Books: The Happy Warrior's Legacy

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Smith supported began the end of patronage politics and the dependence of the urban poor on the clubhouse for a Thanksgiving turkey and a bucket of coal at Christmas. Yet, in founding what has become today's top-heavy, impersonal welfare bureaucracy and undermining old-style city machine politics, they also destroyed the city voter's personal access to government. No televised politico or ombudsman can really replace the old neighborhood political leader. The cry often heard in the cities now is greater participation in government—or "all power to the neighborhoods," as Norman Mailer put it in his New York City mayoralty campaign last year. This demand is a direct result of the vacuum in personal government that began with Al Smith's reforms six decades ago.

This slightly somber by-product of his good intentions would not surprise Smith, were he still alive. For his life and political career ended in shadows and regrets. When in 1924, F.D.R.—a rising fellow New York Democrat —nominated Smith for President, he quoted Wordsworth and called his candidate the "Happy Warrior." But after defeat in the 1928 presidential campaign, Smith was never the same again. For a number of reasons, some political, more personal, all very human, he gradually retreated into a tragic conservatism. He had acquired business associations with millionaires like General Motors Tycoon John J. Raskob, but all through the Depression he continued to have personal financial worries. He was piqued because F.D.R., his successor as Governor, ignored his advice. He was embittered to see the patrician Roosevelt make it to the White House when he himself —a proletarian and a Catholic—could not. By the time he died in 1944, Smith had renounced almost everything in his legacy to the urban masses whom he once served.

His regressions do not make a becoming epitaph for the Brown Derby. A better one appears in Beyond the Melting Pot, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now President Nixon's urban affairs adviser but for all that not an Irishman much given to understatement. "Al Smith," wrote Moynihan, "came close to being for the people of the Lower East Side of America what Lincoln had been for the frontier."