Almost President (17 page)

Smith was born on December 30, 1873, in the Fourth Ward of the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a father who was a Teamster (and most likely of Italian heritage) and an Irish mother. Smith was delighted that “my father, my mother, my sister, my wife, all five of my children and I, were all born within five blocks of one another.” Proud of his heritage, he declared he was not the type who cooked his corned beef and cabbage in the basement to hide the smell from the neighbors. The close-knit Fourth Ward boasted residents of many different ethnic origins and religions, which gave Smith the belief that people of good will from all backgrounds and faiths could peacefully co-exist.

At St. James Catholic School, Smith was taught American history through a series of fables, such as George Washington fessing up to chopping down a cherry tree, designed to demonstrate civic and personal virtues. These stories resonated with Smith, whom the humorist Will Rogers called “the most sentimental prominent man I ever met.”

Smith's father died when he was eleven, and before Smith could complete the eighth grade, he quit school to work and support his mother and siblings. Always insecure about his lack of formal education, Smith liked to tell the story of when he was in the New York Legislature and debate was interrupted to announce the results of an Ivy League boat race. As legislators rose to exclaim their own alma mater, one from Harvard, another from Yale, yet another claiming to be a “U. of M.” man, Smith rose and announced that he was an “F.F.M. man.” Asked what school those initials stood for, Smith replied, “Fulton Fish Market. Let's proceed with the debate.”

Smith began work at the Fulton Fish Market at the age of twelve. An all-purpose helper who cleaned, wrapped, and sold fish, he was paid twelve dollars a week and worked twelve-hour days. The easily spoiled wares were hawked in the market with the intensity of brokers buying and selling at the New York Stock Exchange, which often led to confrontations among rival fishmongers. Smith was known as someone who could settle disputes with words rather than fists. A friend told him, “If you don't have the biggest mouth in the market, you've sure got the loudest.”

Smith's vocal abilities were also put to good use performing in amateur theatricals put on by the St. James Players. “For innocent pastime, for recreation, for knowledge, for training the memory, and for giving a person a certain degree of confidence, there is not better amusement,” Smith said. He even considered the stage as a career before he met his future wife, Catherine “Katie” Dunn. Dunn came from a respectable family and marrying an actor would not have been tolerated.

But politics are another form of show business—show business for homely people, goes the joke. Smith was not homely, but neither was he handsome. He stood five-feet-eight-inches tall and had the broad chest of a swimmer. His oval-shaped face with pink skin, blue eyes, and bad teeth was framed by blond hair, which he parted in the middle. His most distinctive feature after his large nose was his voice. It was gravelly like “the gruff bark of an Irish setter,” according to one description. With his Lower East Side accent, work was pronounced “woik,” and Smith loved to talk on the new device called the “raddio” about making things “betta” for “poisuns” through public “soivice.” Despite his accent, he was an effective speaker. H. V. Kaltenborn, one of the great voices in early radio, considered Smith a superb public speaker because “he knew just how to win and hold . . . [an] audience. Instinctively, he said just the right things in the right way.”

That ability caught the attention of Tammany Hall, the political machine that ruled New York City except for brief intervals when the better elements of society rallied to impose flurries of reforms that would melt away as quickly as a spring snow. To secure its power, Tammany embraced New York's burgeoning immigrant population. Because New York lacked a public welfare system and its private charities were Dickensian in their indifferent brutality, Tammany stepped in to provide the services—food, a job, help with the police—the new immigrants needed to integrate into American society, thereby winning their loyal political support at the polls.

Smith, who regularly attended Tammany meetings and events, was brought under-wing by Boss Tom Foley, who provided him with his first political job in 1895 as a process server. Eight years later, Foley and Tammany tapped Smith to be the Fourth Ward's candidate for the State Assembly, an election Smith won with 75 percent of the vote.

In sending Smith to Albany, Foley offered the advice, “Don't speak until you have something to say. Men who talk just for the pleasure of it do not get very far.” Smith kept quiet as advised but still did not get very far. Frustrated and disheartened, Smith asked Foley if he could quit the legislature. Foley insisted he give it another try. So Smith resolved that if he were stuck in the post, he would learn everything he could to be a first-rate legislator.

Unlike most of his colleagues, Smith read every bill before the Assembly and mastered the arcane legislative procedures. He also hosted regular dinners at his home, inviting every legislator in turn to share some beer, corned beef, and cabbage, so that he might get to know them, learn from them, understand them, and learn how to influence their votes. By 1909, Smith was an Assembly leader, and among his early legislative accomplishments was creation of the nation's first Workmen's Compensation Law.

But his greatest legislative achievement came in the wake of one of the worst workplace disasters in American history. On March 25, 1911, a fire swept through the Asch Building at Green Street and Washington Place in New York City. The top three floors of the ten-story building were occupied by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The firm's workers, mostly immigrant women but including children, tried to put out the blaze only to find that the fire hose was rotted and cracked and there was no water pressure. Panicked, the several hundred workers desperately sought to escape the growing inferno only to discover that the back entrance had been chained shut by their employer to prevent employee theft. The fire escape, ungoverned by any building code, collapsed under the weight of the first few people to use it. Workers who rushed to the front door found that the door opened inward, meaning it could not be budged as the mass of workers pushed forward to get out. A fire drill had never been conducted in the building.

The building's single, small elevator ferried a few lucky survivors to the ground floor. On the final descent, those inside the elevator heard bodies crash onto the roof of the elevator, as workers decided to jump to their death rather than be burned alive. Other workers who made their way to the building's roof, usually with hair in flames, made the same choice. A firemen's safety net collapsed when the first woman to jump hit with a force equal to sixteen tons of pressure. Horrified onlookers now watched as others jumped to certain death and impaled themselves on a wrought iron fence below or hit the ground with such force that the pavement cracked. The fire killed 146 workers, 126 of whom were women.

Smith and future U.S. senator Robert Wagner led the Factory Investigating Commission formed in the wake of the tragedy. In its work, the commission learned that workers, including children, earned as little as one-and-a-half cents an hour in sweatshops like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. They found that many factories lacked toilets; one mill owner provided workers with only a barrel in the basement—and he, shockingly, was a member of the local board of health. They found children as young as three “employed” at jobs such as sorting fruits and vegetables. For these unfortunates, workdays began at 4:00 a.m. and lasted until ten at night. When one child was asked how long he had been working at his job of rolling cigarettes, he blankly replied, “Ever since I was.”

The commission produced thirty-two state bills and New York City another thirty ordinances, and these reforms initiated by Smith and his commission changed the way each of us live and work even today. Because of Smith, every office in America has regular fire drills, sprinklers, and exit doors with panic bars that open outward, and all exit doors are clearly marked with red signs. Other workplace reforms included mandatory clean toilets and washrooms, limited shift hours, restrictions on child labor, and many other initiatives to limit the danger and drudgery of industrial work—plus the inspectors necessary to enforce these new rules.

Given such results, it was not surprising that Smith moved up the political ladder. In 1918, he was elected governor of New York and was already discussed as a potential presidential candidate. He lost his first re-election bid in 1920, when Republicans swept the nation, but won again in 1922 and was re-elected twice more—the first person ever elected governor of New York four times. With his brown derby and ever-present cigar, he was a distinctive figure, but what most distinguished him from so many politicians was his extraordinary record of accomplishments. Smith had completely reorganized New York state government, consolidating New York's 189 different agencies and commissions into a handful accountable to the governor. He increased New York's spending on education ten-fold in eight years, from seven million dollars in 1918–19 to seventy million in 1926–27, doubling teachers' salaries during that same period. He had the state invest heavily in new infrastructure, and, remembering that his own playground as a child had been the pavement, enjoyed promoting a dynamic parks program. When some local millionaires protested plans for a new state park in Long Island on the grounds that it would attract “rabble from the city,” Smith bellowed, “Rabble? That's
me
you're talking about!”

For all his reforms and state investments, Smith still considered himself fundamentally a conservative. “It is a mistake to think that the people approve of reduced appropriations when in the process of reducing them the state or any of its activities are to suffer,” he said. “What the people want is an honest accounting of every dollar appropriated. They want every dollar of public money to bring a dollar's worth of services to the state.” Even with his fiscal prudence, Smith had many progressive admirers. Both Frances Perkins, who later served as FDR's secretary of labor, and the socialist reformer and presidential candidate Norman Thomas concluded that Smith was a “much better [governor] than Roosevelt.”

With such accolades, it is not surprising that Smith was again a strong contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924, but 1924 was also the year membership crested in the resurrected Ku Klux Klan, and what to say and do about the Klan split the Democratic Party in two.

The Klan is primarily remembered in its first and third iterations for its persecution of African Americans during Reconstruction and again during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But the second iteration of the Klan that rose during and immediately after the First World War was focused primarily on resentment by white, middle class Protestants of immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. It also represented, in the words of one scholar, “the most powerful movement of the far right that America has yet produced.”

By 1924, Klan membership peaked, with some estimates placing it as high as five million. It was stronger in some parts of the country than others, but its reach went far beyond the South. Between one-quarter and one-third of all adult white males in Indiana belonged to the Klan, and the Klan openly controlled the state government of Colorado and wielded considerable clout in other states. In Oregon, the Legislature passed a Klan-sponsored law (later ruled unconstitutional) that banned parochial schools.

A resolution was offered at the 1924 Democratic National Convention held in New York City to specifically denounce the KKK by name, but it failed by a single vote (with the shameful help of William Jennings Bryan). William Gibbs McAdoo, the other leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination besides Smith, had the Klan's backing; Smith had the Klan's contempt. So neither man could gain the two-thirds vote of delegates needed for nomination in this badly split convention, and on a record 103rd ballot the party finally turned to former West Virginia congressman, diplomat, and Wall Street attorney John W. Davis, who was trounced by Calvin Coolidge in the general election.

Smith gave one of the more memorable speeches during the 1924 campaign in Buffalo when he attacked the Klan for the sacrilege of christening infants in a Klan ceremony whereby a supposed “disciple of the Christ of Love and Peace, [breathed] into the heart and soul of an infant the spirit of hate and war.” Smith said of the Klan's bigotry, “The Catholics of the country can stand it; the Jews can stand it; our citizens born under foreign skies can stand it; the Negro can stand it; but the United States of America cannot stand it.”

Despite the experience of 1924, Smith believed he could win the presidency, and it is remarkable that he seemed the inevitable choice to lead the Democratic Party in 1928. Harking back to his life in the Fourth Ward, Smith was convinced that, if given the chance, he could unite Catholics, Protestants, and Jews nationally just as he had in New York. Smith told the
New York Times
in February 1928 that “there was no essential difference between the average man of a Middle Western mining town and the man he might meet anywhere in the Bowery.”

That was decidedly not the view of many Americans to whom Smith was a New Yorker in the narrowest sense of the word. Smith was, in the words of one hostile Tennessee editor, “a Manhattanite; of that kith and kin and caste which, complacent in its egotistic self-sufficiency, regards Ninth Avenue as the Far West and the Jersey meadows as beyond the frontier.” Smith was also a “wet,” meaning he believed that the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol, either needed to be repealed or seriously modified. Smith considered Prohibition unenforceable, and in 1923 approved the repeal of New York's enforcement mechanism of Prohibition (alcohol remained illegal, but the state now considered it a matter for federal enforcement only).