Al Smith was reportedly the first legislator ever to read the entire appropriations bill

Evidence

Tired of listening to speeches he couldn’t understand, he would pay clerks for transcripts and study the transcripts. Near the end of the session, the annual appropriations measure, hundreds of pages long, containing tens of thousands of items, was published. No one, so far as anyone in Albany could remember, had ever read the entire appropriations bill. In 1906, Al Smith read it. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 526

Categorization

• CANDY: The eighth-grade dropout became the first person in Albany’s memory to read the whole appropriations bill, which no one had apparently ever done.
• XREF: connects to: Al Smith mastered state politics by reading every bill introduced each day — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 519; Al Smith’s mastery of legislation came from privately reading every single bill — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 520