I have just finished reading Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior by Christopher M. Finan, published in 2002. The first 55 years of Smith's life should be an inspiration to all of us, his last 16 years are best forgotten. But for his first 55 years he was the voice of progressive change and the champion of liberalism. Had not Smith paved the way, there could be no President Elect Obama. Smith created the beginning of the urban coalition, those blue dots on a red map, that would in 80 years become a majority coalition. And it is amazing how little the Republican party has changed.
Join me as we review the remarkable life of one of the founders of the modern Democratic Party. My primary source is Finan's superb book, which I strongly recommend.
Early Life - 1873 to 1903:
Al Smith was born on December 30, 1873, in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York. As a child Al Smith made friends easily, and he was able to pick up much of the Italian and Yiddush spoken by the other boys in the Lower East Side - languages that would serve him well when he entered politics.
Al Smith's dad died when he was the 5th grade, and, to support her family, Al's mom was forced to find a job working long days in an umbrella factory, then taking piece work home to work hours more at home sewing the umbrellas. The 12 and 14 hour days took a toll on her health, and so, in the 7th grade, at the age of 14, Al was forced to drop out of school to work full time, earning $3 per week. Over the next six years Al had a number of jobs, all requiring 12 hour days six days a week. Most famous was his job in the Fulton Fish Market, where he worked from 4 a.m until well after dark, for $12 a week.
New York State Assembly - 1904 to 1918:
Smith became friendly with the local Tammany Hall politicos, and, after eight years of service to the political machine, the local political bosses "nominated" Smith as the machine's candidate to the New York state assembly - a nomination that made the ensuing election all but a formality. Al Smith would be consistently re-elected to the State Assembly from 1904 until 1918, when he was elected Governor of New York, but for the first seven years he did nothing of note.
All that changed on March 25, 1911, when a fire at the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory killed 146 workers, most of whom were immigrant young women and girls from Al Smith's lower East Side. The tragedy, caused by the greed and callousness of the owners, outraged Smith and changed him into a crusading liberal. Smith teamed up with Frances Perkins, who would become the first woman to serve as a cabinet officer as FDR's Secretary of Labor, but who in 1911 was a young crusader for better factory and labor conditions. Al Smith was made vice chairman of the State Assembly's Factory Investigating Commission, with Perkins as staff investigator. Together they toured over 1,800 factories, and witnessed not only safety hazards, but the inhuman treatment to which the working poor were subjected. Smith was incensed to see husbands and wives working opposite 12 hour shifts, greeting each other as they arrived and left the factory. With Smith taking the lead, the Commission recommended 30 new laws strengthening fire codes, banning child labor, setting maximum hours of work for women, and limiting the work week to six days.
As a result of his crusade for workers, Smith, in 1913, became Speaker of the New York state assembly, and, under his legislative leadership, many of the recommendation of the Factory Commission were enacted. When the Republicans retook the State Assembly and tried to repeal the laws Smith had helped to enact, Smith led the Democratic opposition against the Republican efforts to restore laissez faire. The Republicans even tried to repeal a program Smith had helped to enact to provide state aid to poor orphans and widows, causing Smith to proclaim on the floor of the Assembly that it was the State's obligation to aid to the poor "not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of government and public duty."
Governor of New York - 1918 to 1920, 1922 to 1928:
In 1918, when Smith was elected governor, he teamed up with a second remarkable woman, Belle Moskowitz, daughter of immigrant Jews and, like Smith, born in New York's lower East Side. It is remarkable that, in this era, Governor and presidential candidate Al Smith's top two advisers would be women.
Upon taking the oath of office, Smith proposed to the Republican controlled legislature a minimum wage law, health insurance coverage for all workers, and a major increase in funding state hospitals. The Republicans ignored his proposals and, taking their lead from President Wilson's Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, did their part to promote the Red Scare in New York. After a few months of waffling, Smith came to see the Red Scare as an attack on the poor immigrants who were his Lower East Side neighbors, and fought back to preserve civil liberties. Smith fought the expulsion of five Socialist Party members who had been lawfully elected to the Assembly, and vetoed six bills suppressing civil liberties, including bills that would fire any public or private school teacher suspected of disloyalty, and close any school suspected of being "detrimental to the public interest." Nonetheless, in the fall of 1920, the voters of New York voted for a Return to Normalcy, choosing Harding and Coolidge over Democrats James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt, and turning Smith out of office.
Two years later, the voters returned Smith to the Albany Governor's Mansion, and, within two months, the Republican controlled Assembly enacted his proposal to repeal state enforcement of Prohibition (the Mullen Gage Act) - thenceforth, enforcing Prohibition in New York would be strictly the job of the Feds. Smith reintroduced legislation to limit work hours for women and children, which the Republican controlled legislature would finally enact in 1927. Smith also convinced the state legislature to increase the state park system - by the time he would leave office, New York would acquire 125,000 acres for state parks. Smith was most proud of his creation of Jones Beach State Park on Long Island - Smith saw the Long Island beaches as a healthy place where his fellow tenement dwellers in the City could escape during the sweltering summer weekends. Not surprisingly, Long Island Republicans in the legislature opposed the park - telling Smith and his top adviser Belle Moskowitz that they had moved to Long Island to escape the Irish, Jews and blacks of New York City. Smith was most successful in greatly expanding New York state government and its budget, building new state hospitals and psychiatric hospitals, state parks, and new roads, plus creating bonuses and other benefits to veterans of the World War. And, at a time when as many as 4.5 million Americans belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, Smith openly proclaimed that African Americans were entitled to respect and to full citizenship without discrimination.
First Presidential Run - 1924:
Smith announced in April of 1924 that he was a candidate for the presidency. The front runner was William Gibbs McAdoo, President Wilson's Secretary of Treasury and son-in-law. McAdoo was considered a liberal with strong support in his native South. But McAdoo made the fateful decision not to reject, and thereby tacitly accept, the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan had disbanded at the end Reconstruction, but had restarted in 1915. By 1921 the Klan had over 1,000,000 members, and by 1924 as many as 4.5 million members. The Klan had taken control of Texas in 1922, and in 1924 would win victories in Oregon, Colorado, Suffolk County Long Island, and most notably, capture the governorship and most of the legislature of Indiana. The Klan of Reconstruction repressed only blacks, the Klan of the 1920's added Jews and Catholics to their hate list. And the Klan hated no white man more than they hated the Catholic Governor of New York.
Al Smith insisted he would not accept the nomination unless the 1924 Democratic National Convention denounce racial and religious bigotry in general, and denounce the Ku Klux Klan by name. Smith's resolution was opposed by the McAdoo delegates, many of whom were members of the Klan. The platform committee proposed a compromise - the Democratic platform would denounce religious, but not racial, bigotry and would not mention the Klan. McAdoo supported the compromise, Smith insisted that the platform denounce both racial prejudice and name the Klan. After a divisive debate in which some delegates came to blows, the delegates refused to condemn the Klan, by a vote of 542.15 to 541.15.
Al Smith asked Franklin Delano Roosevelt to deliver the speech placing Smith's name in nomination. In his first public appearance since he was stricken with polio three years earlier, Roosevelt struggled on crutches to walk the few steps to the podium, to the cheers of all the delegates. Upon reaching the podium, Roosevelt asked the delegates to lay aside any religious prejudice and nominate "the Happy Warrior," Governor Al Smith.
But it was not to be. For 10 days ballot after ballot was cast with no end in sight. McAdoo led with Smith second, then after a week Smith led with McAdoo second, but neither came close to the 2/3 then required for the nomination. On the 103rd ballot, the convention selected John W. Davis, who would decisively lose to Republican Calvin Coolidge in the 1924 presidential election, with Smith reelected as Governor.
The Democratic Candidate of 1928:
In contrast to 1924, Smith swept the few primaries held in those days, and was nominated by the 1928 Democratic National Convention on the first ballot, after his friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt had again delivered the nominating speech. Senator Joe Robinson of Arkansas was chosen to be Smith's running mate. In his acceptance speech, Smith attacked the Republicans as reactionaries and elitists who enriched their own at the expense of the working men and women.
Smith promised relief for farmers, already experiencing what would become the Great Depression, public works projects to give jobs to the unemployed, and dams to control flooding in the Mississippi valley and to provide hydroelectric power for rural Americans who had no electricity. Smith hoped to debate the Republican nominee, Herbert Hoover, on these issues; he did not expect to have to respond to a deliberate campaign of religious hate, spawned by the Republican Party.
The Blue and Red State phenomenon that we know so well first sprang up 80 years ago. In 1925 pundit Walter Lippmann saw Smith as the embodyment of one of two competing visions of America. One vision belonged to the immigrants and their children, the Irish, Italians, Jews, and others who crowded the cities:
He holds these crowds as no man can hold them. . . . How does he do it? The answer, I think, is that they feel he has become the incarnation of their own hope and pride, he is the man who has gone, as they would like but do not quite dare to go, out into the great world to lift from them the secret sense of inferiority.
Contrasting the urban poor were:
the older American stocks in the South and the West and in the East too . . . inspired by the feeling that the clamorous life of the city should not be acknowledged as the American idea. . . . [T]he main mass of the opposition is governed by an instinct that to accept Al Smith is to certify and sanctify a way of life that does not belong to the America they love.
Smith was handicapped not only because he was an Irish Catholic in a predominately WASP country, and a product of crowded big city tenements in what was still largely a small town and rural country, but he spoke with a New York City accent that, in those early days of radio campaigning, terrified voters in the future Red States. Republican operatives claimed, falsely, that as a state legislator he had voted to legalize prostitution and gambling in saloons and to build saloons next to schools. They attacked Mrs. Smith as an uneducated tenement woman unfit to be First Lady.
But most of all, they attacked the Catholic Church. Fundamentalist Protestant ministers, both in the pulpit and in up to 5 million trash leaflets and "newspapers" distributed each week, ranted that Smith was the leader of a Papist plot to turn America over to the Pope, who would move from Rome to Washington, and turn our public schools into Catholic indoctrination centers to brainwash our children. Herbert Hoover, in his acceptance speech, stated "I stand for religious tolerance", but then he stood silent. Democrats suspected, and Senate investigations later revealed, that some elements of the Republican party establishment funded this hate campaign. When members of the Republican National Committee were discovered writing anti-Catholic hate pamphlets, Hoover rebuked them, but the culprits remained on the RNC and continued penning their garbage, and Hoover resumed his silence.
Smith finally decided to respond, and to do so in a state where the Klan was strong, Oklahoma. When his train crossed the Oklahoma border, he was greeted by a Klan rally, complete with burning cross. More Klansman, and more burning crosses, greeted him on his arrival in Oklahoma City. That night, September 20th, in Oklahoma City, before 10,000 peoplein attendance and millions more listening on radio, Smith said:
In this campaign an effort has been made to distract the attention of the electorate . . . and to fasten it on malicious and un-American propaganda. I know what lies behind all this and I shall tell you. I specifically refer to the question of my religion. I, as the candidate of the Democratic Party, owe it to the people of this country to discuss frankly and openly with them this attempt . . . to inject bigotry, hatred, intolerance and un-American sectarian division into a campaign which should be an intelligent debate of the important issues which confront the American people. . . . In the name of Americanism they breathe into the hearts and soul of their members hatred of millions of their fellow countrymen. Nothing could be so out of line with the spirit of America. Nothing could be so contradictory to the teachings of Jefferson.
Two weeks before the election, Herbert Hoover finally spoke up, but not to condemn the religious hatred his party was inciting. Instead he attacked Smith and the Democratic Party as proponents of socialism!
Our opponents propose that we must thrust government a long way into the businesses which give rise to these problems. In effect, they abandon the tenets of their own party and turn to state socialism as a solution for the difficulties . . . I should like to state to you the effect that this projection of government in business would have upon our system of self-government and our economic system. That effect would reach to the daily life of every man and woman. It would impair the very basis of liberty and freedom not only for those left outside the fold of expanded bureaucracy but for those embraced within it.
In the last weeks of the election Al Smith visited the great cities of the Northeastern quadrant of our country and was met by crowds more massive than any that had ever greeted a presidential candidate: 200,000 in St. Louis, 200,000 to 400,000 in Boston, 100,000 in Baltimore, perhaps a million in Manhattan. These were the immigrants and their children who crowded the cities and for whom Smith spoke, in addition to a new addition to the Democratic coalition, African Americans, impressed by his stand against the Klan, and aware that Smith's persecutors were their persecutors. In city after city, crowds swarmed from the sidewalks, breaking police barriers, to touch his car, to touch the man who embodied their hopes and dreams.
Smith was hopeful on election day, as reports came in that Americans were voting in record numbers. 7.5 million more voters voted in 1928 than in 1924, a 26 percent increase. But Smith would carry only 41 percent of the popular vote to Hoover's 58 percent, and carry only eight states: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. In his 1969 classic The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips would examine the southern vote county by country, and conclude that Hoover carried the counties where whites were a majority, and Smith carried the counties were blacks were a majority. It was in the latter that blacks suffered the most from segregation and persecution, where whites, conscious of their minority status, would not allow even a token number of blacks to vote. These were the white southerners who remained loyal to the Democratic party in 1928.
But, for the first time, the Democratic presidential candidate had carried a majority in each of the nation's fourteen largest cities, plus a majority of African Americans. Urban dwellers and blacks would remain loyal to the Democratic party for the next 80 years, until the triumph of 2008.
Traitor to his Party? 1929 - 1944:
While Smith was losing the state of New York and 39 other states to Herbert Hoover, his friend and hand picked successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was elected governor. Smith imagined that FDR would spend his time in Warm Springs recuperating from polio, allowing him to continue to pull the strings in Albany. But FDR refused to be Smith's puppet, and tension grew between the two. The strained relations, and possibly Smith's jealousy of his successor, impelled Smith to unsuccessfully challenge Roosevelt for the 1932 Democratic nomination. Despite Smith's promotion of a massive public works program to fight the depression, Roosevelt was nominated on the fourth ballot.
Smith reluctantly campaigned for FDR, but thereafter became more and more hostile to the New Deal. As early as 1932 he had opposed a proposed federal law outlawing child labor, and, as the decade progressed, became more and more reactionary in his espousal of right wing Republican laissez faire economics. In the summer of 1934, Smith joined representatives of big business and other wealthy millionaires to form the Liberty League, which funded legal challenges to New Deal programs, and paid the radio and print commentators of the day to denounce FDR and the New Deal. Early in 1936, Smith addressed a Liberty League banquet, where he denounced the New Deal as Communist inspired, the brainchild of American Communists controlled by Moscow. Smith endorsed the Republican candidate of 1936, Alf Landon, and campaigned on the same platform with the 1940 Republican candidate, Wendell Wilkie.
Why did Al Smith change? He was probably jealous of FDR's success, and he had become well paid by some very rich donors. As early as 1922 Governor Smith was receiving $85,000 a year from Thomas Chadbourne, a Wall Street lawyer and Democratic party contributor. A more important relationship arose during Smith's 1924 presidential run, when he first met John Jakob Raskob, a man who rose from poverty to become one of the wealthiest tycoons in the United States. Raskob was genuinely excited about the possibility of a fellow Catholic becoming President, and he shared Smith's opposition to Prohibition, but otherwise he was a reactionary Republican. Shortly before the 1928 Democratic Convention, Raskob changed his voter registration from Republican to Democrat, and, just two weeks later, Al Smith chose Raskob to be the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a post he would hold for four years until purged by FDR. Raskob heaped riches on Smith, allowing him to move from the East Side tenement which was still his legal residence in 1928, into a luxury penthouse condo overlooking Central Park. While the country suffered during the Depression, Smith, thanks to Raskob, lived well. When Raskob formed the Liberty League, Smith followed.
Finan argues that Smith, after his 1928 debacle, became fearful of a national electoral victory by the Klan and the Nazis. In Finan's view, Smith became convinced that the federal government should remain small and weak to minimize the damage following a Klan/Nazi takeover.
But in some ways Smith did not change. He never changed in his outspoken opposition to any form of racial or religious prejudice. He continued to demand that black Americans were entitled to full citizenship and respect. And, the day Hitler came into power, Smith was already speaking up, proclaiming the Nazis to be no different than the Klan, "and it don't make any difference to me if it is a brown shirt or a night shirt." When war broke out in Europe, Smith lent strong support to Roosevelt's efforts to support the Allies by all steps short of war. By the time Smith died on October 4, 1944, Smith and FDR had reconciled.
The Legacy of Al Smith:
Except for the results, 1928 was so eerily similar to 2008. The same Republican appeals to prejudice, less subtle today than then. The same Republican charges of socialism. The same role played by right wing fundamentalists. The same stark choice between an activist government dedicated to the welfare and prosperity of all Americans, or one determined to further line the pockets of the already wealthy. A Democratic candidate, in 1928 and in 2008, who too many believed was too different from themselves, but who, in reality, represented what was truly American.
Those readers who consider themselves theological experts can tell me whether, if there is a Heaven, if the soul dwelling there is the soul of a man or woman at death, or at the prime of life. If the 1928 Al Smith is in Heaven, then he is thrilled that we have elected a President who will implement his dream of an activist government dedicated to bettering the lives of the broadest masses of Americans. But even the 1944 version of Al Smith would be thrilled that the American voters have, 80 years after he fought and suffered the slings of hate, elected a man of color to the highest office of the land. Had there been no Al Smith and no 1928, there would be no President Elect Barack Obama. So Happy Birthday Al Smith, and, to celebrate, we can join in his campaign song from 1928, The Sidewalks of New York.