To President Franklin Roosevelt, he was the “Happy Warrior.” To suspicious Protestants, he was a pawn of the pope. Amid such conflicting views as these, the remarkable political career of Al Smith was forged.
Four-term governor of New York and Democratic candidate for president in 1928, Smith was a living embodiment of the enormous shifts in America’s cultural and political center of gravity during his lifetime — from rural to urban, Anglo-Saxon to immigrant, Protestant to religiously diverse.
Of significance to Catholics in particular, he demonstrated that one could rise to the top of America’s political heap — or at
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