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Republican ads underscored the prosperity Americans were feeling. “Hoover and Happiness or Smith and Soap Houses,” or, even more effective, “A Chicken in Every Pot—Vote for Hoover.” The message, as one Republican pamphlet put it, was “Your Vote Versus the Spectacle of Idleness and Ruin.”

Hoover’s handlers often filmed him romping with a large dog to loosen up his image a bit, but he was a man who always wore a full suit and stiff collar, who read his speeches in a perfunctory monotone. (“I can only make so many speeches,” he once said. “I only have so much to say.”) During interviews he would restrict himself to answering questions without elaborating, and when he was finished, he looked at the questioner blankly, “like a machine that has run down,” as one startled reporter put it.

Hoover wisely stayed away from debating the more colorful Smith (he would not even mention his opponent’s name) and presented himself as a smart businessman who would run the government like an efficient corporation.

But the election soon took a sickening turn. The Ku Klux Klan continued to be a powerful force in America, with a membership that historians now estimate as high as two to four million. When Smith’s campaign train headed West, it was met by burning crosses on the hills and explosions from dynamite charges echoing across the prairies. Klansmen and other religious bigots swayed ignorant voters by telling them that the Catholic Smith, having supposedly sworn fealty to the pope, would turn the United States over to “Romanism and Ruin.” Protestant ministers told their congregations that if Smith became president, all non-Catholic marriages would be annulled and all children of these marriages declared illegitimate. Preachers even warned their congregations that if they voted for Al Smith, they would go straight to hell.

Hoover officially proclaimed that his opponent’s religion had no bearing on his ability to be president, but even Hoover’s wife, Lou, whispered that people had a right to vote against Smith because of his faith. She and many other Republicans spread rumors of Smith’s alcoholism, which were already rampant because he favored the repeal of Prohibition or, at least, the right of states to choose for themselves. Republicans sneeringly referred to him as “Alcoholic Smith,” told of drunken public behavior, and claimed that he had already secretly promised to appoint a bootlegger as secretary of the treasury.

In 1913, Fitzgerald ran for re-election as Mayor, but withdrew from the race after his opponent, James Michael Curley (who would become an even more popular Mayor than "Honey-Fitz" and the basis of the best-selling novel, "The Last Hurrah"), sent Mrs. Fitzgerald a letter informing her that her husband was seeing a 23 year old showgirl named "Toodles". Curley threatened to expose the affair if Fitzgerald did not drop out of the race. "Honey-Fitz" told his wife that it was a lie and that he must challenge it, but "Josie" Fitzgerald was afraid of a scandal and insisted upon her husband's immediate withdrawal. Many people felt that Fitzgerald had backed down against Curley's threats and both the voting public and Fitzgerald himself, lost confidence in his ability to win an election.

In succeeding years, "Honey-Fitz" would run for Mayor (1917,1925), Senator (1916,1942,1944), Congressman (1918), and Governor (1922,1930), but with one exception, he always lost. His only win was the 1918 race for the U.S. House of Representatives. He defeated "Weeping" Peter Tague, but it proved a bitter-sweet victory: he was expelled from Congress the following year when it was proved that he had won the election through voter fraud and illegal campaign funds (allegedly raised through liquor and prostitution ventures). It was even claimed that Fitzgerald had hired street thugs to compel voters to vote for "Honey-Fitz" or else. All this is sheer conjecture, and it should be pointed out that while Peter Tague, finally got his Congressional seat, he had hardly run a clean campaign himself. Had "Honey-Fitz" been a lesser man, he could've tried to exploit this. Ironically, the man who helped Tague contest the election results and unseat "Honey-Fitz" was Joe Kane, a legendary Boston political operative who was Joe Kennedy's cousin and would later run campaigns for Fitzgerald and John F. Kennedy.