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He knew that kind of thing intimately. He knew about how the Brooklyn Bridge was built. He knew about the draft riots in the Civil War from having heard about it from people who were living right there by the Brooklyn Bridge and who knew people who were in the draft riots, who knew how they'd come out, how they'd gathered in a saloon, how they'd marched four abreast down the street and said they wouldn't be taken. Al Smith didn't remember the draft riots, of course, but he had talked to people as a boy who remembered them vividly, or perhaps had been in them. So he knew all that.

But Al, from just reading and listening, was awfully up on the history of New York as it involved Sir William Johnson. We read about Johnson's life as a kind of highbrow thing, but Al got it from visiting around in the State, going to see things and having it told to him, perhaps reading between times, but having it told by people who knew about Johnson's movements.

FDR was a great reader and had read enormously. When it came to doing business, he would be glad to have you sum up your recommendations and tell him what was in the report, rather than read a great long report, but he had been an enormous reader, a really omniverous reader and had read everything from a boy on. Beginning as a boy he read the printed word. I think his knowledge of history was almost