1932 Presidential Election
The 1932 election in the United States marked a significant shift in political power, with Franklin D. Roosevelt winning the presidency in a landslide victory over incumbent Herbert Hoover. This election took place during the Great Depression, and Roosevelt's New Deal policies aimed to address the economic crisis, making it a pivotal moment in American history.
7 Key excerpts on "1932 Presidential Election"
eBook - ePubUnto a Good Land
A History of the American People, Volume 2: From 1865
- David Edwin Harrell, Edwin S. Gaustad, John B. Boles, Sally Foreman Griffith(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Eerdmans(Publisher)
...Roosevelt promised no dramatic new measures to combat the Depression; the vigorous Democratic campaign centered almost entirely on the personal charisma of the president, picturing him as a strong leader capable of saving the country. Extremist Republican attacks made FDR seem more radical than he really was. But Roosevelt indulged in a little demagoguery himself, loudly denouncing the “economic royalists.” “The forces of selfishness and of lust for power,” he cried in one speech, “have never before in our history … been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are united in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” In this decade of intense class antagonisms, such rhetoric was welcome to the many ordinary Americans who felt bitterly alienated from those for whom they blamed the Depression. More movingly—and prophetically—the president also told the nation that “this generation has a rendezvous with destiny.” Roosevelt won the largest electoral majority since the beginning of the two-party system—523 to 8, carrying every state except Maine and Vermont. He polled a popular vote of 27.7 million to Landon’s 16.6 million; Lemke received an unimpressive 882,000 votes. The Democrats amassed huge majorities in both houses of Congress—77-19 in the Senate and 328-107 in the House. The Democratic majority in the Senate was so large that a dozen freshmen senators were forced to sit on the Republican side of the aisle. The election crippled the Republican Party for years. Less noticed, the election of 1936 revealed that Roosevelt’s reform image had virtually destroyed the left wing of American politics. The Communist Party had never won much of a hold in the American electorate and received only about 80,000 votes in 1936...
eBook - ePubFranklin D. Roosevelt
The New Deal and War
- Michael Heale(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In the election of 1932 Roosevelt carried 42 of the 48 states, aided by the unpopularity of the Republicans, the gloomy helplessness of Herbert Hoover, and his own capacity to radiate hope. The Democratic platform itself was cautious and Roosevelt’s speeches were short on specifics, but the energetic Roosevelt campaign managed to project a sense that something could be done. The nature of the New Deal became clearer as the new administration grasped for ways of combating the Depression, although it was its very fearlessness that captured the admiration of many. The British socialist Harold Laski wrote in 1934 that ‘compared with…the unimaginative activity of the British government’, the New Deal was ‘…an exhilarating experiment’. Its various experiments were hardly unqualified successes, but a new burst of legislation in 1935 helped Roosevelt to an even greater electoral victory in 1936. Roosevelt carried every state in the Union save Maine and Vermont, and the Democrats won large majorities in both houses of Congress. As it happened, this Democratic landslide did not produce another sustained period of reform, but by the end of the decade foreign crises were overshadowing domestic tribulations. War broke out in Europe in 1939, and the fearful possibility of American embroilment gave the popular Roosevelt an opportunity to run yet again in the 1940 election, the first time in American history that the tradition that presidents retire after two terms was defied. Perhaps in part because of this the exuberant businessman Wendell Willkie fared rather better than previous Republican candidates against Roosevelt, but FDR again demonstrated his ascendancy, with the assistance of strong support in the big cities. In 1944, with the United States at war, the electorate gave the Commander-in-Chief a similar margin of victory over his new Republican rival, the Governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey...
eBook - ePubThe Climax of Capitalism
The U.S. Economy in the Twentieth Century
- Tom Kemp(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Naturally, the incumbent administration came in for a heavy share of blame; business and its political friends were under a cloud. It was obvious that Hoover had failed to rise to the occasion; he found neither the language nor the policy to match the growing sense of national emergency. Nothing that the administration had done seemed to make the slightest impression on the sinking economy or offer any hope for the future. The sweeping victory of his Democratic Party rival, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the presidential election of 1932 was not therefore a great surprise. During the campaign, and the usual war of words, it seemed that what was at issue was a choice between different styles of government rather than a clear-cut alternative between policies for overcoming the depression. Programmes and policies put forward by the rival candidates were almost interchangeable. The heavy shift in the popular vote towards the Democrats expressed dissatisfaction with Hoover and a desire for a change: it did not signify positive support for an alternative programme, which Roosevelt did not have and did not campaign for. The unprecedented character of what had become, by the beginning of 1933, a national economic disaster nevertheless gave the election of Roosevelt a dramatic significance. The ground had been prepared for a break with the old methods and the time was ripe. If market forces had failed to bring about recovery, that automatically posed the question of what the government could do to promote it. Hoover himself had moved tentatively in that direction, but without great conviction and lacking personal charisma. In his economic ideas, such as they were, his successor was no less conservative. During the election Roosevelt too had promised government economy and a balanced budget; he sought to reassure business and win its support, especially because many of them distrusted the Democratic Party...
eBook - ePubThe Presidential Image
A History from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump
- Iwan Morgan, Mark White(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- I.B. Tauris(Publisher)
...This was no landslide victory on the scale of 1936, but it was still a comfortable one by 54.7 to 44.8 percent of the popular vote and by 449 to 82 votes in the Electoral College. In one way, the outcome confirmed the continued importance of the New Deal voter coalition that had formed in support of the Democrats in FDR’s first term. In another way, it was also a triumph for the Rooseveltian image. As Republican House minority leader Joseph Martin of Massachusetts later observed, ‘There are times, and 1940 was one when the party that seems best able to prosecute a war is invincible. In the last analysis, the people trusted Roosevelt’s experience in coping with the situation that confronted the country.’ For that reason, it is reasonable to conclude that no other Democratic candidate could have won the presidency in 1940. 42 FDR was genuinely reluctant to run again but he was determined to uphold both national security and the New Deal. During his third term, ‘Dr New Deal’ became subordinate to ‘Dr Win-the-War.’ However, the spirit of New Deal reformism never entirely disappeared and would find expression in his 1944 State of the Union address with its vision of promoting an Economic Bill of Rights once the war was won. 43 Conclusion If FDR’s image and, indeed, his presidency were on trial during the Supreme Court episode, the outcome of the 1940 presidential election suggests that he was acquitted by the jury that matters most in American politics – public opinion. The defeat of his Judiciary Bill did not mean that his powers of persuasion were in decline. The Gallup poll findings suggest that he was able to carry a significant proportion of the population with him, and in the month following his Fireside Chat on the Court, a plurality. But in a political system defined by checks and balances, there is a limit to the constitutional change that any president can achieve without securing a formal amendment to the Constitution – even one as popular as Roosevelt...
eBook - ePubFDR
Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America
- Iwan Morgan(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...The 1934 midterm elections offered clear evidence of his significance to the Democratic ticket. Staying true to his supra-partisan strategy, Roosevelt told an old friend, ‘Our strongest plea to the country. . . is that the recovery and reconstruction program is being accomplished by men and women of all parties.’ 34 This did not deter him from setting the Democratic midterm theme in a Fireside Chat in late June. ‘[T]he simplest way for each of you to judge recovery’, he told listeners, ‘lies in the plain facts of your own individual situation. Are you better off than you were last year? Are your debts less burdensome? Is your bank account more secure? Are your working conditions better? Is your faith in your own individual future more firmly grounded?’ Almost every Democrat running for office campaigned on their support for FDR. Sensing the national mood, Speaker Henry Rainey (D-Illinois), shortly before his sudden death in August, counselled congressional candidates in marginal districts that their best hope of victory was ‘to preach the Roosevelt philosophy and stand behind the President’. 35 The New Deal passed its first electoral test with flying colours, thanks to the consolidation of the new Democratic voter coalition. This was the only midterm election between 1902 and 2002 in which a first-term president’s party did not lose seats in at least one chamber of Congress. The Democrats added to their already swollen majorities in making a net gain of nine seats in House races and, even more remarkably, capturing nine Senate seats from the Republicans. They lost some House seats in rural districts in the Midwest and West but made compensatory urban gains in Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri and, most notably, Pennsylvania. In the Senate races, urban support gained them wins in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Their other three pick-ups were in the Border states of Maryland, West Virginia and Missouri...
eBook - ePub- Terrence Edward Paupp(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The Depression wrenched many lifelong Republican voters from their moorings … No less important was the shift in the character of the Democratic party from the conservative organization of John W. Davis and John Raskob to the country’s main political agency for reform … The New Deal transformed the nature of American politics by drastically altering the agenda” (Leuchtenburg 1995, 274–275). The concept of a democratic state and the nature of democratic governance would undergo a radical transformation in the FDR years of a Great Depression, a New Deal and a world war. In this one basic respect, Roosevelt had “altered the fundamental concept and its obligations to the governed,” in the words of historian Isaiah Berlin, by initiating “a tradition of positive action” (Borgwardt 2008, 35). This new and transformative perspective had arisen out of a new historical consciousness that was born of the Second World War. With victory assured, Roosevelt was preoccupied with one ultimate question: What would be the nature of the peace? Just as the war had been a shared international endeavor, with the United States acting as just one participant among many, now, with peace on the horizon, the question had become what kind of world order could emerge after victory. From Roosevelt’s vantage point, the answer was to be found in making a connection between the war that had just been won against fascism, on the one hand, with building a new national and global effort to combat poverty, economic distress, and uncertainty on the other...
eBook - ePubNew Deal or Raw Deal?
How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America
- Burton W. Folsom(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Threshold Editions(Publisher)
...Historian Joseph Conlin concludes, “The greatest positive accomplishment of the New Deal was to ease the economic hardships suffered by millions of Americans….” 18 Third, Roosevelt was a popular and beloved president. He received unprecedented amounts of fan mail and he won reelection by a smashing 523 to 8 landslide in the electoral college—and then won two more terms after that. His fireside chats on the radio uplifted Americans and mobilized them behind his New Deal. “He came through to people,” Schlesinger wrote, “because they felt—correctly—that he liked them and cared about them.” Conlin writes, “Where Teddy [Roosevelt] had been liked and enjoyed, however, FDR was loved and adored.” There were, of course, pockets of opposition to Roosevelt, especially among some selfish and greedy businessmen, who resented the regulations and taxes in the New Deal programs. “Roosevelt,” Leuchtenburg writes, “was also determined to regulate the practices of high finance, and it was inevitable that this would cost him business support.” But most Americans were enthusiastically behind the president. In fact, in his first midterm election of 1934, his party gained seats in both the House and Senate—something only Roosevelt did between 1902 and 1998. By 1936, his Democrats dominated Congress more than any party has in the last 150 years. 19 Fourth, Roosevelt was an admirable executive and a good moral leader. Schlesinger, like all historians, concedes that Roosevelt “made mistakes both in policy and in politics,” but he was a great president nonetheless...
