New Deal or Raw Deal? by Burton W. Folsom Jr

Author:Burton W. Folsom, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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PATRONAGE TRANSFORMED: THE ELECTIONS OF 1934 AND 1936

Roosevelt seemingly dazzled the nation with his election victories. In his first midterm election, for example, he led his party to the most stunning triumph of any president in the twentieth century. Two years later, he won reelection with almost 99 percent of the nation’s electoral votes, the largest of any contested presidential election in U.S. history. How do we explain such spectacular success? Some have focused on ideas, that Roosevelt’s desire for an active federal government in making policy resonated with voters; others have pointed to the president himself, his charisma, his optimism, his popular fireside chats, and his energy to get the nation moving again by galvanizing voters during the crisis of depression. Both of these views have some merit, but they can’t go far as convincing explanations. After all, Roosevelt’s programs, by and large, did not work. They did not reduce unemployment and mostly had unintended consequences that made the Great Depression persist and even grow worse in the late 1930s. Also, much of Roosevelt’s optimism and presidential energy were dedicated to clearly unpopular causes: jailing those who disobeyed the NRA, hiking income and excise taxes, packing the Supreme Court, and purging those Democrats who tried to oppose his centralization of political power.

If the New Deal didn’t work, that is, if unemployment after six years in the White House was greater than in any previous era of U.S. history, and if FDR often initiated dangerous and unpopular programs, how do we account for his astonishing success at the polls?

The starting place to answer this question, I believe, is to look at patronage. Such patronage includes not only the traditional jobs in the government bureaucracy, but more broadly the newly created jobs in the federal programs of the New Deal. If we probe deeply into Roosevelt’s popularity, we almost always discover the presence of patronage—the creating and the manipulating of federal jobs to strengthen his political support. “The party in power should reward its own,” insisted James Farley, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Roosevelt’s postmaster general. “Patronage…is also of assistance for building the party machine for the next election.” Farley practiced what he preached: the Democrats, under Farley and Roosevelt, would use the federal jobs primarily (1) to “reward” party members, and (2) for “assistance for building the party machine for the next election.” 1

Under the New Deal, Roosevelt sponsored a flurry of new federal programs—including the AAA, FERA, CCC, and later the mammoth WPA, which provided government jobs for millions of American voters. Roosevelt and Farley distributed the jobs connected with these agencies (as Farley promised) in ways that best served the Democrat Party. Emil Hurja, deputy director of the Democratic National Committee and Farley’s right-hand man, was an expert pollster and he gathered data regularly on the political effects of patronage. He sampled voters in every state and most counties—“What were the specific reactions to Roosevelt’s federal spending?” Hurja asked, and “What swing states (or congressional districts)

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