Alfred E. Smith

American governor of New York (1919-1920, 1923-1928)

• Born: December 30, 1873
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: October 4, 1944
• Place of death: New York, New York

Smith was a leading figure in the Democratic Party during the Progressive Era and the 1920’s. He represented the urban, immigrant Roman Catholic, and relatively liberal interests of the party at a time when it was deeply divided along regional, cultural, and ideological lines. He was governor of New York, and he ran for president of the United States but lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Early Life

Alfred E. Smith was born the first of two children to a poor but not impoverished Irish American family on the Lower East Side of were chosen. His sister Mary was born two years later. Smith’s father, also named Alfred Emanuel Smith, was a “truckman” (driver of a horse-drawn wagon); he and Smith’s mother, Catherine Mulvehill Smith, were the New York-born children of Irish immigrants.

Smith grew up in a mixed though primarily Irish and German neighborhood in the Battery section of New York, on the banks of the East River. His early youth was a happy one, although never without money worries, revolving around his close and warm family and the Roman Catholic Church. Smith served as an altar boy throughout his adolescence and was educated at the local parish school. His parents, particularly his mother, worked hard at rearing a “respectable” boy who was immune to the bad influences common in their kind of neighborhood.

Smith was not a particularly strong student; books would never play an important role in his life. He did like elocution, however, a not unusual interest among those who would ultimately enter politics. Nevertheless, young Smith stayed in school until completing the eighth grade. His father having recently died, Smith went to work at a wide variety of jobs over, roughly, the next six years. At seventeen, he got a job at the Fulton Fish Market as “assistant bookkeeper,” and despite its title, much of the work was hard labor. At the same time, he expanded his interest in amateur drama and considered a career on the stage. Ultimately, however, this was neither respectable enough nor sufficiently sure as an escape from poverty.

Politics pervaded Smith’s neighborhood, centering on Tammany Hall, the leading Democratic organization in New York City. Tammany’s reputation for corruption went against Smith’s strong personal ethical sense, but it was the only route to political preferment available to a young man with his lower-class, Irish Catholic background.

Smith began active political participation before he could vote, rapidly developing a reputation as a popular speaker, a reputation that his dramatic background served well. He steadily increased his involvement in party and Tammany activities and was rewarded, at twenty-one, with his first political job, as an investigator in the office of the commissioner of jurors. It paid eight hundred dollars per year and was his first white-collar job. During this period, Smith also courted a young woman of a middle-class Irish family from the Bronx, Catherine Dunn, whom he married in 1900. It was a strong, happy marriage, blessed with five children: Emily, Catherine, Arthur, Alfred, Jr., and Walter.

Tammany Hall was in disarray in the 1890’s. Scandals associated with Boss Richard Croker not only permitted the reformers to take over City Hall but also divided the Democratic Party and Tammany itself into bitterly opposed factions. Smith, through both good luck and his own sense of propriety, ended up on the right side among these factions, so that in the post-Croker period, when Charles Francis Murphy came to rule Tammany Hall, his reputation and potential were unblemished.

Finally, after loyal party work for more than a decade, Smith got what he wanted: party nomination for the state assembly in 1903. Once nominated, he easily won the election with 77 percent of the vote in his overwhelmingly Democratic district. His electoral career had begun.

Life’s Work

Smith found legislative life difficult, given his lack of schooling and of social contact outside his narrow Lower East Side milieu. He was a hard worker, however, and a quick learner. He taught himself both sufficient law and sufficient social graces to be able to fit in and function well in the Albany environment. He became a close friend of another Tammany legislator, future New York State and U.S. senator Robert F. Wagner, and both of them gradually developed reputations as unusually honest and competent Tammany legislators. Smith also developed a sense of bipartisanship and was able to work well with the Republicans, who generally controlled the assembly at the time.

The early twentieth century was still a period of much corruption in New York politics but also of increasing interest in reform. Smith, while maintaining his loyalty to Tammany, began to develop an identification with reform as well, particularly in the area of controlling large business interests, such as the utility companies, and defending the “little man.” Steadily, his reputation grew and he became a leader of the Democratic Party in the legislature, straddling the growing division between Tammany and the reform Democrats, who were led by a new breed such as state senator Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1911, Smith became the Democratic leader of the assembly.

Smith’s career continued to progress as he became steadily closer to the political and social reformers of the day. A highlight of this period was his leading role in the state constitutional convention of 1915, in which he demonstrated his expertise in state government and won the praise of both parties and numerous interests. Smith’s contribution to the convention led to his nomination and election as sheriff of New York County in 1915, an extremely lucrative post that provided him with financial security for the first time in his life; it also widened his recognition among voters. In 1917, Smith ran for and was elected president of the Board of Aldermen, New York City’s second most powerful position.

Smith ran for and was elected governor of New York in 1918. He was defeated for reelection in the Republican landslide year of 1920 but came back two years later and won three gubernatorial elections in a row; Smith completed a total of four terms as New York’s governor. His gubernatorial years were successful, as he continued to use bipartisanship and negotiation among Democratic factions to create effective coalitions in the legislature.

Always a fiscal conservative, Governor Smith pared government finances. At the same time, however, he pursued an ambitious legislative program. Most notable was a spate of administrative reform and social legislation, which put his administration clearly in the progressive mainstream of the time. Financial reform, conservation, public health laws, workmen’s compensation, and child labor reform were all among the measures of his governorship. He filled the state’s administrative apparatus with first-rate personnel, a number of whom, such as Frances Perkins, would later distinguish themselves in Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In 1924, Smith campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination. The national convention saw bitter division between the more rural, Protestant, prohibitionist South and West, on the one hand, and the urban, ethnically heterogeneous, antiprohibitionist Northeast, on the other. Smith, representing the latter and being the first serious Roman Catholic candidate for a presidential nomination, was able to stalemate the former’s candidate, William Gibbs McAdoo, but could not get the requisite two-thirds majority for himself.

In 1928, Smith once again fought for the nomination and got it. His unsuccessful campaign against Republican Herbert Hoover was an emotional one; his Tammany and New York background, opposition to Prohibition, and, especially, his Catholicism, alienated many voters. These same characteristics were very attractive to voters in the cities, however, and among newer Americans and the working class. Consequently, Smith’s candidacy was important in beginning the swing of those groups toward the Democratic Party, groups that Roosevelt would soon turn into a Democratic majority.

After the 1928 campaign, Smith entered private business, serving as president of the Empire State Building and in a number of other ventures. He prospered but still sought the presidency, and contested Roosevelt in the 1932 Democratic National Convention. Beaten badly there, his long friendship with Roosevelt came to an end, the break exacerbated by Roosevelt’s failure to request Smith’s involvement in the New Deal.

Both his personal alienation from the administration and his traditional fiscal conservatism rendered Smith less and less happy with the New Deal as its programs developed. By the mid-1930’s, he became a leading figure in the virulently anti-Roosevelt Liberty League, which was trounced by the president in the elections of 1936. Smith remained moderately active in Democratic conservative politics for a few more years, but his public life had really come to an end with the election of 1936. In the spring of 1944, Smith’s beloved wife died; he died six months later.

Significance

In his early public years, Smith was one of those Democrats who brought their party into the mainstream of political reform that had been primarily the province of the Republicans. Throughout his career, he represented, and to some degree sought to enhance the position of, the newer elements in American society: workers, immigrants, Catholics and Jews, and the nonpowerful generally. This was, however, always within the constraints of a cautious, even conservative ideology.

Smith’s presidential campaigns highlighted the contemporary divisions between newer and older groups of Americans and were a frustration to the former. At the same time, they illustrated the rising power of the cities and their people, whose political time did in fact come in 1932. Smith played an important role in the development of that voter coalition, which would dominate American politics from the Great Depression through the 1970’s.

Smith’s alienation from the New Deal was typical of old Progressives of both parties their definition of reform did not include all the elements of mid-twentieth century American liberalism. By the 1930’s, Smith was politically outmoded, but his role in the political developments of the 1910’s and 1920’s was considerable.

Bibliography

Allswang, John M. A House for All Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Chicago, 1896-1936. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971. A case study of Smith’s role in the development of the “Roosevelt coalition” of urban, ethnic, and working-class voters in the Democratic Party.

Finan, Christopher M. Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. A well-researched and comprehensive study of Smith’s life and political career, including a great deal of information about his relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Handlin, Oscar. Al Smith and His America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. An interpretive biography, sketchy in some parts, but also perceptive. Focuses on the religious and ethnic aspects of Smith’s career and his presidential campaign.

Hapgood, Norman, and Henry Moskowitz. Up from the City Streets: A Biographical Study in Contemporary Politics. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1927. A laudatory study by two men who worked with Smith in New York. Useful for its contemporary nature and because of the authors’ closeness to Smith.

Josephson, Matthew, and Hannah Josephson. Al Smith: Hero of the Cities. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Based primarily on the Frances Perkins papers and research Perkins had done for a planned Smith biography. Well researched and interesting reading.

O’Connor, Richard. The First Hurrah: A Biography of Alfred E. Smith. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970. A general but fairly thorough biography. Based primarily on secondary materials but balanced and informative.

Slayton, Robert A. Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith. New York: Free Press, 2001. An excellent biography, well-researched and perceptive. Much of Slayton’s focus is on Smith’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1928.

Smith, Alfred E. Up to Now. New York: Viking Press, 1929. A straightforward autobiographical narrative for the period through the 1928 presidential campaign. Not overly critical but honest and factually reliable.

Voth, Ben. “The Smith ’Heat’: Alfred E. Smith and the ’Catholic’ Issue.” Southern Communication Journal 59, no. 4 (Summer, 1994): 333-342. Examines the intersection of Smith’s politics and his Catholicism.

Warner, Emily Smith. The Happy Warrior. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956. An affectionate and approving biography by a devoted daughter. It is worth reading, as she was close to her father and was in his confidence.