American Notes

As a four-term Governor of New York and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, Alfred E. Smith was celebrated as an honest politician in a corrupt milieu. But a chapter deleted from the recently published autobiography of Thomas L. Chadbourne, a wheeling-dealing corporation lawyer, claims that during the 1920s Chadbourne gave Smith cash and stock options worth $400,000. The motive was high-minded: the payments were designed to augment Smith's $10,000-a-year Governor's salary so the Happy Warrior could live "without bread-and- butter worries." Chadbourne, who died in 1938, admits he was miffed when Smith later refused to support a subway-fare increase, which would have hugely added to the value of Chadbourne's mass-transit stock.

When Chadbourne's memoirs were acquired by New York University, the New York firm of Chadbourne, Parke, Whiteside & Wolff successfully requested that the Smith chapter be dropped from publication. A spokesman told the New York Times that the firm merely wanted to avoid libeling anyone, although dead people cannot be libeled. Still, the reputations of the dead, as of the living, can be tainted by unsavory lore.