Al Smith, Dem. Presidential Candidate, Promises to End Abuses of Native Americans
Al Smith, Democratic candidate for President on this day promised that if elected president he would end abuses of Native Americans under the jurisdiction of the federal government.
In particular, he promised to end the”systematic starvation” of Indian children in federally-run boarding schools. He also promised better accounting of the $1.7 billion dollars in Native American funds administered by the federal government. Smith charged that the Indian “subjects” of the U.S. government were living “under a despotism unknown elsewhere in the Western world.”
In the 1928 presidential election campaign, Al Smith was widely attacked for being a Roman Catholic. Many of the attacks were led by KKK members, which not only believed in the inferiority of African Americans but was prejudiced against Catholics and Jews (April 18, 1927, September 18, 1928). Smith lost the election to GOP candidate Herbert Hoover in a landslide. His loss gave rise to the myth than no Catholic could ever be elected president of the U.S. John F. Kennedy, despite facing some attacks because of his Catholicism (September 12, 1960), shattered that myth by winning the 1960 presidential election.
In the 1930’s Smith became more conservative because he did not support the policies of President Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Read: Christopher Finan, Al Smith: The Happy Warrior (2003)
And more: Alan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (1979)
Read more: Troy Johnson, Red Power: The Native American Civil Rights Movement (2007)
Take your kids to the Alfred E. Smith Playground, a park in New York City
Learn more: Paul Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (1996)