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I called on Wagner in the Senate. As far as my first impressions of him were concerned, I took Paul Kennedy's appraisal of him - that he was a promising person. I grew also to like him. He wasn't as interesting and attractive to me as people who didn't have education like Tim Sullivan, Christy Sullivan, McManus, Al Smith and people like that. They were a new breed of cats in my life and a young lawyer who had gotten himself an education by his own efforts wasn't absolutely strange material.

Wagner didn't have that quality which makes one feel that even if he might be wrong, you will go along with him. He was a little more sophisticated, as was shown by his later actions. He was very politically ambitious. I don't mean to say that Al Smith wasn't, but he wasn't as good a speaker. Al Smith had turned out to be a fine orator with a command of language, a pungent, racy talk in the language of the people, a gift for the figure of speech that would make people remember things and would also make them laugh at the same time. He really was quite extraordinary and if you ever saw him perform on the floor, you'd never forget it because he had such ability of that sort.

At any rate, that was the year when the great crisis