I started a thread on this a few months ago:
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On December 12, 1928, the police of Buenos Aires raided a house at 1184 Estomba Street, where they discovered in the attic, besides bombs and dynamite, the "[p]lans of Caseros railway station...A bomb was to be exploded there two days later when...Herbert Hoover president-elect of the United States would be passing through on a visit." Osvaldo Bayer,
Anarchism and Violence: Severino Di Giovanni in Argentina 1923-1931, pp. 132-33.
https://archive.org/details/Osvaldo...verinoDiGiovanniInArgentina19231931/page/n121 (Hoover was on a "good-will" tour of Latin America, during which he was to meet Argentina's President Yrigoyen. Hoover attached considerable importnce to improving relations with Latin America, and was later to claim with some plausiblity that it was he rather than FDR who had originated the "Good Neighbor" policy.) Alejandro Scarfo, an anarchist who had lived in the attic for some months, was arrested; he was a disciple of the extremely violent Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni, who had lived in Argentina since 1923.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severino_Di_Giovanni
What if the attempt to kill Hoover had succeeded? The first thing to note is that, strictly speaking, Hoover at that point was
not president-elect; true, he had overwhelmingly defeated Al Smith in November, but after all the president is not elected by the voters but by the Electoral College, and the electors did not vote until January 2, 1929.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=2i8iAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_aMFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4996,147293 Who would the Republican electors have voted for in the event of Hoover's death?
Presumably the Republican National Committee would meet to nominate a new candidate. An obvious solution is to bump Charles Curtis up from vice-presidential to presidential candidate. After all, if Hoover had been assassinated shortly
after taking office, Curtis would become president, so the GOP could hardly deny that Curtis was fit for the job if Hoover died shortly
before taking office. Curtis would be the first Native American POTUS; according to my 1957 Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 6, p. 883, he was "born on Indian land now included in North Topeka...His mother was half Indian and his early youth was spent with the Kaw Indian tribe." (Curtis called himself "one-eighth Kaw Indian and one hundred percent Republican.") In that event, the question is who is chosen as Curtis' vice-president. The RNC might try to have Charles G. Dawes continue in that post, but Dawes had made himself unpopular with senators because of his attack on Senate rules.
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/VP_Charles_Dawes.htm
Anyway, is it clear that the vice-presidential candidate
must be "bumped up" in such an instance? The only analogy I can see in US history is Horace Greeley's death in 1872. Evidently the majority of the Greeley electors then did not think they had a duty to vote for Greeley's running mate Gratz Brown for president. (42 voted for Thomas Hendricks and only 18 for Brown; three were scattered and three Georgia electors tried to vote for Greeley even though he was dead--their votes were not counted by Congress.) Admittedly, the analogy is imperfect for a number of reasons: (1) Greeley lost, so his electors could vote for whomever they wanted and know it would make no real difference. (2) Many of the Greeley electors were Democrats who had only reluctantly supported the Liberal Republican candidate Greeley as a "lesser evil" than Grant; and the death of Greeley freed them to vote for a "real" Democrat (Hendricks). (3) Gratz Brown was a notorious drunk. Still, one could argue that whether a candidate was on the winning or losing ticket, if the ticket's electors were willing to vote for him for vice-president, they should be willing to vote for him for president.
In any event, it is likely that
some members of the RNC would want to consider someone other than Curtis--for example, an effort might be made to get Calvin Coolidge to accept another term. (A number of Old Guard Republicans, suspicious of Hoover's record as a Bull Mooser in 1912 and his later association with the Wilson administration, had wanted to "draft" Coolidge even after his "I do not choose to run" statement. Curtis might arouse less suspicion, yet to some Coolidge would seem the only really prestigious candidate once Hoover was dead. But I doubt that Coolidge would be wiling to accept, even under these circumstances.)
The most plausible alternative to Curtis or Coolidge for the presidency if the RNC felt itself free to choose, would be Frank Lowden, former governor of Illinois, who had been one of the leading candidates for the GOP presidential nomination in 1920 and who had turned down the party's vice-presidential nomination in 1924. In 1928 Lowden was IIRC the only fairly serious rival of Hoover for the GOP presidential nomination (the other candidates were basically favorite sons) but only entered a limited number of primaries and withdrew his candidacy before the first ballot at the convention. In his withdrawal statement, Lowden criticized the GOP convention for not doing enough to address the farm problem--something that would not have endeared him to the RNC in December 1928. Charles Dawes would be another possibility, but as I have already noted, his 1925 attack on the Senate's rules had greatly angered GOP senators.
Of course in Argentina this would be an embarrassment to Yrigoyen, but his government would not survive very long anyway.
The one thing I am sure of is that people would later speculate that if only the Great Engineer had lived, the Depression would not have happened or would have been less severe...
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...anarchists-in-argentina-december-1928.452850/