Roosevelt Sweeps the Nation: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the liberal ideal.

How do you write a book about one of the most lopsided presidential campaigns in American history and make it interesting? That was the question in my mind when I picked up David Pietrusza’s “Roosevelt Sweeps the Nation: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the liberal ideal.” The previous books of his I had read: “1920: The Year of Six Presidents” and “1960: LBJ vs JFK vs Nixon” featured some of the 20th century’s most titanic political figures. 1936 by contrast saw Roosevelt demolish the now-forgotten governor of Kansas Alf Landon. 

Was there some drama to this election I didn’t know about?  The short answer is no. Though Landon was a moderate and fairly popular governor, a rare thing for a Republican to be in the wake of the Great Depression, he did prove to be a hapless campaigner, and Pietrusza only devoted a couple of chapters to him. Instead, he cheats a little by focusing mostly on political developments in 1935 and later various minor party candidates.

A New Liberal Democratic Order 

As the title suggests, this book contends that with the conservative Republican orthodoxy of the 1920s losing all popular support in the aftermath of the Depression, Roosevelt was able to forge a new liberal Democratic order in the face of various demagogic popular movements, from the corrupt populism of Huey long, to the right-wing liberty league, to the increasingly antisemitic and borderline fascistic radio priest Father Coughlin.   

This is certainly no hagiography of Roosevelt however. Several times Pietrusza quotes Roosevelt associates as describing him as a purely political being, with no real inner self beyond politics. He also dwells on the supposed failures of certain New Deal programs: mostly the National Recovery Act which attempted to fix prices and wages, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which attempted to prop up farm income by paying farmers to limit their planting and infamously slaughtering millions of pigs.  Roosevelt’s refusal to endorse anti-lynching legislation is also highlighted.

The Townsendite Movement 

As I said, much of this book concerns political developments in 1935, including the shock assassination of populist senator Huey Long, and the search for a new benefactor by his ally the crooked preacher Gerald L K Smith, who attempted alliances with Father Coughlin and Dr Francis Townsend, leader Of the Townsendite movement. Townsend was a small-town doctor who responded to the plight of his impoverished elderly patients by advocating for a type of government-run pension plan.

His plan proved wildly popular, and soon Townsend organizations were springing up all over the country and began successfully electing candidates to Congress. If you thought Townsend would support Roosevelt, who had passed Social Security after all, you would be wrong. Townsend’s plan differed from Social Security in many respects. For one thing, it was much more generous, at 200 dollars per month, which would be over 4000 dollars in today’s money, and be open to anyone over 60, as opposed to 65.  Also, recipients would be required to spend all of their benefits every month, which would be very difficult to enforce, as well as wildly inflationary. Lastly, it would be paid for with a new sales tax, as opposed to the payroll tax.

Though Townsend’s plan was unworkable, as even he admitted in congressional testimony his numbers simply didn’t add up, he viewed Social Security as a betrayal of his vision and allied with Coughlin and Smith to endorse North Dakota congressman William Lemke who ran on the Union Party line.

Fringe Candidates in the 1936 Election 

Besides Lemke, who largely abandoned his campaign in the fall of 1936 to focus on saving his congressional seat, Pietrusza devotes time to other fringe candidates, including socialist Norman Thomas, and communist Earl Browder, who on orders from Stalin waged a campaign that tacitly endorsed Roosevelt without saying so, and the antics of fascist Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German American Bund, who endorsed Landon.  But more attention is paid to the candidate who didn’t run: former presidential candidate Al Smith.

Smith, the first Catholic major party candidate for president, had been an old-style progressive when he was demolished in the 1928 election. He had also been a Roosevelt ally. It was to nominate Smith at the 1924 convention that Roosevelt gave his first major political speech since he was stricken with polio in 1921, and it was Smith who had convinced Roosevelt to run to replace him as New York Governor in 1928. Things began to change between them however when Roosevelt brought in his advisors and ignored most of his advice as governor in the following years. 

Then as Roosevelt’s New Deal policies grew increasingly left-leaning, Smith’s politics became ever more right-wing, perhaps influenced by his new wealthy business associates. By 1935 Smith had joined the newly formed Liberty League, an anti New Deal organization bankrolled by some of the richest men in the country which produced a flood of political pamphlets. Democrats worried that Smith might run as an independent In 1936, potentially splitting the Democratic vote, but in the end, he confined himself to delivering increasingly intemperate and decreasingly effective anti-Roosevelt screeds.

Roosevelt’s Success in Three Phases

As I’ve said, the election itself was a very one-sided affair and is chiefly remembered for three things. First, Roosevelt’s declaration in his convention speech that his generation had a “Rendezvous with destiny,” a phrase borrowed by then ardent New Dealer Ronald Reagan decades later. 

Secondly, it was the first election predicted using modern scientific polling methods. Previous polling methods, such as the Literary Digest’s reader survey had relied on active responses by its readership, and was completely wrong in 1936, while George Gallup’s quota sample predicted Roosevelt’s win and established the Gallup poll as the standard for decades to come. 

Thirdly, Roosevelt’s election eve speech at Madison Square Garden attacked plutocrats as economic royalists who were quote “United in their Hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.”  He went on to say that while these forces had met their match in his first administration, quote “I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.” This militant rhetoric is remembered fondly by many left-leaning democrats today who believe the modern party has become too timid and corporate-friendly but was alarming at the time to even some of Roosevelt’s advisors.

Republican Bias in the Press?

A few interesting facets of the campaign might surprise modern readers. For instance, while many people today believe the mainstream press has a liberal bias, in 1936 the vast majority of newspapers endorsed Landon. And for those people who believe that the press’ willingness to not report on Roosevelt’s disability represented special treatment, Pietrusza relates a story in which Landon confessed to a group that he had no chance in the election, and on learning a reporter was present, was able to convince him not to run the story.

The 1936 Election Results

In the end, the election was a blowout, one of the biggest landslides in American history. Roosevelt received 60.8% of the popular vote, a total only exceeded by LBJ’s 61.1% in 1964 as the highest proportion of the vote since the uncontested 1820 election. He won every state except Maine and Vermont, and the highest-ever proportion of available electoral votes, again since 1820.  This election also changed the nature of the Democratic party’s electoral coalition, with huge increases in the urban vote and also with black voters who, despite Roosevelt’s refusal to push for anti-lynching legislation, switched to the Democratic column thanks to the economic benefits of various new deal work and relief programs.   

Conclusion 

Pietrusza brings the 1930s to life by peppering the story with oddball characters, great and small, from Proto-hippie leader and self-proclaimed God Father Divine to the “Black Hitler” Abdul Hamid, to Frank Hockaday, inventor of the modern road sign, who toured the country throwing feathers at public figures in the name of peace, to more serious figures like publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst and a host of now forgotten senators and congressmen. Over everything sits Roosevelt, the greatest politician of the 20th century, who for better or worse fundamentally changed American government, politics, and economics, as he waged his most successful campaign.