impressed
Al Smith was born and raised in the Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he resided for his entire life. He was of Italian (on his father's side) and Irish (on his mother's side) ancestry. His father had been born Alfred Emanuele Ferraro but changed his surname to Smith because the word 'ferraro' means 'blacksmith' or 'smith' in Italian). His father had served with the 11th New York Fire Zouaves in the opening months of the Civil War. Al Smith grew up at a time when the Brooklyn Bridge was being constructed nearby. "The Brooklyn Bridge and I grew up together," Smith would later remark.
His father died when Al was 13. Al Smith dropped out of parochial school to help support the family, working at a fish market for seven years. He never attended high school or college and claimed he learned about people by studying them at the Fulton Fish Market. On May 6, 1900, Al Smith married Catherine Ann Dunn, with whom he had five children.
Smith became affiliated with the Tammany Hall political machine who took notice of him because of his talent as a speaker. In 1903 he was elected to the New York State Assembly.He served as vice chairman of the commission appointed to investigate factory conditions after 146 workers died in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Meeting the families of the deceased Triangle factory workers left a strong impression on him, and Smith crusaded against dangerous and unhealthy workplace conditions. In 1911 when the Democrats obtained a majority of seats in the State Assembly, Smith became chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. In 1912, following the loss of the majority, he became the minority leader. When the Democrats reclaimed the majority in the next election, he was elected Speaker for the 1913 session. He became minority leader again in 1914 when the Republicans reclaimed the majority and remained in that position until 1915, when he was elected sheriff of New York County.
Smith was elected President of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York in 1917. The following year, in 1918, he ran for, and was elected Governor of New York. At that time publisher William Randolph Hearst was a major player in New York Democratic Party politics. Smith broke with Hearst in 1919, calling him "a man as low and mean as I can picture". Smith lost his bid for reelection in 1920, but was again elected governor in 1922, 1924 and 1926. In his 1922 re-election, he staked a position as an anti-prohibitionist (or a "wet"). Smith offered alcohol to guests at the Executive Mansion in Albany and repealed the Prohibition enforcement statute. On Smith's watch as governor, New York strengthened laws concerning workers' compensation, women's pensions and children and women's labor with the help of Frances Perkins, who would later become President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Labor Secretary.
At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, Smith unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president, advancing the cause of civil liberty by decrying lynching and racial violence. He was nominated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the speech Roosevelt called Smith "the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield." The party was hopelessly split (largely on the issue of prohibition) between Smith and California Senator William Gibbs McAdoo. The delegates voted 100 times before both front-runners accepted neither would be able to win the required two-thirds majority, so each withdrew. The exhausted delegates then nominated the little-known John W. Davis of West Virginia. Davis went on to lose the election by a landslide to the Republican Calvin Coolidge.
Undeterred by his loss in 1924, Smith fought a determined campaign for the party's nomination in 1928. In the election the Republican Party was still benefiting from an economic boom. In addition to this, Republican candidate Herbert Hoover played on the anti-Catholic sentiments that existed against Smith, doing nothing to distance himself from them. Hoover defeated Smith by a landslide in the 1928 election. Some Republicans said that Smith would answer to the pope and not the constitution. He was also vulnerable to accusations of corruption because of his close association with Tammany Hall. Finally, on the controversial issue of Prohibition, Smith was personally in favor of repeal of Prohibition laws, but the Democratic Party split north and south on the issue. During the campaign Smith tried to duck the issue with noncommittal statements. Smith brought millions of Catholics to the polls for the first time, especially women. He lost important Democratic constituencies in the rural north and in southern cities and suburbs. He did carry the Deep South, thanks in part to his running mate, Senator Joseph Robinson from Arkansas. Smith lost New York state, but his fellow Democrat Roosevelt was elected to replace him as governor of New York.
Smith and Roosevelt became rivals for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination. At the convention, Smith's animosity toward Roosevelt was so great that he put aside longstanding rivalries and managed to work with William McAdoo and William Randolph Hearst to try to block FDR's nomination. But after losing the nomination, Smith eventually campaigned for Roosevelt in 1932.
After Roosevelt was elected, Smith became highly critical of FDR's New Deal policies and joined the American Liberty League, an anti-Roosevelt group. Smith believed that the New Deal ran counter to the goal of close cooperation with business. The Liberty League was an organization that tried to rally public opinion against Roosevelt's New Deal. Conservative Democrats who disapproved of Roosevelt's New Deal measures founded the group. In 1934, Smith joined forces with wealthy business executives, who provided most of the league's funds. The league published pamphlets and sponsored radio programs, arguing that the New Deal was destroying personal liberty. However, the league failed to gain support in the 1934 and 1936 elections and it rapidly declined in influence. The league was officially dissolved in 1940.
Smith's dislike for Roosevelt and his policies was so great that he supported Republican presidential candidates Alfred M. Landon (in the 1936 election) and Wendell Willkie (in the 1940 election). However Smith and Eleanor Roosevelt remained friends. In 1936, when Smith was in Washington making a radio attack on the President, she invited him to stay at the White House. To avoid embarrassing the Roosevelts, he declined.
After the 1928 election, Smith became the president of Empire State, Inc., the corporation that built and operated the Empire State Building. Smith's grandchildren cut the ribbon when the world's tallest skyscraper—built in only 13 months—opened on May 1, 1931. Smith was elected as President of the Board of Trustees of the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, in 1929. Smith was not asked by Roosevelt to play any role in the war effort when the US entered World War II.
Smith died at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital on October 4, 1944 of a heart attack, at the age of 70. For the last part of his life he was broken-hearted over the death of his wife from cancer five months earlier, on May 4, 1944. Since 1945 (the year after his death) the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner has been held as an annual white tie charity fundraiser for Catholic Charities USA. It is held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York on the third Thursday of October. It is organized by the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation in honor of former Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate. In election years is offers an opportunity for collegiality between the two candidates for president from the Republican and Democratic parties.