Joan Walsh: Obama, Al Smith and the Triangle Fire
[Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large]
I wrote Wednesday about the unexpected widespread attention to the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It has a lot to do with post-Wisconsin agitation on the left and beyond. The tragedy is also genuine American history: No less an expert than Franklin Delano Roosevelt's labor secretary called March 25, 1911, "the day the New Deal began," and as the mother of the New Deal, Frances Perkins would know.
But because my upcoming book deals so much with the complicated political history of Irish Catholics in America, I've found myself fascinated by the figure of Al Smith, the New York Assembly majority leader who got himself appointed to the commission investigating the tragic fire, and later became the first Irish Catholic to run for president. If Perkins is the mother of the New Deal, Smith is at least an uncle, and maybe even the proud father. Roosevelt himself once said: "Practically all the things we've done in the federal government are the things Al Smith did as governor of New York." Smith, of course, became the New York governor and the 1928 Democratic presidential candidate, and then lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover. After he surrendered the 1932 nomination battle to FDR, he grew bitter and more conservative as he aged, so his legacy as a progressive hero has been obscured. Still, I think there are lessons about our present political mess in the story of Smith, Roosevelt, the Triangle fire and the New Deal....
New York Assemblyman Al Smith had been traumatized by the fire. Smith's Tammany Hall machine was dominated by the Irish, and the Triangle victims were Jewish and Italian. There were four Bernsteins, four Goldsteins, four Rosens; three Malteses, two Miales and two Saracinos on the list of the dead, not an Irish name among the 146 victims. But many lived in Smith's Lower East Side neighborhood, and he went to visit their survivors....
Thanks to their prominence on the Triangle Commission, Smith would become New York's governor and Wagner would become senator. Maybe most important, Smith had begun to assemble the urban New Deal coalition by reaching out to Italians and Jews who'd previously been neglected by Tammany. "Immigrants and city dwellers recognized that he was someone in his politics who stood up for them, accepted them as equals and above all, who gave them respectability," his biographer Robert Slayton wrote. Triangle fire historian David Von Drehle concluded that thanks to Smith's outreach and reform legislation, "In the generation after the Triangle fire, Democrats became America's working class, progressive party." As governor, Smith surrounded himself with Triangle commission veterans like Frances Perkins, Belle Moskowitz and Abram Elkus and continued to pioneer innovative social legislation.
In 1928, the popular New York governor would commence his doomed run for president as the Democratic candidate. The man who'd stood up to the Ku Klux Klan began to interest black voters, hinting at the multiracial New Deal coalition that would later emerge. Smith cultivated NAACP leader Walter White and played up his tough stance against the KKK. But his perceived need to keep the "Solid South" Democratic limited his outreach to black voters, and his selection of segregationist Arkansas Sen. Joseph Robinson as his vice president alienated them further. Still, black newspapers like the Baltimore African American and the Chicago Defender endorsed Smith, the NAACP's White personally (if tepidly) backed him, and a young civil rights organizer named Bayard Rustin volunteered for him as well. Smith would get a record number of black votes in Philadelphia and other Northern cities, and the GOP share of the black vote declined about 15 percent from 1924 to 1928, the first strong sign that African-American voters might be available to the Democrats, who had been the party of slavery 75 years before....
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I wrote Wednesday about the unexpected widespread attention to the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It has a lot to do with post-Wisconsin agitation on the left and beyond. The tragedy is also genuine American history: No less an expert than Franklin Delano Roosevelt's labor secretary called March 25, 1911, "the day the New Deal began," and as the mother of the New Deal, Frances Perkins would know.
But because my upcoming book deals so much with the complicated political history of Irish Catholics in America, I've found myself fascinated by the figure of Al Smith, the New York Assembly majority leader who got himself appointed to the commission investigating the tragic fire, and later became the first Irish Catholic to run for president. If Perkins is the mother of the New Deal, Smith is at least an uncle, and maybe even the proud father. Roosevelt himself once said: "Practically all the things we've done in the federal government are the things Al Smith did as governor of New York." Smith, of course, became the New York governor and the 1928 Democratic presidential candidate, and then lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover. After he surrendered the 1932 nomination battle to FDR, he grew bitter and more conservative as he aged, so his legacy as a progressive hero has been obscured. Still, I think there are lessons about our present political mess in the story of Smith, Roosevelt, the Triangle fire and the New Deal....
New York Assemblyman Al Smith had been traumatized by the fire. Smith's Tammany Hall machine was dominated by the Irish, and the Triangle victims were Jewish and Italian. There were four Bernsteins, four Goldsteins, four Rosens; three Malteses, two Miales and two Saracinos on the list of the dead, not an Irish name among the 146 victims. But many lived in Smith's Lower East Side neighborhood, and he went to visit their survivors....
Thanks to their prominence on the Triangle Commission, Smith would become New York's governor and Wagner would become senator. Maybe most important, Smith had begun to assemble the urban New Deal coalition by reaching out to Italians and Jews who'd previously been neglected by Tammany. "Immigrants and city dwellers recognized that he was someone in his politics who stood up for them, accepted them as equals and above all, who gave them respectability," his biographer Robert Slayton wrote. Triangle fire historian David Von Drehle concluded that thanks to Smith's outreach and reform legislation, "In the generation after the Triangle fire, Democrats became America's working class, progressive party." As governor, Smith surrounded himself with Triangle commission veterans like Frances Perkins, Belle Moskowitz and Abram Elkus and continued to pioneer innovative social legislation.
In 1928, the popular New York governor would commence his doomed run for president as the Democratic candidate. The man who'd stood up to the Ku Klux Klan began to interest black voters, hinting at the multiracial New Deal coalition that would later emerge. Smith cultivated NAACP leader Walter White and played up his tough stance against the KKK. But his perceived need to keep the "Solid South" Democratic limited his outreach to black voters, and his selection of segregationist Arkansas Sen. Joseph Robinson as his vice president alienated them further. Still, black newspapers like the Baltimore African American and the Chicago Defender endorsed Smith, the NAACP's White personally (if tepidly) backed him, and a young civil rights organizer named Bayard Rustin volunteered for him as well. Smith would get a record number of black votes in Philadelphia and other Northern cities, and the GOP share of the black vote declined about 15 percent from 1924 to 1928, the first strong sign that African-American voters might be available to the Democrats, who had been the party of slavery 75 years before....