and he lived in a enclave surrounded by this. he could go just a block down the street and there would be ships from all over the word. and this shaped his image. he thought he knew america by knowing all these people. he knew what it meant to be tolerantdifferent ethnicities. and the shock was it s not like this. when he went to the assembly and started traveling the state, he realized i have seen more in my neighborhood than what these people have seen. he brought many members of the assembly to see this is how merrily is, this is a melting pot. and that caused a lot of problems. some of that came back to religion and his accent. we will get to calls in just a minute. he went to work in 1836, when he was 18 years old. where did he go to work? he probably had one of the toughest careers i have heard of. he starts by leaving early and he goes and sells newspapers, and after school i will sell newspaperses, and he makes a few dollars that way and it s not enough. his mothe
who believes in the constitution of the united states and the principles upon which it was founded. when he is chosen to guide this nation, then and then only will the stars and stripes again wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave. beverly gage, what s your reaction to hearing that? well, it s really remarkable how quickly and how viciously al smith ends up going after the people who had once been his greatest supporters. i was trying to think if there has ever been another major party presidential candidate who, in less than a decade after he had run on his party s platform, is actually endorsing actively the candidates of the other party joe lieberman? joe lieberman, i guess so. he s sort of hard to read. was joe lieberman ever really a democrat? i don t know. but so going around and actually doing these endorsements in 1936, in 1940 and i think in this way that is incredibly outspoken. i mean, he makes this speech in 1936 where he s accusing t
he had probably one of the toughest careers that i ve ever heard of. he starts by leaving early and he goes and sells newspapers. after school, i m going to sell newspapers. he makes a few dollars that way. it s not enough. his mother had to go and get a job the day that they buried his father. she comes back from the funeral, goes back to the lady of the umbrella factory where she worked prior to meeting al smith sr. to get her job back. it s not enough. smith selling papers, it s not enough. eventually he goes through a rapid series of jobs working in a small candy store that his mother was a proprietor of. he then goes and works in a company that is a truck spotting. he used to run around the south end of lower manhattan and pick up the different trucks for his company and report them. don t come back, go to this spot. he was a truck spotter. eventually he gets the most famous job that he s well-known for, fulton fish market. as a young man who was a teenager, getting up
like. and also the port authority in new york and new jersey was one of his ideas. a bistate authority. he had a lot of interesting things. john evers, biggest failure of al smith. some of it might be that he overthought things. i think from a political science point of view, public authorities were something he wanted to deal with. and he created those. and now there s debates over public authorities and bonding. governor smith was a huge proponent of bonding. and that has also created propensity today for dependence on bonding and could create state debt. what difference in al smith make in national politics? i think that al smith called certain questions and faced them down. his candidacy raised questions that had been percolating in various ways throughout the 1920s. these questions that we ve been talking about. immigration, nativism, all of these sorts of issues. and he really calls the question he takes a very sort of powerful stand about who s going to be an
would talk to a chamber of commerce. like you would anybody else in a campaign. smith starts to realize that women suffrage is a good idea. i can enlighten these people. i can get them to vote democratic. that s where he gets the brain trust and many of the people who work for him for governor, for president, a lot of reformers that become sturdy supporters of the democratic party. smith capitalizes on that. just a few blocks south of here is the new york governor s mansion. al smith lived in there for eight years or so during his career here. what was life like for al smith at the governor s mention. hectic. would he walk up here to the assembly? he would walk. he would walk up here. in fact, when i worked for the legislature, worked for an assemblyman up in his 80s who remembers the governor used to tell me these stories. he remembered the governor walking over from the governor s mansion to the capitol. he d stop him and say, do you go to school with my son? prob