Unforgotten Man
Al Smith and His America.
by Oscar Handlin.
Little, Brown. 207 pp. $3.50.
Alfred E. Smith’s career has long symbolized both the gains and the frustrations experienced by the sons of immigrants in this century, so it is fitting that he should find a biographer in Oscar Handlin, our leading contemporary historian of immigration and chronicler of ethnic groups in America. No figure possessing a historical importance that is not immediately apparent tends to be so forgotten as the man of the day before yesterday—too remote in time to be still a living memory and too recent to have been dealt with fully by the historians. Thus Handlin performs a service in briefly narrating the story of Smith’s unusual career: his rise from the Irish tenements of the Bowery through Tammany Hall to the Governorship of New York, his record as a five-term governor, his Presidential candidacy in 1928 and the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant agitation it aroused, and his last embittered years as a critic of the New Deal and a stalwart of the Liberty League.
This service acknowledged, however, it must be admitted that Al Smith and His America is a superficial and pedestrian book, one that goes to such lengths in taking Smith’s side against all the critics and foes he encountered in over thirty years in politics as to give the curious impression of being a retrospective campaign biography. The appearance of intense partisanship is created in part by a stylistic device to which Handlin is addicted: the presentation of his subject’s point of view in the subject’s own imagined words, in prose, that is, which attempts to echo the rhythms of colloquial speech. Thus passages containing rather feeble efforts to reproduce Smith’s Bowery brogue and occasional direct quotes from his speeches are followed by passages of straight narration or, much more rarely, interpretation. This approach was effective in an earlier book of Handlin’s, The Uprooted, where his main intention was to convey the immediate feel of the experience of millions of European peasants suddenly thrust into an alien urban environment in a foreign land, but it is less appropriate to political biography. One can never be certain whether Handlin is endorsing Smith’s views or merely presenting them in dramatized form.
And however justified it may be to regard the unanswered question, “Can a Catholic ever become President of the United States?” as Smith’s main legacy to contemporary America, he was after all primarily an immensely effective politician in a period of major social change who fought numerous political engagements with men some of whom are still alive. Handlin does not fail to remind us of the extent to which the present structure of state government in New York is still largely that which Smith forged into an efficient administrative apparatus, but, while he convincingly exonerates Smith from the charge of being nothing more than a Tammany machine man, he is distressingly vague about Smith’s position on national political issues, greatly overworking the adjective “pragmatic” to characterize his hero’s outlook.
Smith as New York State Assemblyman and Governor is pictured as a pioneer of the welfare state in his concern with humanitarian legislation and state regulation of business, but Handlin avoids fully recognizing Smith’s conservative position in his contest with Roosevelt for the 1932 Presidential nomination. He almost leads us to believe that prohibition, and not the depression, was the great issue of the campaign and he criticizes Roosevelt for avoiding a forthright stand on it. But that Smith’s economic views, heavily influenced by John J. Raskob and other wealthy businessmen with whom he had become associated politically and financially in the late 20’s, were almost indistinguishable from Hoover’s (up to and including advocacy of the protectionism traditionally opposed by the Democratic party) he neglects to mention. He does say that Smith favored “tariff reform,” but without indicating that he wanted tariffs raised rather than lowered. Indeed, Handlin manages to suggest, without ever actually saying so, that the notion that Smith was in 1932 the leader of the conservative city Democrats backed by Wall Street is a canard spread by the Roosevelt forces in the pre-convention jockeying. Clearly, Harvard historians ought to get together more often, for Handlin’s account of the Smith-Roosevelt relationship and of the 1932 Democratic convention differs markedly from that of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in The Crisis of the Old Order published last year. Schlesinger, to put it mildly, is hardly free from partisan enthusiasm for his hero, Roosevelt, but it is possible in his account, as it is not in Handlin’s, to distinguish between the actual record of events, the responses to them of the chief protagonist, and the historian’s own interpretations.
Not until he discusses the violent opposition to Roosevelt and the New Deal which led Smith to become a founder of the Liberty League and a supporter of the Republican tickets in 1936 and 1940 does Handlin allow himself to be critical. And even here he strikes an excessively apologetic note in reading into Smith’s standard anti-New Deal oratory a valid perception of the dangers to “liberty” of excessive emphasis on “security” and “economic problems”—the kind of insight which has become commonplace in the 50’s, but which hardly explains or justifies the banal and irrelevant ideologizing of the Liberty Leaguers in the worst years of the depression. Whatever Smith’s virtues he was not, after all, a political philosopher steeped in Acton, Tocqueville, and Mill.
Perhaps Al Smith and His America, unlike some of the author’s earlier books, should be judged as the work of a publicist rather than that of a historical scholar. Before its publication in book form it was serialized in a Boston newspaper—Boston with its huge Irish population being one of the few parts of the country where Smith is a well-remembered figure as well as being the capital of a state whose leading politician today is like Smith an Irish Catholic and a Democratic Presidential aspirant. The limitations of Handlin’s book clearly stem from his subordination of the actual stuff of history to the obvious yet inescapable symbolism of Al Smith’s career. If his treatment of Smith’s role in national politics is perfunctory and overly selective, this is because Smith is for him pre-eminently the immigrant boy who made good in America but was the victim of religious and ethnic prejudice when he reached for the highest prize of all. And if there are other perspectives from which Smith’s life and career might be viewed, his name still evokes status anxieties among Irish Catholics, anxieties which (as Samuel Lubell has shown) slumber beneath the surface of American politics and erupt sporadically to find intemperate expression in movements like McCarthyism.
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