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Alfred Emanuel Smith, 54, was a living exemplar of the American Dream, big-city version. A laborer's son, he was born and raised in a shabby Irish neighborhood in Manhattan's decaying Lower East Side, left school for good at 14, a month short of completing the eighth grade, to work for a carting firm as a $3-a-week dispatcher's helper. Industrious, personable, and gifted with a flair for oratory, he early caught the eye of the Fourth Ward's Democratic political chieftains, fellow Irishmen all. When he was 21, a Fourth Ward politico got him a job in the office of the commissioner of jurors, serving jury duty summonses, and from there the ladder of politics led upward. Elected to the state assembly in 1903 at 29, he became speaker of the assembly in 1913. In 1918 he won the first of his four two-year terms as Governor of New York. An energetic and dedicated Governor, he reorganized the state administrative structure, overcame the Governor v. legislature impasse that had bogged down previous administrations, pushed through a series of social-welfare measures, notably school construction, public housing and child-labor restrictions.
By 1924 Smith was a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. Picked to make the speech nominating Smith at the 1924 convention, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been the party's vice-presidential candidate in 1920, and was recovering from his polio attack, applied to him a tag that stuck for the rest of Smith's life. Quoting from an 1807 poem by William Wordsworth, Roosevelt wound up the speech with:
This is the Happy Warrior; this is he That every man in arms should wish to be.*
For millions of big-city workers, children and grandchildren of immigrants, Happy Warrior Smith, grandson of immigrants, was a symbol of hopes and aspirations, living proof that in America a boy born to poverty, a member of ethnic and religious minorities, could nevertheless rise very high. Smith's opposition to Prohibition appealed to the big-city minority groups, who looked upon the 18th Amendment as an imposition by the Protestant majority. But the very aspects of Al Smith that endeared him to big-city working-class Americans of Irish, Latin, Slavic and Jewish origins tended to repel older-stock Protestant Americans, some who were dedicated to Prohibition with religious fervor, and some who opposed Prohibition but joined in looking with dislike—or at least distrust—upon big cities, foreign accents and the Roman Catholic Church.
Even minor details about Al Smith and his campaign—his dudish brown derby, his Sidewalks of New York campaign song, the Bowery touches in his speech ("raddio," "horspital," etc.)—grated on Americans west of the Hudson River, emphasizing for them his alien, big-city background. Kansas' William Allen White, widely heeded editor of the Emporia Gazette, expressed the fears and suspicions of a broad, bipartisan segment of the U.S. when he wrote that the "whole puritan civilization, which has built a sturdy, orderly nation, is threatened by Smith."