Terry Golway - Frank and Al: FDR, Al Smith, and the Unlikely Alliance That Created the Modern Democratic Party

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For journalists, everywhere. Now more than ever.

THE DULL LIGHT of a winters afternoon in Albany was beginning to fade, and the men in stiff collars and dark suits who wrote New Yorks laws shuffled papers and tapped their desks while tiresome colleagues expounded on this or that, seemingly unaware that their impatient audience was making plans for the rest of the evening. Some, the more dutiful, would return to the cheap rooming houses they rented for the legislative session. Others would head for the citys legendary saloons or perhaps to the Ten Eyck Hotel, where it was good to be seen, and afterward stroll toward the Hudson River, to places where women made a living providing the comforts of home, an hour at a time.

In January 1911 the air was unusually warm, as it had been for more than a month. Doctors said the absence of snow and bone-chilling temperatures were to blame for a terrible outbreak of pneumonia that had claimed the lives of more than three dozen Albanians since the beginning of December.

The new majority leader of the New York State Assembly found himself alone and surprisingly unscheduled as his colleagues made their way into the delightfully temperate, if somewhat dangerous, Albany air. Had it been a Thursday, he would have gathered up three or four of his colleaguesmen from the mountains of the North Country, the mill towns of western New York, the potato fields of Long Islandand walked down the hill from the capitol past St. Peters Church to Keelers Restaurant on State Street. As the streetcars clambered by, theyd talk politics, gossip about absent colleagues, or critique the days debates. Once at Keelers, they would feast on corned beef and cabbage in one of the fabulous restaurants fourteen dining rooms, where dozens of waiters scurried about with heaping plates of crab, lobster, and shrimp for those with a bit more cash to spend. Later, when the cigars came out, theyd turn their attention to their host as he told stories in his carnival barkers voice about an exotic place called the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where, it seemed, people from half the nations on earth lived side by side in relative peace and even had a laugh together on occasion. The host had a gift for imitating accents the likes of which his listeners had never heard but found hilarious.

This was the world of Alfred Emanuel Smith, the very picture of a rough-and-tumble pol from the immigrant wards of urban America. He sang Irish songs and told Irish stories, but in truth, he was only half Irish. His father thought of himself as Italian-American, but, in fact, he was half German. Al Smith was a gregarious symbol of the new twentieth-century American who lived in tenement houses, not log cabins or mansions, and who worked in factories, not barns or office buildings. And like those other new Americans, he worshipped God in ways that many found offensive, dangerous, and utterly un-American. He was a Catholic, like many of his neighborsexcept for those who were Jewish. He lived in a portion of America that other Americans would not recognize, where business was transacted in languages other than English, where the locals had long and strange-sounding names, where children played in streets rather than fields. He lived in a portion of America that frightened other Americans.

Al Smith had a honker of a nose, and his big smile revealed a mouthful of gold fillings. His wide-striped suits were brassy and loud. In his younger days, his five-foot, seven-inch frame was slender and lithe. Now, at age thirty-seven, there was a hint of a paunch underneath his vest. He was rarely without a cigar and smoked as many as eighteen a day. His voice, a laborers bellow, was urban and ethnic, and in his everyday speech he displayed only the slightest familiarity with English as it was spoken in the Fort Orange Club, just around the corner from the capitol, or in the uptown neighborhoods of Manhattan. But a more refined colleague who was fond of Smith said he and other legislators overlooked Smiths violations of the rules of grammar because he was such an easygoing fellow, quick with a song and story and a slap on the back.

Except for Thursday night, nobody in Albany worked harder than Al Smith did. He was invariably described as a self-taught political genius, for he left school in eighth grade when he went to work to help his widowed mother and his younger sister. But he had some help in mastering the art of legislation: for a few years early in his political career, Al Smith roomed with a quiet young German immigrant with a law degree, Robert Wagner, who taught him the tricks lawyers played with the peoples business. The two men, both products of the streets of New York City, became good friends, and now, in the winter of 1911, they were the talk of Albany. Smith was not only the assemblys majority leader but chairman of the all-powerful Ways and Means Committee. Wagner, at age thirty-three, was the youngest president of the state senate in New York history.

The press called Smith and Wagner the Tammany Twins, for they were members of Tammany Hall, the infamous Democratic Party machine run by Charles Francis Murphy, a saloonkeeper who was said to treat politicians under his control as though they were waiters at his favorite dining establishment, Delmonicos.

* * *

Because it was not a Thursday and there would be no corned beef and cabbage at Keelers, Al Smith had nothing but his tedious homework to keep him busy until bedtime on this warm January night. But then he ran into his friend Wagner, whose business on this night was very much unfinished. Wagner was on his way to see a junior member of the state senate who was holding up business in Albany on an issue that had little to do with the making of laws and budgets, about which the young man knew very little. He had won election to the state senate in 1910 after promising the laborers, farmers, and mechanics in his rural district that he would protect them from the evils of city politicians, and everybody in the district knew who and what he meant. Now he was making good on his promise and, not coincidentally, adjusting the beam of publicity from Wagner and Smith to himself.

Wagner sought to put an end to the nonsense, so he donned a sackcloth of humility, placed his hat in his hand, and prepared to walk across State Street to meet with the new state senator from Dutchess County, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Roosevelt! Smith had never met the man, but he had heard all about him. Who in Albany had not? Two weeks into his career as a public servant, the twenty-eight-year-old with the brilliant smile and impeccable pedigree had proclaimed himself the new archenemy of Tammany Hall and Murphy the saloonkeeper. He was serving as the spokesman for about two dozen dissident Democrats who refused to attend the partys voting sessions to choose a new U.S. senator from New York. These were the dying years of the old way of electing senators, when state legislatures, not the people, made the choice. Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature, so they were ready to send a fellow Democrat to Washington as the term of the Republican incumbent, Chauncey Depew, expired.