MM#341--Pivotal Tuesdays: The Election of 1932

0:07 Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute and to another episode that we are calling Pivotal Tuesdays. A couple of weeks ago we introduced this Pivotal Tuesdays framework and series where we are covering the pivotal elections in the 20th century, namely the elections of 1912, 1932, 1968, and 1980.

0:53 Last week we covered the 1912 election and the legacy of Woodrow Wilson that finally, finally, is being brought forth as the radical that Wilson was. This week we're going to be covering the 1932 election in detail and let me also mention here that we have a twist to this whole series to make it absolutely worth your time. As I've said here before from this microphone, this will not be a conventional liberal reading of history. This will not be your regular high school reading of history. We have all suffered greatly through those government brainwashing classrooms, especially in our history classes.

1:40 So to make this most especially worth your time, we are going to compare the conventional liberal take on the 1932 election and its after effects and then we're going to look at what conservatives say about the same election and its legacy. Stephen Hayward is our conservative historian with his book Politically Incorrect Book of Presidents, part Two, and Margaret O'Meara is our conventional standard liberal historian with her book Pivotal Tuesdays. So, with that reintroduction of our weekly Pivotal Tuesday series, let's begin our journey with this question what happened in the 1932 election?

2:29 And what happened was? It was held on November 8th 1932. It is, I agree with Margaret Amera, a pivotal election in American political history. It occurred against the backdrop of the Great Depression, which was a period of severe economic distress that began with the stock market crash in 1929, and it led to widespread unemployment, poverty and social upheaval. Our key candidates in this election was Franklin Roosevelt, for the Democratic Party. Roosevelt was the governor of New York at the time. He was the Democratic candidate. He campaigned on a platform promising a new deal for the American people aimed at economic recovery and reform.

3:15 His running mate was John Nance Garner, speaker of the House from Texas. Herbert Hoover ran for the Republican side. He was the incumbent president and he was seeking reelection. Hoover's administration was widely criticized for its handling of the Great Depression and, from a conservative point of view we agree. He did everything that was terrible, that he should not have done, and his policies were seen as ineffective in addressing the economic crisis. His vice president running mate was Charles Curtis. Like we said, the election took place during the Great Depression, which had a profound impact on the whole political landscape at the time.

4:01 Hoover's inability to reverse the economic downturn, and then his perceived insensitivity to the suffering of ordinary Americans, severely damaged his popularity. In contrast, roosevelt's message of hope and change resonated with the populace, desperate for relief and recovery. The central campaign issue was the Great Depression, and Roosevelt criticized Hoover's policies and promised a new approach to tackle the economic crises. He did this mainly through his New Deal programs. Like we said, it provided relief and recovery and reform.

4:46 Now, an interesting side note here that we're going to quote from Margaret Amera is how the culture changed underneath both candidates, and this is where you have to give a nod to Roosevelt, because he understood what was happening in the culture. Let's go to the book for this first pull quote. On April 7th, roosevelt sent out a political shockwave with a 10-minute radio address authored by one of his key brain trusters, raymond Moley. Speaking to a national radio audience, he called for bold plans that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

5:35 For all of its emotional renaissance and populist audacity. Fdr's forgotten man speech did not have many specifics about how a plan might be implemented. Instead he was running on an idea that a beleaguered nation needed to test an array of new approaches and see if they worked. In a May speech in Atlanta he said the country needs and unless I make a mistake it's temper the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to try to take a method and try it.

6:20 If it fails, omit it and try another, but above all try something. In a modern age of media saturation and dwindling attention spans, it is tempting to presume that campaigns of long ago were weighty, substantive affairs, all about policy details. Substance over style. They weren't. And again that quote comes to us from our book Pivot Tuesdays by our liberal historian Margaret O'Mara, and I agree with her. Fdr was very effective on the campaign trail. He used radio very, very persuasively. And the interesting thing is this was not the first time radio was used in politics.

7:03 Calvin Coolidge would use radio for the first time way back in 1923. And Herbert Hoover, who preceded FDR, used radio for campaign addresses and formal announcements. But the key is, roosevelt made his addresses conversational, which was quite effective at the time. Now this campaign unfolded, with Hoover trying to defend his record and argued that Roosevelt's policies would worsen the situation, but his message failed to gain traction with the electorate and ultimately the results were this the 1932 election resulted in a landslide victory for FDR he received 472 electoral votes, while Hoover only garnered 59.

7:52 Roosevelt secured approximately 22.8 million, or 57.4% of the total, compared to Hoover's 15.8 million, or 39.7%. Essentially, a shellacking, roosevelt carried every state outside of the Northeast, highlighting the widespread support for his candidacy across the country. Now the significance is it marked a significant realignment in American politics. It ended the Republican dominance that had persisted since the Civil War, except for two terms, each one by Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, and it began the fifth party system.

8:42 Roosevelt's fifth party system characterized by democratic dominance and establishment of the New Deal coalition, which included many diverse groups such as labor unions, urban voters, ethnic minorities and southern whites. And Roosevelt's New Deal policies led to unprecedented expansion of federal government involvement in the economy, social welfare programs, and it set the stage for future government interventions. It was a dramatic, dramatic expansion of the federal government and it made the 1932 election one of the most consequential in US history.

9:25 And it made the 1932 election one of the most consequential in US history. Now one important fact to understand as we go through these Roosevelt's New Deal coalition was incredibly important and crucial because for the next 40 to 50 years that coalition would remain intact. The Republicans weren't able to pick off any of those coalitions or any part of the coalition Now. The coalition was made up of a diverse assembly of various interest groups and voting blocs. Number one they had labor unions. Workers and union members who benefited from labor-friendly policies and job creation programs under the New Deal began to favor Roosevelt Blue-collar workers.

10:11 These industrial workers who found employment through the New Deal projects, farmers who were beneficiaries of agricultural support programs, racial and ethnic minorities, african Americans, jews and Catholics and other minority groups who receive support through various New Deal initiatives. This is also where we see the African Americans absolutely loyal to Lincoln, going back to the GOP all the way to the Civil War. African Americans begin to get peeled off in great numbers and there also began to be a migration from the South to the North into big cities, african-americans naturally wanting to escape the Jim Crow.

10:57 South Transportation also helped that migration happen. Academics and progressive thinkers would support Roosevelt's policies policies. White southerners, traditional democratic voters who continue to support the party due to its stance on various issues, they remain loyal. And then urban voters, residents of big cities, who are often part of political machines, they would end up to supporting Democratic Party. And it's not until, essentially, 1968 when this coalition starts to fracture and break up. And then it ultimately isn't until 1972 when we see the full decline of the New Deal coalition, when even a more radical left, what we call the new left now takes over and splits the Democratic Party when they're trying to back Jim McGovern or George McGovern in 1972.

11:56 Now back to the 1932 election. Here is how Margaret O'Meara covers the legacy of the 1932 election, and she is our conventional liberal historian. Let's go to her book Pivotal Tuesdays for the first pull quote. The profound legacy of Roosevelt's New Deal has been dissected, debated and cataloged and contested by historians, journalists, political leaders and citizens in the eight decades since. What is uncontestable is that the government actions set in motion by Roosevelt in 1933 did pull the United States out of the Great Depression, although sometimes haltingly and unevenly.

12:44 The 1932 election is a window into how and why the New Deal became possible and how it fits into the broader landscape of American history. The utter failure of capitalism in 1929 and the years that followed opened American leaders and voters to new ideas. The results were not only progressive, they were a radical reframing of the national government's role in American life. As we see from the 1932 campaign, roosevelt was not a revolutionary but an experimenter. He could at times be frustratingly vague and he could be cunningly political. He was not an ideologue.

13:26 He wanted to fix capitalism, not overthrow it. Yet Roosevelt and the men and women of his administration, as well as their allies in business and labor, did manage to stake out a profoundly new role for the government, based on the premise that the state had a responsibility to ensure basic economic security for its citizens. It took ideas that had been floating out there ever since the days of the robber barons and turned them into federal agencies. It was a radical notion. In 1932 that became the status quo, and there is your conventional government classroom history of what happened during the Great Depression and our liberal historian Margaret O'Mara.

14:15 What is uncontestable is that the government action set in motion by Roosevelt in 1933 did pull the United States out of the Great Depression, although sometimes haltingly and unevenly. You see, for the last close to a hundred years we have been given that story, and I'm going to say here unequivocally that story is like the story from our crazy uncle at the family reunion.

15:00 It's not based in fact at all. We will address this head on in our next episode. It is quite powerful, so stay tuned. Let's go back to the book for Margaret Amara's second significant part of the New Deal, a second significance of 1932 was that it was a campaign that showed the growing importance of stagecraft and strategy in a new breed of campaign advisors. Roosevelt's political operative, jim Farley, wasn't just good at taking 30,000 mile trips across the country to visit the Democratic establishment.

15:42 He and his boss proved effective at bringing new constituencies into the Democratic Party by a careful combination of retail politics and emotionally reticent and widely broadcast personal appeals by the candidate himself. They appealed to groups that previously had voted Republican, from native-born small farmers to urban progressives, to African Americans. The result was that the Democrats enlarged their electoral base in ways that allowed it to dominate national politics for 50 years, and there's no disputing that, absolutely and absolutely.

16:24 Roosevelt's use of the radio, his conversational tone and the enlargement of the federal government began to pick off those native-born small farmers, those urban progressives and most especially the African-American vote. And then retail politics changed dramatically in 1932 and would forever be changed Now here's one last quote from Margaret Amera. The legacies of 1932 remain. Voters make their choices not just on what candidates say but on how likable they seem. Campaign strategists and pollsters slice and dice the electorate into every possible interest group and try to squeeze votes out of them.

17:12 And regardless where Americans sit on the political spectrum, all have a relationship with the federal government that simply did not exist prior to 1932. The vast enlargement of the government under Roosevelt and the further expansion that occurred in the terms of both his Democratic and Republican successors, meant that what happened in Washington had ripple effects across the country and across the world. Whether American voters think the government should act to do more or do a lot less, they see the relationship between citizens and their government and their president as a highly personal one. And these legacies endured, intensified and became disrupted 36 years later, in the election year of 1968.

18:02 And all of that is true. There was a vast enlargement of the federal government that, frankly, has never receded since 1932. In fact, it has grown and grown and grown some more. Now much of what is commonly believed about FDR and his presidency his time in office is simply wrong. After decades of liberal historians gushing over FDR, we are now looking objectively at anything he did or did not do. We're finally seeing real, objective historians doing the heavy lifting to figure out what really happened during his presidency.

18:49 And so with that, let's hear in this conversation from a conservative historian's viewpoint, stephen Hayward, what say you? As our only four-term president, a chief executive who served through two great national crises, the Great Depression and World War II, it is inevitable that Franklin Roosevelt looms large in the history and development of the modern presidency. While Woodrow Wilson was the intellectual architect of the expansive modern presidency, fdr perfected it and gave it style, building on it and completing the work of Wilson had begun to expand the role of the president and weaken constitutional restraints on government.

19:36 He also finished Wilson's work of making the Democratic Party a wholly liberal party. He inflated the role of charisma and personality pioneered by his cousin, theodore Roosevelt. He was our first mass media president making extensive use of the radio. Despite his sunny disposition, roosevelt was also deeply cynical and manipulative about politics. Indeed, it might be said that he regarded the Great Depression as the ultimate crisis that was too good to waste. Whitaker Chambers called FDR. Quote an artful and experienced ringmaster whose techniques may be studied again and again and again.

20:24 And while FDR was playing ringmaster, the country was suffering in the Great Depression. What was he going to do to make things better, besides soothing people's fears and fireside chats? Let's go back to Stephen Hayward. The pro-Roosevelt histories have always made a virtue of FDR's pragmatism, often quoting one famous remark quote it is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something, all try something.

21:10 But FDR's bold, persistent experimentation, as he called it, undermined business and consumer confidence. His punitive taxes and reckless attacks on the rich and preposterous businesses discouraged capital investment. His pro-union policies retarded hiring. His regulatory schemes to manipulate markets, such as the national recovery administration, the NRA, the agricultural adjustment act, the AAA, backfired badly and were struck down by the Supreme court as unconstitutional. In the case of the NRA, the Supreme court was unanimous. Unanimous, which means that FDR had gone too far, even for the liberal justices of Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

21:52 Quite a feat. At the time, brandeis told an FDR aide I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything. Quite a statement. These and other New Deal measures represented the expansion of government by nearly a full order of magnitude. Amity Shales notes that the NRA generated 10,000 new pages of law in the US statute books, which had been only 2,735 pages long before FDR took office. In 12 months, shales points out, the NRA had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.

22:40 Whenever a measure failed to work, instead of abandoning it or changing course, fdr always doubled down, seeking more political control over the economy and still higher taxes. When business investment froze under the weight of uncertainty of FDR's policies, he responded by proposing an undistributed profits tax, hoping to either force businesses to invest or confiscate their meager profits. So you can see FDR was no experimenter, he was a revolutionary, he was a radical.

23:20 He just did it with a nice smile and great charisma and had nice fireside chats to soothe a very fearful country. Now Amity Shales is a great historian who we will hear from in our next episode, and she prosecutes the question did FDR really help us to get out of the depression? And she prosecutes it very successfully. Now the short answer is I'm sorry. No, he did not, but more to come on that. We want to devote a whole episode to that Now. One last item on FDR was his vicious assault on the judicial branch, a co-equal branch of the government, which, ironically, margaret O'Mara did not address at all in her book.

24:07 But what? Let's go back to Stephen Hayward for what he says about this vicious assault on the judicial branch. Fdr lashed out at the Supreme Court for refusing to rubber stamp his unprecedented New Deal controls on the private sector during his first term. Though it should be noted that the court did not invalidate all of FDR's measures. It upheld some of the most dubious of them, including the confiscation and arbitrary revaluation of the price of gold and the cancellation of mortgage debt, both of which involved a plain violation of the Constitution's Contracts Clause.

24:50 After the 9-0 decision that invalidated the National Recovery Administration, roosevelt complained that the court was stuck in the horse and buggy era. After his landslide re-election victory in 1936, some of Roosevelt's aides proposed that FDR back a series of constitutional amendments to provide Congress and the executive branch with the explicit power to regulate the economy more fully, in other words, that the Constitution should be changed through the mechanism that the founders had provided for just such new circumstances, as Roosevelt had now claimed existed.

25:31 So after he won that landslide reelection, he was going full throated at the court. Later on we read this, which is compelling and certainly not something we've ever heard from our government-run classrooms, and liberal historians Check this out. Going back to Hayward Instead, fdr decided to try to outflank the Supreme Court politically. He made an unprecedented public attack on the Supreme Court, an institution whose traditions of restraint and aloofness from politics kept the justices from defending themselves.

26:14 No other president in history had ever attacked the Supreme Court as FDR did. With no prior indication of his plan during the 1936 campaign and with no discussion or advance warning to his own party members in Congress, fdr sprang his infamous court packing plan in the spring of 1937. It stated intention to infuse new blood into all of our courts and to correct the current ill-balanced Supreme Court. Fdr wanted Congress to pass a law stipulating that for every federal judge or Supreme Court justice over the age of 70, the president could appoint an additional judge or justice.

26:57 As of 1938, six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court were over 70 years old. Had FDR's plan been enacted, he would have immediately been able to command a court majority for anything he wanted passed. Raymond Moley said it was a plan to enable Roosevelt to control the court and suborn its independence. Plain and simple, it was a half-baked scheme which commended itself chiefly because of its disingenuousness. The idea was so unpopular that even FDR's own party rebuked him.

27:38 The lopsided Democratic majority in Congress not only rejected the proposal handily, but the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a report that harshly rebuked FDR's reasoning and defended the court from FDR's attack, which it called a dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle. Seldom has any presidential initiative been so categorically rejected by a president's own party, by a president's own party. Roosevelt responded to this defeat with one of the worst temper tantrums in presidential history. He set out to purge the Democratic Party of senators and congressmen who had opposed the court packing scheme and other New Deal measures in the 1938 election.

28:27 Holy smokes, holy smokes. Indeed, that was just incredible. No history teacher taught these events with this type of Keller commentary. Normally we get three or four statements in a paragraph and a history book that said ah, fdr kind of went a little bit overboard and then the court shot him down, and that's it, move on. Nothing to see here. But here's the cherry on top. You might think. Well, the country was saved, then right, that's what I always thought. The American Constitution was restored.

29:08 Here's the irony. What does Hayward say? The final irony is that the Supreme Court buckled under Roosevelt's attack, dramatically reversing course in 1937, without any changes in the composition of the court. The justices suddenly started upholding New Deal measures that were nearly identical to those they had struck down just a few years before. It was called the switch in time that saved nine. In other words, fdr's court packing initiative actually succeeded in its main aim, which was to intimidate the Supreme Court into ceasing to act as a guardian of economic liberty and to limit, to act as a limit on the extension of federal government power.

29:57 Ever since, the Supreme Court has been on a mostly downhill slide, allowing more and more scope to government power with only limited exceptions. The Supreme Court's abandonment of its role as a guardian of constitutional limits to government power and as a protector of especially economic rights has been called the revolutionary, the revolution of 1937, and with good reason. But the court packing scheme also revealed another flaw in FDR's character his impatience. The scheme was soon shown to have been utterly unnecessary.

30:38 Within three years, he had been able to reshape the Supreme Court exactly as he wanted it through the conventional appointment process Between deaths and retirements from the court. Fdr had appointed eight of the nine justices sitting on the court by the time he died in 1945, the most of any president in American history. They were all liberals who seldom saw an extension of government power they did not approve, or an exercise of executive power they restrained. Wow, how in the world did the country withstand these vicious attacks on her whole system of government from an executive branch that was completely out of control and a judicial branch that cowered in the corner?

31:27 The founders' notion of three co-equal branches of government was nowhere to be found. If you asked any sensible Americans from anywhere of 1935 onward during these vicious fights for government control, what is going on here? Liberty or tyranny? I would have to believe that many would say tyranny beyond measure. We don't recognize our government. Only the looming threat of war distracted the country. And after winning another term, his third term, roosevelt eventually should get credit for at least rallying a nation to defeat two very aggressive enemies Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and by not screwing them up as well.

32:19 By all accounts, roosevelt's foreign policy was quite good. Though many speculate, he leaned heavily on one of the greatest statesmen in the 20th century, namely Winston Churchill, who we need to cover more of in these Mojo Minutes, so in today's Mojo Minute. It's very long, so thank you for staying with me. Let us appreciate the historians, like Amity Shales, who is actually beginning to tell the truth on these brutal eight years from 1932 to 1940. Let us learn what actually happened in history. Let us appreciate liberty that we still have a country and a republic after a brutal takeover and tyranny over four presidential terms on our domestic front, and let our liberty never be compromised again.

33:17 Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.