Week 11
The election of 1932 was also a watershed, since it ended the long period, beginning in the 1860s, when the Republicans had been the majority US party. Between the Civil War and 1932 the Democrats had won four presidential elections, electing Cleveland twice and Wilson twice, but in each case with minorities of the votes cast. Franklin D. Roosevelt, campaigning with Senator John Nance Garner of Texas, now carried the nation by a landslide, winning 22,809,638 to 15,758,901, and taking the electoral college by 472 votes to 59. The Democrats also took both Houses of Congress.70 The 1932 election saw the emergence of the ‘Democratic coalition of minorities,’ based on the industrial Northeast (plus the South), which was to last for half a century and turn Congress almost into a one-party legislature. The pattern had been foreshadowed by the strong showing of A. E. Smith in 1928 and, still more, by Democrats in the 1930s mid-term elections. But it was only in 1932 that the Republicans finally lost the progressive image they had enjoyed since Lincoln’s day and saw it triumphantly seized by their Democratic enemies, with all that such a transfer implies in the support of the media, the approval of academia, the patronage of the intelligentsia, and, not least, the fabrication of historical orthodoxy. The most welcome thing about Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time was that he was not Hoover. Common Sense, one of the new left-wing journals, got it right in one sense when it said the election had been a choice between ‘the great glum engineer from Palo Alto’ and ‘the laughing boy from Hyde Park.’ Roosevelt laughed. He was the first American President deliberately to make a point of showing a flashing smile whenever possible. By 1932 he was an experienced administrator with eight years in the Navy Department under Wilson and a moderately successful spell as governor of New York. At the beginning of 1932 Walter Lippmann described him as ‘a highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions…not the dangerous enemy of anyone. He is too eager to please…no crusader…no tribune of the people…no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man, without any important qualifications for the office, and would very much like to be president.’72 That was a shrewd and accurate assessment, before the reality was obscured by the patina of PR. Time called him ‘a vigorous, well-intentioned gentleman of good birth and breeding.’
Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States),
Oxford University Press,
ISBN 978-0195144031
RECOMMENDED READING
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Vintage,
ISBN 978-0307277947