(2 of 3)
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.