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7-05-2015, 13:32

Election of 1932

Taking place in the depths of the Great Depression, the election of 1932 transferred power from the Republican

Party to the Democratic Party and sent Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House.

Although they had been the nation’s majority party since the 1890s and had dominated the politics of the 1920s, the Republicans faced dismal prospects in 1932. In 1930, the GOP had lost some 50 seats in the House and eight in the Senate and failed to control Congress for the first time in more than a decade. As the depression worsened in 1931 and 1932, the popularity of President Herbert C. Hoover and the Republicans had plummeted as well, all the more after the Bonus Army episode in the summer of 1932. With little hope of victory, the dispirited Republican Party renominated Hoover and his running mate, Vice President Charles Curtis.

The Democrats nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt, the popular activist governor of New York, for president, and Texan John Nance Garner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, for vice president. (Garner had enabled Roosevelt’s nomination on the fourth ballot by releasing delegates pledged to him, Garner, thus avoiding a deadlocked convention.) Wanting to symbolize his desire for change, Roosevelt broke longstanding political precedent by appearing in person at the convention to accept his nomination. He said that Democrats should be “a party of liberal thought, of planned action,” and declared that “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people.”

Neither at the convention nor during the campaign, however, did Roosevelt clearly say just what the New Deal would be. He and the Democrats criticized Hoover both for doing and spending too much and for doing and spending too little, and were perhaps most forthright in pledging to end Prohibition. Nevertheless, a real difference did emerge between the sunny, confident Roosevelt, with his obvious readiness to use the federal government to address the social and economic problems of the depression, and the dour, discredited Hoover, who warned that Roosevelt was a dangerous radical and stubbornly defended his own unpopular and unsuccessful policies.

Election day brought a landslide victory for the Democrats. In the greatest four-year reversal ever at the presidential level, Roosevelt won 57.4 percent of the popular vote and 472 votes in the electoral college. (In 1928, Hoover had won 58.2 percent of the popular vote and 444 votes in the electoral college.) The first Democrat in 56 years to win a majority of the popular vote for president, Roosevelt lost only six states (Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine). Roosevelt added Protestant middle-class, working-class, and farm voters to his party’s traditional urban, ethnic, and white southern strength, though as compared to the full-blown Roosevelt Coalition in the election oe 1936, which culminated the transformation of politics in the

RooSEVELT ERA, Roosevelt’s 1932 vote was based less on massive strength in urban, working-class, ethnic, and Aerican American areas. Picking up another 90 seats in the House of Representatives and 13 in the Senate from 1930, Democrats also took overwhelming control of the Congress, with a margin of 310-117 in the House and 6035 in the Senate.

The 1932 election was a decisive rejection of the HooVER PRESIDENCY and the Republicans, who were identified with the Great Depression and with policies that seemed unresponsive to national and human needs. Despite unemployment of at least one-fourth of the labor force, voters also rejected radical alternatives: the Socialist candidate, Norman Thomas, won just 2.2 percent of the vote, and the Communists garnered a scant three-tenths of 1 percent. Although more a rejection of Hoover and the GOP than an affirmation of Roosevelt and the Democrats, the election was a call for change that gave Roosevelt and his party the chance to deal effectively with the depression and earn reelection in their own right. Only after 1932 did it become clear that Roosevelt’s presidency would bring the transformation of American government and the realignment of American politics.

Further reading: Frank Freidel, “The Election of 1932,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, Vol. 3, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), pp. 2,707-2,806.