Historian David Pietrusza is no stranger to telling stories. Author of books chronicling American political and cultural life, he has shown a knack for combining the careful eye of the scholar with the style and amusement factor of a gifted sportscaster or humorous newspaperman.
Having previously told the story of important “open elections” in which the Republicans and Democrats competed for a seat vacated by an incumbent, Pietrusza now turns his eye to one of the most important reelections in American history, in which voters overwhelmingly reaffirmed commitment to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his reshaping of American life and government through the New Deal, a victory lamented by conservatives and many Republicans to this day. An alternative title to this book could have been The Steelman Case for Roosevelt in 1936, one that even conservatives would have to concede.
To do this, Pietrusza minces no words about FDR’s failings and faults. FDR changed positions almost as easily as one changed socks, depending on the politics and regardless of whether it was actually good for the country and the economy. He courted black voters on economic grounds without budging an inch in his politically motivated opposition to advancing anti-lynching legislation or giving black people in government actual power and executive influence.
He and his government and Congress used investigations and surveillance in what can only be called massive abuses of power and privacy, sometimes for the sake of political gain and sometimes out of sheer pettiness, as in the case of Andrew Mellon. The massive relief programs he pushed kept millions out of poverty but also created perhaps the largest political patronage machine in U.S. history, one that would make machine bosses or spoilsmen of an earlier age blush or perhaps go green with envy.
Nor was he only a leader who spoke of optimism and “happy days.” Fearful of possibly losing the 1936 election, he had no compunction about viciously slandering and attacking rich people as such, regardless of how much actual blame they bore for the country’s misery. This sort of naked class warfare and abuse of power alienated even many Democrats, some of whom changed their allegiance.
Pietrusza concedes all that — but he argues quite strongly that the other actual, realistic political alternatives that existed at the time were worse, while the possibly better ones were simply far too unpopular. In that time of misery and woe, pretty much all the political energy lay with people to FDR’s left.
And if you thought FDR’s policies were bad, these were worse. Whether it was Huey Long’s economically illiterate “Share the Wealth” program or Francis Townsend’s far more generous, and far less sustainable, plan for social security or radio priest Charles Coughlin’s radical ideas, FDR’s ideas and those of his party seemed positively centrist. Citizens did not face the awful choice between different kinds of authoritarianism like much of Europe after 1929, but the options they did face were not all that pleasant, either.
FDR’s main fear of losing the election was that these genuinely popular voices — many Republicans supported Townsend’s ideas! — amplified by powerful media reach and personal charisma, would split the Democratic vote and allow the Republican Party to win in the breach. To fight this, he and his party played hardball with selective IRS investigations, sham congressional hearings, diplomatic flattery when necessary — and skillful political co-option of their ideas when needed.
They need not have worried. When these outsiders finally did try and form a third-party challenge to FDR, it collapsed into a tragic farce.
Absurd and comical might have been apt words to describe the Republican Party of 1936. The party of Lincoln, which had largely dominated politics since the Great Emancipator’s first election, was reduced to barely a shadow of its former self. Three straight electoral wipeouts had gutted most of its leadership, and what remained were largely hated or irrelevant retreads of the era of Teddy Roosevelt or the 1920s.
Republicans were now in the same state Democrats were in the years after the Civil War — largely blamed, fairly or not, for bringing about a national catastrophe. Worse, they didn’t even have a clear or agreed-upon idea of what exactly they opposed about FDR’s efforts. Most, after all, supported his efforts to shore up and regulate the banking system, and the overwhelming majority supported or voted for his Social Security plan.
Their candidate for beating Roosevelt was a nice Midwestern governor of Kansas named Alf Landon. Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower would have found beating FDR in 1936 difficult and maybe impossible. Landon was no Reagan or Eisenhower. He seemed to embody a party whose commitment to limited government or federalism or at least less than what FDR did came off as out of touch or heartless to ordinary people. He put his foot in his mouth often and missed opportunities to attack real weaknesses in FDR’s policies. His crushing landslide loss was almost an act of mercy.
This, then, is Pietrusza’s case for FDR. And while I agree with many conservative academics on the folly of much of what the 32nd president did and how he messed with the Constitution and whatnot, I think I would have voted for FDR in 1936. Academic arguments sounded just that to voters: Academic. Theoretical. Irrelevant. It’s a bracing lesson in how being technically right is not enough in politics. You need to convince the people from the brainstem on down, where most of life actually happens, especially during a depression and a war.
The party that failed to convince them now suffered its fourth straight electoral drubbing. Its numbers in political office were so reduced that Pietrusza acerbically notes that “even the doomed Whigs garnered twenty [Senate] seats in their swan song of 1852″ — the Republicans had just 17. If there was ever a time when it seemed the Republican Party might die, it was after this election.
Except that isn’t where the story ended. Just two years later, the Republicans came roaring back to life in Congress and state offices, beneficiaries of FDR’s overreach on the Supreme Court and a renewed economic downturn that now couldn’t be blamed on Republicans. For the next two decades, Republicans and Southern Democrats would form a “conservative coalition” that would torpedo, pare down, and sometimes even roll back much of what FDR did. If they didn’t yet have the legitimacy of a governing party, voters did trust them to be a brake on Democratic excess — and remarkably fast, too.
New men now emerged on the Republican scene, leaders untainted by the stain of the 1920s. Men like Robert Taft, son of the former president, who as senator of Ohio helped to invigorate the Republicans with a new sense of confidence, articulation of ideas, and incisive responses that were all so lacking in Landon’s campaign. A rigorous centrist wing emerged under the undeservedly mocked future New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, which also helped to breathe new life into the party.
It took time for the Republicans to regain the confidence of the public as a party that deserved to govern outright. But the master co-opter ended up being co-opted, thanks to actions taken by his own party. The national security mantle FDR rightly won by winning World War II was lost to the Republicans after important portions of the Democrats soured on the Cold War. Those sons of immigrants and their children turned on the Democrats for pushing unconditional welfare irrespective of work — an idea FDR himself hated. The Democratic ending of Jim Crow, itself a welcome development, made the South increasingly competitive to Republican inroads for the first time since Reconstruction.
All this would help lead to the first unapologetically Republican president since Herbert Hoover, a former Democrat named Ronald Reagan, a man with a clear and popular governing program and vision in a time when Democrats no longer vastly outnumbered Republicans as they had since 1932. Alf Landon would live to see it.
Avi Woolf is an editor and translator. He has been published in Arc Digital, National Review, the Bulwark, and Commentary.
