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Recently Released:
Alfred E. Smith:The Happy Warrior by Christopher M. Finan

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Today, the name Al Smith emerges from history once a year when the Archdiocese of New York holds a fund-raising dinner in his name. Many would consider it a fitting memorial to a man who went from the streets of the Lower East Side to become the first Catholic to run for president of the United States on a major party ticket.

But Al Smith was far more than an icon of ethnic New York, chomping on a cigar and wearing a signature brown bowler hat. In the new biography, Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior (396 pages, Hill and Wang, 2002, $26), Christopher M. Finan tells the story of a man with little education who achieved high office partly because of his personality and willingness to play politics, but also because of hard work and a desire to help the poor and working people of New York.

After his father died when he was 12, Smith, never an enthusiastic student, left school upon completing seventh grade. He took a series of jobs and flirted with acting before becoming involved with the boisterous politics of the Lower East Side and winning election to the State Assembly as a candidate of the Tammany Democratic machine in 1903.

The Albany in which Smith began his legislative career bears more than a passing resemblance to the often undemocratic capital of today -- only more so. As the state´s immigrant and urban populations expanded in the late 19th century, Republicans devised a scheme to preserve their own power -- and, they said, combat socialist and foreign elements -- by giving upstate voters more representatives than urban ones. Finan quotes Henry J. Cookinham, a Utica Republican, on why rural voters deserved to have more clout:

"The average citizen in the rural district is superior in intelligence, superior in morality, superior in self-government, to the average citizen in the great cities."

Armed with such bias, the upstate Republicans not only taxed the city, but restricted home rule and demanded that Catholic and Jewish citizens follow Protestant rules and observe a Sunday sabbath without liquor or baseball.

Scandal, though, chipped away at the Republican Party´s power, making Smith, Robert Wagner and Franklin Roosevelt men of influence in the Albany of 1910. During this period, Smith tried to push for reform while holding on to his roots in Tammany, alternately infuriating and impressing reform organizations.

As he achieved power in the legislature and become governor, Smith spearheaded the fights for much path breaking legislation of the early 20th century, to improve factory conditions, protect child and women laborers, and help the poor. He also surrounded himself with some of those who would become key players in New York for decades to come, including Frances Perkins, the first woman named to a U.S. cabinet post; and Robert Moses.

Smith´s accomplishments, as well as his background, wit and speaking skills, made him enormously popular at home, leading him to try for the White House in 1924 and to win the nomination in 1928. With the benefit of hindsight, Smith faced an uphill battle. Although the Ku Klux Klan, with its virulent anti-Catholic message, had declined since the beginning of the decade, prejudice remained. Prohibition was the battleground, with many Protestants supporting the measure while Catholics, including Smith, fought for its repeal. Meanwhile, much of the country reveled in prosperity after eight years of Republicans in the White House. Those who demanded changes to address the needs of the poor were often labeled Socialists or Bolsheviks.

Despite all this, and a national campaign replete with bigotry, Smith seemed indeed the Happy Warrior as he traveled about the country attracting huge and adoring crowds. In the days before detailed polling, he went to vote on Election Day convinced the former fish-market worker from the Lower East Side would become president. But Smith lost in a landslide, failing to carry even his home state.

Smith tried to run again four year later when the stock market crash and national economic collapse had turned voters hostile to Republicans. He lost out to his sometime friend, sometime rival, upstate patrician Franklin D. Roosevelt. Smith then went into business, heading up the corporation that would build and operate the Empire State Building. But while he made a good living, his fortune floundered in the stock market. His Empire State Building, considered an engineering marvel, could not find tenants, prompting it to be dubbed The Empty State Building.

Much of the last part of Finan´s book concerns Smith´s political gyrations in the last part of his life. A longstanding progressive, Smith broke with Roosevelt and the New Deal, going so far as to support Republican Alf Landon for president in 1936. Finan argues that, had Smith been elected, he himself would have done many of the things he attacked Roosevelt for doing, such as instituting government relief policies that would require massive government spending and bureaucracies. Smith´s opposition to these policies sprang partly from his anger at Roosevelt, who, Finan says, treated Smith badly, allying himself with Southern and Western Democrats who were enemies of the man from the sidewalks of New York. Other, less friendly observers have accused Smith more simply of selling out to business interests.

Whatever his motives, Smith stayed involved in public life until his death, reconciling with Roosevelt to enthusiastically support the war effort and advocating civil rights.

Finan´s sympathetic portrayal of this fascinating man covers interesting and important characters, controversies and events. Historians can debate whether Smith deserves a more critical biographer. But somehow the book fails to be as compelling as it should be, perhaps because it lacks the flair of its subject. Then too, like so many writers on politics, Finan spends too much time on political infighting, sometimes giving short shrift to the issues that, Finan makes clear, were the focus of Smith´s mind and his passion.


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