Learning Objectives
- Identify the characteristics that made Franklin Roosevelt a desirable presidential candidate
- Describe the events and circumstances surrounding the 1932 presidential election
Figure 1. Major political events between 1932 and 1938.
Few presidential elections in modern American history have been more consequential than the Election of 1932. The United States was struggling through the third year of the Depression, and exasperated voters overthrew Hoover in a landslide for the Democratic governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Franklin Roosevelt’s Background
Roosevelt came from a privileged background in New York’s Hudson River Valley (his distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, became president while Franklin was at Harvard) and embarked on a slow but steady ascent through state and national politics. In 1913, he was appointed assistant secretary of the navy, a position he held during the defense emergency of World War I. During his rise, in the summer of 1921, Roosevelt suffered a sudden bout of lower-body pain and paralysis. He was diagnosed with polio— a virus that attacks the central nervous system. The disease left him a person with paraplegia, but, encouraged and assisted by his wife, Eleanor, Roosevelt sought therapeutic treatment and maintained sufficient political connections to reenter politics.
Photographs of Roosevelt
Figure 2. President Roosevelt in his wheelchair on the porch at Top Cottage in Hyde Park, NY, with Ruthie Bie and Fala. February 1941.
While the Roosevelts were vacationing at Campobello Island in August 1921, Franklin fell ill. His main symptoms were fever, symmetric, ascending paralysis, facial paralysis; bowel and bladder dysfunction; numbness and hyperesthesia; and a descending pattern of recovery. Roosevelt was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down. He was diagnosed with poliomyelitis at the time, but his symptoms are now believed to be more consistent with Guillain–Barré syndrome – an autoimmune neuropathy that Roosevelt’s doctors failed to consider as a diagnostic possibility.
Figure 3. Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers a campaign speech in Topeka, Kansas. September 14, 1932.
Continuing Political Life Through Illness
Though his mother favored his retirement from public life, Roosevelt, his wife, and Roosevelt’s close friend and adviser, Louis Howe, were all determined that he continue his political career. He convinced many people that he was improving, which he believed to be essential, before running for public office again. He laboriously taught himself to walk short distances while wearing iron braces on his hips and legs by swiveling his torso and supporting himself with a cane. He was careful never to be seen using his wheelchair in public, and great care was taken to prevent any portrayal in the press that would highlight his disability. However, his disability was well known before and during his presidency and became a significant part of his image. He usually stood upright in public, supported on one side by an aide or one of his sons.
Beginning in 1925, Roosevelt spent most of his time in the Southern United States, at first on his houseboat, the Larooco. Intrigued by the potential benefits of hydrotherapy, he established a rehabilitation center at Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1926. To create the rehabilitation center, he assembled a staff of physical therapists and used most of his inheritance to purchase the Merriweather Inn. In 1938, he founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, leading to the development of polio vaccines.
Roosevelt Elected New York Governor
In 1928, Roosevelt won the election for governor of New York. He oversaw the rise of the Depression and drew from the tradition of American progressivism to address the economic crisis. He explained to the state assembly in 1931 that the situation demanded a government response “not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty.” As governor, he established the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), supplying public work jobs at the prevailing wage and in-kind aid—food, shelter, and clothes—to those unable to afford it. Soon the TERA was providing work and relief to ten percent of the state’s families.[1] Roosevelt relied on many like-minded advisors. Frances Perkins, for example, the commissioner of the state’s labor department, successfully advocated pioneering legislation that enhanced workplace safety and reduced the use of child labor in factories. Perkins later accompanied Roosevelt to Washington and served as the nation’s first female secretary of labor.[2]
While Franklin Roosevelt was part of the political establishment and the wealthy elite, he did not want to be perceived that way in the 1932 presidential campaign. Roosevelt felt the country needed sweeping change, and he ran a campaign to convince the American people that he could deliver that change. It was not the specifics of his campaign promises that were different; in fact, he gave very few details and likely did not yet have a clear idea of how he would raise the country out of the Great Depression. But he campaigned tirelessly, talking to thousands of people, appearing at his party’s national convention, and striving to show the public that he was a different breed of politician. As Hoover grew more morose and physically unwell in the face of the campaign, Roosevelt thrived. He was elected in a landslide by a country ready for the change he had promised.
The Presidential Election of 1932
The early years of the Depression were catastrophic. The crisis, far from relenting, deepened each year. Unemployment peaked at 25 percent in 1932. With no end in sight, private firms crippled, and charities overwhelmed by the crisis, Americans looked to their government as the last barrier against starvation, hopelessness, and perpetual poverty.
By the 1932 presidential election, Hoover’s popularity was at an all-time low. Despite his efforts to address many Americans’ hardships, his inadequate response to the Great Depression left Americans angry and ready for change. Though born to wealth and educated at the best schools, Franklin Roosevelt offered the change people sought. His experience in politics included a seat in the New York State legislature, a vice-presidential nomination, and a stint as governor of New York. During the latter, he introduced many state-level reforms that later formed the basis of his New Deal and worked with several advisors who later formed the Brains Trust that advised his federal agenda.
Figure 4. Franklin Roosevelt brought a new feeling of optimism and possibility to a country beaten down by hardship. His enthusiasm was the counterpoint to Herbert Hoover’s discouraging last year in office.
Roosevelt exuded confidence, which the American public desperately wished to see in their leader. Roosevelt understood that the public sympathized with his ailment and developed a genuine empathy for public suffering due to his illness. However, he never wanted to be photographed in his wheelchair or appear infirm for fear that the public’s sympathy would transform into concern over his physical ability to discharge the duties of the Oval Office.
Restoring the American Public’s Faith in the Government
Roosevelt also recognized the need to convey to the voting public that he was not simply another member of the political aristocracy. Americans were experiencing the country’s most severe economic challenges to date. It is no surprise that they began to question some of the fundamental principles of capitalism and democracy. Roosevelt sought to calm those fears and to assure the American people that he had creative solutions to address the nation’s problems while restoring public confidence in fundamental American values. As a result, he not only was the first presidential candidate to appear in person at a national political convention to accept his party’s nomination but also flew there through terrible weather from New York to Chicago to do so—a risky venture in what was still the early stages of flight as public transportation. At the Democratic National Convention in 1932, he coined the famous phrase: “I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.” The New Deal did not yet exist, but to the American people, any optimistic response to the Great Depression was welcome.
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Hoover Underestimates his Opponent
Hoover assumed at first that Roosevelt would be easy to defeat, confident that he could never carry the eastern states and the business vote. He was sorely mistaken. Everywhere he went, Hoover was met with antagonism; anti-Hoover signs and protests were the norm. Hoover’s public persona declined rapidly. Many news accounts reported that he seemed physically unwell, with an ashen face and shaking hands. Often, he appeared as though he would faint, and an aide constantly remained nearby with a chair in case he fell. In contrast, Roosevelt thrived on the campaign. He commented, “I have looked into the faces of thousands of Americans, and they have the frightened look of lost children.”
Roosevelt proposed jobs programs, public work projects, higher wages, shorter hours, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, farm subsidies, banking regulations, and lower tariffs. Hoover warned that such a program represented “the total abandonment of every principle upon which this government and the American system is founded.” He cautioned that it reeked of European communism and that “the so-called new deals would destroy the very foundations of the American system of life.”[3]Americans didn’t buy it.
Roosevelt Elected President
November’s election results were never really in question: With three million more people voting than in 1928, Roosevelt won by a popular count of twenty-three million to fifteen million. He carried all but six states while winning over 57 percent of the popular vote and won more counties than any previous candidate in American history. Whether they voted due to animosity towards Hoover for his relative inactivity or out of hope for what Roosevelt would accomplish, the American public committed themselves to a new vision. Historians identify this election as the beginning of a new Democratic coalition, bringing together African Americans, other ethnic minorities, and organized labor as a voting bloc upon whom the party would rely for many of its electoral victories over the next fifty years.
Figure 5. Electoral College Map of the 1932 Election
Unlike some European nations where similar challenges caused democratic constitutions to crumble and give way to radical ideologies and authoritarian governments, the Roosevelt administration changed the nation’s economic fortunes with reforms, preserved the constitution, and expanded rather than limited the reach of democratic principles into the market economy. As a result, radical alternatives, such as the fascist movement or Communist Party, remained on the margins of the nation’s political culture.
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Glossary
election of 1932: the presidential election between Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt which saw unprecedented voter turnout and resulted in Roosevelt’s election to office by a landslide
polio: a virus that attacks the central nervous system that leads to long-term fatigue, chronic muscle, and joint pain, and decreased muscular endurance
- Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 144–146. ↵
- Biographies of Roosevelt include Kenneth C. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny: 1882–1928 (New York: Rand, 1972); and Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007). ↵
- Eric Rauchway, “The New Deal Was on the Ballot in 1932,” Modern American History 2, no. 2 (2019), 202–203. ↵