Al Smith Al Smith, who was elected Governor of New York four times and was the Democratic candidate for president in 1928, was an urban leader of the Progressive Movement. As governor in the 1920s he achieved a number of reforms, but he was also linked to the notorious Tammany Hall group that controlled Manhattan politics. Alfred Emanuel Smith Jr. was born on December 30, 1873 in the Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father, the son of Italian and German immigrants, anglicized the family name to Smith (In Italian, Ferraro means “smith” or “blacksmith”). His mother, Catherine Mulvihill, was the daughter of Irish immigrants. When his father, a Civil War veteran, died in 1886, Smith, only thirteen, had to drop out of St. James …show more content…
Davis of West Virginia, who lost the election by a landslide to Calvin Coolidge. He ran again in 1928, securing his party’s nomination, but lost in a landslide general election to the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover. The loss has been attributed to his Catholic faith, because many feared that he would answer to the Pope and not the Constitution; to his association with Tammany Hall, which was charged with tolerating corruption in government; and to his favoring of the relaxation or repeal of Prohibition laws were also factors. After the 1928 election, Smith became the president of Empire State, Inc., the corporation that built and operated the Empire State Building. Construction for the building was commenced symbolically on March 17, 1930. Built in only thirteen months, the then-world’s tallest skyscraper opened on May 1, 1931. It reminded Smith of Brooklyn Bridge, which he had witnessed being built from his Lower East Side boyhood home. Smith again sought the democratic presidential nomination in 1932, but was defeated by his former ally and successor as New York Governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He went on to campaign for Roosevelt giving a particularly important speech on behalf of the Democratic nominee at Boston on October 27,