CHAPTER 1

The Making of a Progressive

The period between the unofficial close of the Progressive Era (sometime shortly after the Armistice and the precipitous decline of Wilsonianism) and the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency was not simply an unchallenged conservative interregnum.1 To be sure, this “long 1920s” was marked by the cult of the businessman, cultural clashes, and laissez-faire governance. But even as Bruce Barton preached the virtues of corporate prowess, even while William Jennings Bryan delivered jeremiads on the decline of traditional values and Calvin Coolidge made laconic indifference a heroic trait, a progressive ideology and style persisted that would serve to link the two periods of reform within a longer liberal tradition.
During the long 1920s, New York Democratic governor Alfred E. Smith, along with a motley group of reform-minded allies, practiced a specialized, idiomatic progressivism that affected both public policy and electoral politics in the Empire State. This particular progressivism drew from various “progressivisms” of the past, arranging previously unrelated or even antagonistic elements within one consistent agenda for the state and eventually the nation. Of equal significance, Smith and his progressive colleagues politicized this agenda in a radically new way, transposing their reform platform into Democratic partisan dogma. Although the political ramifications were novel, this reformism emerged from long-established elements; identifying those elements and tracing the process by which they were blended reveals the complex heritage of Al Smith’s progressivism, as well as the peculiar conditions under which that progressivism was forged.
The diversity and inconsistency of American progressivism have vexed historians for generations. In response, scholars have defined progressivism as everything from a reactionary defense against a “status revolution” to a rationalization of government in response to modernizing technological and economic forces; from a movement to homogenize the citizenry and control social conflict on the part of the middle class to a set of tools for dealing with industrial society imported from late nineteenth-century Europe by cosmopolitan intellectuals, to a drive to establish the political ascendancy of the “public interest” over interest group, class, or partisan goals.2 Studies have thus located the core progressive constituency variously: old-money “Mugwump” reformers, the professional middle class of the new industrial order, worldly scholars and social activists, settlement house pioneers—even urban machine politicians.3 Moreover, some scholars have questioned whether a “progressive movement” existed at all, and others have suggested that there was no ideological uniformity across the various political drives of the reputedly progressive decades, merely shared “clusters of ideas” and “social languages” that were drawn on by sundry interest groups.4 Indeed, some studies have demonstrated that the rhetoric of progressivism was easily appropriated by partisans and injected into the public sphere toward nonreformist, highly divisive ends.5
Amid this whirl of academic ambivalence over the “age of reform,” there is room for a diversity of “progressives” or even “progressivisms” within the working definition of that concept.6 The objective of the present study is more tangible and precise: to chart the historical forces that produced the specific progressivism practiced by Alfred E. Smith as governor of New York. At its core, Smith’s reformism represented the confluence of two important streams of progressive ideology: urban liberalism and social welfare progressivism.
Urban liberalism was a form of progressivism prevalent among machine politicians, who realized that ameliorative social and labor legislation was an increasingly effective way to retain the political loyalties of their urban ethnic working-class constituents.7 It grew out of the pragmatic machine tradition of urban politics and adopted reform and welfare legislation as means of securing power in lieu of the more traditional, feudalistic system of building fealty to the machine through personal favors.8 The introduction of this concept to the study of progressive politics by scholars such as J. Joseph Huthmacher and John D. Buenker in the 1960s represented a significant shift in the analysis of early twentieth-century reform. It directly challenged previous treatments, most of which had portrayed progressive reformers as “likely to be from urban, upper middle class backgrounds” and as “native-born Protestants of old Anglo-American stock” and college graduates, who were usually “either professional men, particularly lawyers, or businessmen who represented neither the very largest nor the very smallest businesses.”9
Urban liberalism scholars agreed with earlier analyses that during the Progressive Era the “sovereign individualist” culture of old-stock Anglo-America, represented by the progressive profile quoted above, was in conflict with the “organic network” culture largely retained by recent immigrants and central to the success of urban political machines.10 However, these revisionists differed from their predecessors’ exclusive assignment of the label “progressive” within this cultural contest. Indeed, the political disciples of the organic network culture often supported progressive reforms as strongly as the sovereign individualist politicians.11
To be sure, the reformist tendencies of urban machines were often masked by their scandalous administration of city affairs and relentless plundering of the municipal treasury. Indeed, many of the politicians who would later be identified as urban liberals had benefited directly from the machines’ sprawling patronage operations—and since patronage was one of the most distressing targets of old-stock middle-class progressivism’s ire, these figures could at best be viewed by contemporaries as an ironic source of progress. Nevertheless, urban liberalism analyses of progressive politics were able to sift through these incongruities, rightly presenting urban ethnic politicians as at least opportunistic reformers and demonstrating how rank-and-file urban ethnic voters developed an increasingly astute understanding of government’s potential to improve living and working conditions.
Social welfare progressivism was a manifestation of the reform impulse that grew largely out of the settlement house tradition and was generally the progressivism of female social workers.12 It focused on improving the living and working conditions of the urban poor through settlement house work, education campaigns, and pressuring industry with protests and boycotts by organizations such as the National Consumers’ League—as well as through lobbying state legislatures for specific welfare and labor laws. As the large majority of the movement’s leaders were college graduates, a central aspect of these reformers’ modus operandi was scientific surveys of conditions to determine appropriate social remedies. Social welfare progressives often fit the classic progressive profile rather well—they tended to be well-educated, middle-class, old-stock Protestants—except they were women. Indeed, essential to understanding social welfare progressivism is consideration of its development as a largely female enterprise.
The Progressive Era witnessed the entry of more women into public life than any previous age; but this influx of female activists did not occur unhindered, for Victorian ideas about “separate spheres” for the sexes persisted into that period, often excluding female reformers from “professions traditionally dominated by men” and forcing these women “to create within the public realm a new territory they could rule themselves … that territory of policy and professional expertise which affected women and children exclusively.”13 Thus barred from established policy-making institutions, female reformers entered public life at the end of the nineteenth century by opening settlement houses, most notably Jane Addams’s Hull-House in Chicago. Experiences like those at Hull-House “supplied the values and strategies” that made it possible for these women to create what the historian Robyn Muncy has called “a female dominion within the larger empire of policymaking.”14 Critically, these progressive women were not only constructing their own institutions; they were also formulating a unique reform ideology within those institutions—an ideology that heartily endorsed labor regulations and government welfare programs, particularly on behalf of children, mothers, and the poor.15
The alliance between the cigar-chomping, glad-handing, opportunistic ward heeler and the college-educated, old-stock, often moralistic female reformer is a strikingly unnatural one at first glance. Machine politicians often benefited from (or participated in) unsavory or illegal activities, were primarily interested in retaining power, and generally held chauvinistic attitudes toward female civic participation—fittingly summarized by the Boston boss Martin “Mahatma” Lomasney, who declared that in politics, “you can’t trust these women, they are apt to blab everything they know.”16 Meanwhile, female reformers could at times be culturally insensitive toward immigrants, generally favored Prohibition, and often advocated dismantling political machines.17 Nor was this alliance, once forged, unproblematic—for example, during a heated exchange, Al Smith once called National Consumers’ League founder Florence Kelley a “Protestant bigot.”18 Nonetheless, during Smith’s governorship, these two political traditions merged, producing a unique and fruitful reformism that transformed New York State and held revolutionary implications for the entire nation.19
It was unforeseeable in 1904 that Al Smith, freshman assemblyman and Tammany stalwart, would one day become the gubernatorial embodiment of progressive reform. Young Smith learned politics under the tutelage of saloonkeepers and worked his way up the hierarchy of the infamous New York machine until he was rewarded for his loyalty by ward boss Tom Foley with a seat representing Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the state assembly.20 While set apart from many of his machine brethren by what Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, later described as “a receptive mind” that drew him to reform and allowed him to function with a certain degree of ideological independence, Smith always remained true to the Democrats and to Tammany sachem “Silent Charlie” Murphy.21 As partisanship and bossism were precisely the sort of civic vice the extermination of which was New York progressivism’s raison d’être, Al Smith was an offensive character to most reformers. His early career in Albany was dismissed as hackery by progressives, and in fact he did not make a single speech in his first term.22 Yet over time Smith matured as a legislator, and he slowly earned respect within the reform community. Joseph Proskauer, a member of New York’s progressive Citizens’ Union and an eventual Smith confidant, noted that his organization began to change its opinion of the Tammany assemblyman as they witnessed time and again “the whole high caliber of Smith’s service in the legislature.”23
Al Smith gained a forum to demonstrate his capabilities further in 1911, when his party won control of the state legislature. Charlie Murphy had Smith elected majority leader of the assembly; Robert F. Wagner, a German immigrant representing the Upper East Side, was made majority leader of the state senate.24 Wagner and Smith’s relationship dated to 1905, when then-freshman assemblyman Wagner was a roommate of second-term assemblyman Smith at Albany.25 Not only would the two Manhattan Democrats’ careers be inextricably linked over the ensuing decades, but they would also develop a close friendship—Wagner even naming his son Alfred in honor of Smith.26
During this period a tragedy occurred that would change the course of both men’s careers. On March 25, 1911, a fire erupted in the tenth floor workroom of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in Manhattan. One hundred forty-six of the workers who toiled at the sewing machines—most of them Jewish immigrant girls and young women from the Lower East Side—died in the inferno.27 In response, a Committee on Safety was established, culminating with Wagner and Smith’s sponsorship of legislation to form an investigative commission; Wagner served as chair and Smith as vice chair of the body.28
The commission “was one of the first experiments in the utilization of the volunteer citizen in a governmental project to discover what was wrong and what to do.”29 Consequently, this was an important opportunity for nonpartisan reformers to participate directly in the regulatory process. Female reformers served crucial roles: Mary Dreier of the Women’s Trade Union League was named a commissioner, while Frances Perkins, who had served as secretary of the Committee on Safety, was consistently called as an expert witness on factory conditions, having established her credentials as an investigato...