Alfred E

Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior

(1873-1944)

Alfred E. Smith was the leading Democratic politician of the 1920’s and in 1928 became the first Catholic to be nominated for president by either of the major political parties. Smith’s life exemplified the rise of poor Catholic immigrants from the bottom of the social scale to the heights. Today, we do not think of Catholics as a minority that is discriminated against, but in the 1920’s, they were. John F. Kennedy, who was elected President in 1960, was the first (and still the only) Catholic to reach the Nation’s highest office.

Although Smith was nominated by the Democrats and ran for president in 1928, he was soundly defeated by the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover, and he never ran for office again. But before his defeat in the 1928 election, Smith had already served four two-year terms as governor of New York and before that, he had been speaker of the New York State Assembly, the lower house of the state legislature.

Smith was born into an immigrant family, his father being of German and Italian background and his mother an Irish-American. Smith grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City, one of the most densely populated places on earth in the late 1800’s. He loved city life and quickly established himself as a spokesman for the poor and downtrodden immigrants of his home district. It is significant that, in the 1920 census, for the first time in American history, more people were classified as living in urban than in rural areas. Smith almost was nominated for president by the Democrats in 1920. His theme song was, as you might expect for a man who represented the people of the cities, “The Sidewalks of New York.”

New York politics in the early 1900’s was still dominated by the Tammany Hall Democratic machine. This party organization controlled City Hall and most of the political patronage jobs in the city. The machine took a commission on all city contracts, enriching its leaders and ensuring its continued hold on political power.

With the coming of the Progressive movement in the period before World War I, Tammany under the leadership of Boss Charles Murphy, decided that its future lay in providing at least the appearance of honest and efficient government. Murphy knew young Al Smith to be an honest and hard-working political activist. He decided to make Smith the State Assemblyman from the Lower East Side district where he lived. Thus, in 1903, at the age of 19, Smith was elected to the State Assembly, where he remained for the next 12 years.

Smith made a reputation as a masterful political tactician, who could get progressive legislation through the state assembly even when it was opposed by the conservative majority. He was a rapid fire talker and could tell stories that made even his opponents laugh and like him. These qualities were combined with a burning social conscience. This became especially apparent in 1911, when 140 young women workers were killed in the Triangle Shirt Waist fire. This fire in a multi-story factory building where poor immigrant women worked under sweat shop conditions making women’s clothing, created such outrage that Smith and his close friend Frances Perkins (later to become the first woman to serve in a Presidential Cabinet, as Secretary of Labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt) were able to push legislation through the state legislature limiting the number of hours women (and children) could work and also greatly improving safety conditions in factories.

Smith was not a socialist, or even a radical, however. He firmly believed in the capitalist system, but he recognized that workers had to combine for their own protection, and that the Democratic Party could be reshaped into a party that represented the interests of working people, and could thereby become the majority party in the country. It should be remembered that in the early 1900’s the Democratic Party remained dominated – as it had been since the Civil War -- by Southern reactionaries and Northern conservatives, whose idea of politics was to keep blacks in their place and to serve the interests of wealth and privilege. Most blacks who could vote in the early 1900’s voted for the Republican Party, the “party of Lincoln.” Industrial workers had supported Democrats in the past, but they were not comfortable with the rural populism of the party’s leader, William Jennings Bryan, and were likely to vote for Teddy Roosevelt or even the Socialist candidate for President, Eugene V. Debs.

It was Smith and the New York Democrats that he led who would eventually turn the Democratic Party into a party that represented Catholics, immigrants of all sorts, industrial workers, and city dwellers in general. But the process of transformation would be slow, too slow to get Al Smith elected president. But this new Democratic Party would eventually be the base of support for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal of the 1930’s.

Al Smith was famous as the most powerful Catholic politician in the country during the 1920’s, but he was equally famous (or infamous) as the leader of the anti-Prohibition forces within the Democratic Party and in the country as a whole. The continued political domination of rural and Southern America over Northern and urban America accounts for the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution, which went into effect in 1920 and lasted until it was repealed in 1933. Prohibition and the Volstead Act of 1919, which established the detailed provisions for carrying out the amendment, outlawed the sale and consumption of all alcoholic beverages, including beer and wine.

Smith was a moderate to heavy drinker himself and considered consumption of alcoholic beverages to be a normal part of life. His views were shared by millions of Americans, who felt the government had no business telling them what they could and could not drink. As governor of New York, Smith recognized that he had to enforce the law against alcoholic consumption, but he also kept a wet-bar in his office and served drinks to visitors who wished to indulge. As the leading “wet” politician in the country, who also happened to be Catholic, Smith was the object of a violent hate campaign led by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. At the 1924 Democratic Party convention, Smith supported an anti-Klan statement in the party platform. This proved to be the most controversial issue of the convention and led to the nomination of a compromise candidate, John W. Davis of West Virginia, because the anti-Klan forces around Smith could not prevail, and the Southern forces, around William McAdoo, also lacked enough votes to defeat the anti-Klan plank. In the event, a weak anti-Klan resolution was passed, but the party was split and Davis’s candidacy was fatally weakened. Although Davis managed to win most of the traditionally Democratic states of the South, he still lost to Coolidge in a landslide.

Smith finally won the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in 1928. He was the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major political party. He knew he had an uphill fight on his hands, since the country was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, and the Republican nominee, Herbert Hoover, was well known and respected by many Republicans and Democrats alike. Smith mounted a vigorous campaign, however, speaking from the back platform of a campaign train in the eastern and mid- western states. He even ventured into “enemy territory” when he went to Oklahoma City to make a major address about the issue that dominated the election: his religion. Smith knew that his New York accent and his anti-Prohibition stand were unpopular in the South. He also knew that, if he was to win the election, he had to convince the traditionally Democratic states of that region to vote for him. He decided to attack the religion issue head-on, and made one of the greatest speeches of his life to a largely hostile crowd on the night of September 20, 1928. Smith accused the Republicans of injecting the religion issue into the campaign and he attacked the Ku Klux Klan as an un-American and un-Christian organization that desecrated the holy symbol of the cross by using it as a symbol of hatred and bigotry, rather than love and brotherhood. He said he did not want anyone to vote for him just because of his religion, nor, by the same token, did he want anyone to vote against him for this reason.

Smith lost the election by a huge margin of six million votes (21 million for Hoover and 15 million for Smith) and by 444 to 88 in the Electoral College. He lost four states of the Solid South to Hoover – the first time these states had voted for a Republican since the Civil War – and even lost his home state of New York to the Republican candidate. Even so, the turn out was enormous, up 7.5 million or 26 per cent from 1924. Smith had been greeted wherever he went by huge, enthusiastic crowds. He represented something authentically new in modern American politics: a candidate who came directly from the people and spoke their language. Ever since the Civil War, American politics had been dominated by a wealthy, well-educated elite. Suddenly, there appeared in the national spotlight a man who had never been to college, who spoke a heavily accented English, and who aimed his appeal at common people. The Democratic Party that Smith put together would be the instrument for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory, once Roosevelt had reattached the conservative Southern Democrats to the party’s wagon. In order to get the southern and western Democrats into his camp, however, Roosevelt decided he had to distance himself from Smith. The two men, who had been such close allies in New York politics, suffered a tragic falling out at the time of the 1932 Democratic convention, when Roosevelt defeated Smith for the nomination and went on to win over Hoover.

The 1928 presidential election was Smith’s last political campaign. He tried, as noted, to win the Democratic nomination for president again in 1932, but by that time he had been overtaken by Franklin Roosevelt, who followed Smith as governor of New York and managed to win election despite Smith’s defeat in the 1928 election. Roosevelt, who had been stricken with polio in 1921, overcame his physical disability and went on to become the most important political figure in 20^th century America. Smith, on the other hand, went into eclipse.

As often happens with defeated or retired politicians, Smith tried to use his political connections to enrich himself. He accepted a position as chairman of the company that was constructing the Empire State Building in New York City. This project got underway, however, just a few months before the stock market crash of 1929. By the time the building was completed in 1931, the market for office space had collapsed and the project came close to bankruptcy. Smith had been close to rich men before. One of them bankrolled his political career during the 1920’s, providing him with cash payments and stock options on the privately owned New York subway system. Smith sold the stock at a huge profit. He continued to hob-nob with rich businessmen in the 1930’s, after the nation’s economy had hit rock bottom. Together with some of his rich friends, he started an organization called the “Liberty Lobby,” which campaigned against Roosevelt’s “big government” programs as a threat to personal freedom. Smith finally came back to Roosevelt when World War II broke out. He became a successful War Bonds fundraiser and was a frequent guest at the White House. When he died in 1944, he and Roosevelt had reconciled, at least in public.

What does Al Smith’s career represent? Was his early campaign for social justice and workers’ rights ruined by his later support for rich capitalists in their fight against Roosevelt’s New Deal? Let’s face it, politicians are by nature people with huge egos. If they can’t get attention one way, they are likely to get it some other way. Political principles often take a back seat to personal advancement, including the kind of advancement that comes from rich and powerful interests that are willing to pay an ex-President or ex-Presidential candidate, large sums to money to say what they want him to say.

Let’s look for a minutes at Smith’s Republican opponent in 1928, Herbert Hoover. Hoover came to the Presidency in March 1929 with a record of success in everything he had done up to that time: a millionaire mining engineer in his earlier years, then, as head of the American Relief Program, he was the savior of thousands of Belgians and countless other starving Europeans at the time of the First World War, after the war he was considered a likely candidate for president on either the Democratic or Republican ticket, but the politicians did not want him horning into their game. Instead, he was appointed Secretary of Commerce by Warren Harding, and remained at the post throughout the 1920’s, turning the Commerce Department into one of the most important agencies of the Federal Government.

Unlike Smith, however, Hoover had no people skills. He was not cut out to be a politician. He was uncomfortable dealing with the masses. Thus, when the bottom fell out of the American economy in October 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930’s overtook his presidency, Hoover failed to connect with the people. His efficiency minded approach to government and public affairs appeared to be cold blooded and indifferent to the suffering of the millions of unemployed. We can only speculate how Al Smith would have handled the tremendous challenge of dealing with the Depression, but it is a fair guess that he would have adopted a more compassionate approach, despite his own dislike of big government.

Thus, Al Smith and Herbert Hoover represent two different philosophies of government in a democracy: one sees the government as a pro-active leader of the nation, the other views it as subordinate to the private economy and an outright danger to individual freedom. American politics tends to swing between these two poles at about 20 year intervals.