Mr. Smith Explains

...how I love to ramble, oh...

...In the Klan-bedeviled National Democratic Convention in New York, in 1924, Smith loomed up a far more powerful candidate for the Presidency, of course, than in 1920...

...When he went to Albany, his life had been so wholly urban that he had never seen a forest, and his familiarity with legislation was so limited that, speaking of his first session at Albany, in his autobiography, he says: "I did not at any time, during the session, clearly know what was going on...

...In 1914 he was elected to represent his senatorial district in the New York Constitutional Convention of 1915, to which Senator Elihu Root brought his powerful intellect and kindling imagination, as chairman, and in which the floor leaders of the Democrats and Republicans, respectively, were Judge Morgan J. O'Brien and George W. Wickersham, former attorney-general of the United States...

...Pretty much all the moral shortcomings imputed to Franklin are referable to the remarkable candor with which he laid bare, in his autobiography, the errors of his early life...

...It is the joint composition of Alfred E. Smith and Al Smith...

...It was such a book, perhaps, that Job had in mind when he said, "Behold, my desire is that mine adversary had written a book...

...With such a record as that made by Smith as governor, it was but natural that his successful opponent at the gubernatorial election of 1920, Governor Nathan L. Miller, should appoint him a member of the Port of New York Authority...

...After passing through a period of proscription, as an insurgent, at the hands of Patrick Divver, the Tammany leader of his district, Smith became an active member of Tammany Hall, acquired the position of an election district leader, gave his support to Thomas F. Foley at a memorable Foley-Divver primary battle, and was afterward, by the grace of Foley, elected to the New York Assembly...

...There must have been something truly sterling in the character and reputation of the man of whom, when the proceeds of his honest and industrious life were totally consumed by long illness and almost complete physical disability, his son could record: "The bill for his funeral was paid by his many friends...

...yes, it is my pride, Dressed in my best, each day of rest, with Danny by my side...

...The short ballot, the radical reorganization of the New York state government, the executive budget, the extension of the term of the governor of New York from two to four years, the abolition of war-scare legislation involving oppressive violations of personal liberty, the expulsion of Socialist members from the New York Assembly, the repeal of the corrupting Mullen-Gage State Enforcement Prohibition Act, improvements in the labor laws, extensions of the Workmen's Compensation Act, the public health, child welfare, park extensions, housing shortages, rent-profiteering abuses, hospital needs, educational reforms, state development of water power resources-these are some, but only some, of the public matters with which Smith had to deal when governor of New York...

...Both were admirable illustrations of the moral worth that is found in "the short and simple annals of the poor," especially when irradiated by a deep religious faith, as well as in the history of human beings blessed with a larger share of material good fortune...

...But hardly had this disparagement been uttered when, in a series of campaign speeches marked by the highest degree of versatility, vigor and vividness, he displayed as strong a grasp upon all the momentous issues involved in prohibition, the tariff, farm relief, the conservation of our natural resources, the federal oil scandals and the federal guarantees of religious freedom, as if they had for years been the subject of his daily thoughts...

...It was an extraordinary young fellow, indeed, who could bear so manfully and faithfully such burdens as the youthful Smith bore, and yet light-heartedly move about singing, as we are told he can still sing: The Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday is known as lovers' lane, I stroll there with my sweetheart, oh...

...in the absolute separation of church and state, and in the support of the public schools as one of the corner-stones of American liberty...

...Anyhow, what follows is a review of Up to Now, Mr...

...A bare enumeration of the political and social reforms to which he addressed himself, with rare intelligence and single-minded devotion, during his terms of office as governor, suffices to show why he was given the place in the confidence of the people of the state of New York and of the United States, which led the 1928 National Democratic Convention to believe that, like Saul, the son of Kish, he was from his shoulders and upward higher than any of the people...

...There, happily, she was again taken into the employment of the factory...

...All these honors were bearing Smith to the highest office of all in the state of New York...

...It carried a salary of $12,000 a year, and one-half of the fees collected by its incumbent, which, for the two years of Smith's tenure, amounted approximately to $105,000-a much needed windfall...

...Of the achievements of Smith as governor it is, of course, impossible to speak in detail in a brief paper...

...When he was not quite fifteen years of age, he left school before graduation, and became a truck-chaser along the city water-front, at $3.00 a week...

...Later, the family purchased the stock and fixtures of a small candy and grocery store, the earnings of which were sufficient to defray the school expenses of the boy...

...After Smith had been nominated at Houston, it was frequently said by his party opponents that, while he had evidenced an insight little less than marvelous into the problems of the state of New York, there was no reason to believe that he had the familiarity with our national problems to qualify him for the great office of President...

...but that several years ago, when two women who called on him to complain of the nuisance created by an ash dump in their district, were referred by him to their alderman, one of the benighted pair exclaimed: "Oh...

...But, just as that English father said that he preferred his dead son, Oswald, to any living son in England, there are not a few of us fifteen million voters, that voted for Smith in 1928, who would not far rather go down into the dust of honorable disaster with his dancing plume than unite in any paean that ever celebrated a victory, however complete...

...of the statesman and administrator...

...His father was an East Side truckman, and his mother, the native daughter of Irish emigrant parents, was, at the time of her marriage, an umbrella maker...

...for his children, for his children's children, and for the ancient Church which has ever kept the deeper roots of his being refreshed with its sweet, living waters...

...On the other hand, autobiography has been oftener used as an agency for self-laudation...

...Smith gives a dig or so to William Randolph Hearst, to be sure, and he pithily sums up William J. Bryan as a politician in the statement: "Bryan did the thing that helped Bryan...

...It was inevitable, of course, that a young man on the East Side who knew no keener enjoyment than that of driving a team of horses attached to a fire engine, should be drawn into politics...

...of the vivacious, magnetic, affectionate and intensely human being, instinct with love for his city, for his state, for his country, for his friends, and for the devoted wife and companion who has come up hand in hand with him to his present high position in the life of our country, and who accepted the greatest disappointment of her and his life with a simple, "It's God's will...

...Up to Now is a readable, inspiring book that might well be placed in the hands of every youth in the land...

...That they were, both in spirit and results, such as justly to point him out as one of the most useful and fruitful governors that the United States has ever known, few will deny...

...Then he became an assistant shipping clerk and youthful factotum, in an oil establishment, at $8.00 a week, at the same time adding to his income by different forms of night work...

...Smith's autobiography, done with real insight and verve...

...SMITH EXPLAINS By WILLIAM CABELL BRUCE THERE are few severer tests of human character than an autobiography...

...and the influence, exerted over him by his mother, it is safe to say, derived its chief inspiration from the altar, at Saint James's Catholic Church, at which Smith served for a time as an altar boy after he became ten years of age...

...Nor can one single respect be cited in which his conduct as governor was ever influenced or colored by sectarian considerations unworthy of the noble creed in which, in 1927, in his reply to Charles C. Marshall, he declared his belief in absolute freedom of conscience for all men...

...defeated under circumstances which were not so much a blow to him as to time-honored American principles of personal liberty and religious freedom...

...But it did not take that alert, ambitious, honest and invincibly rational young delegate long to win a high place for himself in his new environment...

...a shipping clerk, in the plant of the Davison Steam Pump Works, in Brooklyn...

...It is a grim picture that the son paints of the evening of the day of his father's funeral...

...Democrat as he is, he acknowledges in the frankest manner that, balanced as party strength was in the state of New York, he would never have been of the service that he was to that state but for the aid afforded him by liberal Republicans...

...Of the manner in which Smith distinguished himself in this imposing assembly, it is enough to say that it led Root to declare that Smith was the best informed man on the business of New York in it...

...The sequel was what we might well expect...

...At that time, as now, Democratic Tammany Hall was deeply entrenched in power on the East Side, and the political chowders, picnics, ox roasts and charitable doles by which its disciplined and skilful organization, masterfully directed by such district leaders as Big Tim Sullivan and Thomas F. Foley, was popularized, are graphically brought home to us in the book under review...

...In his attitude toward great public questions we can discern none of the cramping limitations that usually go along with sparse educational opportunities in early life...

...He kindled the fire in the kitchen stove, and after a hurriedly prepared dinner, his mother and he repaired to the home of the forewoman of the umbrella factory, in which his mother had been employed before her marriage...

...The enormous pluralities that he received on several occasions as a candidate for the governorship of New York, were sufficient in themselves to make him the presidential choice of his party...

...Franklin to be in a minority...

...It is said that a Quaker member of the Colonial Assembly of Pennsylvania once asked of an acquaintance, when Franklin was a member of that Assembly, too: "Friend Joseph, didst thee ever know Dr...

...Deeply engraved upon the pages of his book, as upon his life, are to be found the frankness, the sincerity, the honesty, the courage, the manly simplicity of thought and conduct, the loyalty to high religious and domestic ideals, the public spirit and the almost flawless affinity for the enlightened side of political controversies, which bore him four times to the executive chair of the great state of New York, and made him the candidate of one of our two leading national parties for the highest office in the gift of his countrymen...

...All this meant, of course, the hardest sort of hard work...

...Nothing could have been more splendid," John M. Glenn, the head of the great Russell Sage Foundation of New York City, said to the writer of this paper a year or so ago, "than Governor Smith's administration of all the social welfare activities of the state of New York...

...time and time again...

...He was defeated, and so far as his defeat was compassed by snobbery, monstrous lies about his personal habits, unreasoning distrust of Tammany Hall, religious bigotry, blind as the loathsome adder in August, and prohibition extremists, too crackbrained to draw the line between the use and the abuse of God's gifts...

...Everywhere except in the sullen walks of sectarian bigotry or distempered fanaticism, his had become a name cherished by every Democrat, and his figure one that needed but to be seen in vast concourses of human beings to be greeted with a wild acclaim and a passionate enthusiasm that no political leader in the history of the United States, except Henry Clay, had ever before excited...

...that Woodrow Wilson should appoint him a member of the National Board of Indian Commissioners, and that, from the close of his first administration as governor, he should steadily assume larger and larger proportions in the eyes of the people of the United States...

...In 1918 he was elected governor of that state, and entered upon the career as its chief executive which continued, with a single interruption of two years caused by his defeat as a candidate for reelection, on the Democratic "dies irae" of 1920, until his defeat as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, in 1928...

...Fortunately for Smith, his independence coincided in point of time with the general anti-Tammany movement, which resulted in the election of William L. Strong as mayor of New York, and led to Smith's appointment, through the influence of a friend, Henry Campbell, as a process-server in the office of the commission of jurors-a position, which, he tells us, afforded him the opportunity of meeting all kinds of people, from the small store-keeper in Fordham, to the broker and banker in Wall Street...

...The book has been published by the Viking Press, New York.-The Editors...

...His mother, his sister and he returned from the occasion to the cold and cheerless little flat on Dover Street...

...As a boy, he swam and dived in the East River with the careless ease of a wild duck...

...and to drink chocolate and eat huge slices of cake, while his father drank beer...

...As he grew older, he contracted the passion for loitering about fire-engine houses and running to fires, which almost every healthy-minded city boy experiences more or less, and as he grew still older, he formed equally strong predilections for other things that do not appeal to every city boy...

...Rarely has anyone written his own life in a spirit freer from malice or unkindness, or shrinking less from unreserved self-revelation...

...Never have the public school and social welfare interests of the state of New York flourished more vigorously than under his executive oversight...

...In concluding Up to Now, Smith says: "I have tried to make it a plain story of a plain, ordinary man, who received, during his lifetime, to the fullest possible extent, the benefit of the free institutions of his country...

...At that time, this office was perhaps the most luscious plum that grew on the boughs of the patronage plum-tree anywhere in the United States...

...that Charles E. Hughes should declare that, if we had the customs of other lands, Smith would long ago have been elevated to a peerage...

...and sometimes, in part, even as a means of pillorying an object of personal animosity or dislike before the eyes of posterity...

...Though the last national campaign produced a long list of defeated candidates, there were just two outstanding victims of political misfortune: ex-Governor Alfred E. Smith and ex-Senator William Cabell Bruce...

...but Smith, with his brave, jocund and enthusiastic nature, contrived somehow to soften toil, from first to last, with no small measure of recreation and amusement...

...Have we an alderman...

...Though as a rule hampered, when governor, by the fact that his party did not have the undivided control of the Assembly, he yet contrived, by the breadth, the soundness and the disinterestedness of his views in relation to matters of state policy, to secure a degree of support for his executive programs from his own party and the people of New York generally, and from such eminent Republican leaders as Root, Hughes and Wickersham, that enabled him sooner or later to carry into execution most of the public aims upon which his heart was earnestly set...

...And while he was not successful in writing his views, with respect to all of them, into the constitution, laws or practice of the state of New York, he can be truly affirmed to have brought to the consideration of them all, according to their several requirements, a rich wealth of generous sympathy, humanitarian zeal, public spirit and sane thinking, which won for his efforts a remarkable measure of accomplishment, and placed him in the very first rank of able state executives...

...hung about the wharves, to which the great ships came, with their alien cargoes, from the seven seas, and drank in all the pyrotechnic and other spectacles of the mighty water-girt Babylon...

...From it we learn that Smith began his career as a political speech-maker before he was old enough to vote...

...Of Up To Now no higher praise can be uttered than to say that it is almost famdessly true to those moral, intellectual and social characteristics which have made its author such a conspicuous and popular figure of our day...

...not, however, as an adherent of Tammany, but as an outraged supporter of an independent Democratic candidate for Congress, Tim Campbell, whom he believed to have been unjustly deprived of the regular nomination to Congress by Richard Croker, the boss of Tammany Hall...

...coasted...

...and it was at the close of Cochran's brilliant speech on this occasion, if I am not mistaken, that for the first time delegates to a great political assemblage from every part of the United States heard the strains of that infectious melody, The Sidewalks of New York, which Smith, with humorous exaggeration, tells us that he himself has heard probably a million times since that day...

...In 1917 Smith was elected president of the Board of Aldermen, an office of much more moment in the public estimation then than now...

...In the fall of 1915, Smith was elected to the office of sheriff of New York...

...or accompanied his father to the Atlantic Garden to listen to the songs and jokes, and to witness the clog dancing of vaudeville performers...

...mainly, it is but fair to him to say, for the noble purpose of making a beacon of himself for the guidance of his fellow-creatures...

...Indeed, Smith himself states rather ruefully that then every man, woman and child knew the alderman...

...then an assistant in the Fulton Fish Market at $12.00 a week...

...built up a menagerie consisting of a West Indian goat, four mongrel dogs, a pert parrot and an impish monkey...

...in the equality of all churches, all sects and all beliefs...

...And these positions were won by him not more by virtue of his quick wit, his social charm and his solid abilities than of the fearless independence of character which enabled him, in the discharge of his public duty, to see all aspects of public questions with a vision unrefracted by fear or favor...

...He set himself steadfastly to the task of mastering the legislative procedure of the Assembly and the business of the state of New York...

...Repeatedly nominated and reflected to the Assembly, his legislative career of twelve years' duration did not end until he had become the minority leader of that body, when his party was in the minority, its majority leader when his party was in the majority, and at one time its speaker...

...Indeed, as Smith says, all men, young and old, in that part of New York leaned quite naturally toward politics, if for no other reason than because the salary of even a policeman or a fireman was higher than that of most bank clerks...

...To this we need but add "and has fully repaid it...

...So some Quaker might have also asked, when Smith was governor of New York, "Friend, didst thou ever know Governor Smith to be on the wrong side of a public question...

...Occasionally, as a boy, he went with other members of his family to Coney Island or Staten Island...

...that is to say, for recitations and amateur theatricals...

...and with signal success...

...As for Governor Smith's mother, to whom he was tenderly attached, it is easy to see, after reading Up to Now, to what training much that is best in him should be attributed...

...with the result that, long before the convention of 1928 met at Houston, the universal impression made upon the mind of the American people by his administrative genius, his illustrious public services, his unique background, his captivating personality and his sterling moral attributes had rendered his nomination to the Presidency almost a foregone conclusion...

...After school hours he sold newspapers between four and six o'clock, and after dinner he attended to the wants of the store customers until bedtime...

...We think it will be universally admitted that the first was one of the most notable of all governors, and that the second was one of the most able and scholarly in the long roster of senators...

...and then a process server in the office of the commissioner of jurors...

...In 1920 he was already sufficient of a presidential possibility to be placed in nomination as a candidate for the Presidency, at the San Francisco Convention of the National Democratic Party, by that consummate orator, W. Bourke Cochran...

...Alfred E. Smith was born at 174 South Street, in New York City, on December 30, 1873 and rarely in our history have our free institutions worked a greater miracle of self-promotion than in his case...

...But, practically, that is all...