Do Elections Matter?

Economics Without The B.S.**: Do Elections Matter?

[**  Double entendre intended.]

The Election That Wasn’t???

The Election of 1936 and the Reaffirmation of the New Deal

There are only a few elections in American history that really make a change, a change that fundamentally alters the course of history and the American way of life.

The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 brought in an egalitarian spirit and the mythology of the ‘Common Man’ after the previous presidents established the bedrock of the Founding Fathers – a Common Man identity that we still cling to today.  The election of 1860 initiates a great Civil War with the election of Abraham Lincoln and as a result of the consequences brings about a new birth of freedom and national identification and reconciliation that replaces partisan sectionalism.

The election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 brought in the New Deal – re-defining a more activist role for the Federal Government that we are still under the influence of today after eighty years.  The role of the Federal Government was changed during the first days of the New Deal to integrate the industrial, commercial, and agricultural sectors of the economy into a national network and to bring the advantages (e.g., water resources, electricity, better transportation, farming techniques taught at land-grant colleges, etc.) of urbanized centers to rural, isolated areas of the country.  [See the post for Congressman Wright Patman of East Texas.]

Some people attribute this insight on FDR’s part to his experience in the 1920’s traveling (by land) from the Hudson Valley of New York to the Appalachian hills of Warm Springs, Georgia.  Warm Springs was where he spent his time recovering from polio and had to learn all over again how to be somewhat self-sufficient while overcoming a mishap that was not of his own making.  While at Warm Springs he would drive out to the countryside and visit farmers and sharecroppers and he could compare this to other agricultural enterprises in the county.
          The other big change in the role of the Federal Government occurred at the advent of WWII.  And that was disentangling America from its isolationist past and integrating America into world affairs.  It was an attempt to try and spread an American practice of self-government where a legislative body would be the arena for partisan factionalism to evolve into peaceful political compromise rather than having the differences spill over to where the streets became the battleground for one side to triumph over another.  Does this sound familiar?  We are still at it seventy years later; but, unlike our experience after WWI, we have never returned to our isolationist past.
          But, rather than pick the election of 1932 as being crucial, I would point to the re-election of FDR in 1936 as the key election that cements the legacy of the New Deal into the framework of American society.  I point to this because over the recent decades there is an attempt by the Right Wing and Libertarians to give a revisionist view of this period and its influence.  Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, and Bill Buckley, just to name a few, spent many decades mischaracterizing the New Deal influence and now we have Amity Shlaes and George Nash writing several books doing the same.  First, let’s examine what led up to the election of 1932.

During the whole decade of the 1920’s the Republicans controlled not only the Presidency but also both the Senate and House of Representatives.  This did not change until after the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which resulted.  In the off-year election of 1930, the Democrats got control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans barely hung on to control of the Senate by just one vote.  In the main election of 1932 , it was a Democratic Party sweep – the Presidency and both houses of the Congress, by wide margins in each.

During FDR’s first term he initiated banking reforms, public works projects, the TVA and rural electrification projects, and had a very productive first 100 Days with major legislative accomplishments.  His main program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), was eventually declared unconstitutional by the second term.  Did it get us out of the Depression?  NO!  But it helped and showed an administration that was doing something from the get-go and not waiting for an eventual economic recovery.

In the off-year election of 1934, the Democrats increased their margins in controlling both houses of the Congress.  In the election of 1936, in the midst of the Depression with only a little improvement over the past four years, a re-election for FDR and re-affirmation of his first term, it was a Democratic Party wipe-out of the Republican Party.  Not only did FDR defeat Alf Landon by taking just over 60% of the popular vote -- Landon ran not on Hoover’s platform, but as a Populist from the Great Plains; but, the Democrats increased their hold on both houses of the Congress with the Republicans having less than 20 Senators out of a total of 96.

To put this in perspective with other landslide re-elections since:

(1)  If you look at LBJ’s victory over Goldwater 1964 as a re-election of the Kennedy Program, the Democrats had a sweep but their margins in Congress were not as great as FDR’s in 1936.

(2)  Nixon in 1972 could take over 60% of the popular vote but had no coat-tails as the Democrats retained control in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

(3)  Reagan in 1984 took over 60% of the popular vote; but, had no coat-tails as the Republicans lost a couple of seats in the Senate while gaining a few seats in the House but the Democrats still maintained control.

In short, FDR had coat-tails that swept in other Democrats with him by even wider margins than they had before; and, we have not seen this one-sided an election since.

          Now you could make an argument that people do not always know what they are voting for.  And in 1932, when people voted for FDR they knew it would be a New Deal, but they didn’t know, or care, what that was as long as it wasn’t Hoover.  People felt abandoned by the big corporations and looked to the Federal  Government to step in and do anything.  After all, the major corporations hardly had one quarterly loss during the whole period of the Great Depression while Main Street and Small Town America suffered.  From the last couple of years of the Hoover Administration to the first year of FDR's Administration, the country experienced a deflationary spiral of 25% and a GDP that was half of what it was during the Roaring 20's.  But, by 1936, after four years of FDR and the New Deal, people had some idea of what they were in for and this was their chance to ‘APPROVE’ or ‘REJECT’ the previous four years.  The results were so one-sided that the Republicans did not get control of another branch of the Federal Government until the 1946 election.

So, how do we account for this re-interpretation of history by Amity Shlaes and her cohorts?   As one-sided as all of these elections are, there is still almost 40% who did not vote for the victor – FDR, LBJ, Nixon, or Reagan.  That is still a sizeable minority that has to be dealt with even while proponents move forward with implementing their programs.  Try as they might, the Republicans have never been able to un-do the New Deal programs or the influence of the role of the Federal Government in our modern democracy.  The intellectual elite can re-interpret with their revisionist history, but there is still plenty of foundation left in the New Deal legacy for them to chip away at.  A foundation that was embedded into the American fabric eighty years ago.

The re-election of 1936, and re-affirmation of the New Deal, there has never been another election like it since!