The Contenders Al Smith : CSPAN3 : October 13, 2020 2:41pm-4:45pm EDT : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive

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o'connor, and that is jolting, those are deeply catholic stories. so i have to think about that a little bit more. there are leaders across american life now and that's one of the interesting things about studying catholicism. >> and you find this interesting? >> sure. it's -- generally, i think being an historian is an amazing occupation and i always have to remind myself how lucky i am about teaching this. my own fascination right now is with catholicism as a global institution and how you compare the american experience to other experiences and i find that interesting. >> john mcgreevy, from the university of notre dame, thank you for your time. >> what a pleasure. thank you. you're watching american history tv. every weekend on c-span3, explore our nation's past.

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c-span3, created by america's cable television companies as a public service and brought to you today by your television provider. i come here tonight to the al smith dinner knowing i'm the underdog in the final weeks. if you know where to look, there are signs of hope. even in the most unexpected places, even in this room full of proud manhattan democrats, i can't -- i can't shake that feeling that some people here are pulling for me. [ applause ] >> i'm delighted to see you here tonight, hilary. [ laughter ] >> i was thrilled to get this invitation and i feel at home here because it's often been said that i share the politics of alford e. smith and the ears of alford e. newman.

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it's an honor to be here with al smith. i never knew your great grandfather. from everything that senator mccain has told me -- [ laughter ] >> -- the two of them had a great time together before prohibition. >> of course i'm delighted, but not surprised, by the final repeal of the 18th amendment. i felt all along that when this matter was properly submitted to the rank-and-file of our people, they would readily see that it had no place in our constitution. it would be very difficult if not impossible to estimate what would come to this country from the lessons taught to the coming generations to make it their business to see that no such matter as this is ever again made the subject of federal constitutional law. >> and you've been listening to the 2008 presidential nominees talking at that year's annual al smith dinner followed by al

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smith himself talking about the lifting of prohibition in 1933. hello and welcome to c-span's "the contenders" series. we come to you live tonight from albany, new york, where al smith served for 12 years before being elected governor and becoming the democratic nominee for president in 1928. our guests for the next two hours, as we relive the 1928 presidential election and the life and career of al smith, john evers, the former historian for the new york state assembly and he's a ph.d. candidate at soonny albany and doing his sisseration on al smith and joined by bethany gage. she's a history professor. professor, gage, set the scene for us to begin. 1928, the united states, what was going on in this country, what were some of the issues that we're going to be discussed

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in the 1928 election. >> at the 1928 election is one of the most interesting and also one of the most vicious elections in american history. we have two candidates who i think really embody two different sorts of americas that are coming into conflict in the election. so we have al smith, who is the subject tonight, al smith is urban. he's from new york city. he's an irishman. he is catholic and he represents a kind of immigrant, urban america that has come of age in the last 30 years. on the other side, as a republican candidate in 1928, we have herbert hoover who in many ways would hardly be more different from al smith. he's from the mid best. he's from iowa. he is very straight-laced. he's distinctly nonurban. he's pious and these two men in

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1928 really encapsulate some of the most important cultural and political clashes of that moment, clashes over prohibition. to some degree, clashes over the economy, but in many ways, this turns out to be a cultural election that hinges on which of these two americas is the america that's going to be voted into office. >> it's been said that the three "p"s influenced this election in 1928, prohibition, prejudice, and prosperity. >> i think the three "p"s capture it. on prohibition, we have al smith who is one of the nation's most outspoken opponents of prohibition. prohibition has been in effect for almost a decade and it has been a real problem for most of that time and throughout al smith, like many urban politicians, has said that it's a bad idea not only because it

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infringes on americans' freedom, but because it's causing a law enforcement crisis and there are many people who are concerned about this by 1928. what's going to happen to prohibition is certainly one of the big questions. we have herbert hoover on the other side. in terms of prosperity, as you might imagine, both of them are running in favor of prosperity. the problem for al smith is that you've had eight years of republican rule in the presidency by that point, first warren harding and then followed by calvin coolidge. and the republicans have a leg up on the prosperity front. you've had the 1920s. it's been a boom decade certainly for wall street. although less for farmers and agriculture agricultural at that point. that's our second "p." and the darkest part of this election and why it was one of the most vicious elections in history is the third "p," the question of prejudice. and al smith, i think most americans today are probably more familiar with john kennedy

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as a catholic candidate. even in 1960, that causing real stir, a real set of questions about the presidency, but al smith raised all of those questions much early in 1928 which already had been a decade that had been seized with a lot of questions about immigration, immigration reform, the rise of the cue cluku klux klan. >> it was a vicious campaign and smith was not -- this was not new to him. when he ran in new york state to be governor of new york state. in 1914, martin glen faced anticatholic prejudice. it showed up in the 1915 constitutional convention as a little bit of a whispering campaign. he went into this in advance of the election knowing this would be an issue.

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in fact, he addressed this issue in 1927 in his he ply to the atlantic monthly discussing why a catholic man could be president although it was a very good statement, but it was intellectual and it went over everybody's heads. >> we are in the new york state assembly chamber in albany new york, finished in 1894. we also are pleased to have join us a studio audience of albany area residents, historians, some interested in al smith here, and they'll have a chance to ask questions about our two guests. and we're going to put the phone numbers on the screen. we're not going to take phone calls for a little while. we're going to put them on the screen so you can start to dial in now. this is the sixth in our 14-week series, "the contenders."

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202-737-0001, 202-737-0002 if you live in the mountain or pacific i assume zones. what kind of of a candidate was al smith in 1928?737-0001. 737-0002. >> he was a fighter. if you look at him and the short stature and the pugnaciousness of him and his voice comes out all across america and this is one of the first campaign where radio plays a role. he campaigns from the back of trains which is very common, but he goes out there and tries to engage america on issues that are important to americans and as we already talked about, they didn't want to talk about those issues. prosperity was there, so he couldn't talk about issues and say that i'm the candidate of the prosperity and the republican party. he wanted to talk about water power and prohibition which was just unheard of, but he came out as a fighter and his speeches were well reasoned. on paper, he was a fantastic

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candidate, but he was swimming uphill the whole time. >> beverly gauge, electoral vote count in 1928, 87 for al smith and what states did he win and why? >> it was definitely a blowout election and i think the real, in some ways we can almost say al smith, maybe he should thank his lucky stars that he did not, in fact, win the 1928 election and herbert hoover, we may remember al smith's name a little more, but what would we remember him for? >> it was one for such a nasty campaign and one of the questions of the election ultimately became was it prosperity? was it simply the fact that republicans could take credit for this boom decade and therefore smith never really had a chance or was it a rejection of all the things that smith

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really felt deeply and that he stood for? and i think smith really took that to heart and he was concerned about that and the nastiness of that campaign. so he had some support, but not a whole lot. >> there's a fourth "p" and progressivism. al smith was known as a progressive during his time in the legislature and during his time as governor and did that play an issue at all and how was it? >> progressivism is a turn of the century phenomenon and begins around 1900s and say teddy roosevelt is our pioneer progressive and what it means by the 1920s is very hard to define in many ways. there were people who called themselves progressives who supported prohibition and who were impassioned about it and there were some proopposwho werd

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to prohibition and there was a sense that had come about and that al smith really did stand for, that you could use government in new and proactive ways to deal with some of the really pressing social and industrial conditions that americans faced back in the early part of the 20th century, and al smith as governor and running as a candidate for president really tried to make that case. he changes his mind later as the new deal comes along and that was the basic idea of progressivism and the idea that you could use federal power to change people's lives for the better. >> that's a key point about smith. you talk about the new deal today. we talk about the programs and the social security issues and all of the things that fdr brought in. when smith ran for president he had experimented with all of these things in new york state.

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>> he was a champion of the labor issue and the champion of the hydroelectric power and he was one that wanted to spend money for the social programs of the state and they were fore runners of the new deal and when he ran in 1928 people didn't want to talk about that issue and it was this unknown politician that had this thick, new york accent that came out to the farm country. and even smith when he campaigned, he had one funny story. he was driving on the train to wyoming and they were about an hour out and he sees a horse out in the field and he says to someone, he must be getting close to civilization, that's a horse out there. and we have about an hour to go and it showed how much smith was out of his element and he was used to new york and the country was used to someone other than a new yorker and they were used to that prosperity and the calvin

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coolidge, warren harden. >> were you an automatic for consideration on the stage? >> absolutely. al smith was am nominated and i was the favorite son candidacies and they nominated al smith for governor or president in 1928 and it went one round and they dropped the votes and they go with eventually it was the cops from ohio. in 1924 they went out for smith and it was 103 ballots and they had to compromise candidate who is also a new yorker. in 1928 he wins the nomination and all through history, the new york governor is automatically considered presidential material and if you look at the people that have run and won and those that have run and lost, through history. >> i think that it's new york was incredibly important and

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there were two key political states and new york is one of them and ohio was the other one and they kept producing president after president and i don't think we have states quite like that anymore, and maybe we can look to something like texas, and when you look at the republican party, and you see teddy roosevelt and charles evans hughes coming out of politics and you look at the democratic party and you see smith and franklin roosevelt and new york as a state has two machines really going and it has a pretty significant national effect. >> two machines? >> the famous machine is the republicans had an incredibly powerful network, as well. >> so tamany hall is the new york city democratic party and the manhattan democratic party and tamany hall from the mid-19th century was best known

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as the machine of machines in urban america. so it was identified as primarily irish machine. a machine in new york that really depended on neighborhood power, word power and that was as much as taking care of your neighborhood and coming up with your neighborhood as national politics and tamany the most powerful folks certainly in new york city politics in that moment and in new york state, democratic politics, how does tamany hall fit into the 1928 election. >> that was the brush that painted smith into the corner. we talked about the issue and this started in the convention in 1928. tamany hall would go to the conventions and new york was a key state and they would nominate the democratic candidates and many elections and they had the democratic candidate and teddy roosevelt ran in 1904 and the chief judge

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of the court of appeals in new york state and one was a republican and one was a democrat. tamany hall was seen in new york state as the corrupt machine and it was seen as boss tweed and people like william jennings bryant would rant about tamany and he didn't want a tamany man there, and smith is the tamany man and the candidate and it shocked many of the people within the democratic party. >> al smith lost new york in the 1928 election. >> and he had the sad fate of losing the race for president of the united states in seeing his hand picked successor and fdr wins and it flips the dynamic of smith and roosevelt's relationship forever and ultimately roosevelt winds up where smith wanted to be and

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smith winds up in retirement. when we asked you prior to the show some of the issues that we thought were important to the 1928 election and one that you mentioned was the role of the media in 1928. why? >> well, i think, particularly for al smith came off as a media battler and one of the most powerful newspaper tycoons in the country and so smith, i think, had a certain amount of confidence by 1928 that he knew how to fend off those kinds of press attacks and ultimately in the election and one of the interesting things about the catholic issue is that we now understand the two have been absolutely crucial to his election and smith openly acknowledged it and a lot of it was done and talked about through innuendo. john mentioned earlier the idea of a whispering campaign and that it wasn't something that was going to be said in the press and at the same time the press was going to feed into

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these images and so i think smith from my reading of it, anyway, was sort of behind from the first with the press in part because there was so much coded language being used in part because the press liked to sort of -- of a feisty personality and they liked to write about it, but was quite con tetemptuo out of it. >> one of the things that was interesting about smith and the press is he loved the press. he used to hold press conferences here in albany and the press corps got to know what was on the record and off the record and his newspapers in new york state and he enjoyed that. when he left the safe confines of new york state and this whispering campaign came out and there were papers that weren't friendly to him and weren't covering the issues that were with the campaign and he wasn't used to that and he wasn't used

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to the media of the day and the pie plate. he used to call the microphone that you'd speak to, and he accepted the nomination for the president of the united states. >> he would speak into the microphone. he did not like to read prepared speeches and he didn't like ed o write on the backs of envelopes and he said i'll address the nation about these things and i'll speak from the heart and when it started to be more of the prepared speech, she was used to doing the campaign of the old tammy hall way meeting people, greeting people and going out amongst them. >> you also mentioned the rise of radio, and i think that made a huge difference in how americans were able to perceive smith because he is this new york guy and do you want to attempt to do an al smith

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impersonation? >> i don't have a deep enough voice. >> the fact that people could not only read about it, but could actually hear him and in many ways to broad swaths of americans he sounded foreign, right? he sounded different from them, and that became another big issue in the campaign. >> so this was the first time ever that people were able to hear in mass media their canned theas, correct? >> oh, yeah. as radio started to get bigger and as media started to circulate tv came much later, but people would hear the campaigns from their war leader, from their political machines. they'd read it in the paper. they didn't see the candidate and let alone hear the candidate and when you have a candidate that comes out there pronouncing radio as radio or hospital as hospital and people would ask is this guy an american and that would add to the whispering campaign. >> again, we are live from the new york state assembly chamber

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in albany, new york. >> the contenders, al smith, four-time governor of new york 1928 presidential nominee for the democrats. 202-737-7001 in the eastern time zone. >> 202-737-7002 if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones. we'll return to the 1928 election as often as our callers, our questioners want to, but we want to learn a little bit about what and where al smith came from. here is a little bit of al smith talking about how he was raised. >> i was born down in 174th in a little house right under the brooklyn bridge. you know, the bridge was erected when i was a small boy. my father was at the opening ceremony and when he came home he said, al alfred, i've

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witnessed a bitter disappointment. what did he mean? here's the story as he told it to me. he said son, this bridge has kept thousands of men working for years. the cable, the concrete, the wiring and the machinery cost millions of dollars and today was the opening and the bands were playing and flags were waving, they cut the tape and finally it happened. what happened? they found out that all you could do was go to brooklyn. [ laughter ] thft the neighborhood where al smith grew up and it was on the south street port. he raised children here. he went to school right around the block until eighth grade when his father died and he went off to work to support his mother and his sister, but this was al smith and this is where

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his accent came from, and this where it all began for him. it was all irish and italian and they came from over there innelinne ellis island and in through this neighborhood and kind of grew from there. >> the second speaker we heard was al smith iv, al smith's great grandson. >> i never knew vocal chords could be inherited. that sounded a little bit like his grandfather. the lower east side was the southern tip of manhattan and that is where smith was from on the southeast side and it was a port not like it is today and that was his playground and he came from an irish family, but it's interesting that it's not well known although it's being

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rediscovered now and smith's father was from german and italian roots, but smith used to claim that he didn't know this and you probably didn't know this and he came up in this bustling area and the center of his neighborhood was the catholic church where he went to st. james and was an altar boy and the sad part of smith's early life and shaped him forever was that he lost his father very young and he was about 12. his father was a trucking man, a teamster and he would carve goods from the sea port up through the city and he died young and forced smith to leave school. he never graduated from the eighth grade. in fact, if you trace the red book entries which is the official biographies, he always said that he graduated from eighth grade which wasn't true and he inherited his father's dr truck business which also wasn't true. it was a room filled with doctors and wealthy men from upstate, but this real

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struggling die hard neighborhood shaped him forever and it made him tough. he enjoyed it and for the rest of his life it was a catholic church, it was the family and the democratic party. >> he went through seventh grade. >> he had to leave about a month or two prior to graduating from eighth grade because things were too tough at home. >> al smith was born in lower east side of new york and what was new york like? what was the country like in 1873? >> 1873, new york is growing increasingly different, actually from the rest of the country in many ways. so at that point we are eight years out from the end of the civil war and that remains for much of the country, sort of the dominant, political fact of recent history. in new york, really, though, you're beginning to see the city change in all sort of interesting ways. in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, you have this first massive wave

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of immigration and that was mostly from places like ireland and places like germany and irish and german immigrants had settled in the city and by the time you are getting into the 1870s, '80s and '90s, you are getting waves of immigration from new areas and italy, russia, and eastern europe and new york is really becoming the way we think about it as a polyglot city and this is really the age in which that's beginning to congeal and become an important part of the city's politics. as part of this all of these groups are be beginning to organize and this is the heyday of tamany hall of getting its bearings in new york in the middle of the 19th century. >> what were conditions like? the lower east side is famous during these years particularly as you get into the late 19th century as being the single most crowded place on the face of the

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earth and there's not much tenement regulation at that point, and not much sanitary regulations and there are crowded conditions and there are often big problems with disease on the lower east side because sanitary conditions are poor. in many people's minds you have tight-knit neighborhood which is had powerful institutions and sometimes churches and sometimes synagogues and sometimes labor unions beginning to emerge during these years. the lower east side is the tightly packed, very intense place in new york and for a lot of the country it's a symbol of for many people the urban ills that are beginning to impress upon the country and overcrowding and poor working conditions and disease and for many people and this continues through to the 1920s and immigration itself being a

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symbol of the way that the country is changing. >> in smith's day it's the same. he was talking about the sailors for the different countries and he would meet people from all over the world, literally. and there were seks of the area where he lived. >> there were russians and jews and people from chinatown and he lived in this enclave that was surrounded by all of this. he could go around the block and he could go a block down the street and he would be from all over the world. he thought he knew america, and he knew what it meant to be tolerant and to see different ethnicities. this was his world. later on when he went out in america, part of the shock was it wasn't all like this. he thought he knew new york state -- when he first went to the assembly and started traveling the state, he realized i've seen more in my

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neighborhood than what these people have seen. he couldn't bring them down, and this is how america really is. it's this polyglot and a melting pot. some of it came to xenophobia and anti-religion and to his accent and it was almost a kind of way for them to say you're foreign. you're not like us. >> and we will get to calls in just a minute, but he went to work in about 1886 at 13 years old. where did he go to work? >> he had one of the toughest careers i've ever heard of. he starts early and goes and sells newspapers, after school he'd sell newspapers and makes a few dollars that way. it's not enough. his mother incidentally had to go and get a job the day they buried his father. she comes back from the funeral and goes to the lady in the umbrella factory prior to

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marrying him and gets her job back. smith selling paper, it's not enough. eventually he goes through a rapid series of jobs working at a small candy store that his mother was a proprietor of. he used to run around the south end in lower manhattan and pick up the different trucks for his company and report that don't come back and go to this spot and it's a truck spotter and he gets the most famous job which is fulton fish market. a young man who is a teenager and going back in the morning and rolling barrels and shoveling crushed ice and coming home smelling like fish, and they'd get back at 4:00 in the afternoon and this led to them getting a job in tamany hall smelling like fish and the good thing about it was he got to take home all of the fish he wouldn't and if they could pile

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all of the fish out and it was 15 deep because that's how poor he was and fulton fish market gave him a lot of free food. >> this is the contenders. we're talking about al smith in the 1928 presidential election and the first step for our two guests is east greenbush, new york, wayne, you're on. c-span. >> wayne, are you with us? >> i'm here. please, go ahead. >> the question is twofold. just in what al smith's role and commitment was to both the new york civil service system and how he championed that when he campaigned on the federal level and what specific things did he do to help reform new york state politics and particularly the civil service system and this commitment to labor, and new york state and later on the

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federal -- >> thank you, wayne. that's a really good point that separated al smith when it came to labor issues and in 1911 there was the famous triangle shirt and fired down in manhattan, and smith was on the xhigd that w commission that was passed by the legislature to study labor law and smith drew closer and he became good friends with francis perk ins and the reforming at the time and the labor laws, and fire escapes, and how was the service and health codes and workman's compensation and hand in hand with that probably was the advent of civil service and being a tamany man, he wanted to pack everything with democrats and this to say and this grew up as it became prevalent, toward the end of that dube earn torial career. the most qualified person would

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have the job and smith would have people in his cabinet that were republicans and not enrolled and people that would have nothing to do with government at all and the commissioner was a military engineer who had, i believe, republican affiliations so smith wanted the most qualified people around him and some of that bled over into the civil service. so he wanted to have good civil service and he also wanted to have strong labor relations. he stood up for those that came to labor that were shunned to the side and the republican party fought him on this. he took that nationally when he campaigned and had the support of the aflcio from naeshg state in 1928 and the afl was the aflcio 1935. it was not national in the 1928 campaign. >> beverly gauged those issues that john was just talking about. did they play out nationally and how strong were the forces

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behind those issues? >> they did. al smith was someone was radicalized over the course of his time as a politician and starts out as an unexceptional tamany guy that is not putting forth particularly creative ideas and we don't know that much of what he was doing when he was an early assemblyman, but both through the social turmoil that you had during the progressiveiary and particularly through the triangle fire which does seem to have been this kind of eye-opening moment for him. 146 people die in this fire, right? they're mostly teenage girls and locked in the shirt waist building and they're forced to jump to their death and he becomes a true progressive in both what i would say is the

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sort of radical and not radical sense of that word. when he begins to work on the commission they revamp fire codes and they pass legislation to protect women and children and so he becomes an advocate of paternalistic labor laws and of revamping building codes. he's never a super strong supporter of kind of grassroots organizing from its base and one of the things that's often left out of the triangle story is the fact that there were strikes under way in the factory and the shirt waist industry and that was something that he champions in quite the same way in the way that he does ameliorate industrial conditions and that's his stance by the time he's running for president in the 1920s. the 1920s are not a good decade for american labor and so it's not one of the big issues of the campaign, but nonetheless, he holds on to this progressive

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tradition and one other thing that's worth noting, as well is i actually first encountered al smith when i was doing some research on a bombing that happened in new york in 1920 which was this attack on wall street at the time, but i encountered al smith because he had just become governor and this was in the midst of the red scare after the world war, and five assemblymen who had been seated in and voted in from districts of new york and were seated in the new york assembly were thrown out and al smith turned out to be a champion of their right to stay in the assembly. there was a lot of concern in the wake of the bolshevik revolution and the strike waves in the united states over radicalism, but al smith really stood up and he said they have every right to be here and he was one of the few voices that were speaking out in favor of a broadvision of democrat see and of political opinion at that point. >> john evers, knowing what you do about al smith, how do you

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think he'd feel about the current occupy wall street movement? >> that would be interesting. smith always championed, and it was a luck of the draw the underdog because he was an underdog. smith went out there and took on popular stances. he got out there in 1920 and told the speaker of the assembly, i'll put out the press championing and the right of the people to hold their seats. he was flabbergasted. these people are anarchists. the same with labor, and he was sending in this case, francis perkins, a woman who had to settle a dispute, and he said he's not only sending government people, he's sending women now. he was unconventional to that. there was more diversity when it comes to state government.

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i think smith would probably look at it and say what was it for the good of the people? he was not in his early days a big champion of big business francis in cincinnati. thanks for holding, you're on the contenders on c-span. go ahead. >> good evening. i have been privileged to have gone to school in albany and i would like to know if you could address the financial backing that al smith had by john j. ratzkoff and when he was trying to become president. >> francis, where did you go to school in albany? we have several colleges represented in the audience this evening in the assembly. >> i went to the academy of the sacred heart on south pearl street which, unfortunately, has been closed and is now for sale.

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>> that's right. the financial question. >> who was john j. raska. >> he was a good friend of the dupont family and one of the key people at general motors. raska was a multimillionaire, and smith was not a huge champion of business and he voted as he was told to vote and he later on drifted more toward pro-business and that was after the roosevelt fallout and the american league, and raska was a multimillionaire and he wanted to be involved in politics and he got to be friends with al smith and smith makes him the head of the campaign in 1928 much to the consternation of people around him who said this guy is not a politician and not active in democratic politics and why are you doing this and people thought it was because of

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the money and smith became good friends with many people and bill kenny was one and these irish men who made a lot of money and became millionaires and gave smith jobs they made him head of the empire state corporation and smith did drift toward more money later on and smith wanted him as a friend and of course, he brought a lot of money. >> right. >> i think it's true, it depends which al smith we're talking about, and al smith, there's al smith as a young man who is as i said, a straightforward, tamany politician and he's voting as tamany tells him to vote and no glimmers of greatness and then he becomes this progressive politician both as governor of new york and then when he's running for president in 1928 and throughout the 1920s. after that, he takes a turn in which he becomes deeply, deeply

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hostile not only to the new deal, but takes up some of the kind of red-baiting tactics that he himself had fought so hard against. in terms of trying to judge how is smith going to respond to the social movements of his day, some of whom were anti-wall street. if you got him at the right moment he would have been, as john says, he would have been gesturing in support if not being deeply in support. later in his life he would have been calling them communists. >> before we got started, you pointed out where al smith sat in this chamber as a member of the assembly. he started out somewhere in the back, you said. as beverly gauge said at that point, right? >> way in the back. seat 143. he used to get confused with the bystanders and the visitors and that was before they had

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microphones. for two full years he never spoke which is hard to believe. >> he sat in two seats with the gentleman with the beard raising his hand. >> the majority leader and when he served as majority leader. >> right here. and this gentleman here with the tie. >> that was the minority leader and that was in 1911. smith became majority leader when the democrats took over. in 1912, they went into the minority and then in 1913 he wound up being the speaker. and right behind us is the speaker's chair, but right off the chamber, maybe 20 steps from where we're sitting is the speaker's office that al smith used. the currentec sp speaker, sydne sheldon -- sheldon silver. i am so sorry about that. sheldon silver, of course, usees that office now and in there is a portrait of al smith. >> they came from the same

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district. they're both democrats and they were both speaker of the assembly. it's interesting that when you talk about -- it's almost 100 years ago that smith was speaker and 100 years later we had a speaker from the same district, same political party and the neighborhood is still a very diverse neighborhood. smith became speaker on a fluke. new york state reapportionment was so heavily weighted in favor of the republicans that the democrats rarely held this chamber. he was only in the majority twice and he only became democratic once in the '30s and he had to go bfefore the democrats took over. he would be glad that they finally got the representation they needed to match one man, one vote and you could then allow new york city to send its proper amount of legislators to new york and is it resulted in

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another manhattan speaker. >> we talked with speaker sheldon silver about al smith. here's what he had to say. >> i think he was a man ahead of his time. his reaction to the triangle shirt, and putting legislation to deal with child labor and with labor generally providing rights. we today commemorate commemorate the 100th anniversary of it, in the legislative session, but all of the legislation protectionng workers are what we in the legislation have today and al smith when he was the governor of the state. he talked about having the wealthier pay a little bit more. he had some great quotes about

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it. i actually wrote one down because it's as appropriate today as it was in 1930 and what do we say about our colleagues who reject an income tax amendment? what do they say? they reject it, why? they're unwilling to say the great wealth ought to bear their share of the burden of government and they're unwilling to subscribe to the indisputable principle that he who benefits the most should pay the most, and that was al smith in 1930 and that debate is taking place today again. >> john evers, that portrait or that photograph of al smith that's in that speaker's office. when was that taken? >> that was probably taken when he was the speaker and a very young man. smith was elected to the assembly when he was only about 30 years old and so he would probably be in that picture,

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mid-30s or so. maybe close to 35, 36 or so so that might have been one of his official portraits as an assemblyman and it was the portrait as a speaker. >> how powerful was the speaker of the assembly and how does that compare with the power today? >> the speaker is the most powerful person and i'd say it was comparable. back then when smith was just starting out and as i mentioned he sat way in the back row. he didn't even meet the speaker, fred nixon until three days before the session adjourned. the speaker back then was almost regal. today it's more, the power is more diffused and it's not as ash trar as it used to be and still the speaker has tremendous control over the bills that come to the floor and who is on what committee and what the program will be and so it still is a key

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job and the a system blee leass. >> the state governor in the teens and today. >> as i said, new york is this key state nationally, but it has its own particular political culture and in many ways reflects some of the things we see today. the difference between your urban core, your new york is largely dominated although not exclusively by a tamany machine and you've got cultural differences and political differences there and because you had all of these differences, it was always a question of what kinds of issues you would be able to deal with at the state level and one of the things that al smith really ends up doing as governor, as i understand it, john, anyway is that he tries to make it

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possible for the governor to do, and it's not a strong post at that point. certainly not for tamany hall, your powers are concentrated in new york city and al smith is an ambassador from the city to the rest of the state, and he's also trying to make it possible in this impulse to make more things possible, to consolidate executive power up here in albany in ways that you haven't seen before. >> and we'll talk about his career. as for term governor of new york after we take this call from fort lauder deal. neil, you're on the contenders? how are you two gentlemen, and lady? >> your forum is absolutely incredibly stimulating. i don't have the credentials that you folks do. i fancy myself a upon lawn chair historian. despite his oppositions of a new

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deal, catholicism should not enter the picture. he was a proponent for the middle class and pro labor ask a well-intentioned individual, what if, would mr. smeth's mine set, thank you so much and i enjoy watching. >> beverly gauge. >> that's an interesting question. smith goes through a very weird, political transition. after he lost the presidential election he flips on a lot of when he stood for up to that point and i know that we'll get to talking about that a little bit later in the show, but he was a populist of sorts. he wasn he wasn't an absolute populist and he wasn't a william jennings populist. if anything, he didn't like the

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brian wing of the party, particularly around cultural issues, but he was a sort of urban populist and i think it's absolutely true that he's an advocate of the middle class and he himself is a figure who embodies and advertises that he embodies the kind of working you way up to the american system of childhood and poverty up to success and so would a candidate today who had that kind of populist message or at least pseudopopulist message? would it be successful? >> it is hard to say. smith was not particularly successful on his day on the national stage and i think populism has had a kind of mixed history in the united states. >> is there a politician today that you would compare to al smith? >> i don't know. >> i think and i was thinking about this, in today's race, he

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might be more of a technocrat and i'll explain because populism itself that smith embodied was almost like a compassionate technocrat. he wanted to do the new deal prior to the new deal. he experimented with a lot of the programs in new york state and fdr later said i don't know why al smith is complaining and i'm doing what al smith did in new york. with the way that the economy is today and the debates over government and smart sizing, smith would probably lick his lips and try go to d.c. and try to feg thur out and that's what he did in albany and he did it with a republican legislature and so even the discussions now with the bipartisan gridlock and everything, smith that in new york. so he would probably sell himself very well today by saying i've done this in new york. i've battled the legislature that's hostile. i know how to get government under control. i know how to get the economy back moving again.

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so i think he would be seen as a technocrat, not flashy and probably some of that would be the brain trust kind of guy. >> james in dayton, ohio. good evening. >> james? i was wondering if al smith lost the election in 1928 and then in 1929, of course, wall street collapsed. and i wonder if he had any party platforms which might have contributed to perhaps avoiding that -- anything that would check margin trading and any of the other abuses by the wall street that led to that collapse and ultimately the depression. >> if he had it in 1928 would he have done anything that would have avoided and/or diminished the depression that followed? >> thank you, james.

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beverly gauge? >> one would like to be able to say yes, if al smith had been elected, none of the depression ever would have happened and wall street wouldn't complain. i don't think that that's true. i don't think on economic issues by 1928 and the 1920s turn out to be a relatively conservative decade on things like labor policy. smith himself is not running an anti-wall street campaign in 1928 and the real progressive candidate is bob falling in 1924 on the progressive party platform as a progressive candidate and that had a much more vocal anti-wall street sentiment and it had a much more strict set of regulations and had a lot more focus on economic issues. so, unfortunately i don't think that smith would have done a woel lwoel lot significantly

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different and i don't think anyone was in a position to foresee what was coming or would have had the tools to prevent it from happening. >> i think that's kind of what hoover at the end with his reconstruction finance corporation and the ideas that i'm going to experiment with government intervention in this. i heard somebody say, a historian say once that if smith had run in 1928, hoover would have been the obvious type of candidate in 1932 because they'd say this is what we need. we need a businessman and the model of getting the economy going. no matter who run in '28 they would have stopped the avalanche of financial ruin. >> let's take it back ten years, 1918. al smith is elected governor of new york for the first time. how? >> the accidental governor. it took al smith until maybe 1925 or '26 to get into the

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minds of the republican party of new york states that he wasn't going to lose. >> he runs in 1928 against charles wittman. >> 1918, and charles wittman, the d.a. of manhattan becomes governor of new york state and runs twice and gets elected and starts eyeing the white house in 1920 and maybe history people, we both do this for a living and we like to look back and say what if? maybe it would have been harding or charles wittman if he'd beat smith and smith unseats this sitting governor largely because there is a flu epidemic and he campaigns against upstate new york and he wens by a slight margin and in 1919 and 1920, the legislature just crosses its arms and says we're not going to do any of these things. the republican assembly and the republican senate, but smith starts the campaign right off by saying i'm going to have a

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reconstruction commission capitalizing on the transition from wartime economy to the private sector economy and he starts with the strength. >> improvements and we're not going to do the pay issue. we're going to bonds so we can have capital improvements for many yearsen stead of having the infrastructure start to crumble. so he has these great idea says. the legislature said this guy will never win in 1920 and that will be the presidential year and back then they ran at the same time the presidents ran and the tails were enough and he has very little to show and he's got very little to show when he goes up to 1920 and they run a con sfsh ti

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servative and in 1922, and then in '24 and in '26. he starts to avalanche his success. >> at the same time, all of his elections for governor are pretty close. >> they're close until the last two. he has a very, very close election which is 15,000 votes in 1918. he loses somewhat of a close election in 1920. the ticket, the national democratic ticket in 1920 goes down in new york state by over a million votes and smith loses by over 75,000 and that's where one famous person said to him, it's like swimming up to nighing aa falls and he comes back in 1922 and wins a squeaker and in 1924 he starts to add to his totals and he went against teddy roosevelt, jr., and it was only in the 1920s when his terms start to pay, you know, come to fruition. in 1919 and 19 twint, he's seen

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as the accidental governor. >> does that make a difference in al smith's electoral career. as john staffs a lot of his circle with the women in a moment when not many figures are doing that particularly reformers from new york, many of whom go on in the new deal and the ftr secretary of labor. moskowitz, and he's actually got a fairly progressive outlook on women in government. the advent of the women's vote doesn't immediately have a huge impact certainly on national politics. it ultimately begins to build and in terms of new york state, john would know this better than

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i, but i don't have the perception that it transforms. >> smith was not in favor of women's suffrage and he changed his mind. >> smith's mother said i'll never vote. >> there's no need for me to vote and she casts her ballot for her son for governor. >> smith's hook on women's suffrage is he gets bill moskowitz and a lot of these people involved and he starts to realize these are new voters, and they say how do i talk to these people? and they said talk to them like you would talk to a chamber of commerce like you would anybody else in the campaign and smith starts to realize that women's suffrage is a good idea. i can enlighten these people. i can get them to vote democratic ask that's where he gets the brain trust like eleanor roosevelt, and moskowitz and others that become sturdy supporters of the democratic party and he realizes that.

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>> just a few blocks from here is the new york governor's mansion. al smith lived there during his career here. wafs life like at the governor's mansion? >> hectic. >> would he walk up here in. >> he would walk. when i worked, and he used to tell me the stories and he remembered walking over from the governor's mapgd to the capital and said if you go to school with pie son and the governor would joke with him and everything. he was very much a neighborhood guy and the mansion had five children, its own zoo. >> this was true he. he had a zoo. >> a lot of things were given to him. he had a bear, he had deer and elk, and at one point someone gave him an alligator? >> why? >> he had all of this stuff. smith always loved animals.

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when he was a kid he used to collect dogs and down on the south street and the sea port and everything, sailors would come in and they'd have these exotic animals and they'd give him monkeys and goats and he'd put them in his attic and he'd have them in his backyard. he never had less than two dogs, he used to say. when he came to his first term he brought with him his great dane and the great dane jumped up on to charles wittman and smith joked in his good humor, it's the tammy tiger coming to take over and that was his love of animals. the mansion with five children and all of these animals, it was always a hectic place. he always had the neighborhood children dropping in and it was a family atmosphere. >> to add on the animal front, we actually all owe smith a bit of a debt for his love of animals because one of his

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allies with the governor of new york city was robert moses, the famous parks commissioner of new york, the man who made new york in many ways and he and smith remained very, very affectionate well into the '30s after he was out of political life and one of the reasons that robert moses is fashioning new york's parks and one of the reasons that he insists that there be a zoo in central park is so that al smith can visit the animals and he's living up town at that point and there are poignant stories for the end of smith's life about him. he literally had a key to the zoo, and he would go down there sometimes in the middle of the night and he would hang out with the animals at the central park zoo and it was a tribute to al smith. >> the honorary knight superintendent was smith with the central park zoo. >> we've had a patient audience in the assembly with us, and

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we'll take questions from you, as well and we've had a very patient tone ney pleasantville, new york, who has been on the line holding. tony, you're on c-span on the contenders. >> peter, thank you. and for c-span, i've been watching for over 20 years and if more people watched c-span we'd have better presidential candidates, but you beat me to the punch and i wanted to ask about bill moskowitz and robert moses. the two of your guests have pretty much handled that, but i wonder if they can expand on bill moskowitz's role on the role he had for governor smith and you mentioned that al smith didn't speak for two years and intimidated by all of the other lawyers that were there. can you tell us what al smith did at night when they boozed it

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up and how did he educate himself? >> tony, we'll get john evers to answer those questions. and is that an interest for al smith and your knowledge? >> i read a great book called "empire statesman." i didn't know much about al smith even though i worked in albany for a while. i knew the al smith building was there, the tallest building in new york state before the empire state, i believe, but i didn't know much about al smith until a read a biography called empire statesman. >> all right. thanks for calling in tonight, tony and john evers, we've got bill moskowitz and what else he did to educate himself. >> bill moskowitz was his unofficial gatekeeper. her job was the pr for the head of the democratic party, but she would serve as an adviser and it

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was the best way to describe it, she was the person who would pass these labor programs and the reconstruction commission. in pack, reconstruction of new york state which led to the establishment of a strong chief executive was done with the reconstruction commission and that was his brain owe child and tamany hall became jealous of bill moskowitz and they used to joke and say that's the brains of tamany hall and they joked with it because they weren't irish catholics and they were new york city and they were jewish. the interesting point you mentioned about him not speaking in the assembly, smith sat so far back and was so intimidated and he was so lost that he went back to new york, and tamany

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boss of his district and i think i might be in over my head, and i might be the superintendent of new york city if you really can't hack it and that appealed to smith's ability to fight and he said i'm not going to admit that i can't handle something. he went back with a mission and took the bills every night and read them so that he could understand the legislature because he didn't have a high school or college degree. he wasn't a lawyer and the assembly at the time was a prominently legal field. smith made sure that he could do that and also since he didn't have any money and he lived on the $1500 a year plus traveling expenses. he didn't go out partying at night and he didn't do bad things. he missed his family and he would go back to his room at his hotel and he'd read and when he warrant there, he'd be in the legislative library looking up the bills and the laws that he

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affected. >> john evers, are the appropriations bills are still 300 pages long? >> they could save a lot of trees by having them done electronically. smith was the chair of the ways and means. he used to read the oka appropriation bill cover to cover. thick stacks of appropriation line by line by line. he mastered that and it ultimately led him to become a very good financial governor because he had an happeneding of the budget system. >> we have a question from the audience. this is dave patrusia. he is an author, i did not know he would be here tonight. we know him from back tv and he just has a new book coming out which is called 1948 about the 1948 election. go ahead, mr. patrusia. >> thank you. your guests are doing a great job tonight. there is some constants in the al smith career. there's tamany hall and franklin

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roosevelt, and randol william hearst. what specifically can you say about the 1932 1932 presidential nomination process. >> let's start with beverly gage. >> hearst is one of the towering figures of this moment and he turns into one of smith's great critics and he's the man who smith learns to deal with the press in many ways. and you said you had been writing about the milk issue and the attacks on smith. >> this is a great question. william randolph hearst was probably one of the most controversial government figures or quasi government figures in new york history. he was a two-term congressman

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from new york city. he basically bought the seat. he tried to get the nomination for president of the united states and he lost that. he runs for governor in 1906 against charles hughes and loses. he runs for new york city mayor and loses. but he has control of the two newspapers, the evening journal and the new york american and he turns out real -- the basis appeal of people and to try to tell them, i know better, i'm a reformer, i want to have transparent government but you can get that if you back me. in 1918, he wants the nomination for governor. and they try to figure out how to go about -- who is going to get this. they settle on smith. smith goes and gets elected. in 1919 immediately william randolph hearst starts to poke

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at the programs, there's a milk strike in new york city. the upstate dairies can't get the milk into new york city. they then have a milk strike up state where the producers won't ship it to new york city. none of this is within the purview of the governor's powers. he tries to get his government of markets to act. and they don't act. hearst won't take this answer. you're the governor, you should make the legislature do this. they won't do this. so smith goes head to head with him. he takes the stage at carnegie hall and has it out with hearst. hearst won't show up to the debate. he starts buying more artwork, smith goes and probably loses control, red in the face, screams and yells about this man and unmasks hearst. hearst ironically comes out and

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backs smith for re-election. smith wants nothing to do with it. he battles again in 1922. smith is going to make a comeback running for governor. hearst wants the nomination. smith says i won't run on the ticket with hearst. it's either me or hearst. he says, here's will settle to be a u.s. senator. he says i won't run on a ticket with hearst at all. smith was one of those guys that was -- well, he was honest. he says i'm not going to be somebody that would change my mind and be as despicable as hearst when it comes to character assassination. smith wins and he basically -- and he also unseats the new york city mayor who is an ally, who is one of hearst's ally and is replaces him with jimmy walker and takes over the whole party. smith gets the last laugh as was mentioned by our questioner. in 1932, hearst uses his power

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to throw on the ballot the nomination from the fdr/smith battle. he takes his votes under california mca ddoo and knocks smith out. >> there were three or four presidential elections that al smith was active in. the 1920 and the '24, '28 and '32. here is a newsreel recap from 1932 about the '24,' 28, and 1932 elections. >> and then the great political battle of 1934. he stood out as a leader. there never was a political convention to match the gathering of 1924 in new york. ma mcadoo against al smith.

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the high note of all, franklin d. roosevelt's the presentation of the name of alford e. smith. the democratic convention in the lone star state. and franklin roosevelt took the stage to praise, naming him again, the happy warrior, his friend, alford e. smith, the governor of new york. al smith who will always have his own place in the hearts of the american people, but events were moving fast. al smith is candidate for president in 1928 wanted a good man to run for governor of new york. he persuaded franklin d. roosevelt to make the rest. and he lost the state by a

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narrow vote, franklin rose veos was elected for his first term of governor. his opponent was alford e. smith. >> franklin d. roosevelt, having received more than two-thirds of all of the delegates voting, i proclaim him the nominee of this convention for president of the united states. >> you have nominated me and i know it. and i am here to thank you for the honor. i pledge myself to a new deal for the american people. >> and back live in the new york state assembly chairman. beverly, how did we get from 1928, fdr calling al smith the happy warrior and supporting him, to 1932, presidential

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election? >> right. well, 1928, they are allies and they had been allies before that as well. both coming up through the same new york democratic party and a couple of things happen between 1928 and 1932, some of which are very personal and some of which are on a grand scale. the most important thing that happens between 1928 and 1932 is of course that we enter the depression. herbert hoover begins in 19289 s president, the stock market crash, and in 1932 you're in the deepest moment of the depression. in 1932 al smith wants to be the candidate again, in fact, he's put forth as a possibility but there's a lot of controversy about whether or not this is going to be a good idea. there are a lot of people who do

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not want to introduce into what looks like it's going to be a smashing democratic year all of the issues that you had seen in 1928. issues about catholicism, issues about prejudice, issues about prohibition, all of the sorts of things. frank franklin roosevelt has a little bit to say about all of these things, but when he's a candidate, he's being as even keel as all of this is you can possibly be. smith is gunning for this and there's a lot of pushback about that and it's not clear either that smith is huge fan of roosevelt. they had a very, very cooperative relationship, but it's been smith through the elder statesmen with roosevelt, the supportive younger man and it seems that at this moment, smith -- in fact, we should acknowledge, like a lot of people in the united states, in 1932, he views franklin roosevelt kind of as a dilettante, someone who is not willing to come out and take

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hard stands on issues, he's had a life of leisure. you've got this personal drama playing out at the same time that you've got a political drama playing out in of course we know who wins that in the end in 1932. and it doesn't take very long for smith to begin to attack roosevelt personally as well as politically and i think that it's easier to understand his personal animosity toward roosevelt as it begins to develop. i found it a little bit more puzzling to understand by 1936, he's endorsing the republican presidential candidate and is embracing a kind of politics that he had embraced before. is it because he's heartbroken? is it because he doesn't like roosevelt? is it because he's changed his mind as he sees roosevelt actually enact the new deal. i think these are all still open questions about their rel

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relationship. >> back to your calls. richard, you're on c-span. please go ahead with your question or comment for our two quests. >> caller: my grandfather was a county democrat chairman, a state senator, supporter of al smith. compare al smith's campaign for president and dewey's campaigns for president. >> let's ask the former new york state assembly historian if he could do that in a minute or less. >> oh, sure. >> tom dewey will be one of the topics of the contenders in two weeks. >> with dewey, the personalities couldn't be more different. smith a democrat, dewey is a

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republican. smith is a progressive, pre-new deal campaigner. dewey takes over the reins in new york state after -- beats the handpicked successor of fdr and al smith and he runs new york state during the new deal and he's, by all accounts, somebody that implements these programs. so he's not a rock red republican in the sense of a conservative. kind of a rockefeller republican. dewey wanted to be president and made it known. there were rumors that he was going to run for president when he was still new york district attorney. he had it in the cards he wanted to do this for a long time. smith's campaign in 1928 had always been troubled from the start. he did get the nomination and he did his whirlwind campaign from july onwards. dewey had more of the modern campaign. fdr did this in 1932.

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he knew he would run early on. so i think the biggest differences between dewey and al smith was probably that dewey was out there with this campaign and preparation a lot more than al smith ever was. >> we have a question here in our audience, if you would. if you feel comfortable, tell us who you are and where you're from. >> my name is amy and i'm from new york. my question is, besides the zoo that al smith brought to the governor's mansion, what was his most notable achievement for new york and the country? >> as governor? >> as governor, as candidate for president? >> well, i think that if i were to rattle them off, it would be kind of impressive, but we don't have three hours. probably smith's biggest achievements were to bring progressivism into the modern age. smith was that pre-new deal-type

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person. fdr had his own programs. but smith had parks and rec ration. he had new york state vote on bonds to improve roads and bridges, hospitals, prisons, he was ahead of his time when it came to criminal justice. smith's whole movement of government was not to downsize government, but to use government as a tool to provide people with services instead of it used to be more of a conservative work, government was simply there. the federal government would deliver the mail, it had the military. in new york state, it wasn't that much different. it did certain functions, but i didn't go out there and regulate industry and utilities, i didn't provide parks and rec ration. so i think if smith's overall accomplishments in new york state was to launch us on a social welfare in the best positive senses of the word. >> when you're here in the new

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york state capitol, beautiful old building finished in 1894 here in albany surrounded by state government office buildings, many built in the '60s, '70s, et cetera. would al smith -- what would he think about the growth of state government in new york? >> i think that he would be okay with state government as it is. when smith was governor, it was 10, 10 1/2 million people. he realized that new york state government needed to be housed. in fact, he was one of the people who said you got to get all of the agencies not only coordinated but he used to joke and say, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on renting little offices. can't we build state office buildings? can't we professionalize the state workforce. so smith really believed that using the government, which was basically the people, to organize them and to deliver services, that's the proper role of government. he stood with that his whole

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life. he thought the new deal went too far. >> i just wanted to add on the national stage, i think he really plays a very different but equally important role in the sense that smith's candidacy in 1928 comes after a decade where, as we said already, issues about immigration, issues about race. you had immigration reform passed in the early 1920s targeting people from places like italy, russia, the other great kind of social phenomenon of that decade was the rise of the ku klux klan and the ku klux klan in the 1920s is a mass organization. it's not the southern targeted klan that we think of in the '50s and '60s. it has millions of members. the stronghold is in indiana. a lot of midwestern states. a lot of urban centers in the east have large klan populations too that were targeting

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catholics, targeting jews, immigrants. these are the main issues that are driving the klan and smith as a candidate is a person who stands up on the national stage and says no to all of that, no, that's not what the united states is supposed to stand for. all of those people that you're talking about restricting that you're talking about, pushing out, who you're describing as foreign, those are my people. we're all americans. and he stands for that very powerfully on the national stage even though he's rejected as the president. >> and in just a minute we're going to ask our guest what is they think al smith's biggest failures were. but helen in new jersey, you're on "the contenders," please go ahead. >> caller: i was so excited to hear you're going to have al smith on. my grandfather was part of the irish catholic republican. and they did split ranks in '28 and voted for al smith. but my question is, after

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mr. roosevelt's election, al smith had harsh words to say about president roosevelt, the new deal, and the democratic party. do you think it was because he feared that the democratic party was edging too close to socialism and away from true progressivism? >> i think that his initial responses in 1928 were more of a emotional response basically saying -- he admitted this. he says i'm done. i'm not going to run again. but he ran again in '32. he said i think i can do a good job on this. his split with roosevelt is hard to explain. a lot of historians have struggled with this. he says it's gone too far but he says in certain things that's okay. he supports preparation for the

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war in the late '30s, but then he won't support roosevelt in 1940. it's kind of hard to pin smith down near the end except he think that is the federal government is growing too big. he blames some of the proliferation of these alphabet agencies as how government has gotten off track and he also kind of hides a little bit behind the states rights issue. he thought prohibition was a state issue. you can't from the federal government, through the constitution, correct or police people's individual behavior. it played great when it came to the democratic party, but he kind of stretched it a little bit when it came to the new deal by saying states rights when he realized that a lot of the programs were the things that he implemented in new york state as well. >> we heard from john ever who is the former new york state assembly historian. we've heard from beverly gage, history professor at yale university, about the fdr, al

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smith relationship. he supported wendell willkie over fdr. here is al smith on the radio talking about his support for wendell willkie. >> i would like to make a little observation. i would like to wonder what can be going through the mind of the 16 million men that are in the draft. i wonder if they're not saying to themselves, if this becomes serious, if it becomes necessary that we have to face an enemy, who would you sooner be behind, the third-time candidate or willkie? [ cheers and applause ] >> in my opinion, the only hope for the people is the election of wendell willkie who believed -- [ cheers and applause ]

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>> who believed in the constitution of the united states and the principles upon which it was founded. when he's chosen to guide this nation, then, and there only, will the stars and stripes again wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave. [ cheers and applause ] >> beverly gage, what's your reaction to hearing that? >> well, it's really remarkable how quickly and how viciously al smith ends up going after the people who had once been his greatest supporters and allies, and i've been trying to think if there's ever been another major party presidential candidate who in less than a decade after he had run on his party's platform is endorsing the candidates of the other party -- >> joe lieberman?

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>> i guess so. joe lieberman is heard -- was he ever really a democrat? i don't know. but going around and actually doing these endorsements in 1936, in 1940, and i think in this way that is incredibly outspoken, vicious, he makes this speech in 1936 where he's accusing the new deal and fdr of being communists and socialists. he picks up the anti-new deal language, he says he's abusing the constitution and becomes one of the standard bearers of the liberty league which is basically a business-funded -- it's really funded by the dupont family group that begins in the 1930s to push back the new deal and it really is a puzzling moment in his career. people who have tried to sit there and trace, well, he always

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had these platforms, he always believed in state-level power, not federal-level power and he didn't believe in the sorts of -- more populous legislation or he had a more limited view of government. but i don't think those are answers. i think that he went through something personally at that point and that his circle in new york, as he becomes the head of the empire state building and as he begins to solidify the alliances with businessmen, that really becomes his world in the 1930s. >> and we're going to talk about that part of his life in just a minute. we have another questioner here in the new york state assembly. tell us who you are and what you're doing here tonight. >> good evening. i'm a professor at the community college. i teach administrative law. as my students are talking about government and how government is getting larger, we discuss state agencies and federal agencies. we talk about immigration reform as it relates to the department of homeland security. and so as we're talking about al

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smith and his background and having come from new york city, south street arseaport, i wonde what an immigration policy would look like today for, you know, governor al smith? what would he think in terms of, one, the ethnicity of the immigrant that is are coming in is vastly different than those he grew up with, but also largely we're looking for policy's in today's immigration platform that would deal with labor issues, whether or not people who have been here illegally should have the right to work after having been in the country for a certain number of years. where would al smith stand on that type of issue, immigration as it relates to labor and also racism as you talked about? we don't really see much in terms of the ku klux klan anymore, but we see internal racism within agencies.

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thank you. >> let's start with john evers. >> i think that smith would be very understanding of loose immigration and that would probably be because of where he grew up. smith was exposed to all kinds of ethnicities, all kinds of different immigrants. his mother was the daughter of immigrants, his father was the son of immigrants. he worked in an area that had sailors from all over the world. he worked in a neighborhood who had all kinds of people from all over the world. he had joked at one time that even representatives from chinatown came up for one of the marriages of his daughter. so i would say that he would be more understanding of an open immigration or very widely construed program for immigration because that's what he grew up with. >> beverly gage, you want to add anything to immigration? one of the questions i remember as a student, compare and

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contrast. immigration then, immigration now. >> i think it's really true that that was at the core of who al smith presented himself to be to the world and this question of immigration and labor was one of the hot issues, so immigration law, when it was being -- immigration restriction which is passed in the 1920s, it was -- you had decades of debate about the relationship between wages and labor and immigration and in fact during al smith's day, immigration policy was actually under the department of labor. and so these things were really intimately tied then. as i said, when he ran for president in 1928, it was in the wake of a wave of nativist sentiment. if he stood for anything as a presidential candidate, it really was a pushback against this reactive nativism. what he would have ultimately come up with had he been elected president, would he have been

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able to push back immigration restriction, it seems unlikely. this period in the '20s is very intensive around these issues and it lasts for 40 years during al smith's childhood, there had been almost no restrictions on immigration, whatsoever. and so we had seen this kind of constriction then and that constriction wasn't reopened until the 1960s when we begin to get different groups of immigrants coming in. >> about 25 minutes left in our program this evening on al smith. howie in philadelphia, good evening to you. you're on the air. >> caller: i just wanted to shed some light about prohibition and how president harding did not enforce prohibition and the states that who did not do the job themselves. it was in 1923, around may, when alford smith signed the appeal of the prohibition act. can you shine some light on kansas politics where alford

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smith blew the whistle on the new deal. >> i think prohibition is something that is heavily identified with al smith. he never favored prohibition. it was not an issue that he championed. he didn't like how new york state ratified it anyway. they did it by simple resolution through the legislature. he thought it should be a referendum in 1924 they had a referendum in new york state, about what do you think about prohibition. they wanted beer and light wines to be allowed and it passed overwhelming in new york state, but it was just a memorialization of congress that didn't mean anything. smith himself was elected the president of the convention in new york state in 1933 to repeal the prohibition amendment officially in this chamber. the 150 delegates that gathered overwhelming voted and they

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overwhelming voted for al smith to be the president. he got the last laugh on that. they brought out 88-year-old root, the former u.s. senator and secretary of state to second the nomination and come in and pat him on the back. but prohibition shaped him because he thought it was ridiculous to say that you could use the constitution to control individual behavior. it actually took a right away from people rather than the amendments in the bill of rights giving rights to people. and he thought it was hypocritical. he used to say that he saw more people that would come out there and say that they were dries, having their community break the law, whereas all of the wets were out there trying to enforce the law, and the wet meaning those who wanted the repeal of prohibition. he found it as governor almost ridiculous. >> i could add one thing on the prohibition issue. it was tied with all of these questions about immigration, rural versus urban america and a lot of the imagery that had been

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used to promote prohibition is imagery about drunken immigrants running wild in the city and smith also took objection to that, to both the saloon as a real urban institution but also to the kinds of imagery that had been mobilized to get pro prohibition passed. >> was prohibition a christian right issue in a sense back in the '20s, kind of like abortion or gay marriage -- >> it was a cultural issue that mobilized certain sections of the population. but i wouldn't necessarily call it a right-wing issue in its day. it got a lot of its base of support from protestant groups during that day, this being one of the great issues of the 1920s with the scopes trial.

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but you also had a lot of progressive reformers particularly women who had been suffragettes who had been progressive on any number of other issues who were also supporters of prohibition, partly as a feminist issue, saving you from your drunken husband. it was a complicated issue and i don't think it lines up neatly on this left/right spectrum. >> okay. john evers, in between presidential runs, 1928, his last time he was nominated, 1930, what happens to al smith in 1930? >> al smith after he retires from the governorship here in new york, he actually believes -- and a lot of people attribute this to him -- that he's going to help fdr out. he's going to draft the budget for him. he's going to hold his hand.

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fdr wants to stand on his own. he doesn't want anything to do with smith. smith eventually goes back to new york city and he gets a job to run the empire state building. it's going to be built -- >> had it been built at that point? >> not yet. they were going to break ground for this right around the time the stock market crashes. but they continue through. the dupont family and all of the moneyed interests that wanted this building goes up just as the depression happens, everybody is leaving their leases, nobody wants to rent anything, it's dubbed the empty state building and smith who is making $50,000 a year as the president of the corporation is -- >> a large amount? >> a large amount. but he's running a million dollar deficit each year because nobody is renting any space. he asked fdr, could you put some of your agencies in here?

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smith, that's his job and he holds that job until 1944 when he dies, of course, the economy changes and he does recover. but at first, it was a very difficult job to have trying to rent space when nobody is buying office space in new york city. >> you have to feel for al smith. you said we were going to talk about his failures. one of his greatest failures is really bad timing. he ends up as the democratic candidate in 1938. he ends up taking over this building that breaks ground in something like august of 1929 and then ends up as its president. he had a timing problem in the early '30s. >> we have another question from the audience. hi. >> hi. i'm jonathan. i'm a junior political science major at sunny albany, and i have a question, when andrew cuomo first came to office as governor, he said he wanted to emulate some of the qualities of

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alford smith. earlier in the program we talked about how at one point the governor's office was a very weak political office. can you just, if anything, go over what he did to make the office of governor stronger and what example did he leave behind for others. >> that's one of the lasting legacies of alford e. smith. when governor cuomo entered office, he put smith's portrait behind the rostrum so all of the press conferences, we'll see al smith. and then governor cuomo also instituted a sage commission which would investigate government and try to make it more efficient which is like smith's reconstruction commission. the point that smith is probably being emulated the most for is efficiency in government.

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smith took 187 massive rolling bureaus, boards, commissions, departments, and rolled them into the 20 departments of government and had the legislature pass the constitutional amendments and ratified by the people to make the governor a strong governor. this is prior to fdr reforming the executive office of presidency in d.c. smith wanted to make sure if i appoint a commissioner, i want him answerable to me. prior to smith's reforms, commissioner's terms overlapped, the health commissioner had a six-year term. certain commissioners could be appointed by the previous governor. this governor -- the governor that assumes office can't remove him or certain boards or bureaus like ag and markets, the department of agricultural, were appointed by a board of regents-like people who were appointed by the legislature. smith really reformed government. he made it responsive to the

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executive who in turn is responsible to the people. that's his most lasting legacy and that's been emulated by a lot of states and had a little bit of the template taken to d.c. when fdr reformed the office of the presidency. >> mark, what's your question on al smith? >> caller: my question is this -- by the way, i do work for state government. i'm an internal audit director for a public authority and i teach a two-day class to state employees about the state budget process and one of the things i teach them is -- as i understand it, and i wonder if you could talk about this, al smith also reformed how budgeting is done in new york state. and i was surprised that prior to him becoming governor and making reforms in this area, that budgeting wasn't done very well and also the budget may have been put forward by the legislature and now we have a very strong executive budget that is put forth by the

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governor and that's another legacy that exists for al smith. in my opinion, that's bun of his strong contributions to the whole governance structure of state government in new york and i wonder if you could comment on that. >> that's a great point. basically, the legislature would get together all of the budget estimates and what they thought it would take to run government, very inefficient, you had executive agencies reporting to the legislature to say this is what i need. these executive agencies reported -- they worked for the governor. smith used to joke about it and say when the initial budget bill was presented, it was then added to by the legislature so much so that the original budget bill could almost be unrecognizable. they would laden it down with pork. in fact, they joked that the 1915 constitutional convention, they claimed a clerk passing the

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bill added his own budget item in there. so the inefficiency was so bad that smith says, let the governors smith an executive budget to the legislature based on estimates from his own executive departments that the legislature then can act on. and that made budgeting much more responsible to one individual, the governor of new york, and that's how it is today. >> we began this program with a little video from the annual al smith dinner for catholic charities. what's the al smith dinner and how did it come about? >> it is most famous as a place that presidential candidates show up every four years and they show up, democrats and republicans. it's really a memorial dinner for smith and i think it's the -- it's the thing that if anyone has heard al smith's name at this point in time, that that's where you've probably heard about al smith, unless you hang around these hallowed halls. in general, it's probably his

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most lasting public legacy. and it's -- but it's held every year. you have predominant figures coming in and it's a memorial dinner. it's a catholic charity dinner. and it's a place that people get together and try to assess the legacy of al smith and presidential candidates always especially try to crack good jokes about each other. >> and they show up together, most times, they show up both the democrat and republican nominees show up together. we want to show you some of the past al smith dinners. >> might i ask if you would come up here because either the president of the united states or i am without a seat. and i have no intention of standing. >> i just say, i have traveled the circuit for many years. i've never quite understood the logistics of dinners like this and how the absence of one individual could cause three of

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us to not have seats. >> i'm glad to see you here tonight. you said many, many times in this campaign that you want to give america back to the little guy. mr. vice president, i am that man. [ laughter ] >> as i looked out at all of the white ties and tails this evening, i realized i haven't seen so many people so well-dressed since i went to a come as you are party in kennebunkport. >> we had good news off yugoslavia. it's one less polly sla battic name for me to remember. you know what this world really needs? it really needs more world leaders named al smith. >> it is an honor to share the

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dais with a descentent of the great al smith. al, your great grandfather was my favorite kind of governor. the kind who ran for president and lost. [ laughter ] >> about 15 minutes left and glen in michigan, you're on "the contenders," please go ahead. >> caller: thank you very much. the question i have is with all the antiroman catholic racism and his being the first major party american presidential candidate that was roman catholic and everything, how much international attention did this get, specifically did the

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pope at the time ever weigh in or comment on any of the campaign he ran or anything like that? thank you very much. >> thank you, glen. beverly, if you want to start. >> in terms of polls, you didn't have the same kind of polling mechanisms that you have today. these things are a little bit harder to gage in the 1920s. you certainly didn't have polls that took apart, which issue do you care about more, it's kind of tough for historians and historians often make grand claims based on actually not knowing that much about the electorate. on the international question, i think it's really interesting because, yes, there was a lot of attention paid to this and it came in the wake of two trials as well that raised these questions about america's national character. the first was the scopes trial in 1925 and the second -- the trial had happened earlier, but the second was the execution of

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two italian immigrants who had happened in 1927. these questions of what the united states' presentation to the world in terms of race, in ternls of immigration policy, in terms of its attitudes towards radicalism, all of these were out here by the time al smith became the candidate. it becomes another moment to ask those questions and call the questions. >> well, after the election, and he loses, he does eventually go to europe at one time. he does meet the pope. he recounts that in many of his travels around italy, they thought he was the president because they knew that he had run. he goes to the house of commons, he had a very good relationship with winston churchill. it certainly did catapult him to the world stage.

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>> beverly, catholicism in 1928, african-american in 2008, potential mormon president in 2012, is that a fair comparison? >> i think it is a fair comparison in certain ways. i think in that sense, al smith was absolutely -- he was a trailblazer on this front and i think that in many ways, it's hard for people today to understand the depth of anti-catholicism in the united states at that moment. when al smith was on the campaign trail, particularly in places like oklahoma, places that he had never been before, places that he didn't know very much about, his train would pull into account and there would be crosses burning. he faced physical danger and he also faced a series of conspiracy theories about what his role was going to be, he was going to be taking orders from the pope or building secret

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tunnels from the vatican to -- just all of these intense conspiracy theories that are hard to remember, although in certain ways we've seen other conspiracy theories come up in more recent years. but the intensity of the anti-catholic sentiment that he faced can be hard to remember. that's a nice way to bring in some of these parallels. >> another member of our studio audience has a question. >> i'm a junior american studies major in new york. i'm excited to be here. how has president obama reflected al smith's legacy in his presidency thus far? >> i went to sienna, very good. there you go. i think one of the things that there's a great parallel between the two is the working with a legislature that is seen as hostile, seen as the two-party, the partisanship.

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smith faced that every year that he was in office here in albany. he only had control of the senate for two years and that was for a single vote. the other eight years, it was eight years of republican dominance here in this chamber and in the other house he only had the one term. i would think that the problem of dealing with the other party is something that smith had to battle with and undertake. that's something that the current president has a problem with as well. the other thing that he has is, it's remarkable his sense of humor. president obama has a very good sense of humor and he handles press conferences very well. al smith was the same way. he knew he could be funny on occasions, but not all the time because people wouldn't take you seriously. he could really play a very good statesman with a sense of humor which is another good parallel. >> the only good thing that i would add is i'm not sure barack obama has quite learned how al smith managed to make it all

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happen. >> that's true. >> thank you, cassie. next call comes from houston, texas, joe, good evening to you. please go ahead. >> caller: thanks for taking my call. my first question, i -- i know smith lost new york in 1928 to hoover. how well did he do in the five boroughs? i also want to know, was the anti-catholicism vote more pr prevalent in the southern states as compare today the midwest say kansas, nebraska, et cetera. i also want to know, he had a fallout with fdr. i would like to know, how did he feel about social security? >> he did well in new york. he did well.

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he always did well in new york city. he did extraordinarily well in his own district. but he just couldn't make it up over the whole state. the other question -- what was the other -- >> did he win new york city? do you know offhand if he won in 1928? >> i don't know. i don't recall. i don't think he did -- >> not even new york city. >> new york city also had outer boroughs which had republican dominance. >> social security? >> well, the issue on social security is something that smith had tried to implement in new york state when it came to widows and orphans pensions. he tried to experiment with health insurance for industrial workers and he also tried to do all kinds of social security issues when it came to trying to support those who were downtrodden. make work projects was something he had experimented with and it

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might have been one of those projects he carried into the new deal had he won. >> one of the strange things that emerges was anti-catholicism more powerful in the south than the midwest. i think that's a fairly hard question to answer. we've been talking a lot about the democrats versus the republican here and one of the things that was really difficult for smith were divisions within the national democratic party so that the whole south at this point is a democratic south with smith as their national candidate. and so you had real tensions within the democratic party between this kind of urban core that smith was coming to represent and the more southern wing as well as other wings of the democratic party as well. those interparty tensions were as important as these tensions with democrats and republicans. >> hoover, 444 electoral votes, al smith, 87 electoral votes.

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hoover won 40 states. al smith one eight. those eight states, arkansas, louisiana, mississippi, alabama, georgia, south carolina, massachusetts and rhode island. we have another question here from our audience. >> jay. if you were to grade his governorship, what letter would you assign to it. and the second question is, as the first catholic presidential candidate, did he help how the country viewed religion as a factor? >> let's take the governor question here and the religion question is there. >> i would give governor smith an "a" because he faced a tremendously uphill battle. new york was a republican state at the time. and he had a tough time dealing with the legislature which was overwhelmingly republican. in fact, in 1920, when they expelled the socialists, i never understood why because they had 110 republicans and i didn't

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matter when it came to the votes. but i think that i would give the governor smith an "a." he created the executive budget, the short ballot, top voting for six or seven statewide offices and have some of them appointed. the public authority was one thing that he tried to undertake and power authority and the like. and also the port authority in new york and new jersey was one of his ideas. so he had a lot of interesting things. >> john evers, biggest failure of al smith? >> some of it might be that he overthought things. i think from a political science point of view, public authorities were something he wanted to deal with and he created those and now there's debates over public authorities and bonding. governor smith was a huge proponent of bonding and that's also created propensity i think today for dependence on bonding and could create state debt. >> what difference did al smith make in national politics?

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>> i think that al smith called certain questions and faced them down. his candidacy raised questions that had been percolating in various ways throughout the 1920s. these questions that we've been talking about, immigration, nativism, all of these sorts of issues and he calls the question and takes a very sort of powerful stand about who is going to be an american, who ought to be included as an american and becomes a great symbol for that. i think within the democratic party he's also a very powerful figure and sort of consolidating what we now talk about as the roosevelt coalition, but it's something that begins with al smith bringing this urban core into the democratic party. >> beverly gage and john evers, thank you so much for being on "the contenders" and we also want to make sure to thank speaker sheldon silver and the people here at the new york state assembly for allows us to broadcast live.

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we want to thank our studio audience and our cable partner up here in albany, time warner. we're going to leave you with a few of al smith's own words on his career and life. >> i was elected to my public office in 1903. i remained in the assembly for 12 years. then i was elected sheriff of new york county. then i was elected president of the board. in fact i ran for office 22 times. i was elected 20 times and defeated twice. i worked for the county, i've worked for the city. i have worked for the state. and you will probably remember that i tried to get a job down in washington but something happened to me at that time. [ laughter ] ♪

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♪ ♪ weeknights this month on american history tv, it's "the contenders," our series that looks at 14 presidential candidates who lost the election but who had a lasting effect on u.s. politics. tonight we feature 1940 republican presidential nominee wendell willkie after losing to president franklin roosevelt, he became the president's

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representative to britain, the middle east, the soviet union and china. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 eastern and enjoy american history tv this week and every weekend on c-span3. "the presidents," available in paper book, hard cover and e-book from public affairs. presents biographies of every president. inspired by conversations with historians about the leadership skill that is make for a successful presidency. as americans go to the polls next month to decide who should lead our country, it offers perspectives into the lives of events that foraged each president's leadership styles. to learn about the featured presidents, go to c-span.org/thepresidents. up next on american history tv, a con

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CSPAN October 13, 2020 2:41pm-4:45pm EDT