1923 college commencement. But McAdoo could not command the support of unsatisfied liberal spokesmen for The Nation and The New Republic, who favored the candidacy of the Republican Senator Robert La Follette. A further blow to McAdoo was the death on February 3, 1924, of Woodrow Wilson, who ironically had outlived his successor in the White House. Father-in-law to the candidate, Wilson might have given McAdoo a welcome endorsement now that the League of Nations had receded as an issue. William Dodd of the University of Chicago wrote to his father that Wilson had been "counting on" his daughter's being in the White House. The New York Times however reported a rumor that Wilson had written to Cox hoping he would again be a candidate in 1924. McAdoo received support from the Ku Klux Klan and refused to answer questions on if he was a member of the organization. McAdoo's supporters later controlled the platform committee at the convention and voted against adding a condemnation of the KKK to the platform. He defeated Oscar Underwood, who opposed the KKK and Prohibition, in the Georgia primary and split the Alabama delegation. Henry Ford, who was seen as a threat to McAdoo, chose to not run for the nomination. In their immediate effects the heated primary contests drew to McAdoo the financial support of the millionaires Thomas Chadbourne and Bernard Baruch (who was indebted to McAdoo for his appointment as head of the War Industries Board); and they strengthened the resolve of Governor Smith, ten years younger than McAdoo, to make a serious try for the nomination, which he had originally sought primarily to block McAdoo on the behalf of the eastern political bosses. The contests also hardened the antagonisms between the candidates, and cut deeper divisions within the electorate. In doing this, they undoubtedly retrieved lost ground for McAdoo and broadened his previously shrinking base of support, drawing to him rural, Klan, and dry elements awakened by the invigorated candidacy of Smith. Senator Kenneth McKellar from Tennessee wrote to his sister Nellie: "I see McAdoo carried Georgia by such an overwhelming majority that it is likely to reinstate him in the running." The Klan seemed to oppose every Democratic candidate except McAdoo. A Klan newspaper rejected Ford because he had given a Lincoln car to a Catholic archbishop; it flatly rejected Smith as a Catholic from "Jew York"; and it called