Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush by Paul F. Boller Jr

Author:Paul F. Boller Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-03-05T11:10:00+00:00

Iowa

Even before FDR gave a farm speech in Topeka, Kansas, Senator Thomas P.Gore of Oklahoma wired him: "If every Democrat in Iowa should be put in jail on election day, you would carry President Hoover's native state anyway."28

Alternative

After his election, FDR was told by a friend that if he succeeded as President he would go down in history as the greatest American President but if he failed he would live on as the worst one. "If I fail," said Roosevelt solemnly, "I shall be the last one."29

"There's one issue in this campaign," FDR told Raymond Moley in the summer of 1936, "It's myself, and people must be either for me or against me." Moley was shocked by the apparent conceit, but the President spoke truly. By 1936 Roosevelt was the center of both passionate adoration and burning hatred. With millions of Americans he was, as Jim Farley remarked, "more popular than the New Deal itself."

The measures Roosevelt sponsored during his first years in the White House did not produce prosperity. But they pulled the country out of the doldrums and saw to it that millions of people were better off than they had been when he first took office. At the same time the New Deal's sharp departure from traditional use and wont produced indignation, alarm, and then outright loathing on the part of reactionaries in both parties. The J.P.Morgans absolutely forbade the mention of FDR's name in their household; and at least one wealthy businessman left the country for the duration. FDR's old friend Alfred E.Smith, once a foe of privilege but now the friend of the fashionable, "took a walk," and began delighting Roosevelt-haters in both parties by his blasts at the New Deal. Charged Smith: "The young brain-trusters caught the Socialists in swimming and they ran away with their clothes."2

To unseat Roosevelt the Republicans, meeting in Cleveland early in June, picked Alfred M.Landon, Governor of Kansas, on the first ballot. The Landon choice pleased businessmen: he was an oil man and a fiscal conservative and had balanced his state's budget. But Republican Progressives liked him too: he was a former Bull Mooser who had sponsored New Dealish measures as Governor. He came from a farm state, moreover, and had a chance of winning back Western farmers who had gone for FDR in 1932. Landon's forthright and folksy manner also seemed to be an asset; he was called the "Kansas Lincoln." For second place the Republicans turned to another former Bull Mooser who, unlike Landon, was now deeply conservative: Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News. The Republican platform blew hot and cold on the New Deal: flayed the Roosevelt administration for reckless spending, unbalanced budgets, and assaults on free enterprise, but also endorsed federal relief for the unemployed, social security for the elderly, farm credits, and the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively. During the campaign Landon himself reflected the ambivalence of his party toward FDR's handiwork. The New Deal, in short, if not FDR himself, was now the center of political debate.

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