Al Smith’s Log Cabin

The lowest East Side, between the Brooklyn Bridge (completed in 1883) and the Manhattan Bridge (1909), was once a maze of narrow streets lined with row houses, corner saloons and groceries, warehouses, pickle factories, stables. The heart of it was an Irish and Italian working class neighborhood of large families who attended the venerable St. James church and school. It was not a slum or a ghetto, and the residents would have been highly insulted to hear it called that. With the construction of the bridges, followed by high-rises and the FDR Drive in the twentieth century, many of the old streets, and the buildings on them, disappeared.

There’s not much of Oliver Street left, just a couple of run-down blocks in Chinatown between Chatham Square and Madison Street, where it dead-ends. It preserves a row of humble, three-story brick houses, currently looking rather forlorn and exhausted, showing every day of their more than a century’s existence. A brass plaque on the wall of 25 Oliver identifies it as the Alfred E. Smith House, listed on the National Historic Register. Al didn’t grown up there, as is sometimes averred. But he lived there a long time and raised his own kids there as a young politician. Had he succeeded in his bid to become the first Irish Catholic President of the United States, 25 Oliver Street could have become a site of American mythology to rival Abe Lincoln’s log cabin. But Al didn’t make it, 25 Oliver is in bad need of a paint job, and today’s mostly Chinese neighbors pass it without a glance.

 His father, also named Al Smith, grew up on a block of Oliver Street closer to the river that no longer exists. Al Sr. was a brawny, handsome, wide-mustached working man, a cartman, or hauler of goods, with a horse-drawn truck. After his first wife died he married a girl who’d grown up near the stables at Dover and Water Streets where he kept his horses. (Her parents had come from Ireland on a clipper ship of the famous Black Ball Line that pioneered the Liverpool to New York run. They found rooms to let three blocks from where they stepped ashore and never ventured farther into America.) Al Jr. was born at 174 South Street on December 30 1873, above a little grocery store. He grew up as the Brooklyn Bridge was built. In old photographs it vaults right over the rooftop of the small, narrow house. That whole block has long since disappeared.

 As Al remembered it later the waterfront was the neighborhood kids’ playground – there weren’t any others. The rigging of the ships at the docks was their jungle gym. They dove for green bananas that dropped over the side, and bought their pets from sailors who’d carried them up from South America and the Caribbean. At one point Al kept a goat, four dogs, a parrot and a monkey in the South Street attic. He never lost his classic New Yawk accent, salting his speech with dese, dem and youse like a true Bowery Boy.

 In 1886 Al Sr. worked himself to death at the age of forty-six, when Al Jr. was twelve. His mother took a job at an umbrella factory and brought home piece-work. Al worked after school delivering newspapers and helping his sister run their landlady’s candy store in the basement where they now lived on Dover Street. He left the St. James school at the end of the seventh grade, when he was fourteen, and never went back. As a teen he worked a number of jobs, including twelve-hour days, six days a week, at the Fulton Fish Market. One of his tasks was to stand in a lookout and watch for the fishing fleet pulling into the harbor. You could tell how much of a haul they were carrying by how low they rode in the water. Later, when fellow politicians, who were mostly lawyers, bragged to him about matriculating from the U of This or That, he’d reply that he graduated from FFM. He grew up quick. By fifteen he was frequenting the neighborhood’s saloons, drinking beer, smoking cigars with the other men.

He was still too young to vote when he started hanging out at the Downtown Tammany Club, around the corner from Oliver Street at 59-61 Madison. It had something of the look of a volunteer fire hall. Men from throughout the neighborhood streamed up the wide stairs and under the double-arched entry into the meeting hall where politics was discussed, elections fixed, jobs and favors dispensed. It was later knocked down for the playground of P.S. 1, also known as the Alfred E. Smith School. Tammany was starting to purge itself of its most corrupt scoundrels, and young Al Smith fell in with the reformist wing. This led to his first patronage job as a process-server, tracking people down to hand them summonses and subpoenas.

He came under the wing of Big Tom Foley, for whom nearby Foley Square was named. Foley operated a very popular saloon at Oliver and Water Streets. In her 1956 memoir of her father, The Happy Warrior, Al’s daughter Emily remembered Foley as “a genial, smooth-shaven, moonfaced man” who was very well liked and highly respected in the neighborhood – a dude in the ward, as Ned Harrigan would have said. Although he lived uptown at Thirty-Fourth Street Foley spent most of his time in and around the saloon and was active in local politics and the St. James parish. As he thrived financially and politically he spread his good fortune around the neighborhood, the way a successful Tammany man was supposed to. When Smith was a boy he and other kids would flock around Foley on the street, and he’d hand each a nickel, which seemed like a fortune to them. (Years later, Al would frequent a popular barbershop in the ward, run by an immigrant from Salerno who played Caruso on the Victrola. Bartolomeo’s runty, homely son lathered the customers before his dad shaved them. Al once tipped the kid a nickel. Instead of spending it on a lemon ice or a Charlotte Russe, the boy, Jimmy Durante, saved it as a souvenir.)

In 1903 Foley anointed the twenty-nine-year-old Smith to be the Democrats’ nominee for what was then the Second District of the State Assembly. Smith appeared before a crowd of cheering neighbors and Tammany stalwarts in a suit he’d just ironed in the kitchen of his Peck Slip apartment. His other suit was in mothballs. As the Tammany Democrat candidate he was a shoo-in, handily beating a Republican, a Socialist, and a Prohibition candidate, who got five votes.

Smith spent the next twelve winters as an assemblyman, shuttling from the Lower East Side to Albany, where he’d live during the weeks while the legislature was in session, returning home on weekends. His re-elections were always sure things. The affable guy with the honking voice and the taste for suds and stogies was liked and admired by all his constituents, not just his fellow Micks. Besides Durante, another of his fans was a Jewish teenager from up on Henry Street, Izzy Iskowitz, who volunteered to make sidewalk stump speeches for him at re-election time. They were in effect the first public appearances by the performer later known as Eddie Cantor.

In 1907 Smith moved his family, which would grow to five kids, to 25 Oliver Street, which he rented from the parish; the rectory was next door at 23. Emily recalled that they couldn’t afford many luxuries on her father’s salary of a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, but they weren’t poor. They took summer vacations on the beach at Far Rockaway in Queens, and enjoyed an occasional family dinner at the then-new Knickerbocker Hotel in Times Square, followed by a trip to the nearby Palace Theatre, the flagship of vaudeville houses from the 1910s until vaudeville’s end. On Sunday mornings after church they’d often walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to visit family on Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. Sunday evenings the Smiths would have friends over, including another young assemblyman, Jimmy Walker, and his (soon to be beleaguered) wife. Jimmy, who’d started out an aspiring Tin Pan Alley songwriter before his father pushed him into politics, would sit at the Smiths’ piano and play songs like his one bona-fide hit, “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”

Along the way Al Smith began to sport the brown derby that, along with the cigars, became a familiar feature of his public image. He was elected governor in 1918. Emily remembered the children’s wonderment when the family moved from the little house on Oliver Street to the executive mansion in Albany, with its reception room, music room, library, breakfast room, a dinner table that could seat thirty, and nine bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. Plus a small army of servants who magically appeared at the press of a bell. When Smith lost his reelection bid in 1920 and the family returned to Oliver Street, the kids glumly went back to sharing bedrooms and fighting over the two bathrooms.

Smith was briefly convinced his political career was over. Yet that same year, at the Democrats’ national convention in San Francisco, his name was put up for the first time as a possible presidential candidate. As the band struck up “The Sidewalks of New York” (rather than the Ned Harrigan song Smith wanted), the entire convention began to sing along, then waltz in the aisles, and partied for the next hour as the band played one popular tune after another, finally getting to Harrigan’s “Maggie Murphy’s Home.” Ever the skeptic, H. L. Mencken thought it was the free-flowing bootleg bourbon – Prohibition had gone into effect six months earlier – rather than political conviction that got them all going, and in fact Smith was not yet a serious contender. The Democrats nominated Ohio governor James Cox, with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his running mate. Warren G. Harding trounced them.

New Yorkers gave Smith the governor’s mansion back in 1922, and the Smiths moved out of Oliver Street for the last time. In June 1924, the Democrats held their convention at Madison Square Garden. Roosevelt delivered the speech throwing Governor Smith’s brown derby in the ring. Smith and Roosevelt were the most unlikely bedfellows. Smith liked to tell a bitterly humorous story about the first time he’d called on Roosevelt in his mansion back in 1911, and the butler didn’t want to let him in the door. A vast gulf of class and breeding separated the former fishmonger from the upstate aristocrat born with silver spoons in every orifice. Roosevelt had grown up in a household where he was surrounded by German and Scandinavian servants, because his father refused to hire the Irish or Negroes. And he had the upstater’s severe mistrust of anyone associated with Tammany. Yet the two had gotten over their differences and become allies, if not quite friends, working together for reform in the state.

Smith loyalists once again erupted in a prolonged celebration at the end of Roosevelt’s speech, but in fact Democrats at the convention were deeply divided between the urban progressives who backed Smith and the rural and Southern conservatives who were convinced that the nation would never elect an Irish Catholic from Jew Yawk. Smith’s background was in fact a serious drawback at a time when Republicans still characterized Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” Like many other New York politicians, Smith had been against Prohibition, which condemned him with its supporters around the country. He was only a mildly liberal Democrat, but any Democrat running in the Republican boom times of the Roaring Twenties was running up a very steep hill. And finally, there was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had been reborn in the 1910s, riding new waves of xenophobia, racism and anti-communism, and was a much bigger and stronger presence in 1924 than it had ever been. The Klan issued a “Klarion Kall for a Krusade” against Smith should he be nominated.

The convention dragged on for two weeks and more than a hundred ballots. Chairman Cordell Hull passed out a few times from the summer heat – air conditioning was still a way off. Another Lower East Sider, Irving Berlin, was a celebrity observer. He dashed off a campaign song, “We’ll All Go Voting for Al.” It didn’t help. The more conservative John W. Davis got the nomination and went on to lose badly to Calvin Coolidge. (Berlin would soon write a more successful campaign song for Al’s friend, “It’s a Walk-In with Walker.”)

 In 1928 the Democrats finally handed Smith their presidential nomination. There were some faint reasons for them to be hopeful. The Klan had peaked and was slipping back into being merely an ugly nuisance on the lunatic fringe. People were tiring of Prohibition and considered it a failed experiment. On the other hand, the nation was still enjoying unprecedented prosperity under the Republicans, except in the farm belt. Farming was a much bigger sector of the economy then than now, and farmers had effectively been in their own depression since the end of World War One. They weren’t likely to be convinced that a guy from New Yawk would do better for them than a Republican. And Smith’s opponent was not just any Republican. He was Herbert Hoover, one of the most popular figures in America at the time, an orphan from Iowa who by hard work and smarts had achieved the American dream of riches and power. He was also known as a great humanitarian, the American who had almost singlehandedly organized a massive food relief program for starving Belgians during the war.

As the campaigns rolled out, Hoover – who was coincidentally the first Quaker candidate – never played the religion card. But the Klan and other anti-Catholic fringe groups did, and so did more mainstream Protestant spokespeople, somberly questioning if a Catholic could be the leader of the country when he owed his allegiance to Rome first. In the end, though, it was probably the combination of Hoover’s popularity and the unprecedented boom times – the big crash wouldn’t come until October 1929 – that sank Smith. He ran as the friend of the little guy at a time when a lot of the little guys, except for those farmers, were doing all right. Hoover gave Smith a severe shellacking, carrying all but eight states. Most galling of all, even the state of New York went for him.

A private citizen again in 1929, Smith accepted a job as president of the corporation that would build the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Empire State Building. Construction proceeded even after the stock market crashed that October, and the building opened in May 1931, with Smith and Governor Roosevelt leading the ceremony. Listeners to the live radio broadcast heard Smith ballyhoo the edifice as “the tallest thing in the world today produced by the hand of man.” His Lower East Side roots still showed in the way he pronounced world woild. To the average New Yorker the building was a towering beacon of optimism in what had become very dark times, but as a business venture it was a bust. Unlike the successful Chrysler Building that had opened in 1930, the Empire State Building had so few tenants signed up that wags nicknamed it the Empty State Building. It would continue to bleed red ink for twenty years.

Despite the thrashing in 1928, Smith entertained hopes for the Democratic nomination again in 1932, which put him at odds with another contender, Roosevelt. Without officially declaring himself, Smith made it clear he’d accept the nomination if offered, and his supporters at the convention were as boisterous and loud as ever. But he’d had his shot. Roosevelt carried the convention, and the two patched up their differences in public so that the Democrats could beat Hoover that fall.

As Roosevelt’s New Deal policies grew more radical in extending federal power during his long presidency, Smith’s opinions grew more conservative and oppositional. He helped found the anti-New Deal, pro-business Liberty League, making him a pariah among Democrats. He even went completely off the reservation to back Republicans Alf Landon in 1936 and Wendell Willkie in 1940. Roosevelt trounced them both. Once America entered the war, however, Smith was one of the commander-in-chief’s most diligent boosters on the home front.

When his wife died in May 1944 Smith went into broken-hearted decline. He died of cirrhosis that October, a couple months shy of his seventy-first birthday. The whole city mourned his passing. Besides the little house on Oliver Street and P.S. 1, you still see his name all over his lowest East Side neighborhood, on a playground, a rec center, and a giant public housing complex.

by John Strausbaugh