Alfred Emanuel Smith was an American politician who served four terms as Governor of New York and was the Democratic Party's candidate for president in 1928.
The son of an Irish-American mother and a Civil War veteran and Italian American father, Smith was raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge. He resided in that neighborhood for his entire life. Although Smith remained personally untarnished by corruption, he--like many other New York politicians--was linked to the notorious Tammany Hall political machine that controlled New York City politics during his era. Smith served in the New York State Assembly from 1904 to 1915 and held the position of Speaker of the Assembly in 1913. Smith also served as sheriff of New York County from 1916 to 1917. He was first elected governor of New York in 1918, lost his 1920 bid for re-election, and was elected governor again in 1922, 1924, and 1926. Smith was the foremost urban leader of the Efficiency Movement in the United States and was noted for achieving a wide range of reforms as New York governor in the 1920s.