Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  The Bonus March debacle became a public relations disaster for the president, reinforcing a political narrative that he was both hapless and heartless. Hoover “summoned the United States army to rout and maim a pitiful and inoffensive crowd of ragged and unarmed bonusers,” accused a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Democratic Representative Wright Patman of Texas scornfully suggested that the president should have instead “use[d] the army to drive the international banking lobby from the capital city.” Hoover seethed at the mess MacArthur had created for him, but he never issued a public reprimand of the general or an apology to the marchers.25

  Roosevelt was mystified by Hoover’s bungling of the Bonus March. This was not the Hoover he remembered with such admiration from the Wilson administration. Why set on the marchers with tear gas and bayonets, he wondered aloud to an aide? Why not just send them coffee and sandwiches, and listen to their complaint? FDR started to realize the profound weaknesses of his opponent. He began to think he could win this election. His fellow Democrats agreed, and Hoover’s fellow Republicans became more worried. As the fall campaign neared, observed one reporter, “partisans on both sides are busily engaged in polishing up their epithets.”26

  The Election Nears

  The fall campaign showed the stark contrast between Roosevelt’s appeals to the heart and Hoover’s appeals to the head.

  Hoover still was a reluctant campaigner. When on the stump, he could be soft-spoken and hard to hear. He was not a fiery orator, but a great explainer. He scoffed at Roosevelt’s use of speechwriters. Instead, he took on the exhausting task of writing all his speeches himself, loading them with facts and statistics. “Mr. Roosevelt not only advanced the thesis that I was responsible for the depression,” Hoover later wrote, “but also insisted that I had done nothing about it.” To combat this, he gave lengthy, densely detailed speeches that outlined all he had done, and complained about the “hideous misrepresentation” of his record.27

  The result was campaign oratory that was depressing, dogmatic, and dull. Hoover’s over-arching message was that greater disaster would befall his listeners if Roosevelt won.

  Hoover also forgot the power of radio. Earlier in his term he had passed up the opportunity to give regular ten-minute radio addresses from the White House—the format of the “fireside chats” Roosevelt later made famous. Hoover did not believe he could relay anything of substance in ten minutes; the master of slogans and phrases seemed to have dialed back in time to the age of nineteenth-century oratory instead of the twentieth-century era of shrinking attention spans. Modern media also rewarded the softer side of political personality, and the Great Engineer had long disliked being the subject of human interest stories geared to make him more likeable and relatable. In 1928, he had fiercely resisted aides’ suggestions to film a documentary about his life, saying it would “get votes only from the morons.”28

  In contrast, FDR used radio to his advantage. Even with his aristocratic voice, he delivered his message in a way that made him more of a “man of the people” than Hoover. “It is pleasant and clear, with a pleasing inflection,” one radio producer declared of Roosevelt’s voice. “But above all, it has a tone of perfect sincerity, a quality that is supremely essential.” In contrast, “President Hoover’s voice is typical of the engineer, and, generally speaking, this type is seldom an interesting talker on the radio.” The media had become the message.29

  Delivering authoritative and reassuring speeches over the airwaves, Roosevelt used radio as the ultimate distraction from his disability and the ultimate expression of his elegant phrasing and rhetoric. Through the fall, on the radio and on the stump, Roosevelt ran a campaign that tended to be short on policy details and long on emotions. His criticism of Hoover also became fiercer as the fall wore on, and as he got wind of the derogatory things the president had been saying about him, and as he got more and more confident of victory. Roosevelt got a further boost from the most glamorous of places, Hollywood, where studio moguls like Jack Warner and A-list talent like Will Rogers lent their endorsement and star appeal to FDR’s candidacy.30

  Roosevelt’s reliance on a multitude of speechwriters, although disparaged by Hoover, allowed him to float above the fray of competing policy visions and appeal to a range of constituencies. His various speechwriters competed for Roosevelt’s affection and attention by seeding their own pet ideas in his speeches; Roosevelt was adept at picking the most politically saleable ideas and leaving out the possible land mines. It was clear, by this point, that the idea of a more vigorous state had become Roosevelt’s North Star, but the way he characterized this vision was very careful in its spin and stagecraft. He was an old-style progressive turned New Deal liberal, but he remained attentive to the basics of retail politics.

  In the final weeks of the fall campaign, he crossed the country in a custom campaign train labeled the “Roosevelt Special.” Among its innovative features was a fully furnished press car. The venue was perfect. Roosevelt came out on a platform at the back of the train. He powerfully grasped the railings and the microphone stand, his broad chest and shoulders looming as he gestured with one arm. His voice boomed. The crowd cheered. The reporters hopped out of their comfortable press car, mingled with the crowd, wrote it all down, and hopped back on the train. It was meticulously planned political theater, a routine that varied little from town to town and state to state. Further helping Roosevelt’s odds was that Al Smith had finally gotten over his embarrassment in Chicago and endorsed the full Democratic slate, helping cement the support of urban working-class voters who remained passionate about Smith.31

  On 22 October, Hoover finally hit the road as well, but his whistle-stops were less joyous. It horrified him that Roosevelt—lightweight, rudderless, untested—might win, but this seemed more and more likely. People and groups who had long been dependably Republican deserted Hoover. In Des Moines, Iowa, a farmer marching in an anti-Hoover, pro-Roosevelt parade declared, “If Hoover is re-elected, he will be the last American President.” The Down Town Republican Club of Los Angeles canceled a dinner and rally for Hoover after a poll of its members found that 70 percent of them were supporting Roosevelt. The Progressive League launched a campaign “to turn the progressive wing of the Republican party away from President Hoover.” The Chicago Defender, the influential newspaper of the black community, departed from a past pattern of Republican endorsement and refrained from expressing a strong preference for Hoover. By the end of October, another prominent black paper, the Baltimore Afro-American, answered the question “Roosevelt or Hoover” more decisively: “Roosevelt.” Hoover’s flip-flopping on Prohibition chipped away at his base of support as well. The executive secretary of the Methodist Board of Temperance disdained voting for either major party candidate: “I, personally, am casting my ballot for [Socialist] Norman Thomas.”32

  Figure 15. Franklin D. Roosevelt on campaign train, Seattle, 1932. The “Roosevelt Special” barnstormed the country in the final days of the campaign, helping cement support for his candidacy and for the full Democratic slate. Courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI).

  As his campaign train steamed angrily across the country, Hoover stuck to his guns. He declared that “the forces of depression are in retreat” and that “no defense is needed” of his administration’s policies, because they had been the right ones. He ever more staunchly defended the tariff he had signed into law in 1930, which by that time had become despised by Democrats and Republicans alike as a main culprit in the economic crisis. He positioned himself as a true believer, while Roosevelt was “a chameleon on plaid.” Roosevelt’s campaign train was met with cheers and bouquets of flowers. Hoover’s train was met with unemployed men wearing placards saying things like “Hoover—Baloney and Apple Sauce.”33

  The smoothness and professionalism with which Roosevelt ran for president in those final weeks impressed observers, and set a precedent for sophistication in campaign machinery. “If the end crowns the work in his case,
” editorialized the New York Times on the eve of the election, “the example which he has set ought to be full of instruction, as well as of warning, to politicians anxious to learn the secrets of their trade.” The election also hinged on the power of personality. “I tell you, lady,” said a Washington cab driver to political reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick, “I figure out that if we get rid of Old Gloom and put in a feller that can laugh and act human, the Depression will be half over.” Yet ordinary voters’ loyalties were not always this unswerving. “Now what I’d like to see is Roosevelt and Hoover elected and Garner and Curtis licked,” a milkman told McCormick the same day. “Whatever happens, though, I guess the old flag will still be flutterin’ in the hot air over the Capitol and I’ll be deliverin’ the milk as usual.”34

  Election Day brought a landslide for Roosevelt. He won 472 electoral votes, Hoover 59. Roosevelt won over 57 percent of the popular vote. Coming into the Democrats’ corner were the people hardest hit by the Great Depression: urban workers, farmers, and a good number of African Americans. Roosevelt also had decisively grabbed the Progressive vote that had been shared between the Democratic and Republican parties since the days of his cousin Teddy. In his memoirs, Hoover limited his assessment of the loss to one grim sentence: “As we expected, we were defeated in the election.” The conservative, pro-business, incrementalist vision of Hoover had lost resoundingly to an activist, reform-minded “new deal.”35

  After November

  Most people who run against one another for president end up not liking one another very much. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt ended up hating each other. They hated each other so deeply, in fact, that they refused to work together in the four months between election and inauguration (for American presidents still took office in March).

  Hoover had to turn from the shambles of the electoral returns to the shambles of a country in crisis. Yet the defeated president did not want to take the full blame for emergency measures, like closing the banks. He asked FDR to work jointly with him during the transition. However, Roosevelt refused to commit; just like Hoover, he did not want to share the blame or credit with his rival. Roosevelt had distinct policy ideas that were markedly different from anything the conservative Hoover might have agreed to do. Why should the President-elect abandon the principles that had won him the election? Driven by ideological distance and personal animosity, their standoff continued as the economy hurtled further downward.

  By the time Inauguration Day rolled around, the enmity had cemented. Hoover and Roosevelt shared a car ride from the Capitol to the White House without a single word to each other. Roosevelt’s first hundred days was a legislative flurry that involved enacting into law many things that were already moving through Congress while Hoover was still president. By then, Hoover had retreated to his home in Palo Alto, California, licking his wounds and distaining the political limelight. Roosevelt took up these measures and added to them, resulting in an extraordinary first three months of audacious and unprecedented executive-branch action.

  The profound legacy of Roosevelt’s New Deal has been dissected, debated, catalogued, and contested by historians, journalists, political leaders, and citizens in the eight decades since.36 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. 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. 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.

  Figure 16. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover in convertible automobile on way to U.S. Capitol for Roosevelt’s inauguration, 4 March 1933. After a bruising campaign and combative transition, the defeated incumbent and new president rode together down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day. Library of Congress.

  A second significance of 1932 was that it was a campaign that showed the growing importance of stagecraft, strategy, and 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. He, and his boss, proved effective at bringing new constituencies into the Democratic Party by a careful combination of retail politics and emotionally resonant and widely broadcast personal appeals by the candidate. 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 fifty years.

  What was not obvious at the time was that the 1932 election started to mobilize a new conservative movement. One of the chief catalysts for this was Hoover himself. After spending a little time out of the spotlight, recovering from the election-year onslaught, he came back into public life—swinging. He became one of the loudest and fiercest critics of the New Deal, and helped mobilize conservative business leaders against it. His critiques helped seed new interest groups and political tactics that would help the Republicans redefine their base and redefine politics several decades later.37

  Last, 1932 was a campaign in which the relationship between politician and voter became personal. Herbert Hoover lost because he did not fully internalize that it was all about the economy, or realize that his ideology and approach were inadequate to redress systemic crisis and reassure a traumatized public. Although highly attuned to the importance of national mood to economic indicators, he failed to deploy the tools of psychology and persuasion to convince Americans that they, and the Republic, would endure. Although a past master of new media, Hoover failed to play by the rules of the new media machine. Roosevelt won in part because he mastered both the messaging and its delivery.

  All blame cannot lie on Hoover’s choices in the campaign. Some of his problem was one of incumbency. He was trying to stay the course, and no one had faith that the course would correct itself. It was not as if his challenger won on policy. In fact, particularly toward the end of the campaign, Roosevelt and Hoover were voicing policy positions that sounded markedly similar. Yet these ideas were bathed in generalities as they came from Roosevelt, and straitjacketed in morose defensiveness as they came from Hoover.

  It is striking, in listening to the voices of ordinary voters during and after the election, how much their choices hinged on how much they liked and trusted the candidate. Hoover understood the power of image, but not how the magnitude of crisis demanded a compassionate and empathetic leader.

  The legacies of 1932 remain. Voters make their choices not on just what candidates say, but on how likeable they seem. Campaign strategists and pollsters slice and dice the electorate into every possible interest group and try to squeeze votes out of them. 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 sho
uld 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.

  These legacies endured, intensified, and became disrupted thirty-six years later, in the election year of 1968.

  PART III

  1968

  CHAPTER 5

  The Fracturing of America

  On 31 March 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a televised address to the nation. His subject was the Vietnam War, which by this time had escalated into a bloody conflict involving over half a million American soldiers. Two months earlier, the North Vietnamese had launched the Tet Offensive, an assault that moved the guerrilla warfare of the countryside into the streets of Vietnam’s cities—beginning with a bold and devastating attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The war had come to the heart of the American presence as well as to where all the reporters were, and television news reports beamed nightly images of bloody urban combat into American homes.

  Although the United States inflicted heavy casualties and prevented the North Vietnamese from taking control of new territory, the Tet Offensive was a public relations disaster for the U.S. military and its commander in chief. The generals and Johnson had been assuring the American public all along that the end of the war was in sight, that things were going in the right direction. After Tet, these assurances no longer seemed credible. “For the first time,” said one Democratic activist, “a large proportion of the country was capable of being convinced that the government had lied to them.”1