by Paul R. Spitzzeri
For all of the talk (and there always should be discussion) of the matter of how public discourse is handled in American politics, including during this year’s presidential and other elections, the phenomenon of “mud slinging” is perennial and permanent—the question is about degree and whether such activity is about pure practical politics, policy or is personal or combinations of them.
This latest “Read All About It” post looks at the 11 August 1928 edition of The Open Forum, the weekly publication of the Southern California Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), specifically concerning an essay dealing with heated rhetoric during the 1928 presidential campaign between Republican Herbert Hoover, the incumbent Secretary of Commerce, and New York Governor Al Smith, standard bearer for the Democrats. “Mud slinging” was definitely in earnest during that election season, perhaps the worst of it being allegations that, as a Roman Catholic, Smith, if elected chief executive, would be a pawn of the Pope and a vassal of Vatican City and a promoter of vice.
The feature article in the issue is titled “Who Said There Wasn’t Going to be Any Mud Slinging?” from Contributing Editor Lewis Mitchell Head (1873-1934), who had an interesting and widely variable career in advertising, real estate and journalism in several states over his sixty years. A native of Hooksett, New Hampshire, Head moved with his parents and sister to Chicago when he was a child, with his father working as a railroad clerk, commercial merchant, partner in an elevator company, traveling salesperson, postmaster and, late in life, managing a restaurant, while he had some involvement in Windy City Republican party politics. Notably, he had a realty firm for a brief period.
Lew Head was something of a well-known speaker as well as a supporter on the stump for an Independent candidate for Chicago’s mayor in 1897 as well as for a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor a couple of years later, while he apparently engaged in work as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune. The 1900 census showed him as a bookkeeper, but his next stop and occupation was in Portland, Oregon.
He was in the Rose City as early as 1905 and worked for the Chapman Advertising Company, with a major project of his being the work to promote the Rose City Park tract in the northeastern part of the metropolis and where he had a fine home built when that development took place in 1907 for what is now a signature Portland civic event, the Rose Festival. After a brief partnership in an ad firm and then going on his own, Head partnered with Elnathan Sweet (whose father of the same name was a prominent civil engineer and who, appropriately enough, wound up as a candy maker) and H. W. Lemcke in a real estate firm.
Sweet was said to have a background in farm purchases and sales and Lemcke with residences and housing tracts, while Head’s contribution was, as with Rose City Park, in advertising and promotion. The trio took on a project on the coast near Astoria called Sunset Beach, but it quickly tanked and the economic disaster included Head’s declaration of bankruptcy. Head, his second wife and their young son remained in Portland for a short period until a new opportunity arose in Los Angeles.
Specifically, Head was recruited to be director of publicity for the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, formed by Los Angeles Times owner Harrison Gray Otis, his son-in-law Harry Chandler, Moses H. Sherman and others to develop some 47,500 acres of the former Rancho ex-Mission San Fernando, held for about four decades by the Van Nuys and Lankershim families.
This position was short-lived, however, as he took the same job for Fred P. Newport, who moved from being an investment officer for insurance companies to heading a real estate firm that handled sales for Los Angeles Suburban Homes and which worked extensively in the Port of Los Angeles area.
After another brief period with Newport, Head went into journalism and spent much of a dozen years between 1914 and 1926 with the Pasadena Star-News, though he also worked for a short time during the First World War for the Los Angeles Examiner and at the end of the Teens for the Arizona Republican in Phoenix (he was also said to have lived and worked in Ciudad Juárez, México and Denver). Returning to the Crown City, Head spent about a half-dozen years as news editor for the Star-News, before leaving on the last day of 1926.
By then, he’d become very politically active, though he’d abandoned his Republican Party affiliations for something far more liberal, including being chair of the state central committee of the Progressive Party. Among his concerns was his view that Italian-style Fascism was making inroads in Roaring Twenties America, that the Ku Klux Klan had infiltrated Pasadena politics and that municipal ownership of water and power in Los Angeles (he was said to have been a publicist for the forerunner of the Department of Water and Power) was vital to avoid the private takeover of all utilities.
When it came to recent presidential politics, Head was a local official supporting the Progressive candidacy of Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette in 1924, but four years later, in his essay for The Open Forum, he addressed the reality of which of the two major party candidates would win, rather than the third-party office-seeker he preferred. The piece began by assailing William Allen White, whose little Emporia Gazette in Kansas wielded outsized influence because of his well-crafted populist views that seemed to embody rural America (which was far more rural then that it would become in subsequent decades.)
White, who was a Progressive and frequent critic of the Republicans, as well as a vociferous opponent of the Klan, went on the offensive against Smith including as a correspondent from the Democratic National Convention in Houston in June, but his hardest typewritten blows came just afterward as the journalist passed through New York City on his way to a European vacation. There, he revealed that he’d hired researchers to delve into Smith’s record while he was a legislator in the New York Assembly and then wrote that it showed that his voting “so far as it affected the saloon, the gambler and the prostitute, was a Tammany record.”
White was a dedicated teetotaler and supporter of Prohibition, which was the law of the land for eight years but with the problem of being highly honored in the breach, so it was expected that he would score Smith for his support of the 18th Amendment’s repeal, while the governor’s long association with the Tammany Hall machine was well-known and also an obvious target for White and others to aim their shafts of rhetoric. The “Sage of Emporia” elaborated that
No Klansman in a boob Legislature cringing before a Kleagle, or a Wizard, was more subservient to the crack of the whip than was Al Smith—ambitious and effective and smart as chain lightning—in the Legislature when it came to a vote to protect the saloon; to shield the tout [those involved in gambling on horse races] and to help the scarlet woman of Babylon, whose tolls in those years always clinked in the Tammany till.
White insisted “I am throwing no mud at Gov. Smith” adding that “he is honest, he is brave, he is intelligent” and that “I don’t question his motives,” while he then declaimed that “I make no claim here that Smith is a Tammany plug-ugly,” but the publisher then ended with another broadside: “the Tammany system goes on today as it went on 100 years ago, and indeed it will go on in all of our American cities unless Gov. Smith and the sinister forces behind him are overthrown. Tammany is indeed Tammany and Smith is its major prophet.”
After issuing a detailed review of Smith’s voting record in the Assembly concerning his support of saloons, however, White then put out a statement that noted, after he spoke to another famed journalist, Walter Lippman, who was friend of the Democratic candidate, that “Governor Smith was deeply aggrieved that I should charge him with protecting gambling and prostitution.” Moreover, White allowed that Smith “in casting those votes against those reform bills might honestly have felt that the bills were unconstitutional or were not enforceable, or infringed upon personal liberty or encouraged police blackmail.”
The populist publisher acknowledged that “Governor Smith is entitled to fair treatment” and offered that he always sought this as well as believed that he had “never consciously questioned any man’s motives.” Consequently, White, before the morning papers were delivered and in advance of any response from Smith, told the press that “I desire to withdraw the charges formally insofar as they affect his votes on gambling and prostitution, but not his position as to the saloon.” Of course, White’s jeremiads were already widely broadcast and one wonders if there was musing about a possible libel or slander suit, as well.
With respect to Head’s perspective, he was hardly sparing of White, saying that he made “certain nasty charges” and, even with the “walking back” of much of his rhetoric, “he has automatically branded himself as a thoroughly incompetent newspaperman for not knowing the facts before publishing them,” for which any reporter working for the White paper would have been fired. Moreover, Head stated that it was apparent that White was being removed as publicity director for the Republican National Committee.
Head also flayed White because the withdrawal of the gambling and prostitution charges was made with the publisher “knowing full well that their despicable contents had flown unerringly to the mark for which they were intended” and that “true or untrue, they had accomplished the purpose for which they were conceived.”
This, of course, is the very essence of propaganda, which can, naturally, go both ways in a two-way race, but Head insisted that White “out-Tammanys Tammany” because the character assassination on Smith now “earns for him the reputation of being one of the most contemptible publicists in America.”
Beyond this, Head lambasted White for fleeing to Europe “as too great a coward to face the punishment that was undoubtedly meted out to him by his own crowd, too big a coward to withstand the just condemnation that he knew would follow this dastardly sort of politics.” White, it was added, faced 125 million Americans as “practically a self-admitted libeller and betrayed the essential tenets of journalistic practice: “accuracy and proof!” Drawing on his own long experience in the field, Head noted that there were many who became “nonentities” for just such behavior.
Head went on that “I carry no brief for Al Smith, but I do insist that a man’s character shall stand or fall upon facts and proofs, not upon a tissue of lies concocted by an incompetent employe [sic] of a great party.” As to the Republican nominee, Hoover, the writer offered that “neither he not his sponsors had better cast the first stone at Al Smith and his supporters. Before a man like Hoover permits such calumnies to be uttered and printed against his opponent, he had far better read back his own record and be grateful to the Democrats for refraining from telling some of the truths that are easily substantiated in his own career.” Head further commented that,
There can be no doubt now that the present presidential campaign will be a vicious, vulgar, vitriolic battle. It behooves all voters to read and hear all the arguments, pro and con, with a package of salt close at hand. Believe nothing until the sort of proof you, yourself, demand is laid before your eyes. Be satisfied with one fact that cannot be denied: That whichever man of the three—Smith, [perpetual Socialist candidate Norman] Thomas or Hoover—is finally elected to the presidency, there will be a tremendous advance over the insignificant Vermonter that now occupies the White House.
Smith, Head invoked, “has given a fine accounting of himself on behalf of the people of his state” as chief executive of the Empire State since the first day of 1923,” while Hoover had not held any elective position and, the author charged, refused to provide accounting for the money spend in relief work under his supervision.
The Socialist candidate, claimed the essayist, “is, easily, the finest type of a man of the trio,” though Thomas also had not held an elected office and was “an unknown quantity” to the public. Consequently, concluded Head, “you have no other choice and only one of the first two stands a chance to be elected, which reduces your actual voting value to one or the other—Smith of Hoover.”
The outcome of the election was, whatever the effectiveness of White’s “mud-slinging,” about as clear and convincing as it could be. Hoover enjoyed a more than 17% advantage in the popular vote and took 444 electoral votes to Smith’s paltry 87. The governor did not capture his own state and only took eight of the 48 states, six in the South and two in the Northeast.
As for Head, who often contributed articles on local and state history to newspapers, he lived just five-and-a-half more years, dying of heart trouble at the start of 1934 having just celebrated his 60th birthday. The Pasadena Post of 6 January observed that “his career had been colorful” and that “Mr. Head had a flair for politics in the true sense of the word—the study of the science of government.” The paper added that “he was one of the most companionable” of persons and lauded his work on behalf of journalistic organizations in the Crown City during his years there.
We will return to the pages of this edition of The Open Forum again to look at the rest of its content, perhaps next year on this day, because there is much more of interest, given that the ACLU was much further left-leaning than it is today.