Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  Roosevelt saw this as an opportunity. He saw that third parties with more radical messages were getting traction. “The common man,” wrote John Dewey in the pages of the progressive New Republic, “is convinced that neither the Democratic nor the Republican party represents him or his interests.”7 Roosevelt agreed, sensing that voters were deeply frustrated with the status quo in Washington—and he saw first-hand in New York the powerful impact government action could have on poverty and unemployment. It seemed like the same thing was needed at the national level.

  At the very least, the nation had to try.

  Roosevelt declared his candidacy in January 1932, a week before his fiftieth birthday. The field proved crowded, and competitive. Powerful Congressional Democrats like House Speaker John Nance Garner were running. Roosevelt’s old ally—now his rival—Al Smith was considering it. To Hoover, Roosevelt seemed the most beatable of the bunch. Throughout the primary season and into the summer, the White House tracked the Democratic race closely. Hoover still remembered the Roosevelt of the “Feather Duster” years. He was “a pleasant fellow and well meaning, but without a rudimentary grasp of the issues involved,” some aides recollected Hoover saying. He also was far too disabled, Hoover reasoned, ever to be a credible opponent. “He is a sick man,” Hoover observed privately on another occasion. “He wouldn’t live a year in the White House.”8

  Roosevelt immediately marked his territory by being more liberal, bolder than his competitors. He gathered some of the sharpest liberal policy thinkers of the day in what he called his “privy council” but the press quickly labeled the “Brain Trust.” As Roosevelt was not an ideologue, but generally open to new ideas, the work of these advisors proved influential in convincing him the answer to the Depression lay in more forceful government intervention into markets. Old hands like Louis Howe watched with alarm as Roosevelt started to tack leftward.9

  Figure 14. New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach, right, watching agents pour liquor into a sewer following a raid during the height of Prohibition, 1921. Both Republicans and Democrats initially believed Prohibition would be the biggest issue of the 1932 election. Whether to repeal the 18th Amendment had been one of the most animated and divisive political issues of the 1920s, particularly in the Democratic Party, whose core constituencies included urban “wets” and rural “drys.” Library of Congress.

  On 7 April, Roosevelt sent out political shock waves with a ten-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.” For all its emotional resonance 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 mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it and try another. But above all try something.”10

  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. Like many before and after him, Franklin Roosevelt could be vague on the stump about what he was going to do once he got to the White House. Like many before and after him, he was bold in his pronouncements, but careful in how he played his politics. The Democratic Party was a cobbled-together bunch of constituencies with very different interests. This is the era when Will Rogers famously remarked, “I am not a member of any organized party—I am a Democrat.”11 Moreover, the Democrats still found themselves compromised in their ability to appeal to African American voters, given the power of white Southerners within the Party.

  The “black vote” meant little to national politics for over four decades, as the vast majority of black adults lived below the Mason-Dixon Line where state party systems had maintained near total black disenfranchisement since Reconstruction. Yet as more African Americans moved out of the segregated South and into the urban North, shifts in their loyalties began to appear. Starting with the 1928 candidacy of urban ethnic Al Smith, and propelled more decisively by the economic distress of the early 1930s, African Americans began to move away from the Party of Lincoln. The Democratic Party still had its problems, but it was the lesser of two evils, reasoned some black opinion-makers. “It is my opinion that the Republicans will not be able to master the economic alteration of today with its present nominee as president because he favors the few at the expense of the many,” ran one letter to the prominent African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender.12

  Strong commitments to particular positions might alienate these ever-shifting constituencies, and Roosevelt not only declined to take a firm stand but vacillated between left and right throughout the campaign, depending on to whom he was speaking. “He would unite East and West, North and South,” opined the New York Times, “in one grand brotherhood of inconclusive phrases and glittering generalities.”13 In Atlanta in May he had spoken of bold experimentation in a way that might have made a socialist like Eugene Debs happy. In San Francisco in September, now the nominee and speaking to a group of business-minded civic leaders at the Commonwealth Club, he sounded far more conservative, saying “government should assume the function of economic regulation only as a last resort, to be tried only when private initiative … has finally failed.” Implied, but not stated, was that the past three years had proved decisively that the private sector had failed. Roosevelt was too careful with his politics to say it.14

  Some pundits took this as meaning Roosevelt was “not a man of great intellectual force or supreme moral stamina.” The ever-influential Walter Lippmann disdained Roosevelt’s political flexibility as a sign the candidate was a lightweight: “a highly impressionable person, without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions.” Even some of the “forgotten men” became impatient with FDR’s lack of specificity. “Instead of giving us clear, hard, cold facts, the Governor is still talking generalities,” St. Petersburg, Florida, resident John Harrison wrote in a letter to the New York Times. “His reference to what Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt did is very interesting, but he ought to tell us what Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes to do now.”15

  Roosevelt was taking a bet that the Great Depression had altered the rules of the political game. He sensed that the election would hinge on emotional appeals and the power of language that could brighten dark economic times. Americans were seeking answers, and escape. There were many different political constituencies, but the Great Depression was an experience that cut across class, party, and region. It was the power of emotion—not the details of policy—that would pull the different constituencies together into a winning coalition.

  This is the crucial thing Hoover missed.

  The Head and the Heart

  One medium dominated the final months of this pivotal campaign: radio. By 1932, radios were fixtures in American households. Radio broadcasts already had turned events like Charles Lindbergh’s first solo flight across the Atlantic into shared dramas, listened to together live by people from coast to coast. Radio brought entertainment into people’s living rooms, and it became a critical source for any political news. Three decades later, Marshall McLuhan assessed radio as the quintessential “hot” medium, “the tribal drum,” and “the medium for frenzy” that become more effective and persuasive the more intensely dramatic and emotional it became. Radio serials capitalized on this power, using sharp dialogue, raucous sound effects, and cliffhanger plots to drive up their audience share. In 1932, politicians got on the bandwagon.16

  As they had since 1924, radio networks broadcast gavel-to-gavel coverage of the two par
ty conventions. Both happened in Chicago, in the new Chicago Stadium. The Republicans went first.

  Hoover, keeping to tradition, stayed behind in the White House, which was where he had been for most of 1932. Although he had faced a primary challenge, it had not been a significant one. So he didn’t hit the road that often. Instead, he relied on the advantages of incumbency by presiding over official events, all of which were filmed by the newsreel companies and projected nice images of Hoover acting presidential. He gave radio addresses from the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House as GOP operatives invoked Lincoln’s campaign slogan from 1864: “Don’t Change Horses in the Middle of the Stream.” It was compelling coming from Lincoln; it proved dispiriting coming from Hoover.17

  A Rose Garden campaign might have worked in an ordinary year, but this was not an ordinary year. Compounding all this, the Republican Convention was a mess. There were many empty seats. Few members of Congress attended. The proceedings became consumed with platform fights over Prohibition. Hoover refused to come down firmly on one side or the other, leaving both “wets” and “drys” unhappy. As one stalwart Republican clubwoman later noted with displeasure, Hoover’s position was “You be dry and I’ll be moist.”18

  There was little mention of the economy or what was to be done about it, even though there were breadlines crowding the sidewalks and streets of Chicago as the delegates met. Newspaper reporters in attendance told their readers about the half-empty galleries, the droning speeches, the delegates who fought for Prohibition in the convention hall and drank beer and whiskey outside it. In his dispatches to the Baltimore Evening Sun, the ever acerbic H. L. Mencken concluded that “this convention of country postmasters, Federal marshals and receivers in bankruptcy, masquerading as the heirs of Lincoln, is the stupidest and most boresome ever heard of.”19 For the radio listeners at home, the GOP convention reinforced the paucity of new ideas, and new energy, in the Republican Party.

  The GOP and the Hoover White House allowed such a lackluster show in Chicago partly because they did not believe that the Democrats would win. Many pundits agreed with them. Despite oceans of newspaper ink and radio time devoted to the race, 1932 remained an age where there was little solid information based on good data. This included reliable political polling. The science of survey research was in its infancy. Hearsay and punditry often informed politicians’ understanding of where the voters’ loyalties lay. Media outlets used letters to the editor and self-selecting reader surveys as the bases for their predictions. It would be four years before George Gallup took on the business of polling voter preferences in presidential contests, and many more years after that before polling data became a sophisticated barometer of voter behavior.20

  Breadlines aside, the economy actually was getting better in late spring 1932, in part because of the measures the Hoover administration and Congress had taken to shore up banks and loosen credit. Yet Congress went out of session for the summer of 1932. When they did, the Fed tightened credit again. So the economy started trending downward. In the absence of good economic statistical reporting, the Hoover administration—and the men and women at the GOP convention—didn’t understand where it was headed.

  The Democratic Convention took place in the same Chicago hall, two weeks later, and was anything but boring. It was a true political spectacle and cliffhanger, full of energy and controversy and dramatic made-for-radio moments. Unlike the Republican gathering, where the inevitability of Hoover’s nomination loomed large throughout, the Democratic meeting was a horse race. No candidate, including Roosevelt, came into the convention with enough delegates to win. As in 1912, primary results were not binding. Chicago was where the decision would happen.

  Going into the convention, Roosevelt’s odds of winning seemed steep. Mencken noted that Roosevelt “is anything but popular, either in the convention or outside.” Favorite sons of the party like Garner seemed to have the inside track. Al Smith was less a threat, but his hatred of his friend-turned-rival Roosevelt was such that he came determined to prevent a FDR win. Animosity ran both ways. “A majority of the Roosevelt men are really not for Roosevelt at all, but simply against Al Smith,” Mencken wrote. Adding to Roosevelt’s challenges was the fact that his operatives were neophytes in national politics, while his opponents had some of the most seasoned convention veterans around.21

  Nominating speeches began the night of 30 June. There were ten jaw-dropping, mind-deadening hours of them, starting at 5:00 p.m. and lasting until 3:00 a.m. The radio networks kept up coverage through the whole thing, and the Democrats in the hall seized the opportunity to have some airtime. In the wee hours, as speeches finally wound to a close, Roosevelt’s people grabbed their own moment, and forced a first vote, at 4:28 a.m.

  One ballot. Two ballots. Roosevelt made small gains but not decisive ones. Smith’s people howled in outrage at the audacity of the Roosevelt campaign. It was summer. Everyone was sweating. Farley handed out fans with Roosevelt’s picture on them. The radio networks kept their coverage going throughout. On the third ballot, at 8:00 a.m., Roosevelt got five more votes. The exhausted delegates slumped back to their hotel rooms for a nap.

  In the ten hours that followed, there was furious politicking throughout hotel rooms and hallways, resulting in a true game changer: newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst threw his support behind Roosevelt. Hearing of the endorsement, Garner released his California and Texas delegates, putting FDR over the top with the two-thirds majority he needed to win the nomination. Bitter and angry, Al Smith refused to do the same. He—and many others at that gathering—understood that Roosevelt’s win was not the result of a sudden popularity surge, but instead was a rebuke and dismissal of Smith, the man who had failed to win the White House for the Democrats in 1924 and 1928.

  Thus, on ballot number four, Roosevelt got the nomination. Radio listeners at home did not see the degree of antipathy and Democratic infighting that lay behind his victory. They heard drama, a David who had slain Goliath. FDR seized the media moment. He broke with tradition and flew to Chicago to accept the nomination in person. It was another, triumphal moment of Roosevelt stagecraft. Flying from New York to Chicago in 1932 was no small undertaking, and by making this arduous and rather risky trip on the spur of the moment Roosevelt telegraphed his endurance and fitness for office. “Any man who can fly in a storm from Rochester to Chicago to make an acceptance speech, and can carry on as vigorous a campaign as Roosevelt is carrying on,” observed one letter to the Baltimore Afro-American, “is not likely to die the very minute he is inaugurated.”22

  Standing before the crowded and sweltering convention, Roosevelt left all mention of politicking and Prohibition behind and talked about the issue consuming the people listening at home: the economy. It was significant, he told them, that he had broken traditions and come to accept the nomination right there and then: “may this be the symbol of my intention to be honest and avoid all hypocrisy and sham.” In a foreshadowing of the speech he would give at his inauguration the following year, he said “this is no time for fear, for reaction or for timidity.” Instead, he promised “a new deal for the American people.”23

  The Republicans hadn’t talked about the economy. All Roosevelt did was talk about it. The organist at the Chicago Stadium played the popular ditty “Happy Days are Here Again” at both conventions. At the GOP gathering, it sounded like a dirge, a mockery to the radio audience listening at home. After the Democratic convention, the assembled media picked up on the song as a theme for the Roosevelt campaign. Roosevelt used it for every election afterward. Many years of struggle lay ahead for American families, but Roosevelt’s powerful, stirring oratory was able to make them believe happy days might be just around the corner.

  Hoover’s political battering continued through the summer. At the same moment that the two parties were gathering in Chicago, a wave of unemployed World War I veterans from across the country had started to converge on Washington to demand early payment of their veterans’ pensions. Th
e dire economic situation, they argued, made it heartless for the government to wait in giving those who fought for their country what was due to them. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, and set up encampments right in the heart of official Washington. This was a particularly visible and politically problematic sort of Hooverville: highly visible, intractable, and filled with people using the language of patriotism and military service to make their case.

  By July, the situation had become intolerable. The squatters were preventing half-constructed federal buildings from being finished, halting the infrastructure activities at the heart of Hoover’s economic recovery program. The camps were messy and disorderly, and Hoover and his aides strongly suspected they were hotbeds of political radicalism. The racial integration of the camps was a disturbing sign of it, as in 1932 this sort of tolerance was found only in the Communist Party. Communists were indeed there, but not in the numbers Hoover assumed.24

  After Congress adjourned for the summer and official Washington settled into its torpid summer quiet, Hoover called for the Bonus Marchers to be removed. The troops sent in to do so, led by General Douglas MacArthur and an up-and-coming officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower, took their orders above and beyond Hoover’s intention for a quiet, orderly operation. Soldiers on horseback, kitted in uniforms nearly identical to the ones the Bonus Marchers had worn two decades before, set upon the marchers aggressively. The troops took on not only the camps at the center of the city, but those on the outskirts, along the Anacostia River, where women and children joined their husbands and fathers. The confrontation turned violent, tear gas poisoned the air, and the camps went up in flames. The DC press corps was on hand to write down everything they saw.