[To say that the
2020 presidential election will be a pivotal one in American history is to
significantly under-state the case. But while in some clear ways this moment
feels singular, this is of course far from our only such crucial election. So
this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a special
weekend post on this year’s results.]
On a frustrating
undercurrent to a landslide election, and why the positives remain nonetheless.
As I’ve
mentioned a couple of times, I’m writing and scheduling this week’s blog posts
(other than the weekend post on this year’s election results, of course) in the
summer, so I can only speculate about how they might relate to the eventual
results of the 2020 presidential election. But it’s certainly fair to say that
I hope the 1932 presidential election—in
which a deeply divisive and unpopular Republican incumbent (Herbert Hoover) closely
linked to an unfolding national and global crisis (the Great Depression) was
soundly defeated (472 electoral votes to 59, and a popular vote triumph of more
than 7 million votes, 22.8 million to 15.7 million) by his Democratic challenger
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt)—might serve as a parallel to 2020. History doesn’t
repeat itself, but it does rhyme (as someone famous, although probably not
Mark Twain, put it), and as of this July moment at least 2020 and 1932 feel
like they have the possibility to become a pleasantly rhyming couplet indeed.
One thing that
hasn’t happened as of my writing this post is Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s
choice of his Vice Presidential running mate. I’ve seen a good bit of debate
over whether and in what ways that choice can influence an election’s results,
but of course whether it actually does or not, the choice is often made due to
electoral concerns. That was most definitely the case in 1932, when the more
liberal New Yorker Roosevelt chose as his
running mate a more conservative politician from a very different region
(and one who had been seeking the 1932 nomination himself before Roosevelt
secured it): Speaker of the House John
Nance Garner, a Southern Democrat from Texas. Garner’s specific roles and
duties as VP during Roosevelt’s first two terms remain uncertain (when
Roosevelt declared his intention to run for a 3rd term in 1940 Garner
left the administration and unsuccessfully opposed him), but to my mind it’s
impossible to separate this choice of Roosevelt’s from the frustrating reality
of the Roosevelt administration’s and the New
Deal’s consistent appeasement of Southern (often white supremacist)
Democrats at the expense of Americans of color. This wasn’t as bad as Lincoln
choosing Andrew Johnson in 1864 (fortunately FDR didn’t die in office while
Garner was VP, for one important difference), but I’d put it in that conversation.
So we can’t
remember the 1932 election without factoring Garner in, just like we can’t
analyze the New Deal’s inspiring programs and positive effects separately from
those white supremacist elements. But while imagining counter-factuals in which
Roosevelt chooses a different VP and pursues a different course for passing the
New Deal has some value (especially in forcing us to remember those aspects of
his campaign and administration), those are far from the most likely
alternative histories; much more likely, as is the case with any election, is
the election going a different way, Hoover winning a second term, at least the
next four years of Depression-era America being driven by the same presidential
administration and its allies. None of us know for sure what that would have
looked like or meant, but the lessons of Hoover’s four years in office provide
some guidance, and I think it’s fair to say that things would have gone much,
much worse than they did under Roosevelt. Critical patriotism (the subject of
my soon
to be released book!) requires engaging with our most frustrating
histories, but it also means not throwing out the good because it isn’t perfect—and
the result of the 1932 presidential election was very good indeed.
Last election
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other pivotal elections you’d highlight?
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