Al Smith

Alfred Emanuel Smith (December 30, 1873 – October 4, 1944) was the 42nd governor of New York, serving from 1919 to 1920 and again from 1923 to 1928. He was the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in the 1928 presidential election, losing to Herbert Hoover of the Republican Party in a landslide.

Quotes

• The American people never carry an umbrella. They prepare to walk in eternal sunshine. In times of prosperity and plenty, the public...orator who would suggest a measure for unemployment relief would find it most difficult to get an audience....There is little doubt in my mind that we may be able to work out some system of deferring portions of public works and holding them in reserve for...unemployment.
  • Reported in TIME magazine, vol. 17, no. 2 (January 12, 1931), pp. 20–21

• All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
  • Comments during the New York Convention on the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Albany, New York, June 27, 1933. Everett Somerville Brown (ed.) Ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: State Convention Records and Laws (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), p. 302
  • Cf. Jane Addams

External links

• Lewis Copeland (ed.) Popular Quotations for All Uses (1942), pp. 36, 109
• Clifton Fadiman (ed.) The American Treasury, 1455–1955 (1955), pp. 17, 135, 356
• The American Missionary, new series, vol. 17, no. 5 (September, 1925), p. 195