º Roosevelt Assignment Page
º Modern Presidents from FDR to the Present
º Prof. Renka's Franklin D. Roosevelt links
º Biography -
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: A Life in Brief
The New Deal Political Coalition of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Russell D. Renka
31 January 2003
Contents:
° Introduction
° The Fifth Party System
° The Election of 1932: Rise of the new Democrats
° The Hundred Days
° Presidents and Political Coalitions
° The Second New Deal
° The New Deal Opposition
° References
° Endnotes
I. Introduction
A prime reason the second Roosevelt is recognized as the first modern president is that he led the creation of a new political regime, the New Deal, which led to a recognizably modern national bureaucracy and national list of social welfare and economic programs. The creation of this monument to liberalism is illustrated here. We begin with an exposition of partisan political realignments to show that the New Deal was a fundamental upheaval of the American political landscape. Then we attend the specific characteristics of the enduring coalition which came to dominate American politics for a generation after 1932.
II. The Fifth Party System Next down; Top
Major partisan political realignments have historically occurred in the two-party American political system about once every forty years. The founding generation gave way to the Jacksonians and Whigs about 1832; they in turn yielded to a third party system in the Civil War lead-up and aftermath centered on 1860; a fourth party system was ushered in by the 1896 election with Republicans accepting industrialism and urbanization while Democrats took on the voice of southern and western 'perimeter state' agrarian protestors symbolized by the futile presidential candidacies of William Jennings Bryan (Bensel 1984). This fourth system with Republican national majorities went through the 1920s and the Hoover Administration until the shattering experience of the Great Depression broke it down. A new, fifth party system commenced with the sweeping political victory of Democrats in 1932 (Renka, Presidential Elections and Presidents and Congress; Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections - 1932). It was confirmed by the sweeping Democratic election victories of midterm 1934 and presidential 1936 (Presidential Elections; Leip's 1936).
The extensive literature on political realignment disputes certain particulars of how a political realignment works.[1] But all agree that realignments are brought about by a sweeping social change which introduces new political issues on which the existing parties are not clearly aligned; that the firmly held partisan views of party supporters are strained by those new issues; that the parties realign around the new issues; and that both voters and aspiring political leaders adapt over time by shifting to or adopting an allegiance to the party closer to their own core ideological convictions and material interests. There may or may not be one clear election victory in which a newly dominant leader a la Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt comes forth; one such did occur in 1932. There may or may not emerge a newly dominant political party to replace the old one; the Democrats did emerge as dominant for a whole generation after 1932. There may or may not be a single shattering event such as the Civil War or Depression associated with realignment; there was no event of 1896 comparable to the four-year long Depression the nation endured before the national election of 1932. But once changes occur over several elections, fundamental changes in policy are in place that endure. Each of the old party coalitions is replaced by a new one enduringly shaped around different issues, even different ideology, than its precursor. The New Deal period offers a textbook illustration of this process.
III. The Election of 1932: Rise of the new Democrats Next down; Top
The political calendar and the rules of succession to the presidency were about to change in election year 1932. The archaic calendar by which Roosevelt and the congressional Democrats came to power in 1933 suggests that few anticipated how revolutionary the modernizing changes in government would become. The election of 1932 gave little hint of fundamental change in the size and reach of the federal government. It only created the possibility for truly sweeping change, in policy and in the shaping of American political institutions--most particularly, the presidency. This section shows the 1932 election of Roosevelt and New Deal Democrats as part of a newly dominant party which then went on to produce a major expansion of national governmental power and a redefinition of American liberalism and conservatism.
There was no New Deal or New Deal political coalition when Franklin Roosevelt, 118 freshman House Democrats, and a host of new Democratic Senators, swept into office together in the November 1932 general election. The Democratic party that year was still a moribund entity which had become accustomed to consistently losing elections in the previous 12 years. Its major contribution was to choose a good candidate at the national nominating Convention (1932 Democratic National Convention). The Great Depression did the rest.
Both parties in the 1920s were divided along lines established in the Civil War two generations earlier, and in the distinct rural v. industrial conflicts of the 1890s in the following generation. Neither party was “liberal” in its modern, New Deal-derived definition of belief in activist national government to solve fundamental economic problems and ensure social welfare of the people (Brinkley 1995, 8-11). The only political leaders who genuinely believed in large scale domestic governmental action were the Progressives, lodged in both parties mainly in northwestern and west coast states along with with handful of eastern states, especially a then-preeminent State of New York. The most prominent in 1932 were nominal Republicans Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and Senator George Norris of Nebraska. They were frustrated by the conservative dominance within the GOP of the prosperous 1920s and resentful of the long agricultural depression during that decade. They occasionally aligned with the Democratic congressional minority, usually without much success. They entered a de facto tradeoff with Democrats in the progressive states in the 1924 election, where the Progressive Party’s Robert LaFollette carried 16.6% of the national popular vote (Leip's 1924 Election Results). That too was futile, as the conservative Democratic nominee won only 28.8% while the even more conservative Republican Calvin Coolidge saw his 54.1% convert to electoral victory in every state except the solid South and two others. The mainstream Republicans easily dominated other 1920s presidential elections too. The incompetent Harding won 60.3% of the 1920 popular vote, while Hoover got 58.2% in 1928 against the anti-prohibition, urban, Catholic, Irish-American Tammany Hall product and sometime-reformer Al Smith (Leip 1920, 1924 and 1928; Presidential Elections Since 1789, 1991, pp. 124-126). Strictly in two-party vote the GOP took 62.4% of the national popular vote averaged over these three elections preceding 1932. In the Electoral College tally, Republicans won 112 states, the Democrats 31 (all but two in the South), and LaFollette one (Presidential Elections Since 1789, pp. 197-199).
Republican dominance included the Congress in the 1920s. Few voters split tickets, while each party had its own distinct geographic base. The South had only one party except in upland Appalachia districts and in then-open southern Florida. Everywhere else except city machine territory was Republican, and even some cities were GOP-held. The national seat holdings in the House of Representatives show this. In 1929 Hoover's Republicans held 264 non-southern seats to only 67 for Democrats--who had a 102 to 3 edge in the 11 southern states. After 1930 depression midterms the Republicans slipped badly but still led by 2 to 1 (215 to 113) before southern Democrats evened the overall count to 218 Republican, 216 Democrat in the idled 72nd Congress.[2]
The Great Depression changed all this. By November 1932, the October crash was 37 months old. How sweeping was 1932 for Democrats? FDR won the popular vote by 57.4% to Hoover's 39.6%. He won in 282 counties (about nine percent of the nation's total) which had never gone Democratic before (Leuchtenberg 1963, 17). In the Electoral College he won an 88.9% victory, 472 to 59 with 44 of 50 states.[3] Elsewhere Democrats did equally well. In the House Democrats won 313 seats to 117 for the GOP, a Democratic seat gain of nearly one hundred over the 1930 election. Outside the solid South, they won 214 to Republicans' 114, a 2 to 1 reversal of the 1930 results. The Senate followed the House pattern; having gone 48 to 47 favoring the GOP in 1930, it swung to Democrats by a net gain of 12 seats, to 60 Democrats (22 southern) and only 35 Republicans in 1932.
This was the public's temporary verdict on the Depression and Washington's Republican leadership in its depth. Herbert Hoover's March 1929 inaugural said "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land" (Leuchtenberg 1963, 16; Inaugural Address of Herbert Hoover). That was probably true, but no matter. Reversal of that promise by 1932 brought out the famous Hoover gloom, of which a Cabinet officer said "It was like sitting in a bath of ink. ..." (Leuchtenberg 1963, 13). Hoover did not help himself. He had absolutely no modern-styled belief in the value of presidential 'going public' and little more even for cultivating the working press (Kernell 1993, 63-64). Ideology was also a barrier; Hoover consistently warned against any direct federal assumption of relief for the distressed (Sundquist 1983, 200-204). That was no strange tone in 1932, for even Roosevelt “struck a progressive tone” according to Sundquist (1983, 209) yet invoked the traditional dogma that public relief was a state and local item rather than a truly federal one. Desperate citizens were less fastidious than that; they simply wanted help as the Great Depression wore on.
Roosevelt did not expressly rule out direct federal relief in 1932, but his vague positioning probably contributed very little to the 1932 Democratic sweep. The voters fired Republicans wholesale without having a distinct idea what the alternative was. Democrats in Congress had barely shown more support for Progressive concepts than Republicans. Progressives were a vocal but small factional minority within both parties. Roosevelt personally had an identification with progressive policy in his four years as Governor of New York, but his formulaic rhetoric for economic recovery lacked specific commitment to direct federal relief. The 1932 Democratic National Platform was vague in policy and unclear in ideological terms. It derided Hoover for too much activism, not too little! It had one specific proposal, to reduce the size of the federal budget in these terms: "We advocate an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five per cent in the cost of the Federal Government." It never said where or why those curbs would be effected. That vagueness made sense as election strategy: why risk angering and dividing voters when common sense dictates an easy victory over the Depression-tagged GOP while keeping to vague shibboleths? But it also reveals that Democrats stated no clear positions on policies because it genuinely lacked these.
The 1932 election made major enduring policy change possible but not obligatory. There are several more steps to making major and permanent changes in government policy and institutions. Leaders must act in distinctive ways which put a new policy stamp upon their party and the institutions which its leaders run. Liberal reformers were not guaranteed a free hand indefinitely. Roosevelt and the Democrats had broad latitude to act, but no one then knew how long they would have or how far they would be allowed to go. Certainly few if any recognized how much the presidency, the executive branch, and the national government would expand in power and prestige.
IV. The Hundred Days Next down; Top
Roosevelt was inaugurated on 4 March 1933 and immediately called the heavily Democratic 73rd Congress into special session to address the great emergency. The period from 9 March through 16 June of 1933 began the Hundred Days outburst of New Deal legislation (The American Experience - FDR Domestic Policy; Miller Center, Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Domestic Affairs). No period before or since has seen such hasty enactment of so many pieces of legislation. The common element of it all was emergency management. Even crusty southern Democrats and many old-time Republicans voted promptly for bank closures, emergency farm relief, government guarantees for bank loans, the TVA public power project, agricultural production limitations, and a national industrial recovery policy. Congress temporarily suspended its normal skepticism toward presidential proposals for legislation.
Haste and nonpartisan alignment with Roosevelt were most evident on banking, because the crisis was most immediate there. Roosevelt immediately ordered a "bank holiday" (a euphemism for closing all banks) which had no clear constitutional precedent but was 'borrowed' by FDR after it sat unused in President Hoover’s Department of Treasury plans (Friedel 1990, 95). While devoting his first Sunday in office to a 9 March 1933 fireside chat explaining his actions to the public, he asked Congress for legislative authority for the closure after the banks were already closed! It was granted with stunning speed. The draft bill was finished by Roosevelt advisors at 2 a.m., debated on the House floor for 40 minutes, and voted through without record vote for the President's signature by 9 p.m. the same date, 9 March 1933 (Burns 1956, 166-167). Presidents have special powers in special times of crisis.
Other measures followed nearly as fast, revising FDR’s expectations drastically upward for legislative accomplishments. He craftily linked budgetary economy measures (which disappointed veterans seeking bonuses and other benefits) with federal legalization of 3.2 percent beer (which did not). Both passed. He cut into science, military and governmental statistics and data budgets, again without serious opposition. During March 1933 alone he sent up farm relief, direct unemployment relief, securities regulation, mortgage foreclosure protection, the Tennessee Valley Authority proposal, and the framework for what become the Blue Eagle (National Industrial Recovery Administration). Debates were uniformly brief, passage not in doubt, and conservatives’ complaints largely ad hoc and isolated in tenor. Congress itself added federal deposit insurance and a resumption of some veterans’ benefits. Nearly all floor votes were one-sided to the point of difficulty in telling parties apart, as one followed another in the manner of a student's European tour itinerary.
The Hundred Days was not the first time a chief executive became chief legislator. Woodrow Wilson did so skillfully his full first term of 1913-1916, and with much progressive legislation to show for it. That, however, did not become precedent for a permanent 'chief legislator' expectation attached to the office. Wilson successors Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge sought little and got even less from Congress despite having large Republican majorities there. Only during and after Roosevelt did the ‘chief legislator’ tag take permanent root as an institutional expectation of presidents. Here resides one of the major distinctions of the modern presidential office from the historical one. Presidents are seen as activist policy agents within the federal system. Coolidge would not have appreciated this at all.
The initial Hundred Days outburst has become a distorted expectation of later presidents which has lured both theorists and politicians into false hopes. Some academicians and journalists make overblown forecasts of a productive ‘honeymoon period’ at the start of every new presidency. Lyndon Johnson consciously sought to beat FDR's bill tally in the Great Society session of 1965 (Leuchtenberg 1983, 146). Johnson at least had realistic hope of accomplishing that. In the 1992 campaign Bill Clinton unwisely said "I'll have the bills ready the day after I'm inaugurated, I'll send them to Congress and we'll have a 100-day period. It will be the most productive period in modern history." (Safire 1993, 345). It fell very far short of that, as we should have expected.
The Hundred Days were a special, unique circumstance associated with special emergency conditions and an extraordinary recent election victory which left the old regime in shock. It showed that FDR seriously meant to try whatever might work to produce relief, including direct federal assistance to individuals. Conservatives correctly saw this as redefining national political debate and pointed to liberal activist reformers from New York in new high posts. But the Hundred Days were not a planned ideological assault, as little suggests Roosevelt or his lieutenants truly anticipated what would be possible. These special conditions have not been repeated en bloc since then, so there is little basis to idealize or model later legislative leadership of presidents on this precedent. The better model inheres in the gradual creation of FDR's enduring New Deal political coalition and its antagonist conservative counterpart. In that precedent we get a whole cloth emergence of a modern legislative presidency.
V. Presidents and Political Coalitions Next down; Top
James Madison's Federalist No. 10 invoked a large republic as solution to danger of rule by majority factions. He added the expectation in Federalist No. 51 that separation of powers would ensure no singular rule by one faction. No unified, like-minded group would grow large enough to rule a country so large and spread out, divided between national and state governance, and reliant upon electors instead of Congress to select its chief executives. American political majorities have ever since been created from diverse coalitions instead of unified factions. This organizational solution arose gradually in the peculiarly American nineteenth century phenomenon of mass-based political parties, first around Thomas Jefferson, later with Andrew Jackson and in reaction around Whig anti-Jacksonites, and eventually with free soil defenders aligned in the new Republican Party of the 1850s. They all had skillful and ambitious political leaders who spurred factions to form alliances large enough to become potential majorities, in competition with other leaders doing the same. A political coalition is an alliance of two or more factions to achieve purposes no faction can achieve by itself. In a democracy, any governing coalition will face one or more opposition coalitions seeking to replace it. This threat is the chief discipline which prevents internal bickering among factions from breaking the coalition apart. The chief impetus for housing a coalition within a national party is the national presidential election by non-parliamentary means. Any regionally party could elect its leaders to Congress--but it sacrifices any chance to win a national Electoral College contest against a nationally organized rival. And direct primary elections instituted by progressives around the turn of the century allow dissident factions to win influence and nominate their leaders within rather than outside the two existing parties. Two national parties, two broad coalitions.
America's longstanding system of two party coalitions is made enduring with a psychological presence among voters and backed by state-based winner-take-all election rules. The parties have not always differed greatly in core political beliefs, although they currently are fairly far apart. But any successful party must maintain its own assortment of factional stakeholders. This is done with various incentives rewarding those who vote for, finance, or otherwise support that party. Before the 20th century progressive rise and the emergence of a mass middle class, incentives were nearly all material; patronage (jobs awarded on political grounds), preferments (favors, contracts) and venality (bribery, public offices such as embassy seats purchased by large party-investors) are examples. But the chief modern party payoff is with government policy favorable to at least one of the several factions. Late in the New Deal era this took on the label of "interest group liberalism" (Lowi 1969), meaning each of many factions gets something of special value as its reward for support.
VI. The Second New Deal Next down; Top
A political coalition forms over years as a national party leadership lays down an enduring set of policies to which voters eventually form enduring attachments. FDR's first two years were more emergency management than long-term restructuring of national policy, but the winnowing down of coalitional support and opposition was already underway. FDR failed to bring most businessmen and major newspaper publishers aboard. The National Industrial Recovery Administration by 1934 had won as many confirmed ideological enemies as friends. Once the November 1934 midterms confirmed New Dealer predominance (223 Democratic House seats to only 100 Republican outside the solid South, and 319 to 103 overall; 60D to 35R in the Senate), Roosevelt moved firmly toward partisanship and factional division.[4] Party policy and its public acceptance in biennial elections meant nothing less than a new, enduring and elemental realignment of political factions in America. In 1935 Roosevelt turned his Administration and the nation's federal domestic policies firmly leftward--to attract and keep the allegiance of former and current Republican progressives who awaited proof of Roosevelt's reformist bent against corporate power (James 2000, Ch. 4).
Roosevelt took on the mantle of national party leader and made policy decisions accordingly during the Second New Deal which got underway with the 4 January 1935 opening of the 74th Congress. Only enduring and non-experimental New Deal policy could cement enduring loyalties to him and his party for 1936 and perhaps beyond. Roosevelt wanted these Second New Deal policies to last. In 1935 FDR, after long wavering over Senator Robert Wagner's plans, insisted that each Social Security participant should have a tracked personal account to create the fiction that it was personal old-age insurance. With such accounts "those sons of bitches up on the Hill can't ever abandon this system when I'm gone" because citizens would feel like personal stakeholders in the system (Barone 1990, 85; Saving Social Security, p. 869 of .pdf file). He also accepted incorporation of mothers’ pensions into the measure--which later provided basis for both AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and Social Security survivors’ benefits. His avid soundings of public opinion convinced him that combinations of unemployment compensation and old-age pensions would win widespread allegiance of workmen and their wives and would avoid ruinous status as a giveaway pension program comparable to those of his left-wing rivals Townsend and Huey Long (Skocpol 1992; Friedel 1990, 155-57; Barone 1990, 85). Of course that would further anger the restive conservatives--but by 1935 FDR had almost entirely given up on mollifying them (Friedel 1990, ch. 11, 142-151). And besides, conservatives had a natural home--in the other political party.
Roosevelt aimed in 1935 to write the legislative record for his party for ratification by a national majority in 1936. Organized labor's famous right-to-bargain Section 7(a) of the Wagner Act, to which Roosevelt reluctantly subscribed after the progressive Senator Robert Wagner of New York made clear it could pass, brought firm organized labor adherence to the Democrats even while United Mine Workers head John L. Lewis was still formally a Republican. Roosevelt also signed on to the intensely controversial "death penalty" against multi-level public utility holding companies, to the pleasure of rural Republican progressives and the consternation of conservatives (James 2000, Ch. 4; Hardeman and Bacon 1987). Urban relief policy coincided with the burgeoning migration of rural blacks from southern sharecropping to northern cities; and black voters voted largely Democratic in 1936 for the first time ever. Many who voted that year had never done so before. Poor whites, too; a major reason for the 1936 Roosevelt landslide was the jump of nearly six million more voters than 1932 at a time when American population was not growing. Over five million voted for the Roosevelt-Garner ticket (Dave Leip's 1936 compared to 1932; and Presidential Elections Since 1789, 1991, pp. 127-128).
Part of party-building came from expanding the realm of those committed to using it as a vehicle for realizing their dreams. Ideological progressives and the intelligentsia in universities and the media, got plenty of New Deal work (Brinkley 1995). From the first, President Roosevelt knew not to take policy advice mainly from traditional party leaders. Even while conceding that city machines were a fact of life he would accommodate, he sought policy-makers from elsewhere. For example, the handiwork of social security was inspired primarily by Wisconsin-based progressives with long experience in workman’s social programs (Skocpol 1992). High jobs went to loyalists. FDR denied former New York governor Al Smith a suitable New Deal post. These snubs at traditional practice infuriated Smith and many others who thought party seniority gave them special privilege, but it opened the door for a whole generation of influential thinkers and policy tinkerers to become Democrats.
The 1936 Democratic Party was practically unrecognizable to the southern-dominated party of 1926 or 1928. Federal activism went national in a period long before race replaced economic class division as the primary dividing line between the parties. In the racially apartheid South, support rose from those recognizing the enduring impact of the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority, rural electrification (REA), and agricultural price supports of southern crops. The upland South in particular became fruitful land for those seeking New Deal votes and support--a useful notion since these borderland and mountain areas had often been Republican strongholds before FDR. It nurtured many young ambitions to maturity in future public life, including the Texas Hill Country resident Lyndon Johnson who zealously sought extension of public power into the remote hills west of Austin (Caro 1982, chs. 26, 27). It did not end the old politics of race but did introduce a new dimension of loyalty and adherence to activist liberal government. So long as benefits were concentrated upon whites and not expressly for poor blacks, the New Deal could afford to be liberal.
The New Deal issued policy payoffs from activist national government for whoever showed they would sustain an active support of its officeholders. The list of its programs is impressively long in total. There are at least fourteen major New Deal Programs just from 1933 through 1935 (Feldmeth). In simplified form we get this association of faction to policy:
| faction: | policy payoffs (and exceptions): |
| urban machines | work relief, housing, patronage, contracts, no direct reform |
| organized labor | jobs, right to organize and strike, wages and hours legislation |
| blacks | food, housing, work relief; but not anti-lynching in FDR’s day |
| the white South | public electrical power, agricultural price supports |
| the progressive Midwest | curbing of public utility holding companies, agricultural price supports |
| the West | public water projects, public land use, mineral rights |
| Jews and Catholics | civil liberties, full recognition as American citizens |
| the intellectual Progressives | ideological and intellectual satisfaction, governmental positions and contracts |
This varied assortment of groups shared pragmatic adherence to the activist government--but not necessarily a full ideological commitment to its overriding principle. Interest group liberalism does not require its beneficiaries to observe principled support for all others. But a serious underlying view of government’s proper place still drove the debate over New Deal policy. Historian Alan Brinkley argues persuasively that liberalism before the 1930s largely prescribed a very limited role for government in favor of unfettered operation of free markets in accordance with market principles (free entry and exit from markets, full information for all parties to transactions, efficiency standards for public policy). After 1933 liberalism came more to mean using central government to expand rights--including “commitment to generous programs of social insurance and public welfare” (Brinkley 1995, 10). Adherents believed that such liberalism, with progressive taxation, will be an economic leveler (which it was, especially during WWII), a preventative against socialism or some other direct attack upon market capitalism (probably so), and a producer of a broadly better life for the national community (still under active review). So long as the New Deal was the crucial centerpiece of national politics, it divided the nation into opposing camps grounded largely by economic class position.
VII. The New Deal Opposition Next down; Top
Politics in democracy is not about consensus alone. It is at least equally about differences and division into opposing camps. Like the party leader and president Martin Van Buren one hundred years earlier, Roosevelt doubted he could govern for long with assent from all (Remini 1970). Even by June 1933 FDR anticipated that conservatives like Hoover would be irreconcilably angry at his abandonment of an international gold standard (Freidel 1990, 102). Other conservative renunciations soon followed. Corporate leadership and the most conservative farm organizations (specifically the American Farm Bureau Federation) went against him early and often. Conservatives and businessmen railed bitterly against the National Recovery Administration and FDR's abandonment of a national balanced budget (Freidel 1990, 138-141). This pattern accelerated with more New Deal enactments, especially in the Second New Deal's emphasis on class division in 1935. The individually wealthy were offended deeply by the progressive taxation principles first announced in 1935 and passed in varying forms over the following decade--mainly during the financial exigency of World War II. Ideological conservatives in both parties such as Herbert Hoover and former Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith condemned liberalism as economic leveling, communism, or both. And the many rabidly anti-black and anti-immigrant southerners would remain Democrats, there being no other choice at the time, but by 1937-38 would "cross the aisle" in Congress to form the famous conservative coalition with Republicans against organized labor and anything that interfered with their state’s dominion over sensitive class and race relations (Patterson 1967). And all along, the core support for the national Republican Party remained in place. Roosevelt was a liberal rather than a pure pragmatist without ideology. He remade the Democratic Party in his own mold; so the longer Roosevelt stayed in office, the more Republican the nation's white Protestant voters became (Savage 1997).
The 1932 election produced only a pre-coalition majority. Only when able leadership harnessed an ideological framework to create enduring policy did a real coalition arise. So did a new opposition. This elemental reshaping redefined who belonged where, especially in the 1936 and 1938 elections. Under the far-ranging demand of FDR for policy loyalty and One Hundred Percent New Dealers, Democrats during the decade gradually ousted their anti-New Dealers where they could be reached. Republicans became more hostile to the Progressives who through the 1920s had been a significant share of that party. This happened everywhere except the Deep South, where the monopoly Democrats evolved into an untenable mix of pro- and anti-New Dealers united only for racial segregation (Key 1949). By 1938 midterms a resurgent Republican party was largely aligned against the New Deal in Congress--even though its national conventions were to select presidential candidates in 1940 and 1944 who accepted the New Deal as permanent.
The opposition’s major return came in the congressional midterms of 1938. The same GOP written off as a dead force in 1936 gained a net 75 House seats, leaving them trailing 261 to 164 (and about even except for the South) in the House. Roosevelt tried his midterm purge of leading southern conservative Democrats such as Eugene Cox of Georgia, to no avail at all. The articulation of opposing views after six New Deal years, a renewed recession in 1937-38, a hail of criticism about imperial behavior toward the conservative Supreme Court after Roosevelt's paper-thin charade about "packing," all contributed to a drastically reduced loyalist New Dealer balance of forces from 1938 on.
The result was a Republican-Southern Democratic "conservative coalition" shutdown of nearly all New Deal initiatives. There were indeed no major domestic New Deal programs after 1938, and liberal reformers were obliged to redefine liberalism itself away from reforming capitalism and toward a civil rights orientation in subsequent years (Brinkley 1995). But six years of the existing New Deal survived and flourished. The opposition controlled Congress but not executive administration of policy. Social Security, unemployment relief, WPA jobs, Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy, federal recognition of labor unions, minimum wage and hours law, federal bank reform and deposit insurance, agricultural price subsidies, public power, antitrust vigilance, the progressive income tax--all were becoming near-permanent. The majority of citizens who identified with a party preferred the Democrats, and they saw that party as the better one to address economic crisis and social welfare problems. Newly redefined conservatism had come six full years too late to prevent a fundamental reshaping of American life, political life, and political institutions. A new and enduring political coalition tied inextricably to activist and expansive central governance was the result, and it was to last a full generation until 1964. The presidency’s powers and responsibilities grew vastly as a direct consequence. The public took on greatly expanded expectations of what an American president could and should do in office.
Barone, Michael. 1990. Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan. New York: Free Press.
Bensel, Richard Franklin. 1984. Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880-1980. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Brinkley, Alan. 1995. The End of Reform: New Deal Idealism in Recession and War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Burns, James McGregor. 1956. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Caro, Robert A. 1982. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Congressional Quarterly. 1991. Presidential Elections Since 1789,
5th ed. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.
Feldmeth, Greg D. "U.S. History Resources." URL:
New Deal
Programs at
home.earthlink.net/~gfeldmeth/chart.newdeal.html.
Freidel, Frank. 1990. Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny. Boston: Little, Brown.
Hardeman, D.B. and Donald C. Bacon. 1987. Rayburn: A Biography. Austin: Texas Monthly Press.
James, Scott C. 2000. Presidents, Parties, and the State: A Party System Perspective on Democratic Regulatory Choice, 1884-1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kernell, Samuel. 1993. Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership, 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.
Key, V.O., Jr. 1949. Southern Politics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Lawrence, David G. 1997. The Collapse of the Democratic Presidential Majority. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Leip, Dave. 1932 Election Results, 1936 Election Results, both from Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. URL: www.uselectionatlas.org/.
Leuchtenberg, William E. 1963. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks.
Leuchtenberg, William E. 1983. In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Patterson, James T. 1967. Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.
Remini, Robert V. 1970. Martin van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party. New York: W.W. Norton.
Safire, William. 1993. Safire's New Political Dictionary: The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics. New York: Random House.
Savage, Sean J. FDR's Party Leadership: Origins and Legacy. In FDR and the Modern Presidency, eds. Mark J. Rozell and William D. Pederson, pp. 119-132. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Skocpol, Theda. 1992. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Sundquist, James L. 1983. Dynamics of the Party System, rev. ed. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.
[1] An excellent recent review of party realignment literature is in David G. Lawrence, The Collapse of the Democratic Presidential Majority (1997), ch. 2, pp. 11-32.
[2] Details of presidential elections are summarized in Congressional Quarterly's Presidential Elections Since 1789, 5th edition from 1991. Greater detail for each election from cities and counties can be obtained from the America Votes series.
[3] Translation of popular national vote for presidents into Electoral College outcomes, almost always produces a higher percentage victory margin for the popular vote winner. Exceptions come from exceedingly close popular vote contests such as year 2000 between Bush and Gore (Leip's 2000 Election). Political scientists recognize this effect as the inherent byproduct of winner-take-all or unit-ruled state by state tallying of the Electoral College (which very rarely produces a split result within a state) under SMDP (single-member district plurality) election rules.
[4] And 1936 went even farther, achieving the single high point of one-party predominance in America since the two modern parties first prevailed in the 1860s. FDR won 60.8% of the popular vote and 523 to 8 in the Electoral College (Leip's 1936 Election). Even more, Democrats dominated the 75th Congress by 331 to 89 in the House (with 13 independents), and 76 to 16 in the Senate (4 independents).
Copyright©2001-2007, Russell D. Renka