INTRO: Great Depression

A U.S. stock market crash in 1929 sparked the decade-long international economic downturn known as the Great Depression.





He was the first Catholic to win a presidential nomination[1], Smith's was a highly visible Catholic and religion rallied millions of new Catholic voters, while alienating Southern Baptists and German Lutherans.

Smith lost the 1928 election to Republican Herbert Hoover because of national prosperity, and Smith's leadership of Catholics and wet opponents of Prohibition. Although he was personally honest, people distrusted his close ties with the notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall Democratic machine in Manhattan. Smith was a model Progressive reformer in his ability to master the technical details of government as an expert, and pursue constitutional, statutory, and administrative changes to make government more efficient. Smith reached out to Republicans including Charles Evans Hughes, Elihu Root, Joseph Proskauer, John Raskob, and others when it furthered these goals, and he won their genuine admiration for his intellectual ability. He broke with Franklin D. Roosevelt after 1928, lost the Democratic nomination to Roosevelt in 1932, and helped form the American Liberty League to rally conservative Democrats in opposition to the New Deal and in favor of Jeffersonian Democracy.