuanced and temperate
conservative agenda. FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and Civil
Rights were left intact with only minor adjustments. Outside of tax
policy, one could argue that Reagan governed as a moderate
conservative who avoided politically risky radicalism.
In 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush effectively portrayed his
Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, as an
unpatriotic coddler of criminals who was too liberal for the
American people. Bush’s campaign strategy was designed by Strom
Thurmond protégé, Lee Atwater of South Carolina, and it worked
mightily. Bush cruised to victory in 1988 with a campaign style that
echoed that of 1928.
But unlike Reagan, Bush was never beloved by conservatives, and
during his presidency, Bush’s moderation was never overlooked as
Reagan’s had been. When Bush broke his promise not to raise
taxes, he lost credibility with his conservative base. As the
economy tanked in 1991-92, Bush became politically vulnerable. In
1992, he lost to a Democratic southerner, Governor Bill Clinton of
Arkansas
The Bill Clinton Presidency:
January 1993 to January 2001
In 1992, despite personal scandal and an anti-war
counter-culture background, Democratic governor Bill
Clinton of Arkansas won the Democratic nomination for
president and later defeated President George H.W. Bush
in the general election.
At the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston,
conservative activist Pat Buchanan declared, to roaring
approval, that the U.S. was in the midst of a culture war
for the soul of America. He furthered that George H.W.
Bush was on one side of the war, and Bill Clinton was on
the other. For the rest of the 1992 campaign, the
Republicans continued to play on these culture war
themes, though in the end, Clinton and the Democrats
prevailed.
During Clinton’s two-term presidency, much of
America’s political battles were played out in terms of
the Culture War. In 1998, Clinton became ensnared in a
sexual scandal. The ensuing battle was carried out, at
least among the Republicans, as something of a religious
crusade. At one juncture, Republican congressman Tom
DeLay of Texas painted the issue of Clinton’s scandal as a
matter of defending the concept of absolute truth. The
Clinton culture wars climaxed with his impeachment by
the Republican-dominated House of Representatives in
December 1998. The Senate, however, failed to convict,
and Clinton remained president and served the rest of
his second term.
The Rise of Newt:
Southern Republicans in the 1990s
In 1994, Republican Representative Newt Gingrich of
Georgia led a Republican takeover of the House of
Representatives, a body controlled by the Democrats
since 1955. The Republicans also took over the U.S.
Senate, and thus controlled Congress for six years while
Bill Clinton was President.
In 1995 Gingrich became Speaker of the House. Later,
Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi became the Senate
Majority Leader, thus ensuring for the Republicans that
Congress would be lead by conservative Republican from
the South.
In 1994, Gingrich and his fellow congressional
Republicans ran an effective campaign in labeling the
Democrats as being morally unfit to lead the country. In
particular, Gingrich and company capitalized on cultural
resentments of white voters (particularly white Southern
voters), and Gingrich proved particularly skillful as
portraying Bill Clinton and the Democrats as being on the
wrong side of a larger culture war.
Though Gingrich himself was ousted as Speaker in the
wake of the 1998 elections, the Republicans maintained
control of the House of Representatives for 12 years,
until losing the midterm elections of 2006.
To this day, much of Republican representation in the
House of Representatives is firmly rooted in conservative
white-majority districts in the South.
The Age of Dubya
2001-2009
Though the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004
were razor-thin, George W. Bush of Texas proved to be a
very popular candidate among conservatives, particularly
those in the South. In both 2000 and 2004, Bush carried
each of the former Confederate States (though 2000
Florida is still disputed).
As a candidate, and as president, Bush consistently
invoked conservative culture war themes, and proved
very effective at portraying his Democratic opponents as
being unpatriotic, and even un-American. During the
Bush years, the term liberal increasingly became a term
of derision.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda
terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.,
Bush wedded his “War on Terrorism” with the American
culture war. The strategy paid political gold for the
Republicans. The Republicans re-took the Senate in 2002,
and Bush won re-election in 2004.
But Bush-style conservatism reached its high water
mark in 2004. By 2006, the Iraq War had descended into
a quagmire, and in 2008, the U.S. economy collapsed.
Like Herbert Hoover (the winner in 1928), Bush became
a political Dead-Man-Walking in the final months of his
presidency. Unlike Hoover in 1932, however, John
McCain (the Republican nominee in 2008) had to pay the
price of Bush’s political demise.
1928 and 2008
Culture Wars with Different Results
In 2008, the Democratic Party
nominated Senator Barack Obama of
Illinois as its presidential nominee, and
Senator Joe Biden of Delaware as Vice
President. The Republicans nominated
Senator John McCain of Arizona for
president and Governor Sarah Palin of
Alaska as vice president.
In 2008, the Republicans sort of
returned to the 1928 election strategy of
portraying the Democratic nominee as
un-American. This time, eighty years
later, the results were different. The
Obama-Biden ticket won 29 states and
365 electoral votes, a surplus of 95 more
than he needed.
The Age of Obama and the Dawn of
the Tea Party
Elected by a comfortable margin in
2008, Barack Obama became the
first African-American president on
January 20, 2009. Obama’s victory
came roughly 80 years after Al
Smith’s 1928 defeat.
But within months, conservative
Republican backlash intensified into
a movement that became known as
the Tea Party. An overwhelmingly
white conservative movement, this
loosely-associated movement
possessed a family resemblance to
the 100% Americanism movements
of the 1920s.
Continued Culture War and Barack
Obama’s Otherness
When Senator Barack Obama became
the Democratic presidential nominee in
2008, many conservatives responded
that Obama was un-American and
subversive. Some even questioned as to
whether Obama was really born in
America at all. Later, he felt compelled to
release his birth certificate to prove his
citizenship
In many respects, the Obama’s enemies
utilized similar tactics as did the
opponents of Al Smith in 1928. As of
2012, the culture wars continue, with
presidential elections being oriented
along the lines drawn in liberalconservative lines.
And in that sense, 1928 should be seen
as a dividing point in the political history
of the two major political parties.
The 1928 Thread in U.S. Politics,
1928-Present
Since 1928, national American politics, particularly presidential politics, have
often become oriented around liberal-conservative culture wars. And in that
sense, the presidential election of 1928 launched an important juncture in the
history of American presidential campaigns. For the first time, in significant
numbers, the Democratic nominee was widely perceived as being the wrong side
of a larger culture war, and was seen in such a was as being un-American, disloyal,
and subversive---well beyond being merely wrong on the issues. The Republicans
reaped the benefits of these perceptions in a landslide 1928 victory, and would
do so again in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2004. In the early 21st
century, the 1928 Thread was a recurrent American political theme.