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.