How I spent my summer vacations
(and every weekend for the last 18 years)
by Chris Finan
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Chris Finan's first book, Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior, has just been published. Finan is the President of the American Booksellers' Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and former executive director of the Media Coalition. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Alfred E. Smith was a New York politician perhaps best known for losing the 1928 presidential election to Herbert Hoover by a landslide. The meteoric rise and dramatic fall of the "Happy Warrior" are well known -- from his job at the Fulton Fish Market through his years in the state legislature and as four-time governor of New York to his crushing defeat in 1928 and his final, puzzling defection from the Democratic party in 1936. |
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What would make someone spend nearly two decades writing a book about a politician?
Lack of common sense is an obvious answer. But that is only part of the story of how I came to write Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior, which was published by Hill and Wang in June.
Originally, I was interested in the Irish. My father's family on one side is Irish Catholic. But "Irish" is only the beginning of what I am. My grandfather married a German Catholic, and my father married a woman who was neither Irish nor Catholic. My mother herself was the product of a mixed marriage. Her grandfather was a Hungarian Jew, but he told her father, Elmer, that he should feel free to marry a Gentile. Elmer married Doris, a woman of German Protestant background.
The ethnics in my little family pot refused to melt. My grandfather, Mike, refused to attend his son's marriage to a woman he considered a Jew. Doris thought that all "Irishmen" were drunks, including my father.
These tensions made me sensitive to ethnicity from a young age, and my interest grew during high school. It was the late 1960s, and people around the country were rediscovering their "roots." Although I had not been raised Catholic, I identified strongly with the Irish, their struggle for freedom, their music, and their beer.
I was a senior at Antioch College when I met Al Smith. My senior thesis was about the Irish American experience, and Smith, whose mother was Irish, was a key figure. He was born on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1873. While he lacked the size and strength of his father, a truck-driver, Smith was blessed with a wonderful memory and great verbal skills. He dreamed of being an actor, but, following his father's untimely death, he became the family breadwinner. He was in eighth grade when he dropped out of school.
Smith's oratorical gifts brought him to the attention of Tammany Hall, the political machine that ruled New York after the Civil War. He was elected to the New York Assembly, where he soon showed a strong talent for leadership. Unfortunately for Smith, New York politics were deeply divided between machine politicians and reformers. While the reformers liked Smith personally, they distrusted him because of his Tammany connection. He was, said one, "the best representative of the worst element of the Democratic Party."
In the end, Smith won the respect of liberals by leading the fight to pass legislation that would protect workers from unsafe factory conditions, provide a minimum wage for women workers, and eliminate child labor. When conservatives cried out against the expansion of government, Smith's answer was simple. "What did we set up government for?" he asked. In the 1920s, there was no more powerful spokesman for liberalism in the United States than Al Smith.
Smith's main appeal was to immigrant Americans. More than 30 million immigrants entered the United States between 1840 and 1917. Most were Catholics and Jews who lived in cities and yearned to support one of their own, like Smith. They helped elect him to four terms as governor of New York and enabled him to emerge as a national political leader. In 1928, he became the first Catholic to run for President.
I didn't give Smith much thought after I graduated and began working as a reporter, but I bumped into him again when my wife and I moved to New York so that I could go to graduate school. While writing my master's essay about New York City reformers in the 1930s, I became intrigued again by this liberal from the lower classes, and began to think about him as a possible dissertation topic.
I was shocked that there was no biography of Smith by a historian. I knew that he had not left many letters and other personal papers. My thesis advisor warned that I would have to track down every scrap of information I could find. But I didn't listen. How long could it take?
The answer soon became clear. I spent many weeks on the road, doing research at the New York State Library in Albany and at the Franklin Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park. I went to the Library of Congress to listen to tapes of Smith's voice and the National Archives to watch snippets of film. But most of my time was spent in local libraries reeling through roll after roll of microfilm of the New York Times, assembling an almost daily record of Smith's career.
Time began to fly. In the mid?1980s, I began working part?time for Media Coalition, an anti?censorship group. Then Attorney General Edwin Meese appointed an anti-pornography commission, and there was a rapid increase in censorship pressures. I was soon employed full?time, and work on the book was relegated to weekends and vacations.
My two sons were born. (The youngest is named Alexander because his mother wouldn't let me call him Alfred.) We restored an old house in Brooklyn. My wife, Pat Willard, published three food history books (Pie Every Day, A Soothing Broth, and Secrets of Saffron). I became president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.
And every year at our annual Christmas party, our friends, now graying, would ask, "How's the book coming?" Now that it is finally out, it is a joy to be able to put it in their hands.
But publishing this book in my lifetime was never my only dream. Outside New York, Al Smith is hardly remembered today, and many historians no longer view him as an important figure. I hope to convince both the average reader and the historian that although Smith fell short of his ultimate goal, he played a crucial role in making the United States a more democratic country. It is an objective that has always seemed well worth whatever time I could spend on it.