The Happy Warrior's Legacy

AL SMITH : HERO OF THE CITIES by Matthew and Hannah Josephson. 505 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $7.95. THE FIRST HURRAH: A BIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED E. SMITH by Richard O'Connor. 318 pages. Putnam. $6.95. In nostalgic political memory, Alfred Emanuel Smith appears as a jaunty, cigar-chomping, roughhewn Irishman in a brown derby, the first serious Roman Catholic candidate for President, and the man who later turned on his aptest pupil, Franklin Roosevelt, to become a noisy opponent of the New Deal. All that is true as far as it goes--except that Smith was no more than half Irish. But the myth does little justice to the gifted, compulsive, frequently tormented man who created it in the first place. More important and more startling, as this pair of unevenly matched biographies show, the Al Smith myth entirely misses the man's vital contribution to the art and science of government in the U.S. For it was through Smith that ethnic minorities in great American cities first found national voice and national influence.

Matthew and Hannah Josephson, liberal writers of long standing, bring both knowledge, political empathy and personal affection to their biography of Smith. Onetime Hearst Journalist Richard O'Connor's book is breezier and briefer, less analytical about Smith and less reflective about his special place in U.S. politics.

Smith's reforming impulse was rooted in a compassion he learned from the near-slum environment in which he grew up. He was born to slightly better than average circumstances on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1873. After quitting school at the eighth grade, he worked at a variety of jobs--including hawking the day's catch at the

Fulton Fish Market. But at that time, Democratic machine politics was the only ladder to middle-class respectability available to most of the New York Irish, and Smith was soon climbing.

Corned-Beef Dinners. As a backbench state assemblyman beginning in 1904, he won friends among suspicious upstate legislators by entertaining them at weekly corned-beef-and-beer dinners. By 1913, he was assembly speaker, by 1918, New York's Governor. From both offices, he struggled to simplify the ramshackle state government, making New York the classic example of state administrative reform. As early as 1911, he was also engaged in the fight for social reforms (childlabor laws, maximum-work-hour legislation for women, factory safety regulations) that made New York the most advanced welfare state in the nation, and in fact later provided a working example for F.D.R.'s New Deal.

To bring about such reforms, as well as to prosper politically, Smith made use of his own boundless energy and still legendary powers of persuasion and phrasemaking. "I could run on a Chinese laundry ticket and beat your bunch any time," he once snapped at a hostile Democratic boss. He also could call on quite extraordinary mental abilities --among them a phenomenal memory for detail and a dazzling intuitive grasp of administrative structures.

Smith gradually enlisted a special brain trust--among them Robert Moses and Frances Perkins, later Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor--who were the first modern-style technocrats in politics. The social reforms that they proposed and

Smith supported began the end of patronage politics and the dependence of the urban poor on the clubhouse for a Thanksgiving turkey and a bucket of coal at Christmas. Yet, in founding what has become today's top-heavy, impersonal welfare bureaucracy and undermining old-style city machine politics, they also destroyed the city voter's personal access to government. No televised politico or ombudsman can really replace the old neighborhood political leader. The cry often heard in the cities now is greater participation in government--or "all power to the neighborhoods," as Norman Mailer put it in his New York City mayoralty campaign last year. This demand is a direct result of the vacuum in personal government that began with Al Smith's reforms six decades ago.

This slightly somber by-product of his good intentions would not surprise Smith, were he still alive. For his life and political career ended in shadows and regrets. When in 1924, F.D.R.--a rising fellow New York Democrat --nominated Smith for President, he quoted Wordsworth and called his candidate the "Happy Warrior." But after defeat in the 1928 presidential campaign, Smith was never the same again. For a number of reasons, some political, more personal, all very human, he gradually retreated into a tragic conservatism. He had acquired business associations with millionaires like General Motors Tycoon John J. Raskob, but all through the Depression he continued to have personal financial worries. He was piqued because F.D.R., his successor as Governor, ignored his advice. He was embittered to see the patrician Roosevelt make it to the White House when he himself --a proletarian and a Catholic--could not. By the time he died in 1944, Smith had renounced almost everything in his legacy to the urban masses whom he once served.

His regressions do not make a becoming epitaph for the Brown Derby. A better one appears in Beyond the Melting Pot, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now President Nixon's urban affairs adviser but for all that not an Irishman much given to understatement. "Al Smith," wrote Moynihan, "came close to being for the people of the Lower East Side of America what Lincoln had been for the frontier."

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