Underwood the "Jew, jug, Jesuit candidate." The primaries therefore played their part in crystallizing the split within the party that would tear it apart at the forthcoming convention. Urban immigrants and McAdoo progressives had earlier joined to fight the Mellon tax plans in Congress, since both groups represented people of small means; deeper social animosities dissolved their alliance, and the urban-rural division rapidly supplanted all others. Frank Walsh, a progressive New York lawyer, wrote: "If his [Smith's] religion is a bar, of course it is all right with me to bust up the Democratic party on such an issue." More directly, the contest between McAdoo and Smith thrust upon the Democratic national convention a dilemma of a kind no politician would wish to confront. To reject McAdoo and nominate Smith would solidify anti-Catholic feeling and rob the party of millions of otherwise certain votes in the South and elsewhere. But to reject Smith and nominate McAdoo would antagonize American Catholics, who constituted some 16 percent of the population and most of whom could normally be counted upon by the Democrats. Either selection would affect significantly the future of the party. Now in the ostensibly neutral hands of Cordell Hull, the Democratic national convention chairman, party machinery was expected to shift to the victor in the convention, and a respectable run in the fall election would ensure the victor's continued supremacy in Democratic politics. The selection of New York as the site for the 1924 convention was based in part on the recent success of the party; in 1922 thirteen Republican congressmen from the state had lost their seats. New York City had not been chosen for a convention since 1868. Wealthy New Yorkers, who had outbid other cities, declared their purpose "to convince the rest of the country that the town was not the red-light menace generally conceived by the sticks." Though dry organizations opposed the choice of New York, it won McAdoo's grudging consent in the fall of 1923, before the oil scandals made Smith a serious threat to him. McAdoo's own adopted state, California, had played host to the Democrats in 1920. The 1924 Democratic National Convention was held from June 24 to July 9, and while there were a number of memorable moments, none were more crucial to the following proceedings then what occurred after a Platform Committee report on whether to censure the Ku Klux Klan