Master of His Fate by James Tobin (books to read for teens .TXT) 📕

do was steer clear of the wreckage. Not long before, he had thought 1928 might be the right year for him to run for governor of New York. Now he was determined to stay out of that race.

As August turned to September and the national campaign moved into full swing, Democratic chieftains across the state of New York were giving Al the same urgent advice: He had to do whatever it took to get Franklin Roosevelt to run for governor.

Smith had ruled Albany for eight of the last ten years. That had meant good things for Democrats. It wasn’t just that Democratic policies could be enacted, though that was important. A governor also appoints many people to jobs in state government and has a big say in the awarding of contracts to companies that do projects for the state, from building roads to cleaning state parks. If a Republican came in, those political appointees would be out of work, and the contracts would go to other companies.

So who would follow Al as governor—another Democrat, who would preserve the party’s power statewide? Or a Republican, who would cut short the Democrats’ glory days?

The Republicans were putting up a strong candidate, Albert Ottinger, the state’s attorney general. For the Democrats, it was bad enough that Ottinger was effective and popular. What really scared them was his religion. He was Jewish. In New York, a Jewish Republican with a solid record was the Democrats’ worst nightmare.

This was the reason:

In the 1920s, the population of New York State—10.3 million—was split fairly evenly between New York City (5.6 million) and the rest of the state (4.7 million). The city voted for Democrats by lopsided margins. Upstate—the vast region from the city’s northern suburbs all the way west to the Great Lakes—was Republican territory, apart from a few urban enclaves.

Upstate, a great many people were Protestants who favored Prohibition and didn’t care for Al Smith, the Tammany man with his flashy suits and low manners. They tended to vote Republican.

Downstate, many voters were Jewish liberals. Early in Al Smith’s career, many of those voters had distrusted him because of his connections to the Tammany machine. But they had since come to trust him as a true progressive who looked out for their interests. Most voted Democratic. But in Albert Ottinger they were being offered the first Jewish candidate ever nominated for statewide office in New York. Even Jewish voters accustomed to voting for Smith would be tempted to switch to Ottinger.

Anyone could do the math. If the Republicans could add any sizable number of downstate Jewish voters to their traditional majorities upstate, they had a winner in Albert Ottinger.

Could any candidate beat him?

No Democrat based in New York City enjoyed anything like Al’s popularity. Smith had been too popular. In his shadow it had been hard for any younger politician in the city to make a sizable reputation.

Upstate, on the other hand, Democrats spied one figure who could mount a strong threat to Attorney General Ottinger.

He was a Democrat, of course. He spent much of his time—when he wasn’t in Georgia—at home in Manhattan. But in politics, he was identified with his ancestral home in the Hudson Valley, with its air of country estates and “good breeding.” He had none of the low-class reputation that upstaters associated with Tammany Hall. He was against Prohibition, but he seldom talked about it. And he carried the same last name as the greatest Republican since Lincoln.

Democrats could do their own math. With FDR as their candidate for governor, they could fight for a respectable share of upstate Republicans still loyal to the name Roosevelt. As a well-known progressive, FDR could compete for Jewish votes in the city. Add Smith loyalists downstate who would favor the Democratic nominee no matter what, and he’d be in the running against Ottinger.

But what about infantile paralysis?

Well, the leaders of New York’s Democratic strongholds from Brooklyn to Buffalo had just watched FDR walk across that stage at the Houston convention—with help, yes, but he looked so much stronger than he had four years earlier. And hadn’t they been reading newspaper stories about his inspiring recovery? As his admirers were saying, you didn’t have to be an acrobat to be governor of New York. He looked well. He looked ready. They had to pick a nominee for governor at the state convention in Rochester in just a few weeks. Roosevelt was their best shot, probably their only shot. And they said so to Al with increasing urgency every day.

But Al wasn’t so sure.

Sure, he would say, he liked Frank (as he called Roosevelt) pretty well. Who didn’t? But he just couldn’t take him seriously. Being governor of New York was a tough job, too tough for a fancy-pants fellow from the Ivy League. “Smith thinks of Roosevelt as kind of a Boy Scout,” said a party veteran. FDR was the sort of man who could make a fine speech but wasn’t built for the kind of backroom dealing that real politics required. He “just isn’t the kind of man you can take into the pissroom and talk intimately with,” Smith told a friend.

And was he really strong enough? The job had worn Smith out, and he was healthy, more or less. How could a “crippled” man handle it?

But the boys in the party kept pushing him. It had to be Roosevelt, they said. He was the only prospect with vote-getting power both upstate and down.

Then, as the last days of August passed away, Smith’s need grew more desperate.

Even in New York State, public opinion seemed to be swinging in favor of Herbert Hoover. Nothing could be harder for Smith to hear. New York was not only his political base and the foundation of his chance for the presidency but also the place he loved, the place where he had made good as a kid who’d sold fish to pay his mother’s bills. It would be bad enough to lose the presidency to Hoover. But