Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior

From Publishers Weekly After his death in 1944, it took 57 years to get Al Smith the excellent biography he deserved. That book finally arrived in 2001, when Robert A. Slayton published Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith. Now, a year later, comes another worthy Smith biography, albeit a bit shorter and based somewhat less on primary sources than is Slayton's. Full of sympathy for the always sympathetic Smith, Finan (president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression) provides a readable, reliable and reasoned portrait of the Catholic Smith's 1870s childhood on New York City's Lower East Side, his early days with Tammany, his years as a pioneer Democratic reform governor in New York, and his political demise when he fell to anti-Catholic bigotry in the presidential election of 1928. Finan borrows his subtitle from FDR's famous phrase describing Smith, and he spends a great deal of time depicting the complex relationship these two men shared. At first FDR's mentor, Smith eventually came to feel betrayed and displaced by the Protestant Knickerbocker who moved into his post as governor in '28 and then, in '32, achieved the White House, succeeding where Smith had failed. Subsequently, FDR could never understand Smith's myriad criticisms of New Deal reforms that were to a large degree based on policies Smith himself had enacted previously in New York. Still, as Finan shows in his first book, FDR and Smith ended as friends. 24 b&w illus. not seen by PW. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal With two major narrative lives of Al Smith appearing within months of each other, could "The Happy Warrior" finally be getting his due? First came Robert A. Slayton's Empire Statesman: The Rise of Al Smith, which centered on Smith's losing 1928 presidential campaign. Now comes this new biography of New York's popular four-term Democratic governor, capping first-time author Finan's years of graduate research. Significantly, Smith, the first Roman Catholic presidential candidate of a major party, suffered a crushing electoral defeat that stood as a political warning to Catholic candidates until JFK in 1960. Academic biographers have long ignored Smith, who did not leave much of a personal paper trail. Liberals seems never to have quite forgiven him for splitting with FDR's New Deal in 1936, while conservatives seem to have invoked his legacy only when politically convenient. In this full biography, Finan reveals a vulnerable person who was too open and too trusting. Ultimately, the Happy Warrior's broader political realism was limited by minimal education coupled with lack of travel prior to his presidential campaign. He was the candidate of urban immigrants pitted against his party's rural populist wing. Finan's solid and highly readable biography is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries. William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.