In 1924 , Smith unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president , advancing the cause of civil liberty by decrying lynching and racial violence . Roosevelt delivered the nominating speech for Smith at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in which he saluted Smith as " the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield . " Smith represented the urban , east coast wing of the party as an anti-prohibition " wet " candidate while his main rival for the nomination , President Woodrow Wilson 's son-in-law William Gibbs McAdoo ( a former Secretary of the Treasury ) , stood for the more rural tradition and prohibition " dry " candidacy . The party was hopelessly split between the two . An increasingly chaotic convention balloted 100 times before both men accepted that neither would be able to win the two-thirds majority required to win , and so each withdrew . The exhausted party nominated the little-known John W. Davis of West Virginia . Davis lost the election by a landslide to the Republican Calvin Coolidge , who won in part because of the prosperous times
1924 Democratic National Convention
1924 Democratic National Convention
Al Smith