Roosevelt wins the presidential election

On 8 November 1932 the Democratic Governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, defeated the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, in the presidential election. The victory was overwhelming: Roosevelt received about 22.8 million votes, or 57.4 per cent, against 15.8 million (39.6 per cent) for Hoover; he carried 42 of the 48 states and won 472 electoral votes to 59. Four years earlier Hoover had beaten Al Smith by an equally wide margin. This time he was voted down by people who, in three years of the Great Depression, had lost their jobs, savings, farms and homes. The election ended twelve years of Republican rule and opened a twenty-year era of Democrats in the White House.

The third year of the Depression

By the autumn of 1932 the American economy had hit rock bottom. Since the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 industrial output had fallen by almost half, thousands of banks had failed, and well over ten million people – almost one worker in four – were out of work. Grain and cotton prices had fallen so low that it did not pay farmers to harvest their crops, and banks were foreclosing on indebted farms. On the edges of cities stood shanty towns of planks and sheet metal, derisively called “Hoovervilles”.

Hoover was not idle, as the legend spread by his opponents claimed. In January 1932 he set up a federal lending agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which lent money to banks, railways and businesses, and in the summer he agreed that it should also make loans to the states for unemployment relief. In June 1931 he had announced a moratorium on the payment of war debts and reparations. But he believed that direct federal relief for the unemployed would destroy American individualism; he defended the gold standard and a balanced budget, and in 1932 he raised taxes. For millions of voters he became a symbol of helplessness.

What finally sank him were the events of the summer of 1932. In May and June well over ten thousand veterans of the First World War arrived in Washington – according to some estimates, together with their families and sympathisers, more than 40,000 people. This “Bonus Army” demanded the immediate payment of the bonuses for war service that a 1924 law had promised to pay only in 1945. The House of Representatives passed such a bill, but on 17 June the Senate rejected it. Some of the veterans remained in their camp by the Anacostia River. On 28 July, during an attempt to remove them from government buildings, the police opened fire and killed two of them. Hoover called in the army. The Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, with the participation of Major George Patton and his own aide, Dwight Eisenhower, dispersed the veterans with cavalry, infantry with fixed bayonets, tanks and tear gas, and the camp went up in flames. According to many accounts MacArthur exceeded the president’s orders, but it was Hoover who took responsibility. Pictures of soldiers driving out former soldiers, along with women and children, went round the whole country.

The candidate of the “new deal”

Roosevelt, a cousin of the former president Theodore Roosevelt, had governed New York State since 1929. He was one of the first governors to create a state office for unemployment relief, and in 1930 he was re-elected by a huge margin. In April 1932, in a radio address, he spoke up for “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”. The nomination did not come easily, however. The Democrats then required a two-thirds majority of delegates, and Roosevelt was opposed by, among others, his former patron Al Smith and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Nance Garner of Texas, who was backed by the press magnate William Randolph Hearst. At the convention in Chicago Roosevelt led in the first three ballots but lacked the required majority. A deal settled the matter: the California and Texas delegations came over to him, and Garner became the vice-presidential candidate. Roosevelt won the nomination on the fourth ballot on 1 July.

The next day he did something no candidate had done before him: he flew to Chicago and accepted the nomination in person. “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” he said. The press seized on the words “new deal”, and they became the name of his programme. That programme was still vague. Roosevelt promised help for farmers, public works and supervision of the stock exchange and the banks, and in September in San Francisco he spoke of the state’s responsibility for economic order. At the same time, like Hoover, he promised economies and a balanced budget. The Democrats also demanded the repeal of Prohibition, which had lost what remained of its support during the Depression.

During the campaign Roosevelt toured the whole country, and on the radio he spoke better than any politician of his time. Few people knew how severely disabled he was after the illness he had suffered in 1921: by unwritten agreement the press did not show him in a wheelchair or in his steel leg braces. Hoover, renominated by the Republicans in Chicago in June together with Vice-President Charles Curtis, at first intended to give only a few speeches, and when he finally set off on a tour of the country he was sometimes booed and pelted with objects. He warned that if the Democrats lowered tariffs, “the grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities”. No one listened.

The result

Almost 40 million Americans voted. Roosevelt won more votes than any candidate before him. He was the first Democrat since 1852 to win a majority of both the popular and the electoral vote. Hoover carried only six states of the north-east: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware. The Socialist candidate, Norman Thomas, received more than 880,000 votes, about 2.2 per cent, and the Communists just over 100,000. The revolution that many conservatives in America had feared did not happen: voters sought change within the system.

The Democrats also won the congressional elections. They took more than 310 seats in the House of Representatives and 59 of the 96 seats in the Senate. Roosevelt was supported by the South, which in 1928 had partly deserted the Democrats, by the farmers of the West, by workers and Catholic immigrants in the big cities who had voted for Smith four years earlier, and by some progressive Republicans. From this coalition grew the lasting majority on which Roosevelt based his rule. Political scientists regard the 1932 election as one of the most important in the history of the United States, because it permanently changed the balance of power between the parties.

The long interregnum

Under the Constitution the new president would take office only on 4 March of the following year. For four months America was therefore governed by a man rejected by the voters, while the winner had no power and did not want to take responsibility for his predecessor’s policies. As early as November Hoover tried to persuade Roosevelt to take a joint position on the war debts that the United States was demanding from Britain and France. Roosevelt refused. On 15 December Britain paid its instalment, while France defaulted. Meanwhile the Depression deepened, and in the winter of 1932–1933 a fresh wave of bank panics followed.

Significance

The American election took place two days after the Reichstag election of 6 November 1932, in which the NSDAP lost about two million votes, although with 33 per cent it remained the largest party. In Germany the same economic crisis was tearing the republic apart: in the spring of 1932 President Paul von Hindenburg had held on to his office against Hitler only in the second round, and at the end of May he had dismissed Chancellor Brüning, after which successive governments no longer had any support in parliament. In America the crisis brought a change of power within the bounds of democracy. Less than three months after Roosevelt’s election, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The two men took power five weeks apart, and both promised to lead their countries out of the crisis. Their paths, however, were opposites.

Foreign policy barely featured in the 1932 campaign. Roosevelt, who as vice-presidential candidate in 1920 had defended the League of Nations, declared publicly in February 1932 that he no longer supported American membership – a move widely seen as a bow to the isolationists and to Hearst. Meanwhile, in Asia, Japan had seized Manchuria, and Secretary of State Henry Stimson had responded only by announcing that the United States would not recognise gains made by force. In his first years the new president dealt above all with the crisis at home, and in the mid-1930s Congress passed neutrality acts that tied his hands. Only from 1937 did Roosevelt begin gradually to convince Americans that German, Italian and Japanese aggression threatened them too. It was he – elected in November 1932 as a doctor for the economic crisis – who led the United States through the Second World War and made it the “arsenal of democracy”.