Al Smith mastered state politics by reading every bill introduced each day

Evidence

But late in the evenings, when the parties were still loud, Al Smith would leave the saloons, and as he left his steps would quicken. … Hurrying back to his tiny furnished room in a cheap boardinghouse, he would sit down at a rickety desk. On the desk he would earlier have piled the bills that had been introduced that day. Al Smith would begin reading them. Not only the bills which bore on a subject in which he was interested, and not only the bills which dealt with his Assembly District, and not only the bills which dealt with New York City. Sitting at the rickety desk in the furnished room, Smith read all the bills, even those which concerned the construction of a side road or a tiny dam in some remote upstate district. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 519

Categorization

• SHARE: The self-taught legislator who read every single bill introduced, even remote upstate road and dam measures, until the other legislators’ singing stopped—good story for someone interested in self-education and mastery.
• CANDY: The man who had read one book in his life, The Life of John L. Sullivan, became the state’s legislative master by nightly reading every bill that crossed the Assembly desk.
• XREF: connects to: Al Smith was reportedly the first legislator ever to read the entire appropriations bill — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 526; Al Smith’s mastery of legislation came from privately reading every single bill — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 520