Author: Christopher M. Finan

Book Reviewed By: Peter Slocum

This "Happy Warrior" political biography is not a happy story. True, but not happy.

For the courageous career of Al Smith, almost surely the finest New York governor of the 20^th Century, who was trounced in the wildly bigoted presidential campaign of 1928, and then outdone by a successor he always considered a lightweight, ultimately ends in disappointment. This is a particularly cruel fate.

Smith's story has a lot to teach us, about politics, about government, and about how our society has behaved in times of cultural and social stress. Christopher M. Finan spent decades researching and writing Al Smith: The Happy Warrior, after starting the project as a master's thesis at Columbia University.

Al Smith arrived in Albany 98 years ago, in January 1904, a newly minted Tammany Hall assemblyman from the Lower East Side. And he found a political environment not unlike that which exists today. The Legislature was in the iron grip of a few political leaders who controlled all legislation, all assignments, all everything. It happened that Republicans controlled it all back then, because they had rigged the reapportionment system to disenfranchise the big cities and keep the power in rural hands.

Now, of course, the two major parties share control in Albany, Democrats running the Assembly and Republicans ruling the Senate. When Smith arrived, "Only 53 of the 150 members of the Assembly were Democrats. The 97 Republican assemblymen caucused in the Assembly chamber itself, while the Democrats fit comfortably in the Assembly parlor."

Today it is the Republicans who are shunted off to the parlor. Those present day GOP members who complain at their poor treatment by Democratic leaders may take some solace in the realization that in Smith's day there were fewer pretenses of even-handedness. The committees were divided 10 majority members to only three minority members, so that Al Smith and other freshmen didn't even get a committee assignment.

There was a bigotry to this upstate domination, of course, as Finan correctly emphasizes. Henry J. Cookinham, a Utica Republican, defended the apportionment system rather bluntly: "The average citizen in the rural district is superior in intelligence, superior in morality, superior in self-government, to the average citizens in the great cities."

And Cookinham was talking mainly about the Irish Catholics, Smith's people, though we should not fool ourselves that New York was free of racial prejudice back in those days.

It took a number of momentous scandals, involving the insurance and utility industries, to break the upstate's solid grip on state government and bring about political change. That is often how change happens, forced upon a non-responsive system by the pressure of huge events.

One such huge event - the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 - was in many ways the making of Al Smith. The tragic fire killed 146, mostly women and young girls trapped 10 floors up in a factory whose fire exits were nailed shut, and it sparked an undeniable demand for investigation, and ultimately, reform. Smith co-chaired the Factory Investigating Commission (the Democrats had taken control of the Legislature in the 1910 elections) which visited 1,800 factories and held public hearings throughout the state in its first year alone.

Smith was deeply affected by what he saw, according to the testimony of others. "At a Buffalo candy factory….Smith climbed to a window that was marked as a fire escape. Crawling through pipes that blocked the window, he found that there was no ladder from the window to the ground," Finan writes. Frances Perkins, a staff investigator for the commission and later appointed U.S. Secretary of Labor by President Franklin Roosevelt, the first woman to serve in the Cabinet, said that Smith and other commission members "got a firsthand look at industrial and labor conditions, and from that look they never recovered."

Unfortunately, Finan does not offer enough testimony of that sort in Smith's own words. Smith was not a writer, and there is not the voluminous correspondence that there is to draw on with the two Roosevelts. Finan is not able to draw upon other sources for direct insights into Smith's own feelings and passions.

Smith was a great public speaker, however, and while Finan makes use of some of that material, I found myself wanting more, more of a window on Smith's inner self. I was left feeling that we don't know enough about the private person.

Make no mistake, the public person is entertaining enough. He fought for and won passage of a whole serious of reforms coming out of the Triangle Investigation, including child labor laws, limits on working hours for women, workers compensation, as well as safety statutes, overseen by a newly empowered state government. This was, as Finan points out, a reaction to the abuses of predatory capitalism and it pointed the way to the reforms of the New Deal in the 1930s. There is a distinct strain of increasing government activism here, from Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting, to Al Smith's factory regulation to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal that is one of New York's proudest contributions to national political history.

Back on the Tammany track of Smith's career, at the same time as the Triangle reforms were putting him on the policy map, he was cooperating in and even leading the impeachment of Gov. William Sulzer, a Tammany man who crossed the bosses who put him in office and was therefore removed.

Smith was a Tammany man from the beginning. He got his toehold thanks to local political leaders. They sponsored him, promoted him and ultimately let him blossom into an outstanding political leader.

Smith rose up from the streets. He had neither the family money of Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Kennedy and Bush nor the fancy education of Dewey, Clinton and Pataki that are the standard routes to political prominence. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade to support his widowed mother, working first as a truck chaser for $3 a week. In 1892, at age 19, Smith graduated to a job at the Fulton Fish Market: 4 a.m. to 4 p.m., $12 a week and all the free fish he wanted.

There is a wonderful story from Smith's time in the Assembly, of him poking fun at colleagues preening about their fancy college backgrounds ("I'm a Yale man"…"I'm a Harvard man" ... "I'm a U of M man") by announcing, "I am an FFM man."

"What is that, Al?" asked one assemblyman. "I said, Fulton Fish Market. Let's proceed with the debate."

Smith was elected Speaker of the Assembly in 1913 and Governor in 1918. He began his historic crusade for major reorganization of state government, most importantly, creation of the modern executive budget system. Before Smith, agency heads submitted budget requests directly to legislative committees, leaving the governor with little authority. This quest, interrupted by his defeat in 1920, but resumed after his re-election in 1922, was finally completed in the mid-20's. He was truly the architect of modern state government, and added more parkland to the state's system than Teddy Roosevelt.

He also championed minority rights - Finan argues this grew from his background as a poor Irish Catholic and from all those all those years as a downtrodden Assembly back bencher - fighting the expulsion of five Socialist Party members from the Assembly and even vetoing a package of patriotic, loyalty-oath bills that roared through the Legislature in the fevered atmosphere of the post-World War I Red Scare.

"The safety of this government and its institutions rests upon the reasoned and devoted loyalty of its people," Smith said. "It does not need for its defense a system of intellectual tyranny which, in the endeavor to choke error by force, must of necessity, crush truth as well."

Smith was nominated for President in 1924, with Franklin Roosevelt delivering the famous "Happy Warrior" speech, which was written by a Smith aide and which Roosevelt hated, Finan says. In 1928, Smith won the nomination and became the target of the most vicious, bigoted anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant campaign that America had ever seen. "Rum, Romanism and Ruin," was the most notorious slogan used against Smith, who also favored repeal of Prohibition. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses when he was scheduled to speak. Newspapers carried fanciful stories about the Pope building a secret palace in Washington, D.C., to be ready for the Catholic take-over of the government.

But crowds that came out to greet Smith were enormous, and friendly, and he apparently went into the voting booth thinking he would win. The defeat was crushing, both numerically and personally. Smith won only eight states, and New York was not among them. To be rejected by his own state was brutal.

At the same time, his hand-picked successor Franklin Roosevelt was basking in the glory of his own election as governor, and Smith clearly resented FDR's success. Smith thought this wealthy gentleman farmer from the Hudson Valley was a lightweight and short on principle, and that he would need help to run the state. But FDR would have none of it, and turned Smith aside.

Roosevelt was a notoriously crafty and dissembling figure, but it is hard to believe that so experienced a professional as Smith could misread Roosevelt as badly as he did; Smith actually thought his closest aides would stay on and govern, with Smith the real power behind the throne.

The post-1928 years were essentially tragic years for Smith. He watched Roosevelt not only run the state government without him, but then capture the presidency in 1932. It should have been his! Smith became president of the Empire State Building project, a glorious engineering triumph, but two-thirds empty and virtually bankrupt during the Great Depression.

Bitterness and loss led Smith to break with Roosevelt in 1936 and support the Republican candidate, as he argued that Roosevelt's aggressive use of the federal government went too far. But he later became a strong voice against the isolationists who argued against U.S. participation in "Europe's war."

Ultimately, the fates were cruel to Smith. He rose up from the streets, representing and exemplifying the common man's ability to triumph in America, and then was denied the big prize because the country was not ready to put a Catholic in the White House, or to embrace the immigrant as fully as we do today. To compare the abuse that Al Smith took with the isolated incidents following the terrorist attacks of last year is to contrast two entirely different epochs.

The world changed rapidly after Al Smith's heyday. Only 32 years after his disastrous run for the White House, the country elected an Irish Catholic President. Of course, John F. Kennedy was not an FFM man by any stretch of the imagination. Kennedy's Harvard pedigree and his father's oil money - more acceptable than Tammany - launched his career.

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Peter Slocum, a former newspaper reporter, is Vice President for Advocacy, American Cancer Society, Eastern Division.

09/18/2002