1 gen 1936 anni - Election of 1936

Descrizione:

As the 1936 election approached, the Democratic Party had a broad base of support. Many voters had personally benefitted from programs such as the WPA, or knew people who had (Table 22.2). One was Jack Reagan, a down-on-his-luck shoe salesman (and the father of future president Ronald Reagan), who took a job as a federal relief administrator in Dixon, Illinois, and became a strong supporter of the New Deal. Roosevelt could count on a powerful coalition of organized labor, midwestern farmers, white ethnic groups, northern African Americans, and middle-class families anxious about their savings, homes, and retirement. He also commanded the support of intellectuals and progressive Republicans. With some difficulty — mainly because of rising calls for racial justice among some New Dealers — the Democrats maintained their white southern constituency as well.

Republicans recognized that the New Deal was too popular to oppose directly. Alfred Landon, the progressive governor of Kansas and 1936 Republican presidential candidate, accepted the legitimacy of many New Deal programs but criticized their inefficiency and expense. He also pointed to the authoritarian regimes in Italy and Germany and hinted that FDR harbored similar dictatorial ambitions. These charges fell on deaf ears. Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936 was one of the most lopsided in American history. The legislation of the Second New Deal protected Roosevelt from the populist appeals of Townsend and Long, and Long’s assassination by a Louisiana political rival in September 1935 eliminated the possibility of a serious third-party challenge. Roosevelt received 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except Maine and Vermont. The liberal New Republic boasted that “it was the greatest revolution in our political history.”

Even after the remarkable reforms of Roosevelt’s first term, the depression still weighed heavily on American society. Unemployment remained high, at 15 percent, and average family income, measured in purchasing power, had still not returned to 1929 levels. “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” the president declared in his second inaugural address in January 1937. But his hopes for expansion of the liberal welfare state were quickly dashed. Within a year, staunch opposition to Roosevelt’s initiatives arose in Congress, and a sharp recession undermined confidence in his economic leadership.

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