<< continued from part 2A
Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox,
1882-1940
James MacGregor Burns, 1956
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FDR Jean Edward Smith, 2007 |
Traitor to His Class H.W. Brands, 2008 |
Franklin Roosevelt said that he wanted to steer a course in between the fifteen percent on the extreme left and the fifteen percent on the extreme right, but from what I’ve read, when opposition to his administration did finally emerge, “left” and “right” may not be the most useful categories to describe where it came from. It was more like those who hoped to appeal to the bottom of the social hierarchy, and those who constituted the top: the populists and the…
“The cry of socialism has been patented by the powerful interests that desire to put a damper on progressive legislation. Is that cry of socialism anything new? Not to a man of my experience. I have heard it raised by reactionary elements and the Republican Party for over a quarter century.” Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, complaining about critics of the New Deal? Actually, no. That’s his predecessor as New York governor and Democratic presidential nominee, Al Smith—in 1928. The smear was old even then, and applied by moneyed interests just as indiscriminately.
But the New Deal seemed like a whole, ah, new… deal. Was it socialist? Well, the U.S. actually did have a Socialist Party, under whose banner Eugene Debs had won six percent of the vote in 1912; its current standard bearer was Norman Thomas, and when asked about charges that upon taking office Roosevelt had carried out the Socialist platform, Thomas quipped, “True—he carried it out on a stretcher.” Burns ticks through Thomas’s assessment of the New Deal: “The banks? Roosevelt had put them on their feet and turned them back to the bankers. […] The NRA? It was an elaborate scheme for stabilizing capitalism […]. The AAA? Essentially a capitalist scheme to subsidize scarcity. TVA? State capitalism.” The business world had been quiet in 1933, when in the final days of Hoover’s term the banks in all forty-eight states had failed, and Roosevelt and the Democrats were frantically trying to keep the nation from turning into a repeat of the Weimar Republic, with Germans pushing wheelbarrows full of cash around to buy a moldy loaf of bread. A year later, things were on an upswing, the country seemed to be out of immediate danger, and the captains of industry, commerce, and finance found that they didn’t much care for the new landscape the first wave of New Deal programs had created. Regulations to follow! Government support for unions! Banks barred from gambling with deposits! Thus, the summer of 1934 saw the debut of the American Liberty League, an organization dedicated to fighting the New Deal. You might ask, “Wasn’t there already such an organization, namely the Republican Party?”, but the distinctive feature of the Liberty League was that it saw, as Jean Edward Smith puts it in FDR, “assorted du Ponts, Mellons, and Vanderbilts” and the outfits they represented—General Motors, Sun Oil, Montgomery Ward, and the like—join up with disaffected conservative Democrats, for at this time both parties had conservative and progressive wings, and would for decades to come. The Liberty League managed to recruit some pretty big Democratic names, too: Newton Baker, Wilson’s war secretary; John Davis, the party’s presidential nominee in 1924; and their real star, who fumed that Roosevelt’s advisors “caught the socialists in swimming and they ran away with their clothes. Now, it is all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Karl Marx or Lenin or any of the rest of that bunch, but I won’t stand for allowing them to march under the banner of Jackson or Cleveland!” That was the same Al Smith who had griped about being called a socialist in 1928.
Roosevelt responded with allegory: “In the summer of 1933, a nice old gentleman wearing a silk hat fell off the end of a pier. He was unable to swim. A friend ran down the pier, dived overboard and pulled him out; but the silk hat floated off with the tide. After the old gentleman had been revived, he was effusive in his thanks. He praised his friend for saving his life. Today, the old gentleman is berating his friend because the silk hat was lost.” It’s worth noting the repeated references to the Roosevelt figure as the rich man’s “friend”, because Roosevelt came from money and was no stranger to rich old gentlemen in silk hats. When advisors reported that, despite his popularity among the general public, it was no longer possible to go to a country club without hearing the well-heeled members ranting angrily about Roosevelt—or telling dirty jokes about him—Roosevelt was genuinely hurt: had he not gone into politics, he might well be sipping a cocktail at one of those clubs right then himself. These were his people. They wanted plutocracy, government by the rich? Well, he was rich, and he was in charge of the government. They had plutocracy. Just altruistic plutocracy. So why were they pitching a fit?
Burns puts forward an answer: “he had sapped their self-esteem. The men who had been the economic lords of creation found themselves in a world where political leaders were masters of headlines, of applause, and of deference.” Roosevelt, Burns writes, “had dissociated the concept of wealth from the concept of virtue. Only wounds rubbed raw by this psychological deprivation can explain the tortured protests of the businessmen of 1934 and 1935.” This is one of the running themes in American history and one that has plagued us throughout my own lifetime. What do the rich want their money to get them? A palatial hilltop estate? A superyacht with fore and aft helipads? A fun toy, like a sports team or a rocket ship? Yes to all of these, but the main thing they want is admiration. It is no surprise that the rich would be attracted to the prosperity gospel, the belief that wealth naturally flows to the best people—and thereby reveals who the best people are. It holds that plutocracy is not a contrast to aristocracy—not a way to distinguish power held by a superior breed of humanity from the merely rich—but effectively a synonym. But though Burns writes of the “self-esteem” of the “economic lords”, it’s never been enough that they believe themselves to be superior—others must believe it as well. So it has been a longstanding project of the wealthy to weave the prosperity gospel into the fabric of American culture. Prior to the Roosevelt era, the dominant variant of the prosperity gospel in America was founded on the Whiggish notion that the accumulation of wealth must derive from such virtues as ingenuity, industry, and thrift. After the greed and irresponsibility of big business and high finance had sent the country crashing into a depression stretching on for years on end, that myth became hard to sustain. The modern variant of the prosperity gospel involves less pretense about wealth as an emblem of moral fiber and more admiration of wealth for its own sake, or rather, of the ability to acquire it. There’s more of a sense that life is a contest, money is the scoring system, and the rich are not the people who are good but those who got gud, which is more prized. The competitive aspect of wealth also helps to answer the Chinatown question: why waste any of your limited time on this earth making money you could never spend? If you’re already so wealthy that distant descendants of yours you’ll never meet, who due to the vagaries of meiosis may not even inherit any of your genetic material, can take up places among the ranks of the idle rich… “Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” Franklin Roosevelt’s description of his plutocratic critics as “gentlemen in well-warmed and well-stocked clubs” is an artifact of another era, when once you’d been accepted to the club, literally and figuratively, you shared in the admiration bestowed upon all of its members. The breakdown of community in our time has fostered the sense that now you’re on your own and have to win that social capital personally, and that’s one thing that all that otherwise superfluous money can buy: a higher place on the leaderboard.
So what happens when you’ve essentially won this game, climbed high enough that your name has become a watchword for wealth, the way Gandhi’s did for pacifism or Einstein’s for intelligence? In the first half of the twentieth century, this was the case for John D. Rockfeller, founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world; his fortune, as a percentage of national GDP, was the equivalent of $450 billion today. In the 1980s, it was the case for Donald Trump, who lied to the editors of Forbes about his net worth, made their inaugural “Forbes 400” list on the basis of this lie, and then went on a years-long spree of self-promotion to build that niche celebrity into massive fame. But even his inflated numbers never put him in the upper reaches of these lists, and as as the ’80s turned to the ’90s, serial bankruptcies meant that dollars were not the metric he wanted to be measured by. Thus began his obsession with television ratings, first for his reality show, then for his political appearances—the only place I’ve heard people blather on about TV ratings the way Trump does was on the short-lived TV show of his fellow 1980s icon, Max Headroom. When he started doing live events, he became equally obsessed with crowd sizes, to the point that he kicked off his eventual presidency with an easily disproved claim that he’d drawn the largest inauguration crowd in history—and, during his third run, flipped his lid when Kamala Harris mocked his rallies’ dwindling attendance during their one debate. But these methods of quantifying popularity leave open one question: what are you popular for? Consider the case of the 2020s’ answer to the Donald Trump of the 1980s, the heir to a shady fortune (emerald mining in apartheid-era South Africa rather than crooked, racist real estate profiteering) with a penchant for self-promotion: Trump’s current chief backer, Elon Musk. In the mid-2010s, when he was known primarily for his ownership of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk was widely admired, not just for his ability to amass wealth, and not even for the genius that many assumed underlay that ability, but for the sense that he was saving the world by advancing green energy and laying the groundwork for humanity to reach the stars. But these were not qualities Musk truly valued. He desperately wanted to be seen as cool and funny and edgy, and pricing cars at $69,420 wasn’t earning him the laughs he craved. So in 2022 he spent forty-four billion dollars—more than the government of Pakistan, a country of a quarter billion people, spent on everything combined over the course of that entire year—to buy his favorite social network and make sure that his wojak memes appear at the top of everyone’s feed.
Trump has always been somehow even more of a narcissist than Musk, and age has removed whatever restraints he might have possessed in the 1980s. So what does he want to be admired for? Well, everything. His signature rhetorical move, should anyone dare to suggest that he might be lacking in any positive quality, is to trumpet that in fact he is its ultimate paragon. The New York Times found that, even restricting its focus solely to Twitter and solely to the years 2017 to 2019, Trump had tweeted hyperbolic praise of himself, as when he hailed his own “great and unmatched wisdom”, over two thousand times. So, for instance, when Trump first ran for the presidency, and linguists observed that not only did the Flesch-Kincaid scale indicate that he spoke at a much lower grade level than other politicians—a line in his current stump speech, for instance, is “Our country’s going bad. It’s going bad. We have stupid people running it”—but that he used significantly fewer polysyllabic words and far fewer unique words, Trump retorted that “I know words, I have the best words!” After Spy magazine called him a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the 1980s, he spent decades fuming about it, telling the New York Post (in 2011!) that “my fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well-documented, are various other parts of my body”—and when Marco Rubio, looking for a vulnerable spot to poke in the 2016 Republican primaries, tried to jab him on the size of his hands, Trump not only went for superlatives but made up some corroborating witnesses: “I’ve always had people say, ‘Donald, you have the most beautiful hands!’” And on the topic of beauty: you might think that an obese 78-year-old slathered in poorly applied bronzer would steer clear of this area, or at least restrict himself to paeans to what an Adonis he was during his prime, but no—when Time magazine published a flattering cover illustration of Kamala Harris, Trump sputtered, “I say that I’m much better looking than her. Much better. Much better. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.”
In August of 1935, Time devoted its cover to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Franklin Roosevelt immediately took to the hustings to declare that he was much better looking than Wilhelmina, and no he didn’t, because that’s ridiculous. Trump’s wild flights of hyperbolic ego indulgence have led many to wonder, is this meant to be ridiculous? Is it schtick—is he playing up to his reputation, for laughs? Is it con artistry or some kind of dominance play, knowing that it’s a transparent lie to say “no one respects women more than me” when he’s a rapist, or “no one reads the Bible more than me” when he couldn’t recall any verses when asked, or “I’m right about everything, right? Trump is right about everything” when, to pick something at random, he was wrong when he said that you could deactivate a magnet by pouring a glass of water on it? Or is he delusional enough to actually believe his claims? I don’t think that last question can be answered with a yes or no. The answer is N/A, because Trump doesn’t believe anything. To him, there is nothing but what others believe. Many were baffled when, during the initial wave of COVID‑19, Trump demanded that medical practitioners stop testing for the virus, insisting that “when you test, you create cases”. No one could get through to Trump that, no, a test doesn’t create a case—it identifies a case that exists whether you’re aware of it or not, so better to be aware. The reason that no one could get through to Trump is that he simply cannot process the idea that there might be more to reality than a sort of externalized solipsism. To him, what people are aware of is what exists. The things people believe become the facts. Manipulate their beliefs, and reality can be whatever you want. And there are people, a huge number of people, for whom it takes a lot fewer than Huxley’s 62,4000 repetitions to make one truth. They don’t make up the entirety of Trump’s support, of course. There are those who roll their eyes at Trump but vote for him in order to get the tax cuts for millionaires and the forced births and the mass deportations and whatnot. There are those who consider themselves too smart to be taken in by Trump’s hucksterism but revel in the discomfiture of what the George W. Bush crew called, in what was meant to be an insult, the “reality-based community”. That’s a standard part of the demagogue’s playbook, after all: the demagogue promises to take on the elites, and defying their norms helps to establish his bona fides. But Trump would be a political footnote were there not tens of millions in the American electorate who also have a troubled relationship to reality. One moment from the 2016 campaign that stuck with me was one of those “we head out to rural America and interview Trump supporters” articles. In this case, they went to West Virginia. One of the men interviewed said that he was voting for Trump because Hillary Clinton had ordered thirty thousand guillotines that she was going to use after her inauguration “to kill us—Christians and people who believe in the Second Amendment”. Then came QAnon and the hysteria during the 2020 cycle over rumors that Tom Hanks was murdering children in the basement of a pizzeria to harvest the adrenochrome from their blood and thereby obtain eternal youth. Compared to this sort of lunacy, “Donald Trump actually is the world’s foremost expert in every field of knowledge” is a fairly easy lift.
You can say that, oh, c’mon, that “Pizzagate” stuff in particular was just a bunch of teenagers on Tiktok having a laugh—but I think there’s more to it than that. First of all, I’ve seen deprogrammed QAnon people do interviews in which they sincerely apologize to Tom Hanks for their former beliefs, which suggests that those beliefs were genuine at the time. But I think there is a very wide streak in American culture convinced that what is presented to them as reality is just a sham. Whether it’s been some of my own students back when I was teaching at a public high school, or the eccentrics campaigning for Robert Kennedy Jr. and Jill Stein outside the farmers’ markets, or professional athletes giving interviews, it’s been hard to miss the amount of “wake up, sheeple” energy floating around. Often this feeling isn’t even rooted in the political right. It might come from poking around on the Internet and discovering a reference to, say, the white supremacist massacre of African-Americans in Tulsa in 1921. “Why didn’t we learn this in history class? What else are they keeping from us?” Some are inspired to learn history and become informed progressives. But the lesson others draw is that anything they’ve heard from the establishment, including the school system, is a con. And paradoxically, the more desperate they are not to be conned, the more they’ll fall for anything. These are the people who become literal Flat Earthers because their attitude toward anyone who speaks with authority on a subject is “y’all motherfuckers lyin’ and gettin’ me pissed”. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed trying to make your way in a world beset by problems, the causes of and solutions to which seem so complex that you could never hope to truly understand them. Gaining expertise in even one field is hard! Gaining enough expertise to thoroughly comprehend every aspect of the modern world is impossible! So what a relief it must be to suddenly be privy to the secret knowledge that the sheeple are blind to, which explains everything so very simply. And this is the wavelength on which demagogues operate.
Roosevelt and his “Brain Trust” weren’t overly worried that the momentum they’d built would be halted by pushback from big business. The plutocrats actually made for a useful rhetorical target. But events in Europe had shown the power that demagogues could command. So they were more concerned that their momentum might be pushed forward, and out of control, by…
In 1928, Franklin Roosevelt had squeaked to victory in his race to become governor of New York, winning the election by 0.62%. Nine hundred miles and a world away, Huey Long had won his race to become governor of Louisiana by a somewhat heftier margin of 92.28%. Louisiana was essentially a one-party state: Republicans were anathema there because Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves, and with results like these, perhaps it’s not a surprise that as late as 1968 they didn’t even bother to field a gubernatorial candidate. But the domination of a single party did not mean that Louisiana was dominated by a single faction, and the Democratic primary, which essentially served as the general election, tended to be fiercely fought. Northern Louisiana was essentially of a piece with the rest of the Deep South. But the city of New Orleans and southern Louisiana more broadly were home to the Catholic Cajuns. The big issue in Louisiana politics in the 1920s was what to do about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership had swelled as high as eight million after the moribund terrorist group had been reinvigorated by the release of the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. The Klan was as bigoted about religion as it was about race, and some historians have characterized its official rhetoric in the ’20s as anti-Catholic first and foremost. Thus, in Louisiana, to support the Klan was to lose the southern half of the state, while to oppose the Klan was to lose the north. In his 1924 run for governor, Long took no position on the Klan and lost in both regions. He argued that the attention paid to the Klan should instead be focused on the pernicious practices of Standard Oil and other corporations that preyed upon the poor, redneck and Cajun alike. As chair of Louisiana’s Public Service Commission, he’d spent the previous few years winning lawsuits against and thereby lowering the rates of not just Standard Oil but Southwestern Gas and Electric, Cumberland Telephone and Telegraph, Shreveport Railroad, and many more such outfits, who were unaccustomed to receiving checks on their power because they had the “Old Regulars” in the Louisiana Democratic establishment in their pockets. Long’s anti-establishment message won him many more votes in 1924 than pundits had predicted, but that was still only enough to land him in third place in the primary—though Long insisted that he’d only lost because January rains had turned Louisiana’s dirt roads to impassable mud, keeping his rural base from the polls. In 1927, rain worked to his advantage: fearing that their property would be flooded, a group of New Orleans bankers arranged to have a levee blown up so that the countryside would be submerged instead of the city. The idea that fighting the real enemy meant punching up instead of down started to take hold out in the sticks, and for Long, that was often literal: he was known for punching out newspapermen he disagreed with, and when he crossed paths with the sitting governor in a New Orleans hotel, the governor called him a liar and Long replied with a fist to the governor’s face. As for his rhetoric: “His technique was attack, attack, attack,” reported the New Orleans States in 1935. “If charges were made against him he ignored them, save to call the men who made the charges a whole series of short and ugly words, and counter-attack the man with counter-charges that always were sensational, whatever else might be said about them. He dug deep into a fertile brain for fantastic epithets that set listeners and readers laughing at those he opposed. ‘Give me a chance to say something about a man, and I’ll say it loud enough and hot enough so nothing he ever says afterward will ever catch up with what I say,’ he told this reporter once.”
As governor, Long became what some later commentators would call the closest thing to a dictator an American state has ever had. He cleared out the civil service from top to bottom and handed out the newly open government positions to relatives, friends, and allies, with the understanding that a percentage of their salaries would be expected to find their way into Long’s campaign fund. That was standard practice for Louisiana, but Long crossed lines that would have shocked even some of his most corrupt predecessors. For instance, purging the voter rolls of undesirables is a common tactic of Republican governors and legislatures today, but is usually done with a fig leaf of bureaucratic process. Long sent armed goons to the state registrar’s office to cross out the names Long wanted removed. When the police tried to arrest the goons, Long sent the National Guard in to fight off the police. This was far from the only time Long treated the National Guard as his private militia; on multiple occasions he ordered the Guard to smash up the presses of newspapers that published articles he didn’t like. Nor did he stop at threatening property. Critics could often be dealt with by plying them with liquor and prostitutes, either as bribery or blackmail; if that didn’t work, they might have to disappear for a while and spend some time tied to a tree out on the bayou having a think about whether they really wanted to keep badmouthing Huey Long. Trading favors was usually enough to keep the legislature acting as a rubber stamp, though sometimes it didn’t act fast enough for Long’s liking. In such cases he’d park himself in front of the speaker’s chair and preside himself, bringing up bills and pushing them through in lightning-round sessions. If a representative wanted to give a speech about one of the bills? “Shut up! Sit down!” Long would bark. One member pointed out that this was not how separation of powers worked under the Louisiana constitution. “I’m the constitution around here now,” Long retorted.
Dictators love their vanity projects, and one of the bills Long pushed through commissioned a new capitol building for Louisiana, which remains the tallest of all fifty states’ even today. And they love “winning”, so Long funneled bushels of money to the Louisiana State University football program—“my university boys”, he called the players. But Long actually did follow through on his campaign rhetoric. He taxed the oil companies and put the revenue generated to work for Louisiana’s poor. He septupled the mileage of paved road in the state, and where he couldn’t put in asphalt, he at least upgraded dirt roads to gravel—nearly ten thousand miles’ worth, all told. His infrastructure bills led to the construction of over a hundred bridges, including two free bridges across Lake Pontchartrain that Long designed to compete with a toll bridge whose owners wouldn’t sell to the state. The adult illiteracy rate in Louisiana had been around twenty-five percent when Long took office; he started night reading classes that enrolled two hundred thousand students and shaved ten points off that figure. School attendance among children also went up about ten percent, in large part because of an initiative Long pushed through to supply students with free textbooks. He built hospitals, including mental hospitals, and started rehabilitation programs in state prisons. He eliminated poll taxes and the first $2000 of a household’s property taxes. Long’s critics charged that he pushed these measures through to ensure that his rural base would keep him in power. His admirers countered that if Long acted like a tyrant, it was because that was the kind of strength required to advance the cause of the poor in a system rigged in favor of the rich. In any case, Louisiana had a law on the books designed to ensure that any tyranny was short-lived: sitting governors were not permitted to run for re-election. So in 1930, Huey Long ran for Senate, primarying three-term senator Joseph Ransdell. He won, though some found it suspicious that in some precincts, the logs indicated that voters had arrived at the polls in alphabetical order. Long then declined to take his Senate seat for eleven months, remaining in Baton Rouge to serve out the bulk of his term as governor; when some complained that this left Louisiana without full Senate representation, Long sneered that “with Ransdell as senator, the seat was vacant anyway”.
As noted, Long was used to operating in a sphere where the Republican Party was irrelevant and winning the Democratic primary meant that election to office was guaranteed. To jump to the national level would normally have made for a whole different ballgame, but in 1932, Herbert Hoover was unpopular enough that the rules were pretty much the same. Franklin Roosevelt looked like the frontrunner, but recall from part one that in 1932, the Democratic Party had a rule in place requiring that the nominee win two thirds of the delegates. The point of this was to ensure that no one could win the nomination without the approval of the South. At the convention, when Roosevelt failed to clear the two-thirds mark on the first ballot, or the second, or the third, there was chatter about finding a compromise candidate, but as many on the convention floor would later attest, Huey Long was instrumental in keeping that chatter from turning into actual movement. Not only would the Louisiana delegation stay in Roosevelt’s column on his watch, but so would the delegations from Arkansas and Mississippi. With a big chunk of the South firmly locked up, Roosevelt had the breathing room to work out a deal with John Nance Garner: Roosevelt would receive the votes of Texas and California, and Garner would receive the vice presidential nomination. Long felt that he deserved a spot in the inner circle of the new nominee—if not for his efforts on Roosevelt’s behalf, then simply because Long was known as an innovative campaigner. He was one of the first political candidates to put ads on the radio, and he’d pioneered the use of sound trucks, vehicles with huge speakers bolted onto them that could drive around and broadcast those ads even to rural folks without radios. Long was therefore miffed to be more or less sidelined, dispatched to campaign for Roosevelt in a few Midwestern states. He fell out with Roosevelt almost immediately.
Burns suggests that Long’s initial embrace of Roosevelt and his New Deal, and then his rejection of both, may have simply been two predictable phases in a time-honored historical pattern. Why do people rise up and revolt against their governments? The obvious answer would be that they do it because things are really bad, but what even is “bad”? Depression-era America may have been a nightmare to some, but it was a paradise to the Jews who fled there from Hitler’s Germany. And while many Americans in 1932 longed to return to the prosperity of the 1920s, that would be a nightmare to us: an inflation-adjusted median income less than half of what it is today? No technology more advanced than a vacuum tube radio or a Ford Model A? No social safety net? The potential of entire demographic categories wasted, with women locked out of most professions and Jim Crow in full swing? If we had to live under such “prosperous” conditions, there would be rioting in the streets. We expect more. But most Americans of the 1920s did not, and they roared with approval. It is not reality, but the gap between expectations and reality, that produces discontent. The Davies J‑curve, which received some buzz in political science circles half a century ago, was very specific about this: it posited that revolutions occur when things have been improving for some time and then go into a downturn, as expectations continue to rise even as standards of living fall. Yet, as many both before and after Davies have observed, the downturn isn’t necessary. The improvement itself can get expectations racing ahead of the facts on the ground. The example at the top of many minds in the 1930s was the two-stage Russian Revolution less than twenty years earlier. After the February Revolution toppled the Romanov dynasty, the Provisional Government of the moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky launched dramatic political reforms: Russians were granted freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom from the threat of capital punishment—a sharp break from centuries of autocracy. Yet while the Provisional Government hammered out the details of the new Russian Republic’s parliamentary system, the Bolsheviks captured the support of the masses and swept the moderates aside in the October Revolution. Bolshevik promises of “peace, land, and bread” may have seemed like pipe dreams less than a year before, but once people had seen that things could get a little bit better, it was a short hop to the notion that maybe things could get a lot better. In a world where the tsar could be driven out of power, anything was possible! Naturally, this is one of the examples Burns cites in making his case:
Moderate reformers seize power from tired regimes and alter the traditional way of things, and then extremists wrest power from the moderates; a Robespierre succeeds a Danton; a Lenin succeeds a Kerensky. Often it is not actual suffering but the taste of better things that excites people to revolt. Such was the danger of the early years of the New Deal. The Hoover years had been a period of social statics; the Depression seemed to have frozen people into political as well as economic inertness. Then came the golden words of a new leader, the excitement of bread and circuses, the flush of returning prosperity. Better times led to higher expectations, and higher expectations in turn to discontent as recovery faltered. America had been in a political slack water; now the tide was running strong toward new and dimly seen shores.
Burns points out that not only did Roosevelt consider himself a moderate reformer, baffled by charges that he was some kind of radical, but also “an eminently ‘practical’ man” who had no patience for “doctrinaire and systematic thinking” of any kind. “What excited Roosevelt was not grand economic or political theory but concrete achievements that people could touch and see and use.” So he was exasperated both by the conservatives who objected to provisions of the New Deal by labeling them as “socialistic” or even “communistic” and by the leftists who claimed that the New Deal was ultimately doomed to fail so long as it attempted to patch up rather than dismantle American capitalism. Roosevelt didn’t care what “ism” a program might exemplify—he cared whether it would put people to work, keep them off the streets, put food in their stomachs. Give me specific suggestions, he would tell his critics. Give me solutions.
| Despite the caption, this speech is from 1934, not 1935. |
On one of his trips back to Louisiana, Long dropped by the new capitol building he’d commissioned in order to direct the voting on a bill he’d drawn up. The purpose of the bill was to redraw judicial districts in order to gerrymander one of his longtime critics, judge Benjamin Pavy, out of a job. Throwing people out of work was one of Long’s favorite tactics: he’d previously struck at Pavy by having school boards under his control fire Pavy’s brother Paul from his job as a high school principal and his daughter Marie from her job teaching the third grade. Pavy had another daughter, Yvonne. She was married to a young physician named Carl Weiss. As Long exited the Louisiana House chamber and strolled down a corridor, Weiss walked up to him and shot him in the gut. As Long bolted from the scene, his bodyguards riddled Weiss with dozens of bullets, killing him instantly. Long made it outside and flagged down a car to take him to a nearby hospital. He called for two top surgeons, Urban Maes and Russell Stone, to drive up from New Orleans and operate on him; weakening, he then placed his care in the hands of one of his appointees, a doctor named Arthur Vidrine. When Maes and Stone got into a car accident, Vidrine was charged with the task of operating on Long himself. He patched up the damage to Long’s colon but, unfamiliar with abdominal bullet wounds, missed an injury to Long’s kidney. Early on the morning of 1935.0910, thirty hours after being shot, Huey Long died of internal bleeding. The Roosevelt administration put forward the expected statements of regret, but in private his advisors sighed with relief. One of them, Rexford Tugwell, wrote that “When he was gone it seemed that a beneficent peace had fallen on the land.”
But Long was not Roosevelt’s only populist critic. His Share Our Wealth Society may have attracted over seven million members, but five times as many people listened to the weekly radio broadcast of one of Long’s allies, a Catholic priest named Charles Coughlin. Like Long, Coughlin backed Roosevelt in 1932, declaring that “the New Deal is Christ’s Deal”. But even then, his praise was founded on the notion that Roosevelt’s policies toward the banks meant that he was taking on the “money changers”, whom I believe the Nazis on the Internet now refer to as “certain people”. Coughlin warned his audience that the Jews were pulling the strings both in Wall Street and in the Soviet Union, and denounced capitalism and communism in the same breath. What does that leave? Coughlin argued that in place of competitive free markets, which “international bankers of ill repute” would manipulate to funnel money into their pockets, the ideal economy would be regulated by the government to set a minimum wage and a maximum workload. It would also take control of factories and set production schedules to prevent the sort of overproduction that had led to the Great Depression; those charged with oversight of the economy would be instructed to focus on “national prosperity”. The system could be considered a sort of… national socialism, if you will. Unlike modern demagogues, however, he did not fulminate for a return to the gold standard. For one thing, the U.S. was technically still on the gold standard, insofar as the dollar was defined as a certain quantity of gold. But under the terms of the Gold Reserve Act, the president could unilaterally set the value of the dollar; Roosevelt immediately lowered its value from 0.04838 ounces of gold to 0.02857 ounces. This meant that the government could print more money to match its reserves—i.e., for every ounce of gold, it could put $35.00 in circulation rather than a mere $20.67. To get even more money into circulation, the Treasury had to grow its actual reserve of gold, which the Gold Reserve Act accomplished by prohibiting private citizens from owning gold, with exceptions limited to things like wedding rings and dental fillings. But if you were an American who had a gold bar stashed in a safety deposit box, you had to sell it to the government. Most Americans were fine with this, as, again, the bar they had paid $20.67 for would now fetch them thirty-five bucks. In fact, many foreigners were eager to turn their gold over to the United States Treasury for this alluring sum, to the point that by 1940 eighty percent of the world’s gold was in American custody. It was so much gold that the usual storage facilities in New York and Philadelphia couldn’t handle it all, prompting the Treasury to build a vault for it in a location more secure than a coastal city. The site the Treasury selected was an army base called Fort Knox. But this wasn’t enough for Coughlin—he demanded that the government adopt a policy of free silver to foster inflation and thereby ease the burden of those in debt. It was the same position William Jennings Bryan had taken forty years earlier. (Brands points out that Coughlin may have touted silver to his audience less because of his economic ideology than because he was speculating in silver futures to the tune of half a million ounces.)
More benign than Long or Coughlin was Francis Townsend, a retiree who’d spent his life bouncing back and forth between the Great Plains and Southern California trying his hand at all sorts of professions, from hay farmer to medical doctor to real estate agent. In 1933, at the age of sixty-six, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Long Beach Press-Telegram proposing what would become known as the Townsend Plan. His idea was to impose a federal “transactions tax” of two percent in order to fund monthly payments to retirees aged sixty and up with no recent criminal record. The payments would be the equivalent of $4800 in 2024 dollars, and they would come with a catch: the money had to be spent by the end of the month. The idea was that not only would the payments relieve poverty among the elderly, but the forced spending would stimulate the economy, and the provision that only retirees could receive the payments would reduce competition for jobs, making jobs easier for younger adults to get and keeping a floor under prevailing wages. As with Share Our Wealth, experts assailed the math, but as with the Share Our Wealth Society, Townsend Clubs spread across the nation. Roosevelt and his Brain Trust had been pondering ways to outflank Long and Coughlin and the rest, but the mania over the Townsend Plan made getting out ahead of Townsend in particular their top priority in the…
Townsend would later write that he had been inspired to come up with his plan by the sight of two elderly women pulling scraps of food out of his garbage cans. They were dressed in rags, but the rags had clearly once been the sort of clothes you’d pick up at one of the better shops. That is to say, these were not women who’d lived their lives in poverty, the sort that the better off could dismiss as a lower order of creature. They’d fallen into poverty. For Townsend, it was a “there but for the grace of God” moment that showed that, at least during a depression, anyone could end up dumpster diving. And what were a couple of decrepit grandmothers supposed to do to make money? Go build dams with the Civilian Conservation Corps? Add an extra hangar to the municipal airport for the Civil Works Administration? The idea of retirement is not just that after you’ve worked for a few decades you deserve to be able to relax—it’s that age takes its toll, and there comes a point at which realistically you cannot work. No savings? No family or church to rely on? Then, historically, your options were to scavenge for food scraps, beg on a street corner, or die. That started to change in the late nineteenth century as Otto von Bismarck, trying to steal a march on the German socialists, introduced various forms of social insurance, including old-age pensions. Several other countries followed suit. In 1934, Roosevelt convened the Committee on Economic Security, led by labor secretary Frances Perkins, which produced ten volumes of reports, summarized in a 592-page book. This book included capsule summaries of over thirty programs used in European countries and their possessions, plus Chile and Uruguay. It grouped these programs into two categories: compulsory contributory and non-contributory. The latter was very rare outside of Britain and its dominions, but it was the category the Townsend Plan would have fallen into, drawing from transaction tax revenue rather than from money withheld from workers’ paychecks. The German program as drawn up in 1889 was an example of the more common approach. Starting from the age of sixteen, German workers were divided into four classes based on income, with a different set amount removed from each worker’s wage and paid into the retirement program. Working for 1410 weeks qualified a worker to collect benefits from the program starting at the age of seventy. The annual benefit was equivalent to three hundred times the average daily wage for workers in the beneficiary’s class. And this was the model that Roosevelt instructed Perkins to follow in drawing up the Social Security Act, which passed easily in the summer of 1935.
Some in Roosevelt’s camp protested that a depression was no time to launch a program with payouts proportional to payroll taxes collected—with the U.S. population pyramid looking the way it did in the 1930s, there were going to be many more people paying into the system than receiving benefit checks, and the initial benefit checks were going to be tiny. The economy was only just now recovering from a deflationary spiral, and now Roosevelt wanted to take a bunch of money out of the economy and sit on it? “I guess you’re right on the economics,” Roosevelt shrugged, “but those taxes were never a matter of economics. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions.” What about waiting until the recovery was strong enough that it could withstand the deflationary pressure of Social Security’s opening phases? Not a chance, Roosevelt said: “We have to get it started or it will never start.” All right, then maybe run a deficit at first, according to the Keynesian principles that underlay other planks of the New Deal? Roosevelt opposed that idea as well, calling it “dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress of the United States to meet in 1980. We can’t do that. We can’t sell the United States short in 1980 any more than in 1935.” And that brought him back to his original point: the administration had to make it clear that even if Social Security wasn’t literally a matter of putting money into a savings account, it also wasn’t a matter of giving alms to the needy from sources unknown. The program would be universal, proportional, and funded by taxes singled out on every pay stub, because that way, the public would get the sense that Social Security was a matter of getting their money back, and that would transform Social Security into the third rail of American politics. “With those taxes in there,” Roosevelt asserted, “no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”
While critics on the left charged that Social Security was too conservative, insufficiently redistributive—in fact, due to the annual cap on contributions, the Social Security payroll tax was regressive—it was the plutocrats who did most of the squawking about it, especially because it included unemployment insurance as well as pensions. “With unemployment insurance no one will work!” cried the president of General Motors. “With old-age and survivor benefits, no one will save! The result will be moral decay and financial bankruptcy.” New Jersey senator Harry Moore griped that putting up a safety net “would take all the romance out of life. We might as well take a child from the nursery, give him a nurse, and protect him from every experience life affords.” Like the experience of furtively digging through trash cans for food scraps! Isn’t it romantic? Roosevelt had no patience for talk of “romance” or abstract economic principles when it came to alleviating poverty. “Hell, I can stop relief tomorrow,” he told a group of reporters who asked about business leaders clamoring for a balanced budget. “What happens? Tell me that! You know. I don’t mean, by that, the policy of the owner of your paper. You know, as human beings, what happens if I stop relief tomorrow. It isn’t any joke.”
Roosevelt also rejected the idea that people would rather accept meager unemployment benefits than work. In his first wave of New Deal programs he’d launched the Public Works Administration; now he followed up with the Works Progress Administration, and if you found this article by doing a web search on “wpa vs pwa apush”, wow did you ever have to read through a lot to get to the answer. Most links will probably tell you that the main difference is that while both focused primarily on infrastructure project, the PWA drew up plans for projects and then farmed them out to private contractors, who would then hire workers to build the railroad bridge or the housing project or what have you. The WPA directly hired unemployed people, often those who would otherwise have had difficulty finding work due to lack of education and relevant skills, and put them to work on what at least in theory were smaller projects than the PWA took on. But the books focus less on any difference in mission statements and more on who was in charge. The PWA was headed up by interior secretary Harold Ickes. Roosevelt seems to have created the WPA, whose aims did overlap with those of the PWA, primarily so as to get Civil Works Administration chief Harry Hopkins in charge of directing relief money without having to throw Ickes out of the PWA job. “Ickes is a good administrator, but often too slow,” Roosevelt explained. “Harry gets things done.” And Hopkins found all sorts of uses for the billions of dollars Congress had allotted to federal relief. In addition to the infrastructure projects that were its primary focus, the WPA also hired writers to pen guidebooks to every state and record oral histories of former slaves before they were lost; hired artists to produce posters and murals; hired actors to bring live theater to distant communities; hired musicians to give concerts in the downtowns of cities during workers’ lunch breaks; and otherwise gave unemployed people from the creative sector ways to make a living using their talents rather than digging ditches. Unsurprisingly, conservatives objected to the idea of funneling tax dollars to cellists and playwrights, but Hopkins dismissed their complaints, saying, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”
The second wave of the New Deal shored up some elements of the first wave; for instance, deposit insurance was made permanent, with coverage extended to the first five thousand dollars in each bank account (equivalent to $115,000 today). The National Labor Relations Act, a.k.a. the Wagner Act after its chief architect, New York senator Robert Wagner, guaranteed the right of workers to unionize and engage in collective bargaining. Only three percent of farm houses were wired for electricity; the Rural Electrification Act brought light bulbs and refrigerators to ninety percent of the rest. There was a raft of other legislation as well. And yet for a time, much to Roosevelt’s chagrin, it seemed that for every new law that was brought onto the raft, another was thrown overboard. The culprit was the…
One reason that Roosevelt was able to double down on the New Deal in 1935 and 1936 was that voters pushed Congress even further to the left midway through his first term. In 1932, as the Democratic standard bearer, Roosevelt had won the White House in a landslide, 472 electoral votes to 59, and the results on the congressional side had been similar: 318 House seats to 117 for the Republicans, and 60 senators to 36 for the Republicans. Two years later came a rarity: the president’s party actually picked up seats, increasing its advantage to 332–103 in the House and 71–25 in the Senate. But that accounts for only two of the three branches of government in the United States. The House, with all of its members up for election every two years, was designed to serve as the federal body that most closely reflected the politics of the moment. The Supreme Court, with its lifetime appointments, reflected the politics of the past—sometimes the distant past. Franklin Roosevelt was about to become the first president since James Monroe in 1817–1821 to serve a full term without appointing any Supreme Court justices. Instead, here was the lineup considering the lawsuits against various provisions of the New Deal as 1935 dawned:
Charles Evans Hughes. Age 72. Chief Justice. Originally appointed by William Howard Taft in 1910, he had resigned to become the Republican challenger to Woodrow Wilson in 1916. He had served as Secretary of State under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge before being selected as Chief Justice by Herbert Hoover in 1930.
Willis Van Devanter. Age 75. Appointed by Taft in 1910, he was one of the court’s conservative bloc, the “Four Horsemen”.
James Clark McReynolds. Age 72. Appointed by Wilson in 1914, having served as Wilson’s initial attorney general, he was nevertheless one of the “Four Horsemen”. Taft, during his tenure as Chief Justice in the 1920s, despised him, calling him “a continual grouch”, “selfish to the last degree”, “one who delights in making others uncomfortable”, and “fuller of prejudice than any man I have ever known”. McReynolds refused to work with women, people with African ancestry, or Jews, and following from the last count, refused to speak with his colleague…
Louis Brandeis. Age 80. Appointed by Wilson in 1916. The first Jewish Supreme Court justice, he was a member of the court’s small liberal contingent, the “Three Musketeers”.
George Sutherland. Age 72. Appointed by Harding in 1922, he was one of the “Four Horsemen”.
Pierce Butler. Age 68. Also appointed by Harding in 1922, he was another of the “Four Horsemen”.
Harlan Stone. Age 62. Appointed by Coolidge in 1925, he was nevertheless one of the liberal “Three Musketeers”.
Owen Roberts. Age 59. Appointed by Hoover in 1930 after Hoover’s first choice, John Parker, was rejected by the Senate by two votes after it came to light that Parker had said that “the participation of the Negro in politics is a source of evil and danger”.
Benjamin Cardozo. Age 64. Appointed by Hoover in 1932, he was nevertheless one of the liberal “Three Musketeers”.
And here is a small sample of how these men, most of them over seventy, seven of them appointed by presidents from a party that had been overwhelmingly rejected by the public, hobbled the New Deal:
Panama Refining vs. Ryan: Struck down a section of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, ruling it unconstitutional for Congress to delegate to the president the power to regulate the oil industry.
Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton Railroad: Struck down the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934, which had offered pensions to older rail workers so that younger workers could take those jobs, reducing unemployment.
Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford: Struck down the Farm Bankruptcy Act of 1934, which had allowed farmers to stay on farms that had been foreclosed on, or if they had already lost their farms, buy them back with governmental aid.
Schechter Poultry v. United States: Struck down enough of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 that it could no longer operate at all, ruling that the federal government could not regulate businesses that operated wholly in one state just because those businesses indirectly affected interstate commerce. (E.g., a butcher shop located in New York, killing chickens on site and selling them to New York customers, didn’t engage in interstate commerce just because it had bought some of those chickens from a farm in New Jersey.)
United States v. Butler: Struck down the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, ruling that the federal government could not use its taxing authority as a means to regulate agricultural production, which was deemed a state matter.
And while this wasn’t a New Deal provision, as it was a state law, the Supreme Court also struck down New York’s minimum wage in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, ruling it an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of contract. In so doing, the majority relied on the precedent of Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, a 1923 case in which the court ruled that Congress couldn’t enact a minimum wage in the District of Columbia, which in turn relied on Lochner v. New York, a 1905 case in which the court ruled against a state law setting a maximum work week of sixty hours. Tipaldo kind of gave away the game: this Supreme Court was committed to the laissez-faire of the Roaring ’20s, or even of the Gilded Age. Twenty-three million citizens may have voted for a government that would take forceful action to rescue them from a catastrophic depression, but the American system was designed for stasis, and those voters could be checked and balanced by five elderly men. Now the question was whether those voters would endorse the Supreme Court’s point of view and put a Republican back in the White House, or triple down on the New Deal and re-elect Roosevelt in…
Of course, these were unusual times—maybe they’d vote for the Union Party! Whom had this new party joined together in its titular union? None other than Charles Coughlin, Francis Townsend, and the new head of the Share Our Wealth Society following Huey Long’s assassination! He was a preacher named Gerald Smith. This populist triumvirate nominated North Dakota congressman William Lemke to serve as a presentable face for the party, but the unspoken promise was that the power behind the throne would be Coughlin—or Townsend, or Smith, depending on which one had drawn you to the political fringes. Roosevelt’s vote counters had warned that for all his clownishness, receiving visiting dignitaries in his pajamas and whatnot, Huey Long was not to be laughed off. Were his successors? Time would tell.
Meanwhile, the Republicans found themselves faced with a choice between retrenchment and accommodation. Should they insist that Herbert Hoover had been right all along, that the recovery would be much stronger right now had he been re-elected, and that unless the New Deal were dismantled immediately, the American economy would fall into the kind of ruins that would make 1932 look like the good old days? Or should they try to find some kind of Roosevelt lite, who would promise to maintain the aspects of the New Deal that were working, fix the elements that were not, and somehow balance the budget on top of it all? In 1934, Hoover published a screed against the New Deal called The Challenge to Liberty, and made it known that should the party run on the message that Hoover was right, an excellent candidate to make that case, who would accept the nomination if drafted, was Herbert Hoover. Those who worried that Hoover was still electoral poison need never fear, he explained, because the progressive vote was sure to be split between Roosevelt and Huey Long. When Long was assassinated, Hoover’s chances waned. By the time the convention rolled around, only two candidates looked to have a realistic shot at the nomination. One was William Borah, a seventy-year-old senator from Idaho, a maverick who’d found a way to be a thorn in the sides of presidents of both parties. He had a noteworthy connection to Roosevelt: the mother of his only child was Franklin’s cousin Alice, Teddy’s daughter, with whom Borah had had a long extramarital affair. (Alice, notorious for her dark wit, wanted to name the girl Deborah—i.e., “de Borah”—but settled for an unofficial nickname of “Aurora”, short for “Aurora Borah Alice”.) The other was the eventual nominee, Kansas governor Alfred Mossman Landon. Alf Landon was no Hoover, and in fact he and Hoover didn’t get along. Landon had actually helped to implement the New Deal in Kansas, and was a supporter of unions. But he’d also cut taxes and balanced the budget in his state, and promised a calmer version of progress that wouldn’t break the bank.
So how do you run against a moderate? Out on the stump, Roosevelt mockingly summed up his rival’s message: “Of course we believe all these things! We believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things! But we do not like the way the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us! We will do all of them—we will do more of them—we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.” But ultimately, Landon wasn’t Roosevelt’s target. Instead, he set his sights on Hoover, and Coolidge, and Harding, and not even so much those presidents themselves as the philosophy they represented and the forces who had backed them. The Supreme Court had struck down major components of the New Deal on the grounds that they impinged upon precedents that had established laissez-faire as America’s economic creed. That “leave to do”, freedom to act as you please, was what the American Liberty League had named itself after. At the Democratic convention, Roosevelt countered:
Necessitous men are not free men. Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free, liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair!
Heading out of the convention, the polls showed a close race. Set aside the infamous Literary Digest poll that had Landon taking 57% of the vote. Even Gallup had Roosevelt up by only 3.6% in mid-July and 4.9% at the end of September. Specifically, that September poll had Roosevelt at 49.5%, Landon at 44.6%, Lemke at 4.7%, and Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party at 1.1%. As Brands points out, “the unspoken secret of the Great Depression” was that it didn’t immiserate all households equally. At its deepest point, a quarter of the population was out of work—but that also meant that three quarters of the workforce had kept their jobs. And if you aren’t a farmer whose livelihood depends on the price of your crops, and you aren’t struggling under a debt burden that deflation makes more and more onerous… then, hey, you probably don’t mind that every time you go to the store, things cost less! So perhaps there was a silent majority that looked back at the Hoover years with some fondness, now that the drumbeat of terrible headlines was receding into the past? I never had to patch up my shoes with cardboard! And milk cost twenty-six cents a gallon under Hoover! Under Roosevelt, it’s up to forty-seven! Not to mention how great things were in the ’20s! Yeah, now that the crisis is past, let’s put the Republicans back in charge! Could that be the mood that had Roosevelt stuck under fifty percent? Roosevelt wrapped up his campaign with a Halloween rally at Madison Square Garden, at which he reminded listeners both of the Depression and what had led to it:
For twelve years our nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government. The nation looked to that government, but that government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf, and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker, and three long years in the bread lines! Nine mad years of mirage, and three long years of despair! And, my friends, powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that government is best which is most indifferent to mankind.
For nearly four years now, you have had an administration which, instead of twirling its thumbs, has rolled up its sleeves. And I can assure you that we will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it, the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it, these forces met their master!
In reply, Landon offered what Time called “temperate generalities”. He didn’t campaign much, and tended to bore audiences when he did. Meanwhile, between the two speeches quoted above, Roosevelt gave over two hundred others as part of a two-month speaking tour, focusing on the farm belt. And reporters covering the campaign couldn’t help but overhear what people at these stops were saying to each other about Roosevelt. “He saved my home!” “He gave me a job!” So, polls be damned—maybe a landslide was brewing? Maybe not as big as in 1932, but enough that Roosevelt didn’t have to sweat? Roosevelt kept his campaign going full steam ahead just in case, but by his own count, he was likely to win the 1936 election by something along the lines of 360 electoral votes to 171.
He was way off. Roosevelt did not win by a margin of 360 to 171. On election night, he found himself with 523 electoral votes. Alf Landon had… eight. The popular vote was 60.8% to 36.5%, with Lemke not even reaching the two percent mark and Thomas failing to clear half a percentage point. What was more, the Democratic margin in Congress had somehow increased again. In the House, the Democrats and affiliated parties had 346 seats, while the Republicans could muster only 89. Even that looked balanced compared to the Senate, where the tally stood at 80 to 16. It was the sort of mandate not seen since the “Era of Good Feelings” over a century before. And while Roosevelt still had a battle against the “economic royalists” and the Supreme Court ahead of him, his most immediate opposition sort of crumbled away:
With Social Security having firmly taken root, and with later revisions only strengthening it, few saw any point in advocating that it be replaced with the Townsend Plan. Francis Townsend retreated into obscurity and died in 1960 at age 93.
Father Charles Coughlin continued to attack Roosevelt through his radio show, but eventually his archbishop stepped in to order him to choose between his political activity and his priesthood. Coughlin chose the latter and retreated into obscurity as a local pastor. He died in 1979 at age 88.
Gerald Smith ran for president in 1944 as the standard bearer for the fascist America First Party, then in 1948 for the Christian Nationalist Party. In the 1950s he turned his attention to building out the agenda of this organization, making denial of the Holocaust one of its central planks and calling for Jews and African-Americans to be expelled from the United States. He died in 1976 at age 78.
Alf Landon never sought political office again after his defeat in 1936, but he did speak on the issues of the day in the years that followed, such as when he came out as a supporter of Lyndon Johnson’s update of the New Deal, the Great Society. He lived not only to see his hundredth birthday in 1987, but to deliver some remarks when Ronald Reagan paid a visit to Kansas to commemorate the occasion.
One final postscript: in 1978, Kansas elected Landon’s daughter Nancy to the United States Senate; she was the only female senator in the 96th Congress. She wound up serving three terms and is still alive at age 92. Though a Republican like her father, she has endorsed Kamala Harris for president.
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