Recent events echo hatred from nation’s past

ATroy church that has found itself in the news over its pastor’s vitriolic style is hardly the first time the Capital Region has endured such a public display of bigotry. Such religious intolerance, and the backlash against it, are something of an Albany tradition.

Toxic fulminations against Catholics, Jews, and other religious and ethnic groups are not a novel phenomenon in American history. In fact, during the 1920s, Albany was home to the primary target of such demagogues: Gov. Alfred E. Smith.

As the progressive, productive chief executive of the most powerful, populous state in the union, Smith was a national political star by the mid-1920s. He was also despised in many quarters because he was a Catholic grandson of immigrants. During his 1924 re-election campaign, for example, Klansmen burned a cross to protest an October speech by the governor in Ithaca. Smith responded by denouncing the KKK in Buffalo and Harlem, while the Klan — like the controversial Troy congregation — retorted that Catholicism was incompatible with American democracy with an eerie sangfroid that revealed the intentionality of their hatemongering.

Smith was overwhelmingly re-elected, but his triumph did not quell the controversy. As the governor contended for the 1928 Democratic presidential nomination, figures ranging from the KKK Imperial Wizard to an editorialist in the Atlantic to Alabama U.S. Sen. J. Thomas Heflin questioned whether a Catholic could faithfully uphold the U.S. Constitution. Once Smith was nominated, Hef lin — a fellow Democrat — embarked on a nationwide anti-smith speaking tour. The Klan periodical, Fellowship

Forum, unrelentingly attacked the nominee with headlines like “Drunk Negro Boosting Smith” and “Kissing Pope’s Ring Insult to Flag.” As Smith’s campaign train entered Oklahoma in September, he was again greeted with fiery crosses.

In response, Smith denounced religious bigots and others who claimed to be “100 percent American” as “totally ignorant of the history and tradition of this country and its institutions,” and championed a pluralistic view of Americanism, explaining to a Baltimore rally that “from the time I was old enough to understand anything, my mother taught me to believe that the greatest thing about this country was that noble expression in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.” Such sentiments earned Smith endorsements from traditionally Republican African-american newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-american and helped him win Jewish, Catholic, and recent-immigrant voters nationwide.

Still, Smith lost the presidency in a landslide, and 1928 witnessed the splintering of the Democratic “solid South.” Eleanor Roosevelt lamented that “if I needed anything to show me what prejudice can do to the intelligence of human beings, that campaign was the best lesson I could have had.”

All of this is especially relevant to the Capital Region, and to Albany in particular, not only because Smith resided at the Executive Mansion on Eagle Street for eight years, but because of how Smith’s appeals interfaced with the evolving politics of the city itself. As author William Kennedy notes, Al

Smith was a national political star by the mid-1920s. He was also despised in many quarters because he was a Catholic grandson of immigrants. During his 1924 re-election campaign, for example, Klansmen burned a cross to protest an October speech by the governor in Ithaca.

Smith was the first Democrat to carry Albany for governor in the 20th century. Of course, as Kennedy also points out, this resulted in large part from the emergence of the Dan O’connell machine in the 1920s. But just as importantly, Smith’s politics — which sought both to elevate the working class through ameliorative legislation and to affirm the

Americanism of religious and ethnic minorities — was profoundly appealing to an increasingly diverse city population that demanded dignity both in the workplace and in the public square.

Indeed, while historians of the 1920s often point to an “upstate/downstate” divide over Smith, this is misleading, for Albany voters were some of the governor’s most loyal supporters. It was highly appropriate that Smith accepted the presidential nomination in Albany, not only because it was here that he accumulated his credentials for the nation’s highest office, but also because growing numbers of the city’s residents shared his pluralistic intentions for America. Though Smith lost the Empire State in 1928, he overperformed in Albany.

It is sad that in 2020 there are public figures in Troy — and in Washington — who cling intransigently to a constrained understanding of Americanism.

As ancient hatreds echo in a new context, residents of the Capital Region who reject that mindset should take pride in their embrace of pluralism, affirmed, if not perfected, a century ago in the Al Smith years.

▶ Robert Chiles, a historian at the University of Maryland, is co-editor of the journal New York History and the author of “The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism and the Coming of the New Deal.”