After his death in 1944, it took 57 years to get Al Smith the excellent biography he deserved. That book finally arrived in 2001, when Robert A. Slayton published Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith. Now, a year later, comes another worthy Smith biography, albeit a bit shorter and based somewhat less on primary sources than is Slayton's. Full of sympathy for the always sympathetic Smith, Finan (president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression) provides a readable, reliable and reasoned portrait of the Catholic Smith's 1870s childhood on New York City's Lower East Side, his early days with Tammany, his years as a pioneer Democratic reform governor in New York, and his political demise when he fell to anti-Catholic bigotry in the presidential election of 1928. Finan borrows his subtitle from FDR's famous phrase describing Smith, and he spends a great deal of time depicting the complex relationship these two men shared. At first FDR's mentor, Smith eventually came to feel betrayed and displaced by the Protestant Knickerbocker who moved into his post as governor in '28 and then, in '32, achieved the White House, succeeding where Smith had failed. Subsequently, FDR could never understand Smith's myriad criticisms of New Deal reforms that were to a large degree based on policies Smith himself had enacted previously in New York. Still, as Finan shows in his first book, FDR and Smith ended as friends. 24 b&w illus. not seen by PW. (June)
