American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work by Nick Taylor

years later, in 1928, he won his first two-year term as New York’s governor, succeeding Smith, and during his second term launched a series of measures to combat the depression in New York.
    Roosevelt had always been a natural politician. He was gregarious, laughed easily, and was quick to smile. And after his rebound from polio, he had acquired a deeper and more subtle quality of confidence: nothing seemed to faze him. He communicated a forceful serenity, an attitude that no crisis was too great to overcome. One pose in particular would become iconic—his head thrown back, face creased in a grin, cigarette holder jutting at a jaunty angle from his teeth; it imparted a joy of combat and the certainty of winning. Here was a man who believed in himself, it said, and if you took his side in a fight, he would reward your belief in him.
    It was this quality that resonated with Americans whose radios were tuned to the National Broadcasting Corporation on the night of April 7, 1932, when Roosevelt made the first nationwide broadcast of his campaign from the state capital in Albany. In his speech, listeners heard what many had not heard for a long time: that America’s people and their problems mattered as much as the difficulties faced by bankers and industrialists.
    “It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry,” he said. “He staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial cavalry. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army.
    “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power; for plans…'that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
    “The forgotten man” was the memorable phrase. Its powerful impact and populist overtones struck fear in Roosevelt’s rivals for the nomination. They accused him of firing the first salvo in a class war. Al Smith, his former ally, was the loudest.
    Nominating Smith in 1924, Roosevelt had called him the “Happy Warrior,” and the nickname stuck. Smith was to finally win the nomination in 1928 but go on to lose to Hoover in a general election landslide that he attributed in part to prejudice against him as a Roman Catholic. In that same election year, Roosevelt had succeeded Smith as New York’s governor, and afterward, Smith, a charismatic figure in New York, could never understand Roosevelt’s failure to ask him for advice, accept his suggestions on appointments, or include him in his political calculations. Over the next four years, he came to resent Roosevelt’s swift rise to national prominence.
    Smith, the grandson of Irish immigrants, had grown up poor on New York’s Lower East Side. After his father died when he was thirteen, he dropped out of parochial school to help support his mother and his younger sister by working at various menial jobs. But he had one notable skill, a gift for public speaking, and this gave him his entry into politics, by way of the Tammany Hall organization that pulled the strings of New York City’s government. Tammany was corrupt but effective; voters got favors and Thanksgiving turkeys for their loyalty, and the politicians who benefited sealed the bargain by parceling out public jobs.
    Smith’s base was the Fourth Ward, an irregular patch of lower Manhattan squeezed between the East River piers and Chatham Square, overshadowed by the Brooklyn Bridge, and so full of saloons and bars that it was also known as the Whiskey Ward. Its tenements were packed with immigrants: Irish and Italians, Germans, Russian and eastern European Jews, and assorted other nationalities. Some had fled tyranny; all sought work. They baked, they pickled, they picked rags, they worked in factories, and they