The Al Smith Story
NYE, RUSSEL B.
The Al Smith Story Al Smith and His America, by Oscar Handlin. Little, Brown. 207 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Russel B. Nye The Library of American Biography series, of which this volume is one, is...
...Smith belonged to an Irish immigrant community in which a political career was one of the few roads that led upward from the sweatshop, the hod, and the tenement...
...When Franklin D. Roosevelt, who succeeded him at Albany, took over from him the leadership of the Democratic Party, as well as the leadership of the liberal tradition, Al Smith was left an angry and puzzled man...
...He brings to the problem of Al Smith, a complex and often puzzling man, a sympathy and understanding doubly necessary to the task...
...Was he a victim of modern Know-nothingism, and did his defeat settle the question for once and all...
...He started in as an errand-boy for Tammany and in time-honored Alger fashion ended up as governor of New York, leader of the resurgent Democratic Party, and nominee for the Presidency...
...The hidden animus of such defeated minorities, Handlin believes, still breaks through now and then in Christian Fronters, McCar-thyites, and other evidences of minority discontent...
...Al Smith met the question head on...
...Handlin's book is the story of Smith's growth from East Side politician for Tammany into an enlightened, liberal, socially-conscious state executive who made New York, one of the nation's most difficult states to govern, a model of progressive government...
...Reviewed by Russel B. Nye The Library of American Biography series, of which this volume is one, is intended to provide studies of major figures of the American past with an emphasis on brevity, authoritative-ness, and readability...
...Al Smith spent a lifetime of effort in rising to the position from which he could see the promised land of equal opportunity that is so much a part of the American dream...
...His place in the national political tradition was largely lost in the depression and war years, and Smith himself wasted the last years of his life in criticism and recrimination...
...Certainly the Liberty League was an ironic final haven for the poor boy from Ward Four...
...It is, in fact, one of the few meaningful studies we have of this important and neglected political figure...
...Later, in 1913, when he worked with such men as Elihu Root, George Wickersham, and James Wadsworth for reforms in state politics, the young assemblyman from the city found a new dimension in his political thinking...
...The New Deal, the depression, and World War II, in the author's view, smothered the question posed by the elections of 1928, "Could an Irishman and a Catholic be elected President...
...There were few who opposed him in his ascendancy, and his nomination for the Presidency in 1928 seemed only a logical step in his upward climb...
...Page after page of the statute book still show his influence, and the housing projects, roads, hospitals, and parks of the state remain as testimonials to his administrations...
...Since Handlin has specialized in the study of American immigrant life and the social and cultural history of minority groups (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1952), his choice of subject, the poor Irish boy who rose from fish-market to statehouse, is a particularly fortunate one...
...Oscar Handlin's volume on Al Smith is an excellent addition to the series...
...For fifteen years Al Smith had been growing in office, and now, on the eve of the greatest opportunity of his career, he was checked by forces which he could neither understand nor overcome...
...However, as Handlin points out, it was in the 1928 campaign that the forces of nativism and prejudice, which were soon to frustrate and nullify Al Smith's career, first showed themselves...
...Handlin's conclusion is a disturbing one, for he believes it reasonable to assume that by 1944, the year of Smith's death, it was clear "that no Catholic or Jew could aspire to be President, whatever other avenue of advance might be open...
...From his defeat, the author feels that millions of his countrymen were forced to conclude that it was only a dream—a tragic and bitter end to a worthwhile life...
...Far from developing into the usual party hack, young Al Smith saw in the tragic Triangle Waist Fire, in which the lives of 143 were lost, the function of government in protecting the well-being of its citizens...
Vol. 22 • June 1958 • No. 6
