He was funny, earthy, hard-working, and smart. And he was the most-hated man in America.
Al Smith was born poor on the Lower East Side New York City, with grandparents who were Irish, German, Italian, and Anglo-Irish. His father died, and when Al was 14 years old he told his desperate mother that he would support the family. School days ended, and so did childhood. Al liked to say that the only degree he held was F.F.M. – Fulton Fish Market.
It was hard, hard labor, but in his scant spare time he started running errands for the neighborhood politicians of the Tammany Hall machine. He was trusty, and some of them started talking to him. Over time they was entrusted him with bigger and bigger assignments, and finally they rewarded him with the Democratic Party nomination for state assembly.
When he was elected in 1904 he was far from the only uneducated legislator in Albany, but he felt his lack acutely, and kept his mouth shut – not at all surprising for a puppet (his colleagues supposed) expected simply to vote as Tammany ordered.
When he finally started talking, legislators were flabbergasted that was doing something that none of them attempted. He read every word of the proposed bills, and he had ideas about them – his own ideas, not the machine’s ideas.
His quiet competence, his hard work, and his Tammany connections led to a slow rise within the assembly, until the Triangle fire of 1911 killed 146 factory workers in New York City. Meeting with the families affected him deeply, and he was appointed, with State Senator Robert Wagner, to the Factory Commission, to investigate factories and recommend new laws to govern them. Wagner and social worker Frances Perkins took the public lead, while Smith continued his habitual quiet hard work – never missing a meeting, never missing an inspection visit, both of which required travel all across the state. He had strong opinions, but still recognizing his own limitations he told Perkins and Wagner to write the laws, while he concentrated on getting them passed.
Despite furious and unending opposition by many factory owners and money men, the Commission brought 64 bills to the legislature, and got 60 of them turned into law. The state was finally acknowledging and acting on responsibility for ALL its people, not just the ones with big money.
The factory owners screamed that these bills would kill all the businesses, and destroy the economy of New York, but as we all know, that didn’t happen. In 1918 New York’s voters made Al Smith their governor, for the first of four terms.
From the governor’s office he brought about civil service reform, and more laws to protect the workers and the poor. He arranged to pave the East Lake Road on Keuka. Along with Robert Moses he created a state park system, and a modern road system to reach the parks. (They acquired Stony Brook to become a park, though Letchworth and Watkins Glen were already state properties.) In 1928, Smith won the Democratic nomination for president.
And millions of Americans exploded with hatred and fury. It was bad enough that he came from New York City. Bad enough he spoke up the the working poor. Bad enough his parents had been immigrants (a lie – it was his grandparents). Most importantly, most enragingly, Al Smith was a CATHOLIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
To their mind Catholics always obeyed their priests, and the priests always obeyed the pope, so with Smith in the White House we would actually be ruled from Rome, where the Pope was already rubbing his hands with demonic glee. Protestantism (to their mind, the only true religion) would be persecuted. America, they mistakenly insisted, had always been a Protestant country, and could never permit Catholics to rule.
Or do much of anything else, apparently. In Penn Yan the Ladies of the Klan (honest) made a list of “Businesses That Are Prodident” (their spelling), so they’d know to boycott the others. MANY local people, and local churches, openly supported the Klan, and hated Al Smith.
Fueled by anger at Smith, immigrants, big cities, Catholics, Jews, Black people, and anti-prohibitionists, white Protestant Americans signed up in tens of thousands for the Ku Klux Klan – robes, hoods, cross burnings, and all. In many cases, their pastors joined up with them, and they did the same right here. The Klan held rallies at Chemung and Steuben County fairgrounds, and in many local churches. They conducted parades and motorcades. A man in Painted Post named his business “K.K.K. Garage.” There are K.K.K. gravestones in Canisteo.
Franklin Roosevelt had called Smith “the Happy Warrior,” but when Smith campaigned by train in the plains states, burning crosses lined the tracks of his route for miles. He fought hard, but lost. His family said that he never fully recovered from having been the target of so much vitriol.
From there, it was a downhill slide for Al. He was one of a great many who vastly underestimated Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrongly assuming he could pull F.D.R.’s strings. He headed up the company building the Empire State Building (the first time he’d ever made any real money), and came to oppose Roosevelt’s programs and policies (which Roosevelt freely admitted had originally been Smith’s). But he was a fierce and outspoken foe of Hitler from the time Hitler seized power, and eventually reconciled with Roosevelt. He died in 1944, exactly five months after his beloved wife, still living, as he had been since he was born, on the Lower East Side.
Al Smith helped transform the nation into a nation that cares (and works!) for ALL its people. He helped build a government that would be functional in the 20th century. He fought against religious bigotry, and for the rights of ALL Americans to be equal Americans. He didn’t invent the expression, but he said it clearly and frequently, and lived it fully: “All the ills of democracy can be cured by – more democracy.”
Forgotten Freedom Fighters: Al Smith
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