ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
WOMEN AND POLITICS
Volume 6
BELLE MOSKOWITZ
For David, Susanna, and Lewis
BELLE MOSKOWITZ
Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in
the Age of Alfred E. Smith
ELISABETH ISRAELS PERRY
First published in paperback in 1992 by Routledge
This edition first published in 2019
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ISBN: 978-1-138-36393-9 (Set)
ISBN: 978-0-429-39879-7 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-38663-1 (Volume 6) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42668-1 (Volume 6) (ebk)
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BELLE MOSKOWITZ
Feminine Politics
and the Exercise of Power
in the Age of Alfred E. Smith
Elisabeth Israels Perry
Routledge
New York London
Paperback edition published in 1992 by
Routledge
An imprint of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
29 West 35 Street
New York, NY 10001
Paperback Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
Cloth edition published in 1987 by Oxford University Press
Copyright, 1992 by Elisabeth Israels Perry
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Portions of this book are reprinted from Labor History, 23 (1982), 5-31, and American Quarterly 37 (1985), 719-33, with the kind permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Perry, Elisabeth Israels.
Belle Moskowitz: feminine politics and the exercise of power in the age of Alfred E. Smith / Elisabeth Israels Perry.
.p cm.
Originally published: New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-90545-1
1. Moskowitz, Belle, 1877-1933. 2. Smith, Alfred Emanuel, 18731944. 3. PoliticiansNew York (State)Biography. 4. Social reformersNew York (State)Biography. 5. New York (State)Politics and government1865-1950. I. Title.
F124. M885P47 1992 974. 7042092dc20
[B]
91-38013
CIP
British Cataloging in Publication Data
also available
Contents
Let it not be imagined that she was an ambitious woman, that hers was the ambition to lead. It was the will to serve and not the desire to lead that ruled her life.
Rabbi Stephen S. Wise
Eulogy for Belle Moskowitz, 4 January 1933
The news that Belle Moskowitz had died sent a wave of shock and disbelief through the crowd assembled in Albany for the inauguration of New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman. Its a disaster! former Governor Alfred E. Smith cried. Moskowitz had been his closest adviser. A few weeks earlier she had fallen down the front steps of her home and broken her arms. Since then, she had been laid up, presumably recovering. Few had known that more serious complications had set in. Smith and his entourage, including Moskowitzs oldest son, Carlos Israels, left Albany for New York. Three days later, three thousand mourners poured into Temple Emanu-El, and more gathered outside, jamming Fifth Avenue.
The day after her death on January 2, 1933, at the age of fifty-five, the New York Times published a long obituary that began on the first page. Its author said that, during A1 Smiths ascendancy within the Democratic party, Moskowitz had been the most powerful woman in American politics. The author did not need to add that, throughout the 1920s, Moskowitz had been the most powerful woman in New York State politics. After assisting in Smiths first election as governor in 1918, she served as his political strategist and campaign manager during his four terms in office. A social reformer whose efforts dated from the Progressive Era, she developed many of the programs for which Smith later became famous. In 1928 she was the first woman to direct publicity in a major political partys national campaign, and was the only woman on the Democratic National Committees executive committee. When Smith lost the election, he retained Moskowitz as his publicity and literary agent, and chose her to organize his bid for renomination in 1932. Her death meant the loss of a major prop in his battle to remain a power in American politics.
Today Belle Moskowitzs name is no longer widely known. Further, the story of how she achieved her position in an age when few women played major political roles has never been told. One reason is that Moskowitz did not save most of her political papers. We will never know why. Perhaps she discarded them when she moved residences or offices, or when she finished one project and moved on to the next. Perhaps she did not think they were important. To her, what mattered was what she accomplished, not the record of her role. Moreover, since she died fairly young and suddenly, after only a brief illness, she never had a chance to reflect upon the past. Had she lived longer, she might have made an effort to collect and preserve her traces.
Another reason her papers disappeared may lie with her familys treatment of them. After she died, her youngest son Josef Israels cleaned out the attic. Although he recognized that his mother had been a great woman, he lacked the perspective to recognize the importance of the material she had saved, especially from her early life. He preserved a remnant, which her family later donated to Connecticut College for Women, but threw out the rest. On January 13, 1933, he wrote his sister Miriam Franklin, Most of mothers things are pretty well cleaned up. Ive been doing that personally because it would give Dad the Willies and Carlos just couldnt be much help at it. He complained, Mother never threw anything away. Ive just mercilessly thrown out masses of ancient junk rather than pass their meaningless dust on to new generations. On August 11 he reported that he was still moving useless junk out of the house, a vast accumulation that included Grandmas wedding lace, torn and yellow, pictures of unheard of relatives and old magazines and newspapers from 1905. I sort out and throw out a carload a day, and it seems an endless job. He did save locks of his own and Carloss baby hair.
