and instead of making speeches saved his voice for the nightly singing in the saloons.
He had many friends in Albany now. He arrived at the capitol each morning with a fresh supply of jokes, hilarious stories told in a variety of dialects, and legislators and clerks would crowd around him to hear them. During a debate on a bill proposing to regulate Chinese laundries, Smith suddenly burst into the Assembly Chamber bearing a huge sign decorated with Chinese characters.
Surprisingly, his friends included Republicans as well as Democrats. No one would have seemed less likely to get along with the aristocratic upstate Republicans, born into families that controlled the great utilities and banks of the state and educated among the Ivy, than Al Smith, but his jokes had them roaring, too. The rising star of a band of reforming Republicans who were trying to unseat the Black Horse Cavalry was young Jimmy Wadsworth, a scion of one of the wealthiest families in Rochester and a former Yale baseball star. Wadsworth soon began to make a regular supper trio with Smith and a slow-talking, forceful, young German-born state senator who had become particularly close to Smith, Robert F. Wagner, Sr. Elected Speaker, Wadsworth handed Smith some choice committee assignments. In 1908, after Smith had swept his district for the fifth time, he found himself, on his return to Albany, one of the capital's most influential Democrats. He was expected now to use the voice that he had kept silent so long.
And when he did, people began to listen. The years spent reading the obscure minor bills began to pay off. Because no matter what the subject was, the other legislators began to realize, Al Smith understood it. In some way that they were unable to figure out, he had become familiar with their little pet projects, their side roads, the peculiar problems of their districts.
Moreover, when Smith rose to speak, the Assembly Chamber became a place of drama. "His presence electrifies and wins over even his opponents," Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton University was to say. "His . . . voice makes his listeners tingle."
The voice was nasal, grating, harsh and insistent—and unforgettable. One journalist wrote that it had trumpets in it. Coupled with the wit of the man who used it, it could tear an opponent apart or make bored men roar with laughter. (A Buffalo assemblyman once tried to correct Smith's grammar. The Assembly, well aware of Smith's lack of education, waited silently for his reply. Slowly he arose. "I will," he said with dignity, "refer the gentleman from Buffalo to the rule that says, 'When a pluperfect adjective precedes a noun, insert a plus.' ") It could even hold the attention of the legislators during arcane discussions of state finances. One reporter wrote: "Discussion of the annual appropriation bill used to be the signal for a general exodus from the Assembly Chamber. But not so when 'Al' Smith took the floor. He could keep the members in their seats hours on end with his masterly dissection of that measure."
Charles F. ("Silent Charlie") Murphy, the unsmiling Irishman who had risen from saloon keeper to the leadership of all Tammany Hall, had
been hearing a lot about Smith. Now he said he'd like to meet him. After the meeting, someone said to Murphy, "He's a nice young fellow. He has a lot of ability. It's too bad he isn't a college man." Murphy looked at the speaker a long moment. "If he was a college man," he said at last, "he wouldn't be Al Smith." In 1911, aided by revelations of widespread corruption among Republican legislators, the Democrats won control of both houses for the first time in eighteen years. Murphy had the Democratic caucus elect Smith majority leader of the Assembly.
In a position of importance at last, Al Smith carried out orders. Using the powers of his office ruthlessly, he rammed through the Assembly, as Bob Wagner was ramming it through the Senate, the notorious "Murphy Charter," which weakened New York City's civil service system and added thousands of patronage jobs to its payroll.
Good Government groups railed at Smith. The Citizens Union called him "one of the most dangerous men in Albany." Identifying him, day after day, as "Smith, the Tammany man," newspapers joined in the outcry. "The Democratic caucus," said a disgusted editorial in the New York World, "is Charles F. Murphy at one end of a telephone wire and the Democratic leader at the other end." In all his years in the Legislature, one political observer was to say, Smith had never been anything more than "the brilliant henchman at Albany of the organization housed in the ornate and shabby building on Fourteenth Street."
But such analyses were incomplete. Most legislators spent as little time as possible in Albany, coming to the capital only one or two days a week and spending the rest of their time attending to their outside business interests. Murphy saw to it that Smith was offered a well-paying position with a firm doing business with the city. Finances were still tight for Smith. He could have used the money. But he turned the offer down. Instead, he spent most of every week—all of many weeks—in the capital. Not only did he attend every hearing held by every committee of which he was a member but, legislators began to notice, he would slip quietly into hearings held by committees of which he was not a member and sit in the back of the hearing rooms, following the testimony intently. At night, he would still party loudly and happily—and he would still slip away from most parties early.
Now he would slip away not to a cheap furnished room but to the plush majority leader's suite at the Ten Eyck Hotel. Now the face bent over the pile of bills was Considerably fuller than the face that had been bent over the pile seven years before; it was redder and its teeth, once so white, were capped with gold and yellowed by the cigar butts clenched unendingly between them. Now there was a considerable paunch beneath the pinstripes.
But the face still bent over the bills.
And now a new element was added to the background of the picture. Sweatshops didn't close on Saturday, and on the Saturday afternoon of March 26, 1911, hundreds of employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, most of them girls from the Lower East Side, were still bending over swatches of material on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of a building overlooking New York's Washington Square. Someone in the tenth-floor work-
room lit a cigarette and tossed the match away. It hadn't burned out when it fell into the ankle-deep litter around the sewing machines.
There was a puff of smoke, and then a sheet of flame. The exits were inadequate, the doors to many locked. As the terrified girls jammed against them in panic, scores were crushed to death. Others were suffocated by the heavy smoke. As it billowed around them and the flames crept closer, girls leaped from the windows. Bodies smashed against the sidewalks and tore through sidewalk gratings. The death toll was 141.
Reformers had been haranguing against unsafe conditions in the sweatshops for years, but their harangues had thudded without effect against political stockades buttressed with campaign contributions of factory owners. Now they descended on Albany, led by men like Henry Moskowitz, a bunch of near-hysterical women, and one very quiet one, Henry Moskowitz's wife.
Demanding the formation of a commission to investigate factory conditions and to recommend remedial legislation, the reformers brought with them a list of potential commission members. Smith, conferring with them, agreed to most of the names but added one: his own.
At first, the reformers on the State Factory Investigating Commission looked at "Smith, the Tammany man," askance. Then the commission's work began. It took the members to all the major cities of the state. Now and again one or another of the reform members would miss a trip, but they noticed that Smith never did. They watched his face as, day after day, he saw what life in the factories was like. They watched his expression when he saw whole families, mothers with their children, little boys and girls, working all the daylight hours seven days a week in rooms in which there was not a single window, when, after one factory manager had insisted that no children under the age of seven were employed in his plant, commission staffers found such children jammed into an elevator that had been hidden between floors to escape the commission's notice. When the reform members of the commission made their proposals, they waited for Smith's reaction.
You make the proposals, he told them. I'll fight for them.
Even while Good Government organizations were continuing to rail against him—the 1912 Citizens Union summary of his record was even more devastating than its 1911 summary—a few reformers were starting to tell their friends another story.
Al Smith, they said, had absolutely no "general theory." His naivete in matters of philosophy was ridiculous. When he talked about social welfare legislation, it was in terms of "us" against "them," of the "people" against the "interests," of the Fourth Ward against the factory owners. But the "people," the Fourth Ward, did seem to mean something very special to him. No one could listen to him talk about how doctors' bills could eat up a man's savings and leave his family destitute, about how penniless mothers feared that "the charities" would take their children, about children who grew to manhood without ever having a pair of new shoes, without believing that his determination to help them was real. No one could look at his face when he talked and not know it was real. First one and then another of the reformers began to tell their friends that they had really come to believe
that maybe, just maybe, after decades of waiting, reform in New York had found at last, in the red-faced Tammany henchman, the instrument for which it had been waiting: the champion who .would fight for their dreams in the political arena and turn them into laws. And some of the more romantic among them, examining Smith's long, slow rise through the ranks of Tammany, began to speculate that perhaps all the time he had been executing its dirty work he had been waiting for the chance to do good.
When the commission's recommendations, embodied in bills, came up in the Legislature, Smith fought for them. From their seats in the spectator galleries high up over the Assembly Chamber, the reformers could see him roaming the narrow aisles between the legislators' desks, pleading, cajoling, threatening, bargaining, dealing, trading votes—using every trick he had learned in his years of working for Tammany.
Smith's debating ability was already legendary, but never, observers wrote, had he spoken like this. During a debate on a bill that would have required "one day's rest in seven" for women and children, Republican legislators beholden to cannery interests pleaded for exemptions for canneries. Smith waited until every Republican had finished. Then he rose and walked between their desks down to the well of the Chamber. Whirling to face them, he said quietly, "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.' " Without another word, he returned to his seat. On another occasion, the man whose mother had once feared that her son would be taken from her rose to speak on widows' pensions.
Mr. Speaker, what happens when death takes from the family the provider? The widowed mother goes to the police court or to the charity organization and her children are committed to an institution, and from the moment the judge signs the commitment the people of the city of New York are bound for their support. Let us see what effect that has upon the State itself. The mother stands in the police court. She witnesses the separation of herself and her children. They are torn away from her and given over to the custody of an institution, and nothing is left for her to do but to go out into the world and make her own living. What must be her feelings? What must be her idea of the State's policy when she sees these children separated from her by due process of law, particularly when she must remember that for every one of them she went down into the valley of death that a new pair of eyes might look out upon the world? What can be the feelings in the hearts of the children themselves, separated from their mother by what they must learn in after years was due process of law, when they must in after years learn to know what the State's policy was with respect to their unfortunate condition?
That is the old system. That is the dark day we are walking away from. That is the period that, by this policy, we are attempting to forget.
What new policy does this bill inaugurate? What new system does this bill inaugurate? The State of New York reaches out to them, "We recognize in you a resource of the State and we propose to take care of you, not as a matter of charity, but as a government and public duty." What a different feeling that must put into the hearts of the mother and the children! What better citizens that
policy must make! Why? Because it instills into that young heart a love, a reverence and a devotion for the State of New York and its sovereign power.
We are pledged to conserve the natural resources of the State. Millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money, untold and uncounted millions, have been poured into that channel. We have been in a great hurry to legislate for the interests. We have been slow to legislate along the direction that means thanksgiving to the poorest man recorded in history—He who was born in the stable at Bethlehem.
Al Smith's eloquence was useless in the 1912 session, because the Republicans had recaptured control of the Assembly. But in November 1912, the Democrats grabbed it back—and Murphy had the party's caucus elect Smith Assembly Speaker for the 1913 session.
He had never dreamed, Al Smith told friends, that an uneducated Mick from the Fourth Ward could rise so high. That he might rise higher, he was to say later, never crossed his mind. He had, after all, about reached a point beyond which, in America, no Al Smith had ever risen. No Catholic had ever been given a presidential nomination nor, for that matter, any Irish Tammany man a nomination for high statewide office. A Governor or a United States senator was supposed to, in the words of one historian, "present an image—in appearance, speech and manners—appropriate to his high office" and "somehow it was incongruous to think of an Irishman up from the city streets in such a post." Tammany men, while they might not say so, felt that way themselves; they felt unpolished and crude and very uneducated beside the "uptowners"—and they never pushed themselves forward for the top spots.
As Assembly Speaker, Smith was all that Tammany could have desired, building up the organization's patronage and power—and pushing through liquor-law amendments that allowed the sale of alcoholic beverages at hotels that Charlie Murphy favored, and forbade such sales at hotels that Silent Charlie did not.
Some observers bemoaned Smith's lack of dignity. Pounding his gavel with great swings of his arm, bellowing parliamentary rulings in a hoarse gravel voice that one writer called a "Bull-of-Bashan roar," he sometimes seemed to them like a carnival barker. He sometimes ate lunch on the podium. He talked with food in his mouth.
But seldom in the history of the Legislature had its business been transacted so smoothly and expeditiously. Cutting short long-winded speakers, hustling routine bills through at a rate that reporters clocked at eight per minute, Smith was, on the high Speaker's podium, a commanding figure.
And if Smith fought for Tammany's bills, he did not stop fighting for the factory commission's. By the end of the session, many of them had been passed, even a revolutionary workmen's compensation measure. In 1914, the Republicans regained power. Albany was filled with high-priced lobbyists representing insurance companies. Amendments to the compensation measure were introduced that looked innocent but that would in reality tear out its heart. All the amendments did, their sponsors protested, was provide that there could be direct settlements between workmen and insurance com-
panies instead of enforced resort to the machinery provided by the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1913. All that they did was enable the working man to get money sooner.
"And for whom are you doing this?" Smith demanded as he stood in the well of the Chamber and faced the Republicans. Those of them who were his friends saw not a hint of friendliness in his eyes now. "Does the working man want it? No! Does the Legislature want it? No! Does the compensation commission want it? Then what other interested party is there? The Casualty Company! That's who you are working for. . . . The agent can shake the long green before the widow or suffering laborer and tell them if they sign away their rights they can get so much but if they wait they can take their chance on getting something months hence. That car
ries us back to the good old days when we had no compensation law. Be honest and repeal the whole law and stop faking." A Republican legislator rose to protest, but Smith's voice cracked out like a whip. "You and your Governor have ruined the compensation law," he said. "You have gone the limit for the casualty companies. The people's case is lost."
Up in the high galleries that overlooked the floor, the reformers stood and cheered. The compensation law might be lost but they knew the Republicans would never dare to touch the others now. Great advances had been secured. And, more important, at last they had their champion. Smith, the Tammany man, had made their dreams come true. They hastened to hang others on his lance.
But even when Smith took up the banner of the reformers, he never put down the mace of the practical politician. He himself made no bones about this fact. If cynics said that he had recognized in child labor, disability insurance and workmen's compensation a great political issue, Smith said it too. When someone told him that his views were antagonizing factory owners, he would laugh and say that factory owners lived on Fifth Avenue and "There's no Democratic votes on Fifth Avenue; they're all over on Ninth and Tenth, where I live." Fighting for the working man, for better working conditions for women and children—that, he knew, was an issue on which you couldn't miss. The man who fought for the commission's legislation would be a man fighting on the side of the angels. Supporting its recommendations was more than good politics; it was the best politics.
When he had in some instances to drop either the banner or the mace, it wasn't the mace that fell. In the 1915 Constitutional Convention, he fought for the Municipal Research Bureau's recommended reorganization of the state government. Of all the issues raised by the reformers, reorganization was the one he most eagerly embraced because his years in Albany had allowed him to see for himself the almost incredible inefficiency of the system. But on the morning of August 27, 1915, Smith, who had spent all August 26 fighting shoulder to shoulder with the federal crowd for reorganization, waited in the capitol entrance hall for Progressive Republican Frederick C. Tanner, and when Tanner arrived, he pulled him aside.
The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York Page 18
