Word: smithing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Handlin did not set out to write a definitive biography of Al Smith. The omission of footnotes makes it difficult to judge the scope of research, but the length itself indicates that this cannot be the significant work on Smith. It is not quite clear just what Handlin did intend to do, but he has succeeded in writing a short account of the rise and fall of one American Catholic politician...
Handlin himself suggests that Smith was more of a politician than a Catholic for most of his life. Yet the author, not unmindful of Senator Kennedy, seems more concerned about religion than politics, for which he has little feel. The worst example of this nearsightedness on politics arises in contrasting Handlin on Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Everything Smith did that was a trifle unsavory but placated the machine is excused as "playing the game," and this includes a drumhead impeachment of an anti-Tammany governor. But when Roosevelt set out to win delegates in the South and West...
...good third of the book is concerned with Smith and Roosevelt, and though Handlin does concede, "in the last analysis, Roosevelt proved the abler politician--less scrupulous, more free to maneuver, and hampered by fewer enmities," the reader must put up with several pro-Smith absurdities for every analysis like this. For example, in March, 1931, "probably the thought crossed [Smith's] mind that he deserved another chance, but far more important was the insistence that the candidate, whoever he be, vindicate his own position and prove that the hatreds and prejudices of 1928 had been an aberration." This...
...feels also that Handlin has over-emphasized Smith's Catholicism in discussing his 1928 defeat, and has paid inadequate attention to Prohibition as an issue. This fault appears not so much in the chapter on the election itself, but in subsequent references, as when he analyzes Smith's feelings about another nomination, or the position of the Catholic politician in America...
Handlin never quite makes up his mind whether he is writing this book as an historian or as Al Smith. Is a given judgment Smith's or Handlin's? It's often hard to say. When they are given in a pseudo-brogue, one would suppose they are Smith...