We remember the election of 1932 not because it was a dramatically close contest. To the surprise of no one, Franklin Roosevelt routed the hapless Herbert Hoover, becoming the first Democrat to win the White House since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. The drama began years earlier when the U.S. economy began a precipitous collapse, erasing much of the nation’s wealth and annihilating the jobs of millions of working-class Americans. Hoover had no real answers to reverse the shock, but neither did anyone else.
However unfair it was to blame the Republican president for causing the Great Depression – whoever had won the 1928 election would have been blindsided by the coming collapse – Hoover’s response to forces outside his control guaranteed his defeat, for he “stewed in anxieties about the dole and endlessly lashed the Congress and the country with lectures about preserving the nation’s moral fiber, not to mention the integrity of the federal budget, by avoiding direct federal payments for unemployment relief. No issue more heavily burdened Hoover in the presidential election year of 1932,” writes historian David M. Kennedy in his unparalleled overview of the years of Depression and war (1929-1945) for the Oxford History of the United States, “Freedom From Fear.”
By the time FDR took the oath of office in March 1933, the unemployment rate stood at 25 percent. This meant one out of four American households lost their breadwinner, because few married women were in the labor force in those days. Beyond the cold statistics, one must imagine the national mood – the social and economic paralysis amid a frightening sense of insecurity as the Great Depression hurtled into another year with no end in sight. Nothing like this had ever befell the nation before. Nowadays we talk a lot about a crisis of democracy or a crisis of capitalism. The Great Depression truly was a crisis.
As Kennedy discussed in Tuesday’s episode of the podcast, Roosevelt’s New Deal did not solve the Great Depression, either. That is, if you judge it by the measurement of economic recovery. The jobless rate averaged 17 percent annually through the 1930s. Some New Deal initiatives utterly failed to affect substantial recovery and/or were struck down by the Supreme Court, such as the National Industrial Recovery Act.
What Roosevelt and his New Dealers did accomplish – and why the 1932 election reordered American political and economic life for a generation thereafter – can be summed up in a single word: security – as Kennedy writes on p. 365 of his Pulitzer Prize-winning tome.
“Security for vulnerable individuals, to be sure, as Roosevelt famously urged in his campaign for the Social Security Act of 1935, but security for capitalists and consumers, for workers and employers, for corporations and farms and homeowners and bankers and builders as well,” Kennedy contends.
Security and a modicum of predictability to soften the rough edges of life in capitalist America – these were the aims of the new set of institutional arrangements created by the New Deal. And these are what matter today. As my esteemed podcast guest says, we can judge the New Deal by what endures to this day, more so than the experimental programs and tinkering policies that never made it out of the 1930s. Social Security, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, the right to collectively bargain and the emergence of labor unions for the unskilled, transparency in the financial markets, the shoring up of the banking system – quite a legislative legacy, indeed.
The election of 1932 “was a major turning point or inflection point in the historical evolution of the American political system, architecture, constellation of forces, and so on. It inaugurated a long period of Democratic dominance of the federal government, both of the presidency and both chambers of Congress,” Kennedy says in our conversation. Because Roosevelt had supermajorities in the House and Senate, it enabled legislation to “change the landscape of American social and economic life for generations. We are still living with the legacies of the consequences of that election.”
As important as individual programs such as Social Security have been to generations of Americans, the New Deal did something more. It fostered confidence in the federal government’s ability to make a positive difference in people’s lives – confidence in U.S. institutions. Today, some forty years after President Ronald Reagan declared that the government is the problem, rather than the solution to our problems, public trust in government is at a miserable low. A subject for a different episode, yes?
David M. Kennedy is one of my favorite historians, and “Freedom From Fear” one of my favorite books. This episode about 1932 was the latest in my monthly series on important elections in American history. Here are the other installments:
The elections of 1860 and 1864 with Sean Wilentz and James Oakes.
The election of 1992 with Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel.
Engel and Suri also tackled the election of 1980, and they will return next month for the election of 2000! Who won Florida??
Myanmar on the brink
Nowadays, politicians and commentators constantly invoke the fate of democracy and the rules-based order. They point to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine as one major flashpoint that threatens global stability. A civil war in Southeast Asia where democracy and self-determination are at stake receives far less attention in the U.S. than ongoing conflicts such as Israel-Palestine.
In Thursday’s episode of History As It Happens, the former chief of mission in Myanmar (formerly Burma) Priscilla Clapp, now a senior advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace after a 30-year career at the State Department, delved into the decades of military rule and democratic activism that have led to the current crisis: a brutal civil war sparked by the toppling of a democratically-elected government in 2021.
We wrapped up the episode by discussing Clapp’s work at USIP investigating the scam industry in Southeast Asia – a transnational fraud factory run by criminal networks in China, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia that is bilking Americans out of billions of dollars. Read the report here.
Related, I recommend the Crisis Group’s Richard Horsey’s essay (no paywall) in Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, about the civil war in Myanmar.
What’s next?
Over the next two to three weeks I intend to discuss:
* Sergey Radchenko’s new book on Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War, “To Run the World.” I will make sure to share my positive review of this remarkable book as soon as it is published in The Washington Times.
* The Palestinians and international law with Victor Kattan of the University of Nottingham. Why has the law and “rules-based order” failed to protect Palestinians’ national aspirations or even free them from living under military occupation since 1967?
* The Chennault Affair with the master of the Watergate and other presidential audio tapes, Ken Hughes. His 2014 book “Chasing Shadows” is illuminating. Hughes is a historical detective.
* What if the British had won the Revolutionary War? My guest will be Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, the author of “The Men Who Lost America.” This episode will drop on July 4.
And more timely historical conversations to come! We’re nearly halfway through 2024. Can you believe it?