Roosevelt re-elected

On 3 November 1936 Franklin Delano Roosevelt won a second term with one of the largest victories in the history of the United States. He received about 27.8 million votes, almost 61 per cent, and carried 46 of the 48 states. His Republican opponent, the Governor of Kansas Alf Landon, received 16.7 million votes, just under 37 per cent, and won only Maine and Vermont. In the Electoral College Roosevelt had 523 votes to Landon’s 8. No candidate had won so large a share of the electoral vote since the virtually uncontested election of 1820. The election was a referendum on the New Deal, and Americans came down firmly in its favour.

Four years of the New Deal

Roosevelt had first won in 1932, at the worst moment of the Great Depression, and after taking office in March 1933 he had deluged Congress with emergency legislation. By 1936 the economy had clearly recovered. Unemployment, which in 1933 had affected one American in four, had fallen to a level that historians put, depending on the method of calculation, at 10–17 per cent – still very high, but millions of people had found work in public works programmes. In 1935, in the so-called Second New Deal, Congress passed the social security system – old-age pensions and unemployment benefits – and the Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers the right to organise in trade unions.

The President had powerful enemies. In 1935 and 1936 the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional the two fundamental laws of the first New Deal, on industrial recovery and on agricultural relief. Wealthy businessmen, including the du Pont family, financed the American Liberty League, which accused Roosevelt of leading the country towards socialism and dictatorship. From the other side he was attacked by populists for whom the New Deal was not radical enough. The most dangerous of them, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, with his slogan “Every Man a King” and his programme of breaking up great fortunes, was shot dead in September 1935.

The candidates

The Republicans, who had suffered another defeat in the congressional elections of 1934, met in Cleveland in June 1936 and nominated Landon, the only Republican governor to have kept his post in 1934. He was a moderate from the farming Midwest who did not reject the New Deal wholesale but promised to govern more cheaply and efficiently. The vice-presidential candidate was Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News. Landon was not a stirring speaker, and in time his campaign, run largely by the party machine, took on the tone of fierce attacks on social security.

The Democrats gathered in Philadelphia at the end of June and nominated Roosevelt and Vice-President John Nance Garner by acclamation. The convention abolished the century-old rule that a candidate needed two-thirds of the delegates’ votes, which had given the South a veto. On 27 June, at a stadium in Philadelphia, Roosevelt told more than a hundred thousand listeners that “this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny” and attacked the “economic royalists” who wanted to take away the rights people had won during the Depression.

A third force was to be the Union Party, created by the President’s opponents from left and right: the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin, whose radio sermons were heard by millions, Francis Townsend, the advocate of universal pensions, and Long’s successor, the preacher Gerald L. K. Smith. Its candidate, William Lemke, a congressman from North Dakota, won less than two per cent of the vote. In the following years Coughlin moved to openly antisemitic positions, and after Kristallnacht in 1938 he justified it in his broadcasts. One radio station after another refused him airtime, and in 1942 his church superiors ordered him to end his political activity.

The campaign and the result

For most of the summer Roosevelt avoided open campaigning, appearing as President rather than as candidate. In the autumn he toured the country, pointing to the recovery. On 31 October, at Madison Square Garden in New York, he threw down the gauntlet to his opponents: “They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.” Roosevelt was backed by the coalition that would govern America for decades to come: workers and the trade unions, led by the new Congress of Industrial Organizations, Catholic and Jewish residents of the big cities, farmers, white Southern voters and – for the first time as a majority – Black Americans, who had voted Republican since Lincoln’s day.

The election also went down in history as a disaster for the polls. The popular weekly The Literary Digest, which had correctly picked the winner since 1916, sent out ten million questionnaires and, on the basis of more than two million replies, forecast a Landon victory with 57 per cent of the vote. Those surveyed came largely from lists of telephone subscribers and car owners, and most of those who replied were opponents of the President. The magazine folded within two years. Roosevelt’s victory was correctly predicted, on the other hand, by George Gallup, using a much smaller but properly selected sample, and his surveys became the model from then on.

Before the election the Democratic campaign manager James Farley had predicted that Roosevelt would win everywhere except Maine and Vermont. Afterwards he paraphrased the old saying “As Maine goes, so goes the nation” as “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”. The Democrats won more than three-quarters of the seats in both houses of Congress.

The world in 1936

Foreign policy was hardly mentioned in the campaign, even though 1936 brought the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the Italian capture of Addis Ababa and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Both parties agreed that America should keep out of the conflicts of Europe and Asia. In February Congress extended the Neutrality Act, and on 14 August, at Chautauqua in New York State, Roosevelt gave a speech in which he said: “I have seen war. (…) I hate war.” He promised that America would avoid commitments that might drag it into other nations’ wars, though he warned that neutrality could not be guaranteed if lawlessness prevailed in the world.

Significance

The crushing victory gave Roosevelt a self-confidence that soon let him down. At the beginning of 1937, after his second term had begun, he proposed a bill to enlarge the Supreme Court with justices who would stop blocking his reforms. Congress, although dominated by the Democrats, rejected it, and in the autumn of 1937 the economy slid into a new recession. The President emerged from these setbacks weakened in domestic politics.

The coalition that had won in 1936 nevertheless endured, and in 1940 it gave Roosevelt an unprecedented third term, at a time when Britain was fighting Germany alone. Knox, the Republican who had lost as vice-presidential candidate in 1936, joined Roosevelt’s cabinet in July 1940 as Secretary of the Navy and led it during the war with Japan. The mandate of 1936 meant that in the years when Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese military marched from one act of aggression to the next, the United States was governed by a politician who understood the danger, even if for several years he could not convince Congress and his fellow citizens of it.