USH 851-855

FROM HOOVERISM TO THE NEW DEAL

THE ELECTION OF 1932 On June 14, 1932, while the ragtag Bonus

Army was still encamped in Washington, D.C., glum Republicans gathered

in Chicago to renominate Herbert Hoover. The delegates went through the

motions in a mood of defeat. By contrast, the Democrats converged on

Chicago later in June confident that they would nominate the next presi-

dent. The fifty-year-old New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt was

already the front-runner, with most of the delegates lined up, and he went

over the top on the fourth ballot.

From Hooverism to the New Deal

• 851

In a bold, unprecedented gesture, Roosevelt flew for nine hours to

Chicago to accept the nomination instead of awaiting formal notification.

He had intentionally broken with tradition, he told the delegates, because

the stakes were so high. “Republican leaders not only have failed in material

things, they have failed in national vision, because in disaster they have held

out no hope. . . . I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American

people” that would “break foolish traditions.” Roosevelt’s acceptance speech

was a bundle of contradictions, promising “to cut taxes and balance the bud-

get” as well as to launch numerous innovations to provide the people with

“work and security.” What his New Deal “crusade” would be in practice Roo-

sevelt had little idea as yet, but he was much more willing to experiment

than Hoover. What was more, his upbeat personality communicated joy,

energy, and hope. Roosevelt’s campaign song was “Happy Days Are Here

Again.”

Born in 1882, the adored only child of wealthy parents, educated by tutors

at Hyde Park, his father’s Hudson River estate in New York, young Roosevelt

led a cosmopolitan life. His parents arranged for a private railroad car to

deliver him to Groton, an elite Massachusetts boarding school. He later

attended Harvard College and Columbia University Law School. While a law

student, he married his distant cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, a niece of

his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the United States.

In 1910, Franklin Roosevelt won a Democratic seat in the New York State

Senate. As a freshman legislator he displayed the contradictory qualities that

would characterize his political career: he was an aristocrat with empathy for

common folk, a traditionalist with a penchant for experimentation, an affa-

ble charmer with a buoyant smile and upturned chin who harbored enor-

mous self-confidence and optimism as well as profound convictions, and a

skilled political tactician with a shrewd sense of timing and a distinctive

willingness to listen to and learn from others.

Tall, handsome, and athletic, Roosevelt seemed destined for greatness. In

1912 he backed Woodrow Wilson for president, and for both of Wilson’s

terms he served as assistant secretary of the navy. Then, in 1920, largely on

the strength of his name, he became James Cox’s running mate on the

Democratic ticket. The following year, at age thirty-nine, his career was cut

short by the onset of polio that left him permanently disabled, unable to

stand or walk without braces. But the battle for recovery transformed the

young aristocrat. He became less arrogant, less superficial, more focused,

and more interesting. A friend recalled that Roosevelt emerged from his

struggle with polio “completely warm-hearted, with a new humility of

spirit” that led him to identify with the poor and the suffering. Justice Oliver

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• REPUBLICANRESURGENCE ANDDECLINE(CH. 26)

Wendell Holmes later summed up his qualities this way: “a second-class

intellect—but a first-class temperament.”

For seven years, aided by his talented wife, Eleanor, Roosevelt strength-

ened his body to compensate for his disability, and in 1928 he won the gov-

ernorship of New York. Reelected by a whopping majority of 700,000 in

1930, Roosevelt became the Democrats’ favorite for president in 1932. Partly

to dispel doubts about his health, the Democratic nominee set forth on a

grueling campaign tour in 1932. He blamed the Depression on the Republi-

cans, attacked Hoover for his “extravagant government spending,” and he

repeatedly promised Americans a New Deal. Like Hoover, Roosevelt pledged

to balance the budget, but he was willing to incur short-term deficits to pre-

vent starvation and revive the economy. On the tariff he was evasive. On

farm policy he offered several options pleasing to farmers and ambiguous

enough not to alarm city dwellers. He called for strict regulation of utilities

and for at least some government development of electricity, and he consis-

tently stood by his party’s pledge to repeal the Prohibition amendment. Per-

haps most important, he recognized that a revitalized economy would

From Hooverism to the New Deal

• 853

The “New Deal” candidate

Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee for president in

1932, campaigning in Topeka, Kansas. Roosevelt’s confidence inspired voters.

require national planning and new ideas. “The country needs, and, unless I

mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation,”

he said. “Above all, try something.”

What came across to voters, however, was less the content of Roosevelt’s

speeches than his uplifting confidence and his commitment to change. By

contrast, Hoover lacked vitality and vision. Democrats, Hoover argued, ignored

the international causes of the vision. They were also taking a reckless course.

Roosevelt’s proposals, he warned, “would destroy the very foundations of our

American system.” Pursue them, he warned, and “grass will grow in the streets

of a hundred cities, a thousand towns.” But few were listening. Mired in the

persistent depression the country wanted a new course, a new leadership, a

new deal.

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• REPUBLICANRESURGENCE ANDDECLINE(CH. 26)

Franklin D. Roosevelt

472 22,800,000

Electoral Vote Popular Vote

(Democrat)

Herbert Hoover

59 15,800,000

(Republican)

TN 11

VT 3

NH 4

MA 17

RI 5

CT 8

NJ 16

DE 3

MD 8

KY 11

THE ELECTION OF 1932

Why did Roosevelt appeal to voters struggling during the Depression? What were

Hoover’s criticisms of Roosevelt’s “New Deal”? What policies defined Roosevelt’s

New Deal during the presidential campaign?

Some disillusioned voters took a dim view of both major candidates.

Those who believed that only a radical departure would suffice supported

the Socialist party candidate, Norman Thomas, who polled 882,000 votes,

and a few preferred the Communist party candidate, who won 103,000. The

wonder is that a desperate people did not turn in greater numbers to radical

candidates. Instead, they swept Roosevelt into office with 23 million votes to

Hoover’s 16 million. Hoover carried only four states in New England plus

Pennsylvania and Delaware and lost decisively in the Electoral College by

472 to 59.

THE 1933 INAUGURATION For the last time the nation waited four

months, from early November until March 4, for a newly elected president

and Congress to take office. The Twentieth Amendment, ratified on January

23, 1933, provided that presidents would thereafter take office on January 20

and the newly elected Congress on January 3. Just two weeks before his

March inauguration, Roosevelt survived an attempted assassination while

speaking in Miami, Florida. The gunman, an unemployed bricklayer and

Italian-born anarchist, fired five shots at the president-elect. Roosevelt was

not hit, but the mayor of Chicago was killed.

The bleak winter of 1932–1933 witnessed spreading destitution and mis-

ery. Unemployment increased, and panic struck the banking system. As bank

after bank collapsed, people rushed to their own banks to remove their

deposits. Many discovered that they, too, were caught short of cash. When the

Hoover administration ended in early 1933, four fifths of the nation’s banks

were closed, and the country teetered on the brink of economic paralysis.

The profound crisis of confidence that greeted Roosevelt when he took the

oath of office on March 4, 1933, soon gave way to a mood of expectancy and

hope. The charismatic new president displayed monumental self-assurance

when he declared “that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless,

unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert

retreat into advance.” If need be, he said, “I shall ask the Congress for . . .

broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the

power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” It

was a measure of the country’s mood that Roosevelt’s call for unprecedented

presidential power received the loudest applause.