Alfred Emanuel Smith, or Al Smith, was an American political leader who was elected governor of New York four times. In 1928, he was an unsuccessful candidate for president of the United States. He became active in politics at the age of 22 and worked his way up in the Tammany Hall machine to become a leader of the Democratic Party. He was elected to the state legislature of New York in 1903 and first became governor of New York in 1919. He ran for President in 1924 but failed to win the Democratic Party's nomination. However, he did receive the nomination in 1928 with the help of his friend and associate, Franklin D. Roosevelt. He lost the election to Herbert Hoover. Some voters opposed Smith because he was a Roman Catholic and because he opposed prohibition (Johnson, 1997, 738). As the Great Depression began, Smith supported federal spending, but later, Smith broke with his friend Roosevelt, who by then had been elected president in 1932, and Smith became critical of Roosevelt's New Deal policies and joined the Liberty League, an anti Roosevelt group. He also became involved in one of the strangest plots in American history, an attempt to overthrow Roosevelt's government by business interests opposed to the New Deal and all it represented. The American Liberty League would not survive this attempt.
PROHIBITION AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Prohibition was instituted with a constitutional amendment--the Eighteenth Amendment--in 1919. This was the first constitutional amendment to have a time-limit on ratification, having a seven-year period for that process. It remains the only amendment to be repealed. To a great extent, Prohibition would be a social experiment that was perceived as a failure. The amendment prevented the transport or sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States, and yet traffic in alcohol did not stop and became the basis for the development of an organized criminal empire that would live beyond ...