Al Smith - Early Life

Early Life

Smith was born and raised in the Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and it was here he would spend his entire life. His mother Catherine Mulvihill's parents, Maria Marsh and Thomas Mulvihill, were from County Westmeath, Ireland, and his father, Alfred E. Smith, was the son of Italian-German immigrants. Al was their first son. His father, a widower with a daughter, served with the 11th New York Fire Zouaves in the opening months of the Civil War.

Al Smith grew up in the Gilded Age as New York itself matured. The Brooklyn Bridge was being constructed nearby. "The Brooklyn Bridge and I grew up together," Smith would later recall. His four grandparents were Irish, German, Italian, and Anglo-Irish, but Smith identified with the Irish American community and became its leading spokesman in the 1920s.

His father, Alfred, a Civil War veteran who owned a small trucking firm, died when the boy was 13; at 14 he had to drop out of St. James parochial school to help support the family. He never attended high school or college and claimed he learned about people by studying them at the Fulton Fish Market, where he worked for $12 per week. He became a notable speaker. On May 6, 1900, Al Smith married Catherine Ann Dunn, with whom he had five children.