With all other prominent Democrats sitting the election out , the party nominated Alfred E. Smith , four-term Governor of New York as its nominee for 1928 , with little opposition . Arkansas lies in the core of the Ozark “ Bible Belt ” and would have been expected to stand extremely vulnerable to anti-Catholic and pro-Prohibition voting – it ’s public support for prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools showed the Natural State in the vanguard of fundamentalist Protestantism . Elsewhere in the White South , extreme fear ensued because the region had no experience of the Southern and Eastern European Catholic immigrants who were Smith ’s local constituency . Southern fundamentalist Protestants believed that Smith would allow papal and priestly leadership in the United States , which Protestantism was a reaction against . The Southern Baptist Convention said that In other Outer South states and in Alabama , powerful local Democrats refused to support Smith . However , in Arkansas , the two leading politicians in the state , Charles Hillman Brough and Joseph Taylor Robinson , had supported the New York Governor for more than a year before his nomination had become official . Robinson was the first major party Vice-Presidential nominee from a former Confederate state since Andrew Johnson in 1864 , and was a moderate who had refrained from supporting either Smith or his rival William Gibbs McAdoo during the disastrous 1924 Democratic National Convention . The fact that Robinson denounced Thomas Heflin ’s claim that some American Senators ( including Heflin himself ) were being paid or bribed by the ( anti-Catholic ) Mexican Government and quarrelled with the Alabama Senator violently over whether religion could be a qualification for office further linked him to Smith even before becoming his running mate
1924 Democratic National Convention
1924 Democratic National Convention
1928 United States presidential election in Arkansas