Al Smith entered politics for advancement, not to help the poor

Evidence

Moses and Smith came to public service not merely out of different backgrounds, but with different attitudes and for different reasons. … Not even Al Smith’s best friends ever said that he went into politics to help the lower classes. He went because, perhaps, he was gregarious and politics for a young man in the Fourth Ward without connections was, in its early stages, mostly hanging around the Downtown Tammany Club or Tom Foley’s saloon with other young men, drinking beer, singing around a piano and telling stories while waiting for a contract from Foley. He went because, perhaps, it was a natural course for a young man with little education who wanted to get ahead in the ward’s politics-drenched atmosphere—and because, perhaps, he saw no other way out of a life that for most of the years he could remember had been rolling heavy barrels and lifting heavy pipes. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 505

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Moses dismissed Al Smith as a typical machine politician — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 385; Personal lived poverty, not ideology, drove Al Smith’s political passion — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 545; Al Smith argued material bribes would lose educated lower-class voters to reform parties — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 566

Broader Connections

• Personal lived poverty, not ideology, drove Al Smith’s political passion #contradicts (0.90) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 545
• Al Smith argued material bribes would lose educated lower-class voters to reform parties #corroborates (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 566