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Alfred Emanuel "Al" Smith (December 30, 1873 – October 4, 1944) was an American statesman who was elected Governor of New York four times and was the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928. He was the foremost urban leader of the efficiency-oriented Progressive Movement and was noted for achieving a wide range of reforms as governor in the 1920s. He was also linked to the notorious Tammany Hall machine that controlled New York City's politics; was a strong opponent of Prohibition and was the first Catholic nominee for President. His candidacy mobilized Catholic votes—especially women who previously had not voted. It also mobilized the anti-Catholic vote, which was strongest in the South.
As a committed "wet" (anti-Prohibition) candidate, Smith attracted not only drinkers but also voters angered by the corruption and lawlessness brought about by prohibition.[1] However, he was feared among Protestants, including German Lutherans and Southern Baptists, who believed that the Catholic Church and the Pope would dictate his policies. Most importantly, this was a time of national prosperity under a Republican Presidency, and Smith lost in a landslide to Republican Herbert Hoover. Four years later Smith sought the 1932 nomination but was defeated by his former ally and successor as New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. Smith entered business in New York City and became an increasingly vocal opponent of Roosevelt's New Deal.
Smith was born and raised in the Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and it was here he would spend his entire life.[2] His mother, Catherine (Mulvihill), was the daughter of Maria Marsh and Thomas Mulvihill, who were from County Westmeath, Ireland.[3] His father, Alfred Emanuele Ferraro, took the name Alfred E. Smith ('ferraro' means 'blacksmith' or 'smith' in Italian). The elder Alfred was the son of Italian and German[4][5] immigrants. He served with the 11th New York Fire Zouaves in the opening months of the Civil War.
Al Smith grew up in the Gilded Age as New York itself matured. The Brooklyn Bridge was being constructed nearby. "The Brooklyn Bridge and I grew up together," Smith would later recall.[6] His four grandparents were Irish, German, Italian, and Anglo-Irish,[7] but Smith identified with the Irish American community and became its leading spokesman in the 1920s.
His father Alfred owned a small trucking firm, but died when the boy was 13. At 14 he had to drop out of St. James parochial school to help support the family, working at a fish market for seven years. Prior to his dropping out of school, he spent time as an altar boy, and was strongly influenced by the priests he worked with.[8] He never attended high school or college and claimed he learned about people by studying them at the Fulton Fish Market, where he worked for $12 per week. His acting skills made him a success on the amateur theater circuit. He became widely known, and developed the smooth oratorical style that characterized his political career. On May 6, 1900, Al Smith married Catherine Ann Dunn, with whom he had five children.[9]
In his political career, Smith traded on his working-class beginnings, identifying himself with immigrants and campaigning as a man of the people. Although indebted to the Tammany Hall political machine, particularly to its boss, "Silent" Charlie Murphy, he remained untarnished by corruption and worked for the passage of progressive legislation.[9] It was during his early unofficial jobs with Tammany Hall that he gained notoriety as an excellent speaker.[10] Smith's first political job was in 1895 as an investigator in the office of the Commissioner of Jurors as appointed by Tammany Hall.
He was a member of the New York State Assembly (New York Co., 2nd D.) in 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914 and 1915.[8] After being approached by Frances Perkins, he sought to improve the conditions of factory workers. He served as vice chairman of the commission appointed to investigate factory conditions after 146 workers died in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Meeting the families of the deceased Triangle factory workers left a strong impression on him, and together with Perkins, Smith crusaded against dangerous and unhealthy workplace conditions and championed corrective legislation.[10][11] The Commission was chaired by State Senator Robert F. Wagner and cochaired by Smith. They held a series of widely publicized investigations around the state, interviewing 222 witnesses and taking 3500 pages of testimony. They hired field agents to do on-site inspections of factories.They started with the issue of fire safety and moved on to broader issues of the risks of injury in the factory environment. Their findings led to thirty-eight new laws regulating labor in New York state, and gave each of them a reputation as leading progressive reformers working on behalf of the working class. In the process, they changed Tammany's reputation from mere corruption to progressive endeavors to help the workers.[12] New York City's Fire Chief John Kenlon told the investigators that his department had identified more than 200 factories where conditions made a fire like that at the Triangle Factory possible.[13] The State Commissions's reports helped modernize the state's labor laws, making New York State "one of the most progressive states in terms of labor reform."[14][15] New laws mandated better building access and egress, fireproofing requirements, the availability of fire extinguishers, the installation of alarm systems and automatic sprinklers, better eating and toilet facilities for workers, and limited the number of hours that women and children could work. In the years from 1911 to 1913, sixty of the sixty-four new laws recommended by the Commission were legislated with the support of Governor William Sulzer.[16]
In 1911, the Democrats obtained a majority of seats in the State Assembly; and Smith became Majority Leader and Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. In 1912, following the loss of the majority, he became the Minority Leader. When the Democrats reclaimed the majority after the next election, he was elected Speaker for the 1913 session. He became Minority Leader again in 1914 and 1915. In November 1915, he was elected Sheriff of New York County. By now he was a leader of the Progressive movement in New York City and state. His campaign manager and top aide was Belle Moskowitz, a daughter of Jewish immigrants.[9]
After serving in the patronage-rich job of sheriff of New York County, Smith was elected President of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York in 1917. Smith was elected Governor of New York at the New York state election, 1918 with the help of Murphy and James A. Farley, who brought Smith the upstate vote.
In 1919, Smith gave the famous speech, "A man as low and mean as I can picture",[17] making a drastic break with William Randolph Hearst. Publisher Hearst, known for his notoriously sensationalist and largely left-wing position in the state Democratic Party, was the leader of its populist wing in the city. Hearst had combined with Tammany Hall in electing the local administration. Hearst had attacked Smith for starving children by not reducing the cost of milk.[18]
Smith lost his bid for re-election at the New York state election, 1920, but was again elected governor at the elections in 1922, 1924 and 1926 with James A. Farley managing his campaign. In his 1922 re-election, he embraced his position as an anti-prohibitionist; Smith offered alcohol to guests at the Executive Mansion in Albany, and actually repealed the Prohibition enforcement statute: the Mullan-Gage law.[19] Governor Smith became known nationally as a progressive who sought to make government more efficient and more effective in meeting social needs. Smith's young assistant Robert Moses built the nation's first state park system and reformed the civil service, later gaining appointment as Secretary of State of New York. During Smith's term, New York strengthened laws governing workers' compensation, women's pensions and children and women's labor with the help of Frances Perkins, soon to be President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Labor Secretary.
At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, Smith unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president, advancing the cause of civil liberty by decrying lynching and racial violence. Roosevelt made the nominating speech in which he saluted Smith as "the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield."[9] Smith represented the urban, east coast wing of the party as an anti-prohibition "wet" candidate while his main rival for the nomination, California Senator William Gibbs McAdoo, stood for the more rural tradition and prohibition "dry" candidacy.[20] The party was hopelessly split between the two and an increasingly chaotic convention balloted 100 times before both accepted they would not be able to win the two-thirds majority required to win and so withdrew. The exhausted party then nominated the little-known John W. Davis of West Virginia. Davis went on to lose the election by a landslide to the Republican Calvin Coolidge. Undeterred, Smith fought a determined campaign for the party's nomination in 1928.
It was reporter Frederick William Wile who made the oft-repeated observation that Smith was defeated by "the three P's: Prohibition, Prejudice and Prosperity".[21] The Republican Party was still benefitting from an economic boom and a failure to reapportion congress and the electoral college with the results of the 1920 census which registered a 15 percent increase in the urban population. Their presidential candidate Herbert Hoover did little to alter these events.
The Republican Party was benefitting from an economic boom and historians agree that the prosperity along with anti-Catholic sentiment made Hoover's election inevitable.[22] He defeated Smith by a landslide in the 1928 election.
Smith's Catholic beliefs played a key role in his loss of the election of 1928.[8] Many feared that he would answer to the pope and not the Constitution. His close association with Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine in Manhattan, opened the issue of tolerating corruption in government. Another major controversial issue was the continuation of Prohibition. Smith was personally in favor of relaxation or repeal of Prohibition laws despite its status as part of the nation's Constitution, but the Democratic Party split north and south on the issue. During the campaign Smith tried to duck the issue with noncommittal statements.[23]
Smith was an articulate proponent of good government and efficiency, as was Hoover. Smith swept the entire Catholic vote, which had been split in 1920 and 1924 and brought millions of Catholics to the polls for the first time, especially women. He lost important Democratic constituencies in the rural north and in southern cities and suburbs. He did carry the Deep South, thanks in part to his running mate, Senator Joseph Robinson from Arkansas and he carried the ten most populous cities in the United States. Some of Smith's losses can be attributed to fear that as President, Smith would answer to the Pope rather than to the Constitution, to fears of the power of New York City, to distaste for the long history of corruption associated with Tammany Hall, as well as to Smith's own mediocre campaigning. Smith's campaign theme song, "The Sidewalks of New York", was not likely to appeal to rural folks and his city accent on the "raddio" seemed slightly foreign. Although Smith narrowly lost New York state, his fellow Democrat Roosevelt was elected to replace him as governor of New York.[24] James A. Farley left Smith's camp to run Franklin D. Roosevelt's successful campaign for Governor and later Roosevelt's successful campaigns for the Presidency in 1932 and 1936.
Some political scientists believe that the 1928 election started a voter realignment that helped develop the New Deal coalition of Franklin D. Roosevelt.[25] As one political scientist explains, "...not until 1928, with the nomination of Al Smith, a northeastern reformer, did Democrats make gains among the urban, blue-collar and Catholic voters who were later to become core components of the New Deal coalition and break the pattern of minimal class polarization that had characterized the Fourth Party System."[26] However, Allan Lichtman's quantitative analysis suggests that the 1928 results were based largely on religion and are not a useful barometer of the voting patterns of the New Deal era.[27]
Finan (2003) says Smith is an underestimated symbol of the changing nature of American politics in the first half of the last century. He represented the rising ambitions of urban, industrial America at a time when the hegemony of rural, agrarian America was in decline. He was connected to the hopes and aspirations of immigrants, especially Catholics and Jews. Smith was a devout Catholic, but his struggles against religious bigotry were often misinterpreted when he fought the religiously inspired Protestant morality imposed by prohibitionists.
Smith felt slighted by Roosevelt during the latter's governorship. They became rivals for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination. At the convention, Smith's animosity toward Roosevelt was so great, he put aside longstanding rivalries and managed to work with William McAdoo and William Randolph Hearst to try to block FDR's nomination for several ballots. This unlikely coalition fell apart when Smith refused to work on finding a compromise candidate and instead maneuvered to make himself the nominee. After losing the nomination, Smith eventually campaigned for Roosevelt in 1932, giving a particularly important speech on behalf of the Democratic nominee at Boston on October 27 in which he "pulled out all the stops."[28]
Smith became highly critical of Roosevelt's Conservative Democrats who disapproved of Roosevelt's New Deal measures founded the group. In 1934, Smith joined forces with wealthy business executives, who provided most of the league's funds. The league published pamphlets and sponsored radio programs, arguing that the New Deal was destroying personal liberty. However, the league failed to gain support in the 1934 and 1936 elections and it rapidly declined in influence. The league was officially dissolved in 1940.[29][30]
Smith's antipathy to Roosevelt and his policies was so great that he supported Republican presidential candidates Alfred M. Landon (in the 1936 election) and Wendell Willkie (in the 1940 election).[9] Although personal resentment was one motivating factor in Smith's break with Roosevelt and the New Deal, Smith was consistent in his beliefs and politics. Finan (2003) argues Smith always believed in social mobility, economic opportunity, religious tolerance and individualism. Strangely enough, Smith and Eleanor Roosevelt remained close. In 1936, while Smith was in Washington making a vehement radio attack on the President, she invited him to stay at the White House. To avoid embarrassing the Roosevelts, he declined.
After the 1928 election, Smith became the president of Empire State, Inc., the corporation that built and operated the Empire State Building. Construction for the building was commenced symbolically on March 17, 1930, per Smith's instructions. Smith's grandchildren cut the ribbon when the world's tallest skyscraper—built in only 13 months—opened on May 1, 1931—May Day. As with the Brooklyn Bridge, which Smith witnessed being built from his Lower East Side boyhood home, the Empire State Building was a vision and an achievement constructed by combining the interests of all rather than being divided by interests of a few.
Smith was elected as President of the Board of Trustees of the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, in 1929.[31]
Like most New York City businessmen, Smith enthusiastically supported World War II, but was not asked by Roosevelt to play any role in the war effort.[9]
In 1939 he was appointed a Papal Chamberlain of the Sword and Cape, one of the highest honors the Papacy bestowed on a layman, which today is styled a Gentleman of His Holiness.
Smith died at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital on October 4, 1944 of a heart attack, at the age of 70, broken-hearted over the death of his wife from cancer five months earlier, on May 4, 1944.[32] He is interred at Calvary Cemetery.[33]
Notes:
Note: This was the last time the running mate of the elected governor was defeated, Democrat Smith having Republican Lowman as lieutenant for the duration of this term.
New York State Legislature, The Bronx, Carl Heastie, Brian Kolb, Albany, New York
Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Nance Garner, Four Freedoms, United States presidential election, 1920, Al Smith