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Presidential Election of 1936

SEVEN YEARS AFTER the onset of the Great Depression, the presidential election of 1936 proved an important turning-point in American electoral politics. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal had generated unprecedented growth in the American welfare state. With agencies like the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Social Security Administration (SSA), the New Deal provided unprecedented relief and employment to millions of struggling Americans. During his first term in office, Roosevelt also created the National Labor board, which supported labor unions' rights in collective bargaining. As these policies illustrate, Roosevelt's theory of the role of government could be characterized as one that emphasizes an activist government. Roosevelt's support for big government appealed to some Americans, while repelling others. The election of 1936 determined the future of the American welfare state, serving as an indicator of Americans' preferences for the role of government.

The Primary Elections

Incumbent president Franklin Roosevelt and his vice president, John Nance Garner of Texas, once again became the Democratic Party's nominees. Roosevelt had little noteworthy opposition in the primary election. His most significant challenger was New York's Henry Breckenridge. Breckenridge, a lawyer, was a staunch opponent of the New Deal. He challenged Roosevelt in four primaries, losing each by a substantial margin. At the national Democratic convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the delegates unanimously re-nominated the president and vice president. Interestingly, Roosevelt's acceptance of the Democratic nomination that year represents the first occasion in American political history that a president personally accepted his party's nomination.

The Republican primary proved more competitive than the Democratic primary. Kansas Governor Alfred “Alf” Landon and Iowa U.S. Senator William E. Borah were the primary contenders for the nomination. In addition to these two candidates, other potential nominees included Illinois newspaperman William Franklin Knox and future Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was then a county district attorney in California. Ultimately, Landon would secure the presidential nomination, and Knox would run as the Republican nominee for vice president.

Third-party candidates in the election of 1936 included the Union Party's William Lemke, Norman Thomas on the Socialist Party ticket, and Earl Browder on the Communist Party ticket. Senator Huey Long, a Democrat from Louisiana, was expected to run for president as a third-party nominee with a “Share Our Wealth” platform; however, Long was assassinated in the fall of 1935.

The General Election

The 1936 election represented unprecedented partisan division. As William Leuchtenburg notes,

the Democratic party, the historic defender of states' rights, had become an instrument of the Welfare State, while the Republican Party, the traditional advocate of a strong national union, now championed a weak central government.

The bulk of the issues dividing the parties pertained to their differing conceptualizations of the appropriate role of the federal government. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party represented firm support for an activist government. From this perspective, big government was the solution to America's problems. Roosevelt effectively painted himself as the opponent of big business and the wealthy, appealing particularly to the urban working-class and to ethnic minorities. His condemnation of a greedy, hostile class of business elites, who he framed as aggressive opponents to the New Deal, comprised a central campaign theme during this election year. On the other side of this debate, Landon and the Republican Party demanded that federal government temper its involvement in American life. Critics of Roosevelt's activist approach to governing advocated a hands-off, free market approach. As such, in 1936, large companies were interested in small government and in an unfettered free market, and directed tremendous financial resources toward the Republican candidates.

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