History and the Fall Election

Nicolaus Mills: FDR and the Fall Election

AS THE 1936 presidential election approached, Republicans were desperate to defeat Franklin Roosevelt and undermine the new Social Security legislation Congress had passed in 1935. The Republicans failed in the campaign of disinformation that they launched, but what they did and how Roosevelt fought back to win a second term carries with it important lessons for the Obama administration and the 2010 midterms.

The 1936 story, told in detail in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s, “The Age of Roosevelt,” began in October when a group of Detroit industrialists worked out an anti-Social Security campaign that the Republican National Committee quickly adopted. Two weeks before the election, signs began appearing in plants with the message, “You’re sentenced to a weekly pay reduction for all your working life. You’ll have to serve the sentence unless you help reverse it November 3.” On opening their pay envelopes workers were told, “Effective January, 1937, we are compelled by a Roosevelt ‘New Deal’ law to make a 1 percent deduction from your wages and turn it over to the government. . . . You might get this money back . . . but only if Congress decides to make the appropriation for this purpose. There is NO guarantee. Decide before November 3—election day—whether or not you wish to take these chances.”

Nothing was said about the employers’ contributions to Social Security or how the system would really work, but as the election grew nearer, Republicans were sure that they had an issue that would undermine labor’s support for Roosevelt. Republican candidate Alf Landon, who in September had declared that Social Security was “unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted, and wastefully financed,” upped the stakes still further by insisting the federal government had no way of keeping track of Social Security recipients. “Are their photographs going to be kept on file in a Washington office? Or are they going to have identification tags put around their necks?” he asked.

The attack on Social Security infuriated Roosevelt, and on October 31, in a campaign speech at Madison Square Garden, he took off the gloves. “Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America’s working people,” the president declared. The Republican disinformation campaign against Social Security was, FDR believed very different from politics as usual. When his opponents implied that Social Security would be stolen from its intended recipients, they were, he argued, guilty of more than deceit. “They attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself,” the president declared.

There was, Roosevelt realized, no turning the other cheek in the face of such political venom, and he did not hesitate to categorize his foes as those who believed in “financial monopoly, speculation, and reckless banking” before concluding, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Roosevelt’s counterattack, in combination with his New Deal reforms, paid off. Even before his speech, he was ahead in the Gallup and Roper polls. Only the Literary Digest forecast a Landon victory. But Roosevelt’s speech and his willingness to take on the anti-Social Security forces helped turn his expected victory into a route. He won more than 60 percent of the popular vote, defeating Landon 27,747,636 to 16,679,543 and carrying every state in the nation except Maine and Vermont.

It was 16 years before the Republicans regained the White House, and they did so during the prosperous 1950s only by nominating a war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, who had no quarrel with Social Security.

PRESIDENT OBAMA is not by nature given to Roosevelt-like rhetoric, and the current Great Recession is a far cry from the Great Depression of the 1930s. But as the government administers a health care program that in a comparatively short time will help people with preexisting conditions get insurance, allow children to stay on their parents’ health plan until they are 26, and provide a rebate to Medicare users whose initial drug benefits run out, President Obama—like President Roosevelt—will be in a position to reach out to voters whose lives have been changed for the better. Conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh (“I and most Americans do not believe President Obama is trying to do what’s best for the country”) are sure to continue demonizing the president, but they are going to have a hard time persuading voters that they will be better off if health care goes back to the way it was. Give-back campaigns are not traditionally winners, especially during hard times.

In this context President Obama’s greatest enemy—greater than his Tea Party opponents or those Republicans who have tied their Congressional candidacies to repealing the new health care bill—will be his celebrated cool and a reluctance to remind voters as passionately as FDR did in 1936, “Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side.”

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and co-author with Michael Walzer of Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq.

(Homepage photo: FDR Fireside Chat / Wikimedia Commons)