In the U. S. last week millions of citizens gathered to hear the man who might have been President talk about the man who was President. At the Mayflower Hotel in Washington only 2,000 listeners actually saw the speaker, but it was to the unseen audience of the air that his words were significantly addressed. Most of that audience remembered the 1924 Democratic Convention when the speaker had first been called the "Happy Warrior"— by the same Franklin D. Roosevelt whom Alfred Emanuel Smith was about to denounce. They remembered March 4, 1933, when Al Smith paraded with the New York delegation in honor of the man who had won the prize denied to him. That was the last day on which the two New Yorkers stood together. Hardly had the Administration established itself before Editor Smith was sniping at it in the pages of his magazine. But the New Deal was stronger than the New Outlook and Editor Smith went into a long retirement.
From retirement the Warrior was now returning to the war, mounted on a strange charger known as the American Liberty League and surrounded by such unfamiliar lieutenants as Banker Winthrop Aldrich, ex-Senator David A. Reed, Steelman Ernest T. Weir, Politicalite Alice Longworth.
Al Smith, 62, with deeply silvered hair, his once full face already growing hollow with age, is a Conservative. Those who in 1928 mistook the fact that he was a Wet for the fiction that he was a Liberal, had long ago seen their error. To Al Smith the New Deal was a Strange Deal, full of Socialism, Radicalism, Communism. In Washington he stood up before the du Fonts and the Raskobs not to speak to them but to his party. He spoke not as the statesman of eight years ago but as the New Yorker of 30 years ago in the solecisms of the Lower East Side. Not once did he mention the name of Franklin Roosevelt, but every long word that he twisted his raucous tongue around, every point that he drove home with platitudinous common sense, every uproarious poke at the New Deal invited comparison with the polished plausibility of the Squire of Hyde Park. He made no attempt to grapple with the New Deal in argument. His was what his friends would call an appeal to principle and his enemies an appeal to prejudice. A score of times he made his audience bellow with amusement, yet his address was delivered in a tragic spirit. To Al Smith, the Democracy was in danger, and Al Smith was sounding the alarm.
"At the outset of my remarks," he began, "let me make one thing perfectly clear. I am not a candidate for any nomination by any party, at any time. . . . Further than that, I have no ax to grind. There is nothing personal in this whole performance insofar as I am concerned. ... I am in possession of supreme happiness and comfort. . . . "When I see danger, I say danger. . . . What are these dangers that I see? The first is the arraignment of class against class. ... Of course in my time I met some good and bad industrialists. . . . But I also met some good and bad laborers. This I know—that permanent prosperity is dependent upon both capital and labor alike. I also know that there can be no permanent prosperity in this country until industry is able to employ labor, and there certainly can be no permanent recovery upon any governmental theory of soak the rich or soak the poor. . . .