Outside a few Presidential and gubernatorial elections like that of 1922 influenced by the Ku Klux Klan, Oregon was a virtually one-party Republican state during the “System of 1896”, where the only competition was via Republican primaries. Apart from Woodrow Wilson’s two elections, during the first of which the GOP was severely divided, no Democrat since William Jennings Bryan in 1900 had carried a single county in the state. In 1924 Oregon had nonetheless been the fifth-strongest of the fifteen Western and Plains States for Democrat John W. Davis behind Ozark mountaineer-dominated Nebraska, Mormon Utah and southern-leaning New Mexico and Arizona. Moreover, although maverick Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette Sr. fared less well than in the other Pacific States, he still gained nearly one in four of Oregon’s ballots as an independent. However, when La Follette died in 1925 his family endorsed New York CityCatholic Democrat Al Smith, towards whose faith Oregon’s largely Puritan or Ozark Methodist, Anglo-Saxon and fiercely anti-Catholic populace was strongly hostile. This had been seen in a notorious law outlawing private religious schools under Klan-supported Governor Walter M. Pierce, whose decision was viewed unconstitutional by both the Oregon Supreme Court in 1924 and federally in Pierce v. Society of Sisters a year later. Despite this severe wariness, Smith did manage to win the state’s Democratic presidential primary against token opposition from Missouri SenatorJames Reed and Montana SenatorThomas Walsh, whilst Secretary of CommerceHerbert Hoover won the state’s Republican primary unopposed with over six times as many voters. From the beginning polls showed opposition to Smith’s Catholicism and anti-Prohibition views as very strong in Oregon, and neither major party would campaign in the state during the fall. October polls showed Hoover winning the state by a two-to-one margin and Smith gaining no more than a quarter of the La Follette vote.
Vote
Whereas in more Catholic states of the northern “Frost Belt” like Wisconsin, North Dakota and Minnesota Smith was able to revive a moribund Democratic Party at a Presidential level, Oregon’s smaller but still significant La Follette electorate concentrated in the lower Willamette Valley and arch-isolationist Southern Oregon balked at voting for a Catholic. Consequently, Republican nominee Hoover was able to gain 13.17 percent upon Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 performance in the Beaver State and become the fifth Republican in seven presidential elections to sweep all Oregon’s counties. This would be the last occasion until Donald Trump in 2016 that Columbia County voted for a Republican Presidential candidate.
