Alfred Emanuel Al Smith was an American politician who served four terms as Governor of New York and was the Democratic Party's candidate for president in 1928.
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Alfred Emanuel Al Smith was an American politician who served four terms as Governor of New York and was the Democratic Party's candidate for president in 1928.
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Son of an Irish-American mother and a Civil War–veteran Italian-American father, Al Smith was raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Al Smith served in the New York State Assembly from 1904 to 1915 and held the position of Speaker of the Assembly in 1913.
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Al Smith was the foremost urban leader of the Efficiency Movement in the United States and was noted for achieving a wide range of reforms as New York governor in the 1920s.
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Al Smith was the first Roman Catholic to be nominated for president of the United States by a major party.
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Al Smith was a committed "wet", which was a term used for opponents of Prohibition; as New York governor, he had repealed the state's prohibition law.
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Al Smith then entered business in New York City, became involved in the construction and promotion of the Empire State Building, and became an increasingly vocal opponent of Roosevelt's New Deal.
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Al Smith was born at 174 South Street and raised in the Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; he resided there for his entire life.
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Al Smith's father, baptised Joseph Alfred Smith in 1839, was the son of Emanuel Smith, an Italian marinaro.
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Al Smith grew up with his family struggling financially in the Gilded Age; New York City matured and completed major infrastructure projects.
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Al Smith never attended high school or college, and claimed he learned about people by studying them at the Fulton Fish Market, where he worked for $12 per week.
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Al Smith's acting skills made him a success on the amateur theater circuit.
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Al Smith became widely known, and developed the smooth oratorical style that characterized his political career.
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Al Smith served as vice chairman of the state commission appointed to investigate factory conditions after 146 workers died in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
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Together with Perkins and Robert F Wagner, Smith crusaded against dangerous and unhealthy workplace conditions and championed corrective legislation.
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In 1911, the Democrats obtained a majority of seats in the State Assembly, and Al Smith became Majority Leader and Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means.
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In 1919, Al Smith gave the famous speech "A man as low and mean as I can picture", making a drastic break with publisher William Randolph Hearst.
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Al Smith had combined with Tammany Hall in electing the local administration, and had attacked Smith for starving children by not reducing the cost of milk.
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Al Smith offered alcohol to guests at the Executive Mansion in Albany, and repealed the state's Prohibition enforcement statute, the Mullan-Gage law.
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In 1924, Al Smith unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president, advancing the cause of civil liberty by decrying lynching and racial violence.
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Undeterred, Al Smith returned to fight a determined campaign for the party's nomination in 1928.
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Reporter Frederick William Wile made the oft-repeated observation that Al Smith was defeated by "the three P's: Prohibition, Prejudice and Prosperity".
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Al Smith'storians agree that prosperity, along with widespread anti-Catholic sentiment against Smith, made Hoover's election inevitable.
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Al Smith defeated Smith by a landslide in the 1928 election, carrying five Southern states in crossover voting by conservative white Democrats.
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Al Smith was personally in favor of the relaxation or repeal of Prohibition laws, because they had given rise to more criminality.
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Al Smith was an articulate proponent of good government and efficiency, as was Hoover.
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Al Smith swept the entire Catholic vote, which had been split in 1920 and 1924 between the parties; he attracted millions of Catholics, generally ethnic whites, to the polls for the first time, especially women, who were first allowed to vote in 1920.
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Al Smith lost important Democratic constituencies in the rural North as well as in Southern cities and suburbs.
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Al Smith carried the ten most populous cities in the United States, an indication of the rising power of the urban areas and their new demographics.
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Al Smith narrowly lost New York State, whose electors were biased in favor of rural upstate and largely Protestant districts.
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Finan says Al Smith is an underestimated symbol of the changing nature of American politics in the first half of the last century.
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Al Smith represented the rising ambitions of urban, industrial America at a time when the hegemony of rural, agrarian America was in decline, although many states had legislatures and congressional delegations biased toward rural areas because of lack of redistricting after censuses.
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Al Smith was a devout Catholic, but his struggles against religious bigotry were often misinterpreted when he fought the religiously inspired Protestant morality imposed by prohibitionists.
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That coalition fell apart when Al Smith refused to work on finding a compromise candidate; instead, he maneuvered to become the nominee.
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Al Smith became highly critical of Roosevelt's New Deal policies, which he deemed a betrayal of good-government progressive ideals and ran counter to the goal of close cooperation with business.
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In 1936, while Al Smith was in Washington making a vehement radio attack on the President, she invited him to stay at the White House.
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Al Smith continued to promote the Empire State Building, which was derided as the "Empty State Building" due to a lack of tenants, in the years following its construction.
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In 1929, Al Smith was awarded the Laetare Medal by the University of Notre Dame, considered the most prestigious award for American Catholics.
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In 1929 Al Smith was elected President of the Board of Trustees of the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University.
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Al Smith supported the Anti-Nazi boycott of 1933 and addressed a mass-meeting at Madison Square Garden against Nazism that March.
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Al Smith's speech was included in the 1934 anthology Nazism: An Assault on Civilization.
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In 1938, Al Smith took to the airwaves to denounce Nazi brutality in the wake of Kristallnacht.
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In 1939 Al Smith was appointed a Papal Chamberlain of the Sword and Cape, one of the highest honors which the Papacy bestowed on a layman.
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