1936 Presidential Election
The Presidential Election of 1936 in the United States saw incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, win a landslide victory over Republican candidate Alf Landon. This election is notable for being one of the most lopsided in American history, with Roosevelt securing a second term in the midst of the Great Depression. His New Deal policies and popularity among working-class voters were key factors in his re-election.
8 Key excerpts on "1936 Presidential Election"
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 - ePubFDR
Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America
- Iwan Morgan(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...8 Party leader FDR and the Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt achieved greater success as party leader than any president before or since. He had two transformational goals: to elevate the Democratic Party from the minority to the majority party and to make it a liberal party. He was unquestionably successful in achieving his first objective. Having elected just two presidents and only intermittently controlled Congress from 1860 to 1932, the Democrats won all but two presidential elections from 1932 to 1968 and dominated both the House of Representatives and the Senate into the 1980s. FDR also remade the presidential wing of his party into a liberal entity that drew on the support of a new, class-based voter coalition centred in the urban North and West. In Congress, by contrast, conservative Democrats retained considerable influence and eventually established an informal coalition with Republicans to constrain New Deal expansion. Despite this, FDR was instrumental in bringing about one of the greatest political realignments in American history in support of an active national state with the presidency as its driving force. The Democratic Party inherited by Roosevelt lacked a coherent political identity, had a narrow base and was internally divided. The white, rural small town, Protestant South, its most reliable source of support, had fallen out with the growing but still secondary constituency of urban, predominantly Catholic ethnics over sociocultural issues in the 1920s. The onset of the Great Depression did nothing to unite the Democrats in support of an economic agenda. Conservatives who controlled the Democratic National Committee (DNC) under the chairmanship of corporate executive John J. Raskob, put in charge by Alfred E. Smith in 1928 to boost fundraising, stood for limited government, balanced budgets and a free hand for business amid the crisis...
eBook - ePub- Gary A. Donaldson(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- The University Press of Kentucky(Publisher)
...Seeing the volatility of the postwar political world, groups in the Democratic party struggled for power, and they all seemed to move toward 1948 with a “succeed or destroy” attitude toward the party. One important theme of the 1948 election is always the deep splits in the Democratic party, but it was in the Republican party that the split was the most disastrous. The Democrats healed their wounds for one brief moment, just long enough to vote Truman into office, but the Republican left-right split produced for Truman the issue of the Eightieth Congress, and that issue carried the president right into his November victory. The election of 1948 shaped postwar politics in both parties. For the Democrats, at least through Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, the goal would be to maintain the coalition—pacify the various groups—by holding on to the party’s political center as Truman did. For the Republicans, the answer would be to heal the wounds between the left and the right—as Eisenhower would do through the 1950s—and to expand the party’s voter base, particularly into the South. The election reaffirmed the strength of the American party system, the strength of both parties, and the strength of the American electorate. The impact was great....
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 - ePub- William J. Bennett(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Thomas Nelson(Publisher)
...But the hat floated away on the tide. At first, the old gentleman thanked his friend and praised his courage. Four years later, though, the old gentleman had begun to complain about losing that fine hat! 34 FDR’s telling of this story fit the caricature of the Big Businessman that even then was being popularized by the best-selling board game, Monopoly. People could see the “old gentleman” who wore the shiny top hat. * In a more serious vein, FDR accepted his renomination in Philadelphia with an eloquent call: “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” 35 The well-respected Literary Digest attempted a public opinion poll. The science of polling was then in its infancy. The Digest polled those with telephones. In the depths of a Depression, this meant the views of millions of poverty-stricken Americans were not considered. The Literary Digest confidently predicted a Landon win. “A Landon- slide” boasted GOP campaign operatives when Maine’s vote came in. The Down East State traditionally had voted in September. The old saying was, “As goes Maine, so goes the Nation.” Not this year. When the votes came in, FDR had triumphed again. He won reelection with an unprecedented 27,476,673 popular votes—a stunning 60.6 percent. Landon got 16,679,583 popular votes, just 36.8 percent. In the electoral college, Roosevelt swept the nation with 523 votes to Landon’s derisory 8. Democratic National Chairman Jim Farley, one of FDR’s savvy Irish political lieutenants, jibed that in view of Roosevelt’s forty-six-state sweep, the old adage would have to be changed: “As goes Maine, so goes Vermont.” 36 Abashed, the Literary Digest soon ceased publication. IV. FDR’S “RISKY SCHEME” Overwhelmingly reelected and with even stronger majorities in both Houses of Congress, FDR prepared to take on the U.S. Supreme Court. He had reacted angrily to the Court’s 1935 decision in the famous “sick chicken” case. By a vote of 9–0, the Court ruled in Schechter Poultry Corp. v...
- Aaron D. Purcell(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- The Kent State University Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER ONE Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression AARON D. PURCELL Before the ascendancy of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1933, Americans lacked a host of reassurances; for many, employment, food, stability, prosperity, and hope had all become scarce. The Great Depression officially began with the collapse of the stock market in October 1929. 1 President Herbert Hoover’s efforts at economic recovery were varied. Hoover largely followed the tradition of limited involvement in the economy by the federal government. He relied on American businesses to stop the downward spiral and trusted that philanthropic and religious groups could reach the struggling masses. Many of Hoover’s recovery efforts mirrored New Deal agencies, but the size and scale of his approach paled in comparison. While some of Hoover’s programs yielded small signs of recovery, overall his measures proved ineffective in reversing the nation’s economic plunge. 2 The arrival of Roosevelt in the early 1930s changed the political landscape and offered Americans, more than anything, a sense of hope. Compared with Hoover, Roosevelt’s charisma, charm, and confidence inspired optimism. Roosevelt and his team of advisors, the “brain trust,” promised great change through experimentation. Solutions came in the form of federal assistance, with government programs that were part of what he called, in the closing lines of his 1932 acceptance speech for the Democratic Party’s nomination, “a New Deal for the American people.” 3 New Deal programs started in early 1933, with a flurry of activity during Roosevelt’s First Hundred Days in office. With Roosevelt’s encouragement, Congress created a variety of new federal agencies and programs, designed to reach Americans in need...
eBook - ePubNew Deal or Raw Deal?
How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America
- Burton W. Folsom(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Threshold Editions(Publisher)
...If Roosevelt had only balanced his Brains Trust by including a businessman, he might have thought through his ideas more carefully. 10 In Roosevelt’s quest for the presidency, he established himself as the Democrats’ front-runner by handily winning reelection as governor in 1930. Then, in early 1932, he entered several Democrat primaries and won many party leaders to his cause by his victories there, by his personal charm, and by the confidence he projected that he could lead the Democrats to victory in November. When Roosevelt was campaigning from state to state he was often shrewdly cryptic in his comments on the Great Depression. At one level, Roosevelt promised a free-market approach to economic growth: cut federal spending, reduce taxes, and lower the Smoot-Hawley tariff. He hit these three points frequently and no doubt won many votes because of that. In other speeches, however, he expressed his underconsumption views. On May 22, at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Roosevelt described low wages, insufficient purchasing power of consumers, and the need for government intervention “to inject life into our ailing economic order” and to create a “more equitable distribution of the national income.” 11 On July 2, Roosevelt came to Chicago to accept the Democrat nomination for president. At this time, he outlined his economic views for the delegates. “Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action,” Roosevelt urged. He then asked the delegates to “look a little at the recent history and the simple economics” of the Great Depression. In the years before 1929 we know that this country had completed a vast cycle of building and inflation; for ten years we expanded on the theory of repairing the wastes of the War, but actually expanding far beyond that, and also beyond our natural and normal growth...
eBook - ePubIssue Evolution
Race and the Transformation of American Politics
- Edward G. Carmines, James A. Stimson(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
...But this strategy also led to severing the historic ties between the Republican party and the black electorate. Conversely, the Democratic party, historically the party of slavery and segregation, had now become the home of racial liberalism, representing the views of the desegregationist forces in the struggle over civil rights. In so doing, it had strengthened its ties to blacks and white liberals but severely strained them with southern whites. The Roosevelt Democratic coalition, which counted upon southern electoral votes, was shattered beyond recognition. Not for many years would the full effects of this election work their way through the American party system. But it was already clear, in retrospect, that the 1964 presidential election had set into motion political forces that would transform the nature of American politics. T HE P OST - 1964 P ERIOD Several things could have happened in the post-1964 period that would have reversed or at least halted the political transformation marked by this election. The 1964 presidential election may have been a critical moment in the partisan evolution of racial desegregation. But if the moment had not been reinforced by future developments, its effects may have been temporary and thus ultimately inconsequential. Three developments in particular seem crucial in understanding the long-term significance of the 1964 election: Johnson’s actions after the election, the racial orientation of the Democratic party in the post-Johnson era, and the response of Republicans to the Goldwater candidacy. Johnson’s Racial Policy Agenda One possible course of action for Johnson after his overwhelming victory in 1964 was to be conciliatory toward the white South— to moderate the strong stand he had taken on civil rights. Johnson, of course, did nothing of the kind. Instead he pressed for congressional action in a new area of civil rights—black voting rights...
