This movie is predominantly about the life of Al Smith Jr. It is about how he went from an 8th grade education and working at Folton Fish Market to the presidential election of 1928.
Smith was born to Alfred Emanuel Smith and Catherine Mulvihill and initially grew up in the multiethnic Lower East Side of Manhattan, on Oliver Street, New York City, within sight of the Brooklyn Bridge which was then under construction. His four grandparents were Irish, German, Italian, and English, but Smith identified with the Irish American community and became its leading spokesman in the 1920s. He was thirteen when his father Alfred, a Civil War veteran who owned a small trucking firm, died; at fourteen he had to drop out of parochial school, St. James School, to help support the family. He never attended high school or college, and claimed that he learned about people by studying them at the Fulton Fish Market, a job for which he was paid $12 per week to support his family. An accomplished......
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