Smith was a Complex Man

It brings me no joy to disagree with another Krugman column. In this case it's really just a quibble:

One of the saddest stories I tell in my book is that of Al Smith, the great reformist governor of New York, who gradually turned into a narrow-minded economic conservative and bitter critic of F.D.R. H. L. Mencken explained it thusly: “His association with the rich has apparently wobbled him and changed him. He has become a golf player.”

The thing about Al Smith is that while he pushed through a lot of reformist legislation in New York, I don't think he was really a reformer in the conventional sense. Smith was a Tammany man. True, he outgrew his corrupt beginnings, much like Truman, but at least I'd say his story is a good deal more subtle than "reforming crusader is corrupted by wealth." Rather I'd say that Smith started out as a venal politician, rose to greatness on the strength of his character and his political skills at a time of sweeping changes in New York, and then lapsed into bitterness after his defeats in 1928 and 1932. I think that even at his peak his reformist instincts were largely subservient to his fairly straightforward populism.

In other words, to quote Robert Caro in The Power Broker, "Not even Al Smith's best friends ever said that he went into politics to help the lower classes. He went because, perhaps, he was gregarious and politics for a young man in the Fourth Ward without connections was, in Tom Foley's saloon with other young men, drinking beer, singing around a piano and telling stories while waiting for a contract [a task to be carried out for the political machine] from Foley. He went because, perhaps, it was a natural course for a young man with little education who wanted to get ahead in the ward's politics-drenched atmosphere - and because, perhaps, he saw no other way out of a life that for most of the years he could remember had been rolling heavy barrels and lifting heavy pipes."

Now don't get me wrong - in fact, let me just quote again from Caro:

Before his fourth term was over, "against the tide of the Twenties" that blinded most of a prosperous nation to the needs of its urban masses, Al Smith had not only forced through a recalcitrant Legislature measures that improved working conditions and reduced working hours for men, women and children, but had also lashed state departments into enforcing the measures.... Franklin D. Roosevelt, as President, was to say that "practically all the things we've done in the federal government are like things Al Smith did as Governor of New York." [it was a rare moment of magnanimity - generally Roosevelt snubbed Smith]

Sigh. All right. I guess my point is that Krugman's version is grossly incomplete, but then, he only has 740 words or something. I guess I wish he had left the Smith stuff out of the column. Also I think one of the big corrupting influences in Smith's later life was Robert Moses. More later.