WHY MR. HOOVER WON
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—Most of us will disagree with the statement that the election of Mr. Hoover is a victory for Prohibition. Far from it. Prohibition was not considered an issue by the vast majority of the electorate. It was the Republican campaign strategy to discount the Prohibition issue. Republican speakers and literature repeatedly told. the voters that Prohibition was not an issue. Support of opponents of Prohibition was weaned away from Governor Smith by these arguments. I have hundreds of friends in this locality, good Americans, who have no respect for the Eighteenth Amendment, but who voted for Mr. Hoover because they always vote the Republican national ticket. The same applies to every locality in the United States.
.ken drank wet and voted dry because of partisan politics, and in a few weeks the wets and the drys will be drinking again out of the same bottle as before the election of Mr. Hoover. No, and as a Protestant and a lifelong Republican, I am ashamed to confess it, Governor Smith's defeat was largely due to his religion. Protestant bigotry, revolting at the thought of a Catholic in the White House, hid behind the Volstead Act and vented its hate and spite in this cowardly way.
In Virginia another factor entered largely into its defection from its usual place in the Democratic column, and this was " snobbery." Many of the so-called First Families, forgetting the humble origin of the nation's greatest President, resented the possible elevation of Governor Smith from the sidewalks of New York to the Presidential chair, a strange factor to enter into an election in this land that boasts of equal opportunities for all its citizens.
The Republican ticket, of course, received the support of the militant drys for its Prohibition plank alone, but the two factors I mention, together with the belief deeply rooted in the minds of so many of our citizens that Republicanism and prosperity are synonymous terms, gave Mr. Hoover his large majority. And it is admitted by all fair-minded people, Republicans as well as Democrats, that religious bigotry swayed the largest block of votes in the Republican column, humiliating and saddening as the truth is to all of us who believed the dedication of this country to religious liberty was fact not fiction.—I am, Sir, &c., F. W. O'DONNELL.
Junction City, Kansas, U.S.A.
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