Alfred Emanuel Smith is best remembered as the Democratic Party's 1928 nominee for President of the United States - the first Roman Catholic to have been chosen by a major political party. He was also a legislator and a four-term governor in New York State.

Smith was born on December 30, 1873, on the Lower East Side of New York City to a father with Italian and German parents and a mother with Irish parents. He attended St. James Catholic school until the age of 15 before going to work to support his widowed mother. Smith soon showed an interest in politics and came to the attention of the local leaders of the city's Tammany Hall machine, from whom he received first some minor posts and then in 1903 a seat in the New York State Assembly. Smith was easily reelected every year until he left the legislature for a political position in New York City in 1915.

During his years in the Assembly, Smith evolved from a clueless neophyte to an experienced political leader who was respected by his colleagues in both parties and by many others outside of government. Through diligent self-study Smith made himself an acknowledged expert on the workings of the state. Through his service on the Factory Investigation Commission following the Triangle factory fire in 1911, Smith was awakened to the need for ameliorative social legislation, after which he helped to secure passage of such legislation. Through his knowledge and statesmanship, Smith distinguished himself at New York's 1915 constitutional convention. Meanwhile, Smith's position within Tammany Hall, which dominated politics in his home city, also evolved from subservient junior legislator to the machine's key representative in Albany.

Smith won the New York governorship in 1918 and set about reorganizing the state's government. Narrowly defeated in the Republican landslide in 1920, Smith spent two years in business before accepting renomination in 1922. Reelected in that year, again in 1924, and for the last time in 1926, Smith left a lasting mark on New York State. His leadership there (along with his opposition to national prohibition) naturally attracted considerable attention throughout the United States. Smith was a candidate for president in both 1920 and 1924. In the latter year, his candidacy served as a vehicle by which the Eastern, ethnic, wet portion of the Democratic Party prevented the nomination of William Gibbs McAdoo during a long and turbulent convention battle that was one of the most memorable political events of the 1920s.

It became increasingly apparent by 1927 that Smith would become the Democratic Party's nominee for president the next year because of his strong record in New York, the absence of a plausible rival within the party, and the conclusion of many Democratic leaders that he should be given his chance. As a result, Smith and his friends had to do little more than let the nomination come to him. Smith adroitly handled one major challenge when in 1927 he forthrightly addressed the question of his religion by avowing that his views as a public figure and the views of his church were not in conflict.

Smith ran an energetic national presidential campaign in 1928 against the Republican nominee, Herbert C. Hoover. The major issues were the prosperity of the country after a decade of Republican control, the differences of the two candidates over national prohibition, the economic distress in American agriculture, and Smith's identity as an urban, wet, Catholic whose ancestors had come to the United States following the Civil War. The outcome was a decisive popular and electoral vote in Hoover's favor.

Smith, deeply affected by the extent of and apparent reasons for his defeat, returned to the business world after 1928. Named the next year to oversee the construction, management, and promotion of the Empire State Building in New York City, he spent most of the rest of his working life at these tasks. Smith did not, however, lose his interest in politics. Having played a key role in the election of his political protégé, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to the governorship of New York in 1928, Smith became frustrated over Roosevelt's subsequent failure to seek his counsel. Smith offered himself as a presidential candidate again in 1932, primarily in an attempt to deny Roosevelt the nomination, but this effort was unsuccessful.

At first cautiously positive about Roosevelt's New Deal, Smith increasingly found reasons in 1933 and later to be concerned with its philosophy, directions, and programs. He was an organizer of the American Liberty League, opposed a second term for Roosevelt, and then broke with his party to support the Republican nominees in 1936 and again in 1940. As a result, Smith's political influence steadily waned through the 1930s, although he became an outspoken foe of the Nazis and encouraged support for Roosevelt's foreign policies after 1939. He died in Rockefeller Institute Hospital on October 4, 1944.

Smith married Catherine Dunn in 1900. The couple had five children: Alfred, Jr.; Emily, Catherine, Arthur, and Walter. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York.

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