In April 1927, the Atlantic Monthly, a respected American magazine, published an open letter from an obscure attorney, Charles C Marshal, to Alfred E Smith, the Democratic Party’s likely candidate for president of the United States.
Using examples from history and extracts from the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, he argued that Smith, as a loyal and conscientious Catholic, was unsuited for the office because he couldn’t reconcile the “conceptions” of his church with the US constitution which, as president, he would be obliged to preserve, protect and defend.
In a long reply in May written with help of Fr Francis Duffy, the decorated chaplain of the Fighting 69th Regiment, Smith challenged each of Marshal’s allegations, quoted statements in praise of the constitution by Catholic clerics and pointed out that he was not bound by any papal statements that were not matters of faith.
He added that, in his years of office in New York, he had never favoured Catholics or discriminated against non-Catholics, and he pointed out that two of America’s chief justices, men who were particularly obliged to uphold the constitution, had been Catholics.
In conclusion, he stated flatly that he believed in the absolute separation of church and state.
The editor praised the candour of Smith’s reply but added that “the thoughts rising almost unbidden in the minds of the least bigoted of us have become matters of high, serious and eloquent debate”.
Within months, the high debate had become vulgar abuse. A campaign using the social media of the time, pamphlets and handbills, and orchestrated partly by the Ku Klux Klan, made allegations ranging from the barely credible to the ludicrous: Smith was a drunkard and a crafty scheming Mick. He would bring the pope to America in a battleship and install him in the cabinet office. Priests would be put in charge of civil marriage ceremonies. Mrs Smith was an uncouth, dowdy woman who was unfit to receive callers to the White House.
Al Smith, as he was generally known, was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1873 to Albert senior, a truck driver and Catherine Mulvihill. His father died when he was 11 and he went to work selling fish in the local market.
After joining a Democratic club as a teenager, he became a protégé of the Tammany Hall leaders, Big Tom Foley and Charlie Boss Murphy and progressed through a series of elective offices culminating in four two-year terms as governor of New York state.
Unlike some other graduates of Tammany, however, he had an unblemished record of honest dealing and he was recognised as a champion of decent conditions for workers, especially after a fire in a shirtwaist (blouse) factory in 1911 that took the lives of 146 employees.
In January 1923, Smith pardoned the Irish Labour leader Jim Larkin who had been jailed for “criminal anarchy”, and the federal government deported Larkin in April.
In 1924, Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominated the governor, unsuccessfully, as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate at its national convention. Four years later, he succeeded, and Smith picked Arkansas Senator Joseph Robinson, a Protestant, as his running mate. Meanwhile, the Republicans chose Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce in the outgoing Republican administration of Calvin Coolidge.
The result was a landslide for Hoover. Smith won only 41 per cent of the popular vote and only four of the 48 states, and even lost in New York.
Historians are generally agreed that while the campaign to deny the office to a Catholic was a significant factor, the party’s stance on the prohibition of alcohol was also important. Smith who was familiar with the social consequences was a “wet” but sections of the party were “dry” and the compromise that the issue should be left to individual states satisfied neither side and alienated many women.
Economics also played a part. This was the period known as the Roaring Twenties when postwar exuberance sustained by high employment and low taxes generated a widespread feeling of wellbeing across America, and Hoover benefitted accordingly.
Roosevelt rather than Smith was the Democratic candidate in 1932 and their friendship fell away and wouldn’t be revived until America declared war on Japan, in 1941.
In private life, Smith became the president of the corporation that built and operated the Empire State Building.
In June 1937, he travelled to Europe and visited Italy, France, Britain and Ireland. While here, he went to Parkwood, Co Offaly, near Moate, Co Westmeath, and met second cousins, relatives of his grandmother, Marie Marsh, who had married Thomas Mulvihill from nearby Tubber and emigrated in 1841.
Moate Development Association gave him an illuminated address.
Smith was vague about the origins of his paternal grandparents and although there was a strong tradition that his grandfather had come from Drumbrucklis, in Ballintemple parish in Co Cavan, he didn’t know of any connections in the county.
The “happy warrior”, as Roosevelt called him, died 75 years ago on October 4th, 1944.