On a cold January day in 1911, a young lawyer with a famous last name and a spring in his step entered the New York state capital in Albany to be sworn in as a new state senator.
His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was 28 years old and he was sure he was following in the footsteps of his fifth cousin—who also happened to be his wife’s uncle. Not so many years earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had been a young member of the New York State Legislature, and he had gone on to bigger and greater things. Young Franklin told friends that his goal was to be a New York legislator, then assistant secretary of the Navy, then governor of New York. Just like Teddy. And then? Anyone who was governor of New York, he said, was a presidential candidate in waiting. None of Franklin Roosevelt’s friends considered this scenario far-fetched.
Some of his new colleagues, however, had a very different opinion of the young patrician from Hyde Park who had been raised in a manor house called Springwood and traveled in a private rail car with his wealthy parents. They found him aloof, arrogant, contemptuous of professional politicians, especially those from New York City. More than anything else, they considered him an amateur and a lightweight.
One of Albany’s most powerful politicians summed up what others were thinking about state Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “He doesn’t have any idea of how you get on in politics,” said the majority leader of the state assembly, Alfred E. Smith—better known to friend and foe alike as simply Al.
Al Smith was a son of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the grandson of an Irish immigrant, a self-made, self-taught product of New York’s famous political machine, Tammany Hall. He was 37 years old, wore loud suits, and had the voice of a carnival barker. On Thursday nights when the Legislature was in session, he gathered a handful of colleagues together for dinner at a hotel just down the hill from the Capitol. There, over cigars and drinks, he told stories about the sidewalks of New York to legislators from the mill towns of western New York, the potato fields of Long Island, and the forests and villages of upstate. They had never met such an extraordinary political leader, a grade school dropout who learned about life as a teenager working in the Fulton Fish Market.
On that January day in Albany, there was a chasm separating Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Al Smith. True, they were both Democrats. But they represented two very different constituencies and two very different traditions, and they seemed unbridgeable. Roosevelt was a voice for the party’s elite reformers and its rural voters, who had in common a disdain for cities, immigrants, and urban politics. Smith represented the new Americans of the 20th century who traced their roots to the shtetls of eastern Europe, the villages of southern Italy, the townlands in the west of Ireland. They were a rural people transformed almost instantly to city dwellers, and they relied not only on themselves but on their local political machines for help and guidance. The machines were happy to help, as long as they could depend on their new friends on Election Day.
For years, decades even, the two factions of the Democratic Party operated on opposite sides of the canyon that divided them, shouting insults at each other from across the chasm. Not surprisingly, the party was virtually impotent in national elections. From the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 to the election of Teddy Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, in 1908—a span of nearly 40 years—only one Democrat, Grover Cleveland, had been elected president. And as long as the Democrats continued to produce disparate leaders like Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, the party’s divisions seemed destined to continue.
But, because of Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, that’s not what happened.
Within seven years of Roosevelt’s debut as a state senator, he and Al Smith began building a bridge between all that divided them.
Within seven years of Roosevelt’s debut as a state senator, after he left Albany and moved on—as he predicted—to become assistant secretary of the Navy, he and Al Smith began building a bridge between all that divided them. In 1918, a century ago, Smith was running for governor of New York against a popular incumbent. As election day approached, Smith received a letter from somebody who described himself as his “sincere friend.” The letter spoke of the “personal friendship” they had formed when they served together in Albany. And the letter-writer said he would be delighted to help Al Smith’s campaign for governor in any way he could. It was signed by the assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt.
Nobody, least of all these two very different men, would have predicted such a coming together, the Protestant country squire and the Catholic city kid, the reformer and the machine pol. And, in fact, Roosevelt was unable to actively campaign for Smith in 1918 because he and his children fell victim to the flu pandemic that killed as many as 100 million people around the world. The horrific outbreak forced Smith to cancel most of his campaign appearances in the weeks before Election Day, a distinct disadvantage for a candidate with Smith’s personal magnetism.
But he won, barely, becoming the first Catholic to be elected governor of New York, a cultural milestone at the time, something taken for granted a century later.
Letters poured into Smith’s office from old and new friends, favor-seekers, job-hunters, advice-dispensers. Among them, and perhaps fitting into all of those categories, were letters from Franklin Roosevelt.
They were building a bridge, the two of them. And that bridge would one day unite their party and lead it to unprecedented dominance of national politics.
And in many ways, it was Al Smith who paid the toll.
Photo of Franklin Roosevelt as a child on his pony, “Debby,” on the grounds near Springwood in Hyde Park. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum)
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