Master of His Fate by James Tobin (free ebooks for android txt) 📗

and selling newspapers. A smart and friendly kid, he caught the eye of neighborhood politicians, who gave him odd jobs. Soon he was working for Tammany Hall full-time, and when he was only thirty, he was put up for election to the state assembly, and he won. Before long he became the state’s most powerful Democrat and a leading voice among the swelling millions of Americans who were first- or second-generation immigrants.

Smith was of the city, Roosevelt of the countryside. Before Smith took his first trip on the New York Central Railroad to the state capital at Albany, he had never seen a farm. He so loved New York that he once said he would rather be a lamppost on Manhattan’s Park Avenue than the governor of California. FDR, by contrast, treasured his family’s old roots in the rural Hudson Valley, and he liked to call himself a farmer, though his only crop was trees. As an adult, he used New York City as his home base, but he privately called it “this vile burgh” and fled it for tiny Hyde Park whenever he could.

FDR was an Episcopalian, the favored religious denomination of the well-to-do and the powerful. Smith was a proud Catholic, the religion of immigrants who worked in factories and swept the streets.

FDR had learned the law from distinguished professors in wood-paneled rooms at Columbia University. Smith had taught himself the law, sweating over books that he read late at night.

Roosevelt read widely and collected fine books as a hobby. Smith declared he had never read a book for pleasure.

In politics, Smith had become the best-known and most respected product of the Tammany Hall machine. Other Tammany politicians took bribes, but not Al, or so it was said. The Tammany boss “Silent Charlie” Murphy had nurtured Smith’s career and steered him clear of trouble, hoping that Al might make Tammany Hall respectable. During Smith’s lifetime he was never accused of dirty dealing. But he always bore the brand of the machine.

Smith and FDR differed on the biggest issue of the day—whether to keep or get rid of the unpopular laws known as Prohibition, which, since 1920, had banned the sale of liquor, beer, and wine throughout the United States. Millions of Americans, especially European immigrants with cherished traditions of enjoying wine and beer, wanted Prohibition overturned. Just as fiercely, other millions, especially conservative Protestants in rural America and the South who hated “the demon rum,” wanted Prohibition to remain in place.

Like many others, Smith and FDR privately scoffed at Prohibition and drank bootleg beer and liquor in private. (Despite the laws against alcohol, it was still easy to get.) But in public, FDR was a “dry,” in favor of enforcing the Prohibition laws. Smith was a “wet,” who wanted to do away with them.

In their personal manners the contrast was sharpest of all. One of FDR’s favorite expressions from his Harvard days was infra dig, short for the Latin phrase infra dignitatem, meaning “low class” or “beneath one’s dignity.” So much about Al Smith, in the eyes of the Roosevelts, was infra dig.

Smith chewed on a fat cigar; FDR smoked slim cigarettes in an elegant holder. Smith was legendary for the raspy roar of his voice; Roosevelt spoke in a cultured tenor. Smith played cards with his old pals from the Bowery. FDR, before contracting polio, had golfed and sailed with his old classmates from Harvard.

When Governor Smith was invited to dine at Hyde Park, Sara Roosevelt had to master her emotions to treat him with respect. He was exactly the sort of man who had made her son’s entry into politics so appalling to her.

On his side, of course, Smith viewed the Roosevelts as “swells” with barely a clue about what life was really like for most people.

But there was common ground, too.

FDR and Eleanor had long since come to admire Smith’s ability to win elections and get laws passed. More than that, like many a progressive New Yorker, they knew the governor truly believed in liberal principles. When a fire killed 146 women workers in New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911, Smith was among the leaders who won new laws to make workplaces safer. When conservative clergy argued against a law that would give women and children in the oppressive canning industry one day off a week, Smith stared them down and said: “I have read carefully the commandment ‘Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.’ I am unable to find any language in it that says, ‘Except in the canneries.’”

Eleanor’s respect for Smith had grown during her work for the state Democratic Party. And FDR could not help but like the rollicking governor. “Al Smith could make anybody laugh,” a friend said, and FDR was no exception.

Did Smith return FDR’s liking and respect? Not so much. The governor saw the younger man as a spoiled upper-cruster just dabbling in politics. And as a proud son of Tammany, Smith resented FDR’s history of fighting the organization.

But in 1924, affection was beside the point. Smith was getting ready to run for the Democratic nomination for president, and he perceived that FDR might be able to help him.

Smith’s main rival was William Gibbs McAdoo (MACK-a-doo), a Californian with strong backing from the party’s old rural wing in the West and South. To stand a chance against McAdoo, Smith would need the unified support of his home state’s Democrats. Party members in New York City were no problem. They loved Al. But he also needed support upstate, where most people were Protestant, dry, and deeply suspicious of Tammany Hall. The same was true of Protestant Democrats across the country. That’s where Roosevelt could help. With his popular last name, his reputation for integrity, and his anti-Tammany record, he could soothe the fears of “the better class of Democrats.” If Franklin Roosevelt could support a Catholic “wet” for president, then maybe they could, too.

So Smith asked FDR to be the chairman of his presidential campaign.

If Roosevelt had been