The Happy Warrior

New York in August seemed oppressively hot to him. In the old days there had been little open garden patches in mid-Manhattan, but now the skyscrapers shut out the harbor breeze. The old "governor" was 70; finally he went to the hospital, for a "rest." But autumn came and he did not go home. Suddenly he was gravely ill. He prayed in his conscious moments, and one night the Most Rev. J. Francis A. Mclntyre, auxiliary bishop of New York, administered the last sacrament. He rallied; but four days later, Death, as it must to all men, came to Alfred Emanuel Smith.

Millions of Americans, who had almost forgotten Al Smith the politician, remembered him as a symbol of a wonderful era--the years of the never-ending bull market, of the hip flask, of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Dempsey fights. Al Smith's hoarse and genial East Side voice, his chewed cigar, his violent pajamas and his rasping expletive, "Baloney!" belonged to the fabulous '20s as much as It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'. He was against the Volstead Act; and in the '20s the U.S. almost elected him its President.

But Al Smith's philosophy was squarely at odds with the reckless public attitudes of his great years. He was devoutly religious, a family man who never went into nightclubs. The jazz age never won him away from songs like the Mulligan Guards. He toiled stubbornly for social reform. His life story had the old Horatio Alger plot. He was a poor East Side boy with an Irish gift for politics and people, who made good against tremendous odds.

Gaslit Years. He grew up in a New York which remains only in tintypes--a city of cobblestoned streets, red horsecars, gaslit saloons, Bowery sluggers and bowler hats.

When he was 13 his father died. Al quit St. James Parochial School to go to work. He could hardly read the printed word. But by the time he was 19 he was earning high wages--$12 a week--at the Fulton Fish Market. Tom Foley, a Tammany district leader, made young Al his lieutenant. When he was 30, Foley got him elected to the state legislature.

He had never been outside New York City, and he knew nothing about law or parliamentary procedure. He voted as Foley told him to vote, and for lonely years spent his nights in a cheap boardinghouse, trying to understand the bills before the Assembly. And he learned. He could talk. Men liked him. When a New York sweatshop fire in 1911 killed 149 women, he began fighting for a labor code for the state. He became a public figure, and speaker of the Assembly.

Governor of New York. He was elected governor of New York in 1918. By now he was a shrewd, blunt, humorous campaigner, with an unequaled knowledge of the state's affairs. He was also a great legislative technician with an uncanny ability to rasp out simple, pointed explanations of complicated governmental problems. He battled for slum clearance, set up children's courts, got additional millions for teachers' salaries. He wanted people to enjoy themselves--he took the ban off Sunday baseball.

He was greying, heavier, and a meticulous dresser. There was always a knifeedged crease in his trousers and his shoes glittered. He said: "I feel spiffy when I'm dressed just right." He carried a half-dozen clean handkerchiefs and sprayed himself with eau de cologne.

His fame spread outside the state, and by the 1924 Democratic Convention he had begun his great losing battle for the White House. Franklin Roosevelt put his name in nomination for President, and gave him the nickname that stuck for the rest of his life--"The Happy Warrior." It was not Al Smith's year. He was a Catholic and a Wet, and the Southerners and the Drys were against him. But by 1928 a Democratic boom for Al Smith swept the country. When the convention met at Houston, Tex., the opposition forces of 1924 had swung behind him.

The 1928 Campaign. Al Smith, the first U.S. Catholic to run for President as the nominee of a major party, went out to stump the nation. He was met by one of the most virulent whispering campaigns in U.S. history. Thousands muttered that he was building a tunnel to connect the White House with the Vatican.

The Happy Warrior fought back. He traveled the U.S. in a special train with 40 reporters. He never lost his grin; at press conferences he would order: "Throw in the ball, boys, and I'll kick at it." But the shrewd, hoarse eloquence, the administrative abilities that he had, and the support of all liberals, were not enough --the Great Engineer was elected. But now Smith had the fever. He became convinced that next time he would make it. When his old friend Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 nomination by the famed McAdoo-Garner-Hearst deal, Al Smith felt betrayed.

He campaigned for Roosevelt in 1932, but by 1936 he could no longer contain his bitterness. He invented the term "alphabet soup" to describe the plethora of New Deal agencies, spoke for Alf Landon, and warned the U.S. sarcastically that "You can't lick Santa Claus." Then he quit politics. His last years were quiet but busy. He became Honorary Curator of the Bronx Zoo, president of the long-empty Empire State Building, a director of a half-dozen corporations. He was one of the nation's great Roman Catholic laymen, and in 1937 he visited the Vatican. The next year he became a papal privy chamberlain. With his wife, who had once hung big washings on East Side clotheslines, he now lived handsomely on Fifth Avenue, resplendent in pin-striped double-breasted suits, piped vests, spats and fawn-colored derbies.

His wife died last spring. After that Al Smith grew old quickly.

The People Remembered. During the afternoon and night before his funeral his body lay in state at St. Patrick's Cathedral --the first time since the death of Ignace Paderewski in 1941 that a layman had been accorded this honor. The people of New York had not forgotten him. From mid-afternoon until 2 a.m. the four blocks of sidewalk around the cathedral were jammed with a solid mass of people, waiting to enter. A drizzling rain fell toward evening, gleaming wetly on hundreds of umbrellas, but the patient, silent crowds shuffled on--soldiers, old women, Negroes, bobby-sox girls, prominent citizens. When the doors were finally closed, 200,000 men & women, of every faith and from every station of life, had passed the bronze casket.

Next morning 7,000 jammed the cathedral; 35,000 more clotted into side streets nearby--one of the greatest crowds ever assembled for a New York funeral.

Then the organ's first notes trembled into the hush, began the solemn and ancient pageantry with which the Roman Catholic Church sends its kings, its great men, its princes of the clergy from this world. The East Side's Al Smith lay below the sanctuary, in a shrouded casket on a catafalque flanked by six tall, flickering candles. The altar before it was bright with the purple garb of bishops and the monsignori.

Outside, New York's great central artery, Fifth Avenue, lay empty and silent, cleared of all traffic. The crowds stood bareheaded and motionless; there was hardly a sound as the funeral procession started on its long way to the place beside his wife, under a simple headstone in a Queens cemetery. He would not be forgotten; to millions of Americans, as long as they lived, the jingling strains of The Sidewalks of New York would bring back the memory of The Happy Warrior of the Fabulous '20s.

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