Al Smith

Alfred Emanuel Smith (New York, December 30, 1873–ibid., October 4, 1944), known as Alfred E. Smith or Al Smith, was an American politician. Of Italian and Irish family, he was sheriff and governor of New York and the first Catholic candidate of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States.

Early years

Son of Alfred Emanuele Ferraro and Catherine Mulvihill, he grew up in the multiethnic neighborhood of the Lower East Side, in Manhattan on Oliver Street in New York. His grandparents were of Irish, German, Italian and English descent, but Smith, a devout Catholic, identified with the Irish-Catholic community and became its spokesman and leader around 1920. He was thirteen years old when his father, Alfred, a veteran of the civil war, owner of a small trucking firm, died. At fourteen years old he was forced to leave his studies at the parochial school, St. James School, to help support the family. He did not attend secondary school or higher education; He said he had learned everything he knew about people by studying at the Fulton Fish Market, a job for which he was paid $12 a week. On May 6, 1900, Alfred Smith married Catherine A. Dunn, with whom he had 5 children.

Political career

In his political career, he emphasized his humble origins, identified with immigrants, and saw himself as a man of the people. His first political job was as a clerk in a Jury Commissioner's office in 1895. In 1903 he was elected to the New York Assembly. He served as vice president of the commission appointed to investigate factory conditions after one hundred workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911. Smith launched a crusade against dangerous and unsanitary workplace conditions. and advocated corrective legislation. In 1911 the Democrats won the majority in the state Assembly, and Smith was elected chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. In 1912, after the loss of the majority, he was appointed minority leader and later, speaker (president) of the Assembly in 1913, when the Democrats regained the majority in the following election, until 1914 in which he was again the leader. minority, losing to the Republicans. He held this position until his election as sheriff of New York County in 1915.

Since then he led the progressive movement in New York City and in the state itself. His campaign manager and top aide was Belle Moskowitz, the daughter of Jewish Prussian immigrants.

In early 1918 Smith was elected governor of New York City with the help of Charles F. Murphy, who ran Tammany Hall, and James A. Farley. He was the first citizen of Irish origin elected governor of a state, although not the first Catholic, an honor that corresponds to Martin H. Glynn who held the position in New York between 1913 and 1914, after the impeachment of Governor William Sulzer. In 1919 he gave the famous speech "A man as low and means as I can picture", definitively breaking with William Randolph Hearst. The editor and journalist Hearst, a notorious exponent of the tabloid press, who was the leader of the most populist wing of the Democratic Party in the city and had allied himself with Tammany Hall for the local administration election, attacked Smith, accusing him of & #3. 4; depriving children of food " for not reducing the price of milk.

Smith lost reelection in 1920, but was reelected as governor in 1922, 1924, and 1926. As governor he became known nationally as a progressive leader who sought to make government more efficient and effective in social issues. His young assistant, Robert Moses, designed the nation's first state park system and reformed the civil service system; Smith later appointed him secretary of state of New York.

During her term in New York she strengthened laws on workers' compensation, women's pensions, and child and women's labor with the help of Frances Perkins, who would become the first woman to serve in the Cabinet. upon being appointed Secretary of Labor by President Rossvelt. At the 1924 Democratic Convention she failed to win the nomination as a candidate for the US Presidency. But she advanced the cause of civil liberties, decrying racial violence and lynching. Roosevelt called him "the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield." In 1928 he won the Democratic nomination, being the first Catholic candidate of one of the two major parties. He received a comprehensive defeat against Herbert Hoover, weighed down both by his religious creed and by his anti-prohibitionist stance, opposing Prohibition. During the campaign he was attacked by Protestant groups for both reasons. He was also harmed by the long history of corruption at Tammany Hall, to which he was somehow linked, and by the economic prosperity of the roaring 20s, immediately preceding the Great Depression. Journalist Frederick William Wile summarized the causes of Al Smith's defeat in the three Ps: "Prohibition, Prejudice and Prosperity".

Civilian life

After the 1928 election, he became president of Empire State Inc., the corporation that built and operated the Empire State Building.

Smith cut the ribbon at the opening of the tallest building in May 1931, built in just 13 months. Just like with the Brooklyn Bridge. With the Empire State it was a vision and an achievement built by combining the interests of all or rather having divided by the interests of a few. Like most New York City businessmen, Smith supported World War II.

Smith died on October 4, 1944, at the age of 70, devastated by the death of his wife from cancer five months earlier. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York.

Electoral history

Presidential Elections of 1928