STUDYING THE RULERS of foreign lands, Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times found that they had shriveled or aged during these tortured years. “On the faces of Mussolini, Hitler, Stanley Baldwin, even the rotating governors of France,” she reported, “strain and worry have etched indelible lines. Caught off guard, when they are alone, they are tired and baffled men who have paid a heavy price for power.”
Not so Roosevelt. Home again, Mrs. McCormick marveled that he was so little shaken by the seismic disturbances over which he presided. “On none of his predecessors has the office left so few marks as on Mr. Roosevelt. He is a little heavier, a shade grayer; otherwise he looks harder and in better health than on the day of his inauguration. His face is so tanned that his eyes appear lighter, a cool Wedgwood blue; after the four grilling years since the last campaign, they are as keen, curious, friendly, and impenetrable as ever.”
If other leaders bent under the burdens of power, Roosevelt shouldered his with zest and gaiety. He loved being President; he almost always gave the impression of being on top of his job. Cheerfully, exuberantly, he swung through the varied presidential tasks: dictating to Miss Tully pithy, twinkling little notes for friends and subordinates; splashing in the White House pool for the delighted photographers; showing off the incredible gewgaws that littered his desk; greeting delegations of Indians, of Boy Scouts, of businessmen, of Moose, of 4-H Club leaders, of Democratic ladies; relating long anecdotes about his ancestors to luncheon guests; scratching his name on bills with a dozen pens and carefully awarding each to a congressional sponsor solemnly standing behind the President’s big chair; conferring genially with congressional leaders, agency heads, party leaders, foreign emissaries; poking fun at reporters while deftly turning aside their questions.
The variegated facets of the presidential job called for a multitude of different roles, and Roosevelt moved from part to part with ease and confidence. He was a man of many faces. Presiding over meetings of chiefs of his emergency agencies, he was the brisk administrator investing the sprawling bureaucracy with pace and direction, and patiently educating his subordinates on the Realpolitik of administrative management. Entertaining visitors on a yacht, he was the quintessence of sociableness and charm. Addressing a party meeting, he was the militant political leader, trenchant, commanding, cocky, assertive. Motoring through the woods at Hyde Park, he was the country squire, relaxed, casual, rustic. Attending Harvard’s tercentenary in top hat and morning coat, he was the chief of state, august, sedate, and solemn.
Watching the President perform at a press conference midway through the first term, John Gunther was struck by the incredible swiftness with which he struck a series of almost theatrical poses. In twenty minutes, Gunther noted, Roosevelt’s features expressed amazement, curiosity, mock alarm, genuine interest, worry, rhetorical playing for suspense, sympathy, decision, playfulness, dignity, and surpassing charm. And when the reporters roared at Roosevelt’s remarks, he was clearly pleased at this audience response; after one such burst of laughter, the President took a sort of bow with a tilt of his huge head.
In all these roles Roosevelt gave an impression of directness and simplicity, and winning qualities these were. Ushered into the presidential bedroom one morning, Ickes found him shaving in the adjoining bathroom. Roosevelt invited him to sit on the toilet seat while they talked; the President was then wheeled to his bed where he reclined, still talking, while being dressed. He had his braces put on to greet a delegation, then returned to his room to take his braces off and relax again. “I was struck all over again,” Ickes exclaimed that night, “with the unaffected simplicity and charm of the man.” But this apparent simplicity was most deceiving—as Ickes himself was to discover.
The staff, as the last year of the first term arrived, reflected some of the change in Roosevelt’s political posture and in the alignment of forces amid which he operated. Howe had died in April, until the end toying with great schemes for Roosevelt’s triumphant re-election. Douglas, Acheson, and most of the other conservatives had long since left. By 1936 only Moley remained from the right wing of the original brain trust—and the graying, anxious professor was not to stay long. For months he had watched with rising alarm as the New Deal veered left. In turn captivated by Roosevelt’s charm and pained by his policies, Moley somehow stayed on until a night in June when the President in a small gathering began taunting him about his new conservatism. Moley replied with heat, an angry quarrel followed, and the old relationship was over.
New faces in the White House took the place of old. There was Stanley High, a smooth-mannered, bespectacled young man whose religious background helped him supply the President with what his more irreverent White House aides called “inspirational messages.” There was Tommy Corcoran, a brash, engaging lawyer, only thirty-six years old, whose role as White House court jester with his jokes, Irish ballads, and mimicry seemed to belie his growing reputation as a tough-minded puller of governmental wires and manipulator of politicians and bureaucrats. There was Corcoran’s “Gold Dust twin,” Ben Cohen, a dreamy intellectual who had shown brilliant powers in drafting New Deal bills and coping with legal technicalities. Others fluttered in and out of the White House limelight: Robert H. Jackson, William O. Douglas, Isador Lubin—militant legal and economic technicians of a changing social order.
The President steered his kitchen cabinet with an easy rein. Its members in fact made up his staff for legislative, propaganda, and election campaigns, but he never institutionalized it. He casually borrowed personnel from agencies as he needed them. Presidential business was carried on in a catch-as-catch-can turmoil of personal conferences, sudden telephone calls, handwritten chits circulated among key advisers. The most valuable member of the kitchen cabinet was still Eleanor Roosevelt, who not only reached millions of people with her endless trips and with a newspaper column on “My Day,” but continued to bring a stream of new faces and new ideas into the White House.
Yet to single out even this half-dozen or so White House personalities is to risk underestimating the vital role that the others in the executive establishment would play in 1936. For, as convention and election time approached, it became clear that Roosevelt would campaign squarely on the basis of the new benefits and the new hope that the New Deal administrators and their alphabetical agencies had brought to America.
Perhaps it was Roosevelt’s grasp of the cardinal fact of New Deal benefits to the people that largely explains his optimism about re-election. “We will win easily next year,” he told his cabinet in November 1935, “but we are going to make it a crusade.” His steady optimism continued into the early months of 1936. And well it might. For the New Deal program, partly by design and partly by chance, was coming to a climax in the election year.
By almost any test the economic surge since 1932 had been remarkable. Unemployment had dropped by about four million since the low point early in 1933; at least six million jobs had been created. Pay rolls in manufacturing industries had doubled since 1932; stock prices had more than doubled. Commercial and industrial failures in 1936 were one-third what they had been four years before. Total cash income of farmers had fallen to four billion in 1932 and recovered to almost seven billion in 1935. Capital issues had shot up sixfold since 1933. The physical volume of industrial production had almost doubled.
When the President wrote to agency heads in 1936 asking them for detailed lists of their achievements that could be used in his campaign, the responses underlined the central part that the New Deal had played in this upsurge. In three years federal and other relief agencies had poured over five billion dollars into work projects and related relief activities. Another four billion had gone into public works: roads, dams, sewage systems, public buildings, and the like. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration was supplying a substantial chunk of farm income through its direct benefit and rental payments. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a major carry-over from the Hoover administration, had stepped up its huge lending operations.
Most important of all—in a long-run sense—was the social security program, which began operating in 1936. Its main provisions involved unemployment and old age, although there was a small appropriation for preventive public health. The program was financed through pay-roll taxes, which began at a low rate and were to rise in the years ahead. Social security in 1936 was only a modest beginning. Benefits were small, and would not be received for some time. There were grave administrative difficulties. Since money was being collected and not distributed, the effect of the program in 1936 was deflationary. But the towering fact was that at last the national government had acted to underpin the future security of Americans.
A remarkable aspect of the New Deal was the sweep and variety of the groups it helped. Not only the millions of farmers and industrial workers, but great numbers of people in other categories had benefited from New Deal largesse. The Home Owners Loan Corporation conducted a vast rescue job, making over a million loans to mortgage-ridden home owners. The WPA put to work not only blue-collar workers but artists, writers, actors, teachers—and in jobs that salvaged their self-respect. The National Youth Administration helped thousands of hard-pressed high-school and college students to continue their education. Old people were looking forward to their pensions. Bank depositors had a guarantee of the security of their savings. Businessmen gained from government contracts, broadened purchasing power, freer lending policies.
Behind the cold statistics was the picture of a nation again on the march. The impact of Roosevelt and his New Deal had been to arouse the energies and aspirations of a people chilled by the bleak hand of depression. To them the New Deal was not a list of figures. It was a group of farmers stringing up electric wires in the Missouri Ozarks. It was a towering dam in California, water sluicing through an irrigation ditch in Colorado, a hospital in Jersey City, cars streaming through a tunnel under the Hudson. It was men swarming back to work in Pittsburgh, a widow keeping her home in Ohio, Negroes watching a slum-clearance project in Chicago. It was grass cover holding soil onto a hill in Georgia, a farmer buying a new tractor in Iowa, a river in Tennessee running fast and clear where once the water had been brown with topsoil.
The New Deal had brought a new condition for man; more than this, it had brought a new condition in the relations among men. The old subserviency of worker to employer, of mortgagee to mortgage holder, of farmer to shipper and middleman, of tenant farmer to landlord, of small businessman to banker, may have remained in its essential form; but the laws and spirit of the New Deal had instilled in these relations some of the equality and dignity that marked the old American dream. “My friends,” Roosevelt said to a crowd of young Democrats in April 1936, “the period of social pioneering is only at its beginning.” And that pioneering in the readjustment of human relationships had been accomplished with zest and—on the whole—with good will, rather than in an atmosphere of bitterness and reprisal. “Once again,” Roosevelt could say on the same occasion, “the very air of America is exhilarating.”
There were, to be sure, grave deficiencies in the transformations wrought by the New Deal. For all the talk of re-employment, eight to nine million Americans still had no jobs in 1936. The spending of the New Deal had not markedly improved the lot of millions in areas that could not be easily reached by government. Pay rolls had gone up, but so had living costs. Conditions compared favorably with early 1933—but not so favorably with 1929. Some programs, especially housing, had hardly got off the ground. Over most of the New Deal emergency agencies hung an aura of improvisation, wasted effort, and inefficiency. And despite the expansionist philosophy of the New Deal, its basic program for farmers was restrictive.
But in 1936 such matters could be left for the Republicans to enunciate. Of his own role the President had no doubt. It was to herald the gains of the New Deal and to assert that even better days lay ahead. It was to proclaim—again and again and again— the contrast between the America he had found in March 1933 and the America of 1936. Nothing would be allowed to soften the vividness of that contrast. When the National Emergency Council early in 1936 submitted to Roosevelt some statistical tables and statements implying that recovery began in 1932, Early indicated that this would not do at all. Changes must be made in the report.
“The President is insistent,” he wrote to the NEC, “that the low point in the depression be fixed as March, 1933, or early in the year 1933—this for obvious reasons.”
A voice boomed out from the back of a crowd in Hyde Park as the President stood on the platform of his special train.
“Boss man! You’re out in front now. Show ‘em your heels!”
Roosevelt waggled his head jauntily.
“There’s something in that,” he shot back.
But how much was there in that? Was the President really out front? Was it enough to capitalize on the politics of the deed and to roll to re-election on the wave of rising prosperity? If so, he could assume a defensive posture and hoard his strength until Election Day. Or did the battle still have to be won? If so, a hard, militant campaign lay ahead.
Throughout the early months of 1936 Roosevelt wrestled with this cardinal tactical problem. And, characteristically, he ended up by shifting back and forth between two tactical lines and sometimes following them simultaneously.
Early in the year the President seemed decided on a defensive campaign. The White House passed word to Congress that its session should be a brief one, devoted to appropriating money and passing routine administrative bills. A bill regulating conditions of employment of firms receiving government contracts was passed as a final plugging of the gap left by the NRA’s demise. The Supreme Court’s AAA decision forced the passage of a new farm bill and indirectly led to a controversial proposal by the President for a corporate-surplus tax in order to make up for the lost revenue. But the President failed to make a vigorous fight either for the new tax bill or for an effective housing program. He seemed ready to rest on his record.
Politically this tactic involved soft-pedaling the party and also some fence-mending. Democrats were grumbling that Roosevelt hardly mentioned his party, even in a Jefferson Day dinner speech. In March the President tried to soothe businessmen by giving a long White House luncheon to members of Commerce Secretary Roper’s Business Advisory Council; he talked anew about a cut in spending, and he laid plans for organizing businessmen in the campaign ahead. He asked Ickes to call in Norris, Johnson, and other Republicans to revamp the Progressive League.
Far more ambitious was a plan for tapping the enormous reservoirs of votes contained in the huge religious, economic, and civic organizations across the nation. American politics is largely group politics; and Roosevelt characteristically approached these groups through their leaders. He set up a new organization with the innocent title of the Good Neighbor League. Stanley High solicited the use of their names from religious leaders like Rabbi Lazarus, labor leaders like George Harrison of the Railway Brotherhoods, civic leaders like George Foster Peabody, women’s leaders like Lillian Wald and Carrie Chapman Catt. This organization of the forces of piety, hope, and feminism, decked out in the demure garments of nonpartisanship, became a smooth vote-getting machine for Roosevelt, financed actually by the Democratic National Committee.
Late in April Roosevelt seemed still undecided between a “unity” crusade and a partisan campaign directed against the business groups that opposed him. Then in late spring came a tactical change in the other direction—toward a partisan campaign based on a promised expansion of the New Deal. By early May he was denouncing, in private conversation, the business and press opposition and asserting that he welcomed their hatred. He was telling Moley, in one of their last long conversations, that the country needed less talk and obstructionist criticism and more leadership.
The main reason for the shift lay in political developments. By May the Republicans were gathering their forces and heading toward their national convention in Cleveland. More important, one candidate had clearly emerged as a front runner in the quest for the Republican nomination. This was Alf M. Landon. Governor of Kansas, a successful businessman, attached irretrievably to neither the Republican Old Guard nor the liberal wing of the party, Landon had just the qualities of common sense, homely competence, cautious liberalism, and rocklike “soundness” that the Republican leaders hoped would appeal to a people tiring, it was thought, of the antics and heroics in the White House. Middle class by every test and in every dimension, he had the shrewd, guileless face, the rimless glasses, and the slightly graying hair that made him indistinguishable from a million other middle-aged Americans. At the Republican convention in Cleveland, Landon won overwhelmingly over Borah on the first ballot.
Later it would become fashionable to joke about Landon, but he was no joke to the Democrats in June of 1936. For one thing, Landon had made a powerful run for the nomination against strong candidates—Borah, Vandenberg, and several others. For another, the Republicans, eying the great prize of the presidency and the obvious appeal of New Deal prosperity and reform, enunciated a moderately liberal platform. Landon himself was no mossback reactionary, he had deserted the Old Guard for the Bull Moosers in 1912, and he impressed the country when he boldly stated his position on certain planks of the 1936 platform in such a way as to put him a few degrees left of the party. More imponderable than all, in the late spring of 1936, was the potential of Al Smith and of the Jeffersonian Democrats who were splitting away from the New Deal. There were rumors that the anti-New Deal Democrats might set up a third party.
Faced by this mobilization of the conservatives, Roosevelt found himself still harried elsewhere by the forces of Coughlin, Townsend, and Long. Huey Long had been shot to death in his state capitol in September 1935, but the Louisianian’s nationwide following had not fallen apart with his assassination; one of Long’s organizers, a handsome, slick-talking Louisiana minister named Gerald L. K. Smith, had sprung forward to grab the reins and the mailing lists. By June 1936 this ill-assorted trio was joining hands and preparing to set up the Union party. The only basis for their harmony was hatred of Roosevelt and the realization that his defeat would favor their own chances in later elections.
The attacks from left and right brought a sudden little drop in Roosevelt’s popularity in June 1936, and his sensitive political ears doubtless caught this. The Supreme Court’s extreme swing right-ward in the New York minimum wage law case at the beginning of June also probably influenced the President. In any event, the force of the opposition made it clear that he would have to wage a strong campaign. But Roosevelt evaded for a time the question of whether or not he would promise an extension of the New Deal, and whether or not he would wage a party fight. His way of delaying a decision on these tactical matters was to play up the presidential personality.
“There’s one issue in this campaign,” he told Moley. “It’s myself, and people must be either for me or against me.”
Like all party conventions, the Democratic national assemblage in Philadelphia had its smoke-filled room—but it was the President’s study 150 miles away in the White House. Roosevelt dominated the proceedings throughout. He drafted the platform, passed on the major speeches, made the main convention decisions, and brought the affair to a stunning climax with his acceptance speech.
The platform was, of course, a string of hosannas to the New Deal. One plank reflected a major decision on Roosevelt’s part. The ticklish problem of the Supreme Court could be handled either by a plank boldly calling for a constitutional amendment broadening congressional power over the economy, or by silence on the matter—or by generalities, assuming, of course, that the President had not yet formulated the plan he was to present to Congress seven months later. Beset with conflicting advice, Roosevelt chose the method of generality. After asserting that national problems demanded national action, the platform went on cautiously: “If these problems cannot be effectively solved by legislation within the Constitution, we shall seek such clarifying amendment” as would allow the state and federal legislatures, within their respective spheres, to pass laws adequate to regulate commerce, protect public health and safety, and safeguard economic security. “Thus we propose to maintain the letter and spirit of the Constitution.”
Still, the platform was an unusually outspoken and eloquent document. “We hold this truth to be self-evident—that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are: (1) Protection of the family and the home; (2) Establishment of a democracy of opportunity for all the people; (3) Aid to those overtaken by disaster.” While ambiguous on foreign policy, the declaration was an emphatic pledge to continue and to expand the domestic New Deal. Most revealing, perhaps, of Roosevelt’s militance of the moment was the inclusion in the same sentence of a promise to “rid our land of kidnapers, bandits, and malefactors of great wealth.” After considerable wrangling in the resolutions committee, a period and a few words were set between the criminals and the malefactors—but they stayed in the same paragraph.
The fight over the period was symptomatic of convention proceedings. The delegates had little to decide. Farley kept the huge assembly in session for five days, partly because he wanted to give the Philadelphia businessmen, who had donated $200,000 to have the convention in the City of Brotherly Love, their money’s worth, partly because he saw a chance to drench the air waves with Democratic propaganda day after day, and partly because Roosevelt wanted to give his acceptance speech on a Saturday, as he had four years before. Time was consumed by endless speeches and parliamentary formalities; the delegates were amused by songs, stunts, and the ousting of a group of Al Smith Democrats who had the temerity to call out their hero’s name.
But the convention did make one decision of potential importance. The President was still determined on the abrogation of the two-thirds requirement for nomination, and Bennett Champ Clark, son of the victim of the rule in 1912, had the satisfaction of moving the adoption of the majority rule. Mollified by a promise of increased convention representation for their section, the Southerners put up only a token fight; but the governor of Texas wondered out loud about the implications of the change for 1940.
By the time Roosevelt’s neighbor John E. Mack placed the President’s name in nomination, the convention had become a wild political jamboree. “With our decks cleared for battle,” shouted Mack, “with justice and right and progress with us, we are ready for more action under the inspired leadership of that great American whose name I give you as your candidate for President, no longer a citizen merely of one State, but a son of all the 48 States, Franklin Delano Roos—“ An hour-long political demonstration followed the climactic uttering of the magic name: delegates milled about, cheering hoarsely, waving banners, tooting horns, jabbering, whistling.
Hardly less enthusiastic was the candidate himself. To Mack he exclaimed over the telephone: “John, you were grand! You had the jury right in the hollow of your hand—perfectly grand. I hope they will find for your client. It’s all right. You were in grand voice. It came over the air marvelously. It’s great stuff.…”
While the seconding speeches—no less than fifty-six of them—droned on, Roosevelt was putting the last touches on his acceptance speech. This speech would set the tone for the campaign. Once again Roosevelt faced the problem of whether to give a “sweetness and light” address appealing to all groups or a partisan talk to a partisan throng; and once again he was for a time undecided. At first he turned to Moley for a draft stressing the theme of unity and co-operation; later he got from Rosenman and High a “militant, bare-fisted statement of the necessity for economic freedom,” as Rosenman later described it. The night before he was nominated, with the embattled speeches of party militants in Philadelphia still echoing in his ears, the President hammered out a rough draft— “so rough that I didn’t like it,” he told reporters the next day, “being a peaceful man.” Sweetness and light were still in it—and something else too.
A theatrical setting awaited the President in Philadelphia Saturday night. Masses of humanity—over one hundred thousand persons—sat in great banks in the Franklin Field stadium. Rain had been falling, but by the time Roosevelt’s long black car slid up the ramp to a curtained-off area behind the platform, stars were showing through the splotchy clouds. Behind the curtain the smiling President started his slow, stiff-legged walk toward the stage. Suddenly he spotted in the crowd around him the benign, white-bearded face of Edwin Markham. Reaching out to seize the poet’s outstretched hand, the President was thrown off balance, and down he went. Pulled back to his feet, white, shaken, and angry, he snapped, “Clean me up.”
But only for an instant did he lose his composure. A moment later, when the curtain was parted, there stood the President—calm, erect, smiling. The crowd burst into frenzied, ecstatic cheering.
Roosevelt opened serenely on a note of national unity. “I come not only as a leader of a party, not only as a candidate for high office, but as one upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.” He thanked members both of his own party and of other parties for their unselfish and nonpartisan effort to overcome depression.
“America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of all of us. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived. In those days we feared fear.… We have conquered fear.”
The President’s voice sounded clearly in the soft summer air. “But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places.” Even in America, the rush of modern civilization had raised new problems that must be faced if Americans were to preserve the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson had fought. Political tyranny had been wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. But economic tyranny had risen to threaten Americans.
A hundred spotlights set the President off brilliantly from the dark masses around him. “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.…
“The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.”
Roosevelt’s voice was rising in crescendo after crescendo. “These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.” The crowd roared its approval. “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution.” Roosevelt’s phrases cut through the cheering—“democracy, not tyranny … freedom, not subjection … dictatorship by mob rule and the overprivileged alike … the resolute enemy within our gates …”
Roosevelt lowered his voice. “Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.…”
Roosevelt looked up at the crowd.
“I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join—”
A clamorous roar swept through the stadium, drowning out the last words “—with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.” Like a prize fighter, Roosevelt held his clasped hands over his head, then seized John Garner’s. Slowly the President made his way back to his car. As the ecstatic crowd cheered, he circled the field twice; then his car disappeared into the night.
From the center of the stage Roosevelt moved back into the wings. He gave two or three “nonpolitical” dedicatory speeches, and then he entered the fullest blackout a President can enjoy, by cruising for two weeks off the New England coast. The President’s vacation was carefully timed. He was perfectly willing to let the Republicans take over the stage; his time would come later. “The Republican high command,” he wrote Garner, “is doing altogether too much talking at this stage of the game.”
Others were not so serene. Watching the Landon build-up in the press, Ickes grumbled that the Democratic campaign was drifting and the President was defeating himself. Eleanor Roosevelt warned that the Landon headquarters was moving quickly into action. Without Roosevelt’s direct control things fell into disorder; even Early and High were disturbed. “The President smiles and sails and fishes,” Ickes complained, “and the rest of us worry and fume.”
Roosevelt could afford to smile and sail. In a broad sense he had been campaigning for re-election ever since taking office, and he had begun setting his campaign machine in action months before his nomination. He had asked many of his ambassadors abroad to come back for the campaign; he had assigned propaganda jobs, including the preparation of a “Life of Governor Landon” that would picture the Kansan as a pleader for federal relief; he had directed the setting up of special campaign groups like the Good Neighbor League, reviewed campaign tracts, helped draft Lehman for renomination as governor to strengthen the whole ticket in New York, instructed his campaign aides not to mention any Republican candidate. When Farley forgot this last precept and referred to the Republican candidate as the governor of a “typical prairie state,” the President chided him none too gently. It would have been all right if Farley had said “one of those splendid prairie states,” the President wrote him, but the word “typical” coming from a New Yorker was meat for the opposition.
Within a few weeks after the Philadelphia convention Farley had campaign headquarters actively functioning in New York. The national chairman wrote 2,500 local Democratic leaders for their appraisal of the situation in their area. “I want the true picture,” Farley warned, and it was on the basis of these and succeeding estimates that he later made his remarkably accurate prediction of the election results.
Farley set up the usual campaign divisions, including business, veterans, foreign language, and the like. The Democrats paid special attention to labor. Lewis and other CIO chiefs organized Labor’s Nonpartisan League, a wholly partisan agency for mobilizing Roosevelt votes in the industrial centers. Perhaps its most important contribution to the campaign was a gift of half a million dollars. In the face of the widening labor schism between Lewis’s CIO and the American Federation of Labor, the Democrats were careful not to jeopardize their good relations with the AFL. Administration officials lobbied among Federation chiefs to hold labor’s ranks together at least until November. Roosevelt kept in close touch with Green, and the AFL chief publicly promised after a visit to Hyde Park that 90 per cent of labor’s vote would go to the President.
While Farley framed a party campaign during midsummer, while Landon and his hard-driving running mate, Frank Knox, stumped the country, the President serenely kept his posture of nonpartisanship. Actually he was closely directing aspects of the campaign, even to the extent of specifying the kind of paper and color process to be used in pamphlets. Publicly, however, the President seemed occupied with his presidential duties. Of course, as President he could continue to exploit the politics of the deed. He deflated Republican criticism of the Democratic spoils system by putting postmasters under civil service regulations. He anticipated a Landon pronouncement on farm problems by creating a crop insurance committee for protection against farm surpluses.
As President, too, Roosevelt could make pronouncements of nonpartisan character but with wide popular appeal. Such an occasion was his Chautauqua address. “I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. … I hate war.” Carefully skirting dangerous political shoals, the President fell back on his old formula of shunning political commitments, such as those involved in the League, but warning that peaceful nations could be involved as long as war existed anywhere in the world. “I have passed unnumbered hours, I shall pass unnumbered hours, thinking and planning how war may be kept from this Nation.…”
Nature, too, aided the President’s guise of nonpartisanship. By the summer of 1936 a belt of land running from Canada to Texas had been seared and baked by drought. With the sun remorselessly drying up streams and killing off crops, the President decided on one of his “look-sees.” Any politics on the drought trip? reporters asked. “It is a great disservice to the proper administration of any government,” the President said piously, “to link up human misery with partisan politics.”
The trip was a political master stroke. The President made a score of back-platform speeches in nine states; he saw, and was seen by, tens of thousands of voters. Never did he mention the campaign, except in an offhand, humorous way, and never did he mention the Republican opposition. But he often pointed out the contrast between the conditions he had seen in 1932 and the conditions he saw now, even in the drought areas. As the politician joked and politicked with local officials, the inspection train took on the aura of a campaign train. Roosevelt himself seemed to take on magical qualities as his trips through the parched country time and again brought rain.
But the tour was a work trip, too, and the President had a chance to talk with scores of federal and local officials. The climax came in Des Moines when Roosevelt conferred with state governors—including the governor of Kansas. The meeting was called in part to put Landon “on the spot” in regard to farm relief, but the Kansan held his own. Roosevelt took care to be thoroughly briefed for the encounter. “You will not remember,” Landon said at one point, “but the first talk with me when you invited me to Washington in 1933—”
Roosevelt cut in: “About the water?”
“I am amazed you remember,” Landon said.
The President’s main difficulties came at the hands not of Landon but of blunt-talking Governor Ernest Marland of Oklahoma, where drought conditions were at their harshest. At the end the Oklahoman demanded: “Mr. President, what are we going to tell the 100,000 hungry farmers in Oklahoma tomorrow when we go home?”
“You are going to tell them that the Federal agencies are getting busy on it just as fast as the Lord will let them.… You can accomplish something in one week, but you cannot accomplish the impossible.”
“That is small consolation for a hungry farmer,” the governor persisted.
“What more can you say to the hungry farmer, Governor? The machinery will be put in gear just as fast as the Lord will let you.”
The grand strategy in this battle, Herbert Bayard Swope wrote Roosevelt in August, “is to be firm without being ferocious; to be kindly rather than cold; to be hopeful instead of pessimistic; to be human rather than to be economic; to be insistent upon every man having a chance, and above all, to make yourself appear to be the President of all the people.…”
“I agree with all you say,” Roosevelt replied. And during September, while the people and the politicos waited for the old campaigner to open up, Roosevelt doggedly kept his nonpartisan pose. He spoke to the nation on conservation, to a world power conference on “human engineering,” to the Conference on the Mobilization for Human Needs, to a national convention of philatelists, to the tercentenary celebration of Harvard, where he was booed by the undergraduates and where he brought smiles even to the faces of stiff-necked Republican alumni by saying: “At that time [one hundred years ago] many of the alumni of Harvard were sorely troubled by the state of the Nation. Andrew Jackson was President. On the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, alumni again were sorely troubled. Grover Cleveland was President.” A pause. “Now, on the 300th anniversary, I am President.”
But still the President took no notice of the campaign, of the Republicans and their charges. “Say, Steve,” a reporter asked Early jocularly, “is this going to be a nonpolitical campaign?”
Farley could take no such lofty stand. As the rallier of party forces, he was fair game for Republican thrusts. Day after day he was charged with using relief jobs and public funds to bribe millions of voters, with operating a colossal spoils machine, with neglecting the post office. The Republicans hoped their shots would glance off Farley and demolish Roosevelt; more likely, their drumfire against the Postmaster General simply helped Roosevelt in his tactic of staying above the battle.
Farley’s worst troubles came from Democrats rather than Republicans. Roosevelt’s bipartisanship of 1934 had left Democrats disorganized and disgruntled in half a dozen states. The Wisconsin Democracy had warned Farley against any further administration flirting with the Progressives, and they had put up another candidate to fight Philip La Follette for the governorship. The EPIC groups, still in control of the Democratic party organization in California, had toyed with third party ideas but were now grudgingly supporting Roosevelt. Farmer-Laborites in Minnesota had been openly critical of the New Deal but were now lining up behind Roosevelt, to the discomfiture of the Democratic factions. And it was to Farley, the party leader, that the angry Democrats turned to demand help from the national administration.
The kind of problem Farley faced was typified by the situation in Idaho. Mutual friends of Senator Borah and Roosevelt had tried to induce Farley to withdraw administration support from Borah’s Democratic foe in exchange for the Idaho senator’s support for Roosevelt against Landon. The proposed deal was backed also by a Democratic faction in Idaho opposed to the Democratic nominee, and Borah was willing to play along with the idea. But Farley reported to the go-betweens that the Democratic candidate was in the fight to stay. Borah never took a stand between Roosevelt and Landon.
Another pro-Roosevelt but non-Democratic senator was Norris of Nebraska—and Norris was a man Roosevelt especially esteemed. Late in 1935 the President had urged Norris to run for re-election in 1936, but the old white-haired Nebraskan allowed the party primaries to go by without filing. He cut off his ties with organization Republicans by denouncing the 1936 platform, and he continued to attack organization Democrats, including Farley, for their spoils activities. But he came out for the President; “Roosevelt is the Democratic platform,” the Senator announced. Nominated on petitions as an independent by thousands of his followers late in the summer of 1936, Norris confronted the regular nominees of the two parties. The Democratic nominee, Terry M. Carpenter, appealed for support to his national party leaders, but in vain. To make matters worse for Carpenter, key Democratic leaders in the state came out for Norris against their own party nominee. Carpenter could merely hope that Roosevelt would remain silent.
In planning his mid-October campaign, the President handled state situations such as these with his usual versatility. He kept entirely clear of California, Wisconsin, and Idaho, and thus avoided hostile factions in those states. He planned to go to Minnesota, but before he arrived the local Democrats had been induced to withdraw their state ticket in favor of the Farmer-Laborites, so that the President’s main task in this state was to soothe the injured feelings of the ticketless Democratic leaders. As for Nebraska—here he intended to be as direct and outspoken as elsewhere he had been evasive.
Roosevelt opened his formal campaign with a speech at the end of September to the New York Democratic convention in Syracuse. He used the occasion to answer charges of Coughlin, Hearst, and others that the Communists were supporting the New Deal. The President had been urged to answer these charges by denouncing Soviet violations of treaty agreements, but he believed that a flat statement would be enough. “I have not sought, I do not seek, I repudiate the support of any advocate of Communism or of any other alien ‘ism’ which would by fair means or foul change our American democracy,” he asserted. The New Deal, he said, had saved the country from the threat of communism posed by the social and economic wreckage of 1932. Liberalism was the protection of the farsighted conservative. “Reform if you would preserve.”
With biting sarcasm Roosevelt struck out at the “me-too” speeches of the Republicans. “Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says,”—and here Roosevelt arched his eyebrows and raised his voice to a near falsetto—“Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them—we will do more of them—we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”
As Roosevelt’s campaign train rolled slowly through the Midwest during October, the patterns of his attack became clear. Over and over again, in rear-platform talks and formal speeches, he stressed three simple themes: the contrast between conditions in March 1933 and conditions in October 1936; the role of the New Deal in getting the country out of depression; and the interdependence of the American people—of workers and businessmen, of farmers and consumers, of state governments and the national government. With homely examples he drove these points home.
Although the President said on one occasion, “We are here to proclaim the New Deal, not to defend it,” to a surprising degree he devoted his talks to a point-by-point answer to Republican charges. Again and again he answered Landon’s charges of waste and wild spending with the simple question, “If someone came to you and said, ‘If you will borrow $800 and by borrowing that $800 increase your annual income by $2,200,’ would you borrow it or not?” When some Republican orator accused him of bringing out a new farm program every year, like new automobile models, he accepted the simile and said the nation had passed beyond Model-T farming. “While his speeches did not resound with Webster’s sonorous roll, or shimmer with the polished hardness of Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric,” Charles and Mary Beard wrote not long afterward, “his prose, although sometimes dull and repetitious, often glowed with poetic warmth and was enlivened by the flight of speeding words.”
It was notable, though, that Roosevelt talked little about the future during his Western swing. He was making the New Deal record, not the New Deal promises, the issue. He implied that the New Deal would be enlarged if he stayed in office. But it was no more than an implication; and his speeches were studded with conciliatory remarks for businessmen, doctors, beet sugar growers, and others. Foreign policy he almost completely ignored.
When he wished to take a forthright position the President did so with a flourish. Such was his endorsement of Norris. Speaking in Omaha, the President said that outside of his own state of New York he had consistently refrained from taking part in state elections. But to this rule “I have made—and so long as he lives I always will make—one magnificently justified exception. George Norris’ candidacy transcends State and party lines.” Roosevelt appealed directly to the cheering crowd to help Norris win re-election.
Always Roosevelt was the gay campaigner, easy in his way with crowds, quick on the trigger, homey, laughing, waving, obviously enjoying himself. In Emporia, Kansas, he looked through the crowd for Editor White, who was supporting Landon. “I wish he were here,” the President said genially. “He is a very good friend of mine for three and a half out of every four years.”
There was a rustle in the crowd and White appeared. “Shoot not this old gray head,” he cried out in mock alarm as he went up to the rear platform of the train.
“Hello, Bill, glad to see you,” Roosevelt said. Then turning to the crowd: “Now that I see him, I shall not say anything about the other six months.” The crowd laughed and applauded as the two men shook hands, and the train pulled out.
By late October battle lines had stiffened between the two main parties. The Union party, denied a place on the ballot in a dozen states, riven by cleavages among the strange assortment of men who founded it, was visibly faltering. Coughlin had antagonized people by stripping off his black coat and Roman collar at the Union party convention and calling Roosevelt a betrayer and liar. Townsend in October was urging supporters to vote for Landon in states where they could not vote for the Union candidate, William Lemke. Greeted by deep, ominous booing and cold, dead silence in some cities, the Republican candidate was grimly plugging away at his anti-New Deal line. But his hopes ran high on the crest of support from the great majority of newspapers and of denunciations of the New Deal by Democrats Smith and Davis. Moreover, the Literary Digest, whose polls had been accurate in past elections, showed Landon holding a decisive edge over his opponent.
Roosevelt late in October set out on a ten-day tour of the urban Northeast. In an almost literal sense the tour was not a campaign trip but a triumphal procession. The President himself said that the trip brought out the “most amazing tidal wave of humanity” he had ever seen. There was something terrible about the crowds that lined the streets, Roosevelt remarked to Ickes—he could hear men and women crying out, “He saved my home,” “He gave me a job.” Roosevelt made the entire New England swing in an open car, and even hard-bitten reporters were incredulous over the wild enthusiasm of the crowds. For mile after mile people lined the roads, not only in the cities but in the outskirts as well. Boston Common was overrun by a seething mass of 150,000 people. In Connecticut cities the candidate’s entourage—including Eleanor Roosevelt—could hardly get through the crowded streets. In New York City the Roosevelt car traveled more than thirty miles without passing a block whose sidewalks were not jammed.
As he waved and talked to such crowds Roosevelt seemed to catch their militancy. His speeches took on a sharper edge, struck a more positive note. In New York City he promised national legislation for better housing. In Wilkes-Barre he attacked scathingly the “propaganda-spreading employers” who were putting anti-social security law slips into pay envelopes. In Brooklyn he stated the task still to be done—to destroy “the glaring inequalities of opportunity and security which, in the recent past, have set group against group and region against region.”
Before a wildly fervent, chanting crowd in Madison Square Garden, Roosevelt on the last day of October brought his campaign to a passionate climax.
“… We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you that we cannot go further without a struggle.
“For twelve years our Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to that Government but that Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! And, my friends, powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent to mankind.”
Explosive cheers were punctuating the President’s sentences. He was deftly modifying the transitions in his prepared text as he caught the rhythm of the crowd. “For nearly four years now you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. And I can assure you that we will keep our sleeves rolled up.
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless barking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”
Roosevelt’s voice had been in turn stern with indignation, sonorous with moral fervor, solemn, and even cheery. Now his tone hardened. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
A raucous, almost animal-like roar burst from the crowd, died away, and then rose again in wave after wave. Roosevelt began again, gently.
“I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.” The words came faster, rang with increasing militancy. “I should like to have it said—” Cheers, cowbells, horns, clackers drowned out the words.
“Wait a moment!” Roosevelt commanded. The old performer would not have his lines spoiled. The din subsided.
“I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.” The roar from the crowd was like that at a prize fight—a massive sound through which the promptings of individuals could be faintly heard.
A few days before, Landon had stood where the President was now standing, and had demanded that Roosevelt indicate his future course if re-elected. The President picked up the challenge but did so in his own terms. Again and again hitting the refrain “For all these we have only just begun to fight,” he said:
“This is our answer to those who, silent about their own plans, ask us to state our objectives.
“Of course we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America.… Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity in the homes and on the farms of America.… Of course we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America.… Of course we will continue our efforts for young men and women … for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers, our insurance for the unemployed, our security for the aged. Of course we will continue to protect the consumer … will continue our successful efforts to increase his purchasing power and to keep it constant.
“For these things, too, and for a multitude of things like them, we have only just begun to fight.…”
Reporters groped for words. The election results were a tidal wave, an earthquake, a landslide, the blizzard of ‘36. Roosevelt carried every state but Maine and Vermont. He won over Landon by 27,752,309 to 16,682,524 votes, the biggest popular plurality in history; his 523 to 8 ratio of electoral votes—exactly as predicted by Farley—was the biggest since 1820. He helped enlarge the already top-heavy Democratic margins in Congress. The new House would have 334 Democrats and 89 Republicans, against 321-104 before; sitting in the Senate would be 75 Democrats and only 17 Republicans, as compared to the old 70-23 ratio. If there had been a coattails effect, Roosevelt had the longer tails; Lehman in New York and Frank Murphy in Michigan had been urged to run to help the President; Roosevelt ran far ahead of both of them.
Roosevelt’s political reputation soared. Tumbling over one another, observers called him the master politician, the champion campaigner. What was the secret of his political sorcery? Some of his techniques were as old as politics itself; a few were new; all were invested with the deft Roosevelt touch. If categorized, they might go as follows.
Grasp of Public Opinion. Roosevelt showed such a sure sense of popular moods and attitudes that some believed he had intuition or a sixth sense in this field. Actually, his understanding was rooted in solid, day-to-day accumulation of facts on what people were thinking. Roosevelt read half a dozen newspapers a day. He kept up a vast correspondence. Tens of thousands of letters came to the White House every week reporting people’s views and problems. He got some understanding from crowds—the way they looked, how they reacted to certain passages in his speeches. As President he enjoyed special advantages. Through favored journalists he could put up trial balloons and test public reaction. He had special voting polls conducted, and he often received advance information on other polls. Administrators in regional and state offices sent in a good deal of information, as did state and local party leaders. A huge division of press intelligence clipped hundreds of newspapers and compiled digests.
Timing Roosevelt’s timing also seemed intuitive, but it too was largely calculated. Essential in his timing was the care he took not to confront his political opposition when it was mobilizing and moving hard and fast; he believed, for example, that presidents could expect to lose some popular support during congressional sessions, and that the President should wait until Congress adjourned before seizing the offensive again. Sometimes he moved fast, before the opposition could mobilize. “I am like a cat,” Roosevelt said once. “I make a quick stroke and then I relax.” More often, he waited for the crest of the opposition wave to subside, then he acted. In the 1936 campaign he was under intense pressure from his political advisers to attack Landon when the Republican tide was running strong in early summer, but he refused. When he told Rosenman that tides turned quickly in politics, he was recognizing a shiftiness and moodiness in certain sectors of public opinion that have since been tested and proved in opinion and voting studies.
Attention to Political Detail. Roosevelt showed infinite patience in dealing with the day-to-day routine of politics, involving in most cases the ambitions, hopes, and desire for recognition of countless politicians. The White House establishment was carefully organized for this purpose. A memo to Roosevelt during the campaign from one of his aides read:
Or take the case of David E. Fitzgerald, a Democratic leader in New Haven. In 1935 the White House sent him an autographed picture of the President. Fitzgerald traveled with Roosevelt’s entourage during the New England tour in 1936; his note of congratulations brought a “Dear Dave” reply from the President. Each of three Fitzgerald letters in 1940 was answered by a warm little note from Roosevelt; a postelection wire of congratulations brought a presidential letter in which “Dear Mr. Fitzgerald” was crossed out and “Dear Dave” substituted. When Fitzgerald caught cold campaigning, the White House sent him flowers. In 1941, another “Dear Dave” letter; a year later Fitzgerald died, and a warm presidential letter went to his widow, who replied, in a widow’s tremulous handwriting, “Mr. Fitzgerald was always an ardent admirer of yours.…”
Attention to Intragroup Factions. The White House checked carefully on the political situation within groups, in order both to keep on friendly terms with all the factions and to avoid being compromised by some faction of politically suspect leanings. Splits among Negroes, Jews, labor groups, bankers, veterans, and the like were followed with care. Through administration officials who had longtime connections with national associations, the White House got deeply involved in the internal politics of some groups, but always covertly. Pro-Roosevelt activities in the groups were often defensive, designed to offset opposing factions which might swing the formal association against the President during an election campaign.
Separating Opposition Leaders from Rank and File. Splitting enemy leaders from their followers is an old political tactic, but few politicians have used it as persistently or as meticulously as Roosevelt. Almost invariably he attacked “Republican leaders” or “Republican spokesmen,” never the Republican party or Republicans generally. “There are thousands of people,” Roosevelt had said to Rosenman as far back as 1930, “who think as you and I do about government. They are enrolled as Republicans because their families have been Republicans for generations—that’s the only reason; some of them think it is infra dig to be called a Democrat; the Democrats in their village are not the socially ‘nice’ people the enrolled Republicans are. So never attack the Republicans or the Republican party—only the Republican leaders. Then any Republican voter who hears it will say to himself: ‘Well, he doesn’t mean me.…’”
Fighting on Your Own Battleground. Offensively this meant attacking the opposition at its weakest point in an effort to force it to accept the gage of battle on the worst ground for it. Defensively it meant answering the opposition’s most extreme or absurd attacks. In 1930 Roosevelt ignored Republican charges against his handling of the New York City situation until almost the end of the campaign. In his Madison Square Garden speech in 1936 he skillfully converted Landon’s effort to put him on the defensive into a superb defense of the New Deal on his own terms.
Personal Charm and Political Craft. No political technique is effective unless employed with skill in a given situation. Immensely strengthening all Roosevelt’s tactics were the calculated flattery he could use in winning over critics and the sheer astuteness with which he outmaneuvered rival leaders. An example of the latter was his handling of John L. Lewis’s campaign donation in 1936. The CIO chief came into Roosevelt’s office one day with a check for $250,000 and with a photographer to record the ceremony. Roosevelt was all smiles, but he would not take the check.
“No, John,” he said. “Just keep it, and I’ll call on you if and when any small need arises.”
Lewis left, grumbling that he had been outsmarted. He had been. During the next few weeks requests for money flowed in from Farley and from independent Roosevelt groups. In vain Lewis tried to stem the torrent by insisting on a written order from the President. Roosevelt backed up the requests with orders or with telephone calls. In the end Lewis’s treasury was drained of almost half a million dollars—and without undue notice in the press.
Undeniably, the triumph was largely a personal victory for Roosevelt. “I am the issue,” he had said to Moley; and Farley had built his campaign around the Roosevelt personality. So the post-election huzzas were justifiably for Roosevelt, rather than for his party or even for his cause.
Drowned out by the applause were some misgivings about certain aspects of the election results. Roosevelt himself, according to one report, was disturbed by the shriveled Republican strength in House and Senate. Without strong party opposition, he foresaw that splits might more easily develop within the huge Democratic majorities as shifting factions fought with one another. Ickes said bluntly that the President had pulled through to victory men whose defeat would have been better for the country. On the other hand, Roosevelt was pleased with his own sweep. If Landon had gained over Hoover he feared that the “reactionary element” would exploit that fact during the next Congress.
The personal nature of the sweep had other implications. For one thing, it left in some obscurity the nature of the mandate the voters had given him. He had run mainly on the New Deal record; what was the New Deal future to be—a continuation of the present program, an enlargement, a shift in new directions? To be sure, Roosevelt in the eleventh hour of the campaign had uttered his magnificent “we-have-only-just-begun-to-fight” statement. Was this a bit of campaign oratory, or a pledge to an expanded New Deal?
Roosevelt’s victory, too, had been realized at some expense to the party that he headed. In several states the Democratic organization was left stranded, and in New York State the American Labor Party, composed largely of unionists suspicious of both major parties, boasted of the voters who had supported the President on its ticket. It was odd, and yet significant, that within a few days of the Democratic party nominee’s great victory, observers were predicting a party realignment, and possibly even a national labor party, by 1940.
Another aspect of the personal nature of Roosevelt’s victory was the ambiguity of the class groupings supporting him. In 1932 voters from all income classes had flocked to his standard out of their common deprivations during the Depression. Roosevelt’s fuzzy position on many issues that year had made it possible for his vote to cut across class lines. What had happened in 1936? Polling results suggested that a class cleavage had begun to divide the voters at a point about midway through the first term, and had widened considerably by 1936. But later studies were to show that the cleavage in 1936 was not as sharp as some had supposed. This was due in part to the breadth of the President’s appeal—he won votes not only from the great majority of the poor, but from a surprising percentage of the better off too.
There is a rule of economy in politics. “The perfect party victory,” it has been said, “is to be won by accumulating a relatively narrow majority, the mark of the skillful conduct of politics.” To win a great majority of votes may involve such commitments as to make victory politically embarrassing. From such a standpoint Roosevelt’s landslide was political extravagance. Of course, he had not expected to win by such a sweep, and he did not have the benefit of hindsight. But much would depend on the decisions he made as he strove to govern with his top-heavy majority.
Such speculations as these, however, would have seemed academic indeed in November of 1936. Roosevelt was at the peak of his political form. When he sailed on the Indianapolis for a good-will tour to South America late that month, he left an America that was itself bursting with good will toward its leader. Rested by the trip and greeted by huge throngs in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, he was as captivating as ever.
He looked forward confidently and eagerly to his second term, which would start in January 1937 rather than March as a result of the passage of a constitutional amendment. All seemed well and calm at home—his only worry was the situation abroad. “… I still don’t like the European outlook,” he wrote Eleanor at the end of November.