Roosevelt Era Politics
April 30, 1932
Around Smith will rally the big Democratic chiefs of plutocracy — the Wall Street crowd, that always finances the various Tammanies of both parties, Republican and Democratic. These plutocratic leaders, for all their plug-hat respectability, are fundamentally responsible for the corruption that stigmatizes civil governments in American towns that pass the million mark.
Roosevelt is not sufficiently liberal to attract and to hold Bryan’s following. As a rabble-rouser he is badly infected with weasel words. He has a charming sense of balance, and when he seems to be going well as a progressive or a liberal he checks himself with a string of “althoughs”, “buts”, “on the other hands”, and “on the conteraries” which takes the heart out of Western liberals.
The West will take Roosevelt in the Democratic Convention not because it loves Roosevelt but because it hates Tammany and distrusts the plutocratic aristocracy in the Old South. So Roosevelt’s Western followers will not be a last-ditch crowd as McAdoo’s was.
The agrarian West is ready for a rabble-rouser. Roosevelt does not fill the bill, but he is the only one in sight. […]
Just now, the West wouble probably vote against the president because it wants to vote against somebody and it isn’t particular about who shall be the object of its wrath. But, given a row in the Democratic Convention, let Smith and his Tammany plutocrats defeat Roosevelt and nominate a reactionary like Ritchie, and the protest vote of the West will be divided. They have two men to vote against, and Hoover may win. He probably will.
June 10, 1936
Hoover Acclaimed in Days of Ovations
Former president Hoover arrived here today to become the center of a series of rousing demonstrations leading up to his speech tonight before the Republican convention. As a result his political stock again was put on a rising market.
Following his attack on the New Deal and, for him, the virtually unprecedented demonstration which came after he called his party members to a “Holy Crusade for freedom”, the California delegation went into session to discuss, among other things, the possibility of placing Mr. Hoover’s name before the convention for the Presidential nomination. […]
Chairman Snell tried to aquiet the crowd but could not be heard. The former President stood out on the platform, making no attempt for the moment to stop a demonstration far greater than that accorded him in the same hall when he appeared here in October, 1932, as a candidate for re-election. […]
AMr Snell finally appealed to Mr. Hoover. The former President walked to the lectern and held up his hand for silence, but the crowd would not stop even then for several minutes. It did not understand that radio time was flying fast. […]
Soon after he arrived supporters in his own delegation from Clifornia raised the new slogan: “Hoover or his choice.”
June 18, 1940
As in a wartime “blackout” started by air raid sirens supporters of most of the Republican Presidential candidates groped in some perplexity today as they sought to explain the rapidly growing sentiment in behalf of Wendell L. Willkie and to arrive at a general conclusion that he was “the man to beat” at the convention next week.
Representative Halleck of Indiana, Mr. Willkie’s only spokesman in the vanguard of delegates and campaign managers, was somewhat baffled by the wide sweep of the Willkie talk, but he was about the only one of the official or semi-official campaign chiefs on the ground who was thoroughly enjoying himself.
J Russel Sprague of New York, campaign manager for District Attorney Dewey, reached Philadelphia too late in the day to get at first hand an idea of the number of times the question, “What are you going to do about Willkie?” was being asked.
May 27, 1944
Deep down in the Wllace opposition is a contest for control of the Democratic party organization. Renomination of the Iowan would be an undeniable signal that Franklin D. Roosevelt still hopes to throw the party to its liberal wing, as revived, enlarged, and to a great extent, created during his incumbency, when he steps down from the Presidential chair. […]
The current search for a Vice Presidential candidates in the Democratic party is, frankly, more of a stop-Wallace movement than it is a “start” movement for anyone else. If the political leaders finally center on some one name, it will be more because of the feeling that they can succeed in substituting this particular one in the President’s favor than anything else. […]
They know, for instance, that he has become the symbol of the ultra-New Dealers and CIO labor in their resistance to the recent so-called “rightist” tendencies within the party and the Administration.
June 28, 1944
The change in Administration, Dewey confidently predicted, would bring “an end to one-man government in Washington.”
After Jan 20, Inaguration Day, he said, the Government would have a Cabinet of the “ablest men and women to be found in America” who would receive full delegation of the powers of their office.
He made an appeal time after time to youth – youth to win the war, youth to keep the peace.
No organization of peace can last if it is slipped through by “stealth or trickery”, he said. Making and keeping the peace was “not a task for men who specialize in dividing our people.”
“It is no task to be entrusted to stubborn men, grown old and tired and quarrelsome in office,” he said. “We learned that in 1919.”