MM#341--Pivotal Tuesdays: The Election of 1932

Transcript

WEBVTT

00:00:07.612 --> 00:00:20.788
Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life.

00:00:20.788 --> 00:00:24.850
Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

00:00:30.740 --> 00:00:41.005
Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute and to another episode that we are calling Pivotal Tuesdays.

00:00:41.005 --> 00:00:53.515
A couple of weeks ago we introduced this Pivotal Tuesdays framework and series where we are covering the pivotal elections in the 20th century, namely the elections of 1912, 1932, 1968, and 1980.

00:00:53.515 --> 00:01:04.954
Last week we covered the 1912 election and the legacy of Woodrow Wilson that finally, finally, is being brought forth as the radical that Wilson was.

00:01:04.954 --> 00:01:20.495
This week we're going to be covering the 1932 election in detail and let me also mention here that we have a twist to this whole series to make it absolutely worth your time.

00:01:20.495 --> 00:01:28.546
As I've said here before from this microphone, this will not be a conventional liberal reading of history.

00:01:28.546 --> 00:01:32.280
This will not be your regular high school reading of history.

00:01:32.280 --> 00:01:40.843
We have all suffered greatly through those government brainwashing classrooms, especially in our history classes.

00:01:40.843 --> 00:01:59.829
So to make this most especially worth your time, we are going to compare the conventional liberal take on the 1932 election and its after effects and then we're going to look at what conservatives say about the same election and its legacy.

00:01:59.829 --> 00:02:15.674
Stephen Hayward is our conservative historian with his book Politically Incorrect Book of Presidents, part Two, and Margaret O'Meara is our conventional standard liberal historian with her book Pivotal Tuesdays.

00:02:17.782 --> 00:02:29.324
So, with that reintroduction of our weekly Pivotal Tuesday series, let's begin our journey with this question what happened in the 1932 election?

00:02:29.324 --> 00:02:32.352
And what happened was?

00:02:32.352 --> 00:02:35.579
It was held on November 8th 1932.

00:02:35.579 --> 00:02:40.735
It is, I agree with Margaret Amera, a pivotal election in American political history.

00:02:40.735 --> 00:02:56.368
It occurred against the backdrop of the Great Depression, which was a period of severe economic distress that began with the stock market crash in 1929, and it led to widespread unemployment, poverty and social upheaval.

00:02:56.368 --> 00:03:01.604
Our key candidates in this election was Franklin Roosevelt, for the Democratic Party.

00:03:01.604 --> 00:03:05.231
Roosevelt was the governor of New York at the time.

00:03:05.231 --> 00:03:07.042
He was the Democratic candidate.

00:03:07.042 --> 00:03:15.329
He campaigned on a platform promising a new deal for the American people aimed at economic recovery and reform.

00:03:15.329 --> 00:03:21.343
His running mate was John Nance Garner, speaker of the House from Texas.

00:03:21.343 --> 00:03:24.930
Herbert Hoover ran for the Republican side.

00:03:24.930 --> 00:03:28.542
He was the incumbent president and he was seeking reelection.

00:03:28.643 --> 00:03:36.627
Hoover's administration was widely criticized for its handling of the Great Depression and, from a conservative point of view we agree.

00:03:36.627 --> 00:03:46.693
He did everything that was terrible, that he should not have done, and his policies were seen as ineffective in addressing the economic crisis.

00:03:46.693 --> 00:03:50.586
His vice president running mate was Charles Curtis.

00:03:50.586 --> 00:04:01.080
Like we said, the election took place during the Great Depression, which had a profound impact on the whole political landscape at the time.

00:04:01.080 --> 00:04:14.400
Hoover's inability to reverse the economic downturn, and then his perceived insensitivity to the suffering of ordinary Americans, severely damaged his popularity.

00:04:14.400 --> 00:04:23.651
In contrast, roosevelt's message of hope and change resonated with the populace, desperate for relief and recovery.

00:04:23.651 --> 00:04:36.670
The central campaign issue was the Great Depression, and Roosevelt criticized Hoover's policies and promised a new approach to tackle the economic crises.

00:04:36.670 --> 00:04:40.711
He did this mainly through his New Deal programs.

00:04:40.711 --> 00:04:46.250
Like we said, it provided relief and recovery and reform.

00:04:46.250 --> 00:05:06.286
Now, an interesting side note here that we're going to quote from Margaret Amera is how the culture changed underneath both candidates, and this is where you have to give a nod to Roosevelt, because he understood what was happening in the culture.

00:05:06.286 --> 00:05:08.528
Let's go to the book for this first pull quote.

00:05:10.821 --> 00:05:21.716
On April 7th, roosevelt sent out a political shockwave with a 10-minute radio address authored by one of his key brain trusters, raymond Moley.

00:05:21.716 --> 00:05:35.132
Speaking to a national radio audience, he called for bold plans that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

00:05:35.132 --> 00:05:41.389
For all of its emotional renaissance and populist audacity.

00:05:41.389 --> 00:05:48.922
Fdr's forgotten man speech did not have many specifics about how a plan might be implemented.

00:05:48.922 --> 00:05:58.507
Instead he was running on an idea that a beleaguered nation needed to test an array of new approaches and see if they worked.

00:05:58.507 --> 00:06:09.432
In a May speech in Atlanta he said the country needs and unless I make a mistake it's temper the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.

00:06:09.432 --> 00:06:20.800
It is common sense to try to take a method and try it.

00:06:20.800 --> 00:06:22.362
If it fails, omit it and try another, but above all try something.

00:06:22.382 --> 00:06:35.413
In a modern age of media saturation and dwindling attention spans, it is tempting to presume that campaigns of long ago were weighty, substantive affairs, all about policy details.

00:06:35.413 --> 00:06:37.896
Substance over style.

00:06:37.896 --> 00:06:42.791
They weren't.

00:06:42.791 --> 00:06:51.627
And again that quote comes to us from our book Pivot Tuesdays by our liberal historian Margaret O'Mara, and I agree with her.

00:06:51.627 --> 00:06:55.276
Fdr was very effective on the campaign trail.

00:06:55.276 --> 00:06:58.002
He used radio very, very persuasively.

00:06:58.002 --> 00:07:03.060
And the interesting thing is this was not the first time radio was used in politics.

00:07:03.060 --> 00:07:07.649
Calvin Coolidge would use radio for the first time way back in 1923.

00:07:07.649 --> 00:07:14.367
And Herbert Hoover, who preceded FDR, used radio for campaign addresses and formal announcements.

00:07:14.367 --> 00:07:21.665
But the key is, roosevelt made his addresses conversational, which was quite effective at the time.

00:07:23.648 --> 00:07:52.334
Now this campaign unfolded, with Hoover trying to defend his record and argued that Roosevelt's policies would worsen the situation, but his message failed to gain traction with the electorate and ultimately the results were this the 1932 election resulted in a landslide victory for FDR he received 472 electoral votes, while Hoover only garnered 59.

00:07:52.334 --> 00:08:08.237
Roosevelt secured approximately 22.8 million, or 57.4% of the total, compared to Hoover's 15.8 million, or 39.7%.

00:08:08.237 --> 00:08:20.949
Essentially, a shellacking, roosevelt carried every state outside of the Northeast, highlighting the widespread support for his candidacy across the country.

00:08:20.949 --> 00:08:28.341
Now the significance is it marked a significant realignment in American politics.

00:08:28.341 --> 00:08:42.267
It ended the Republican dominance that had persisted since the Civil War, except for two terms, each one by Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, and it began the fifth party system.

00:08:42.527 --> 00:08:58.522
Roosevelt's fifth party system characterized by democratic dominance and establishment of the New Deal coalition, which included many diverse groups such as labor unions, urban voters, ethnic minorities and southern whites.

00:08:58.522 --> 00:09:15.061
And Roosevelt's New Deal policies led to unprecedented expansion of federal government involvement in the economy, social welfare programs, and it set the stage for future government interventions.

00:09:15.061 --> 00:09:25.336
It was a dramatic, dramatic expansion of the federal government and it made the 1932 election one of the most consequential in US history.

00:09:25.336 --> 00:09:29.264
And it made the 1932 election one of the most consequential in US history.

00:09:29.264 --> 00:09:43.094
Now one important fact to understand as we go through these Roosevelt's New Deal coalition was incredibly important and crucial because for the next 40 to 50 years that coalition would remain intact.

00:09:43.645 --> 00:09:52.488
The Republicans weren't able to pick off any of those coalitions or any part of the coalition Now.

00:09:52.488 --> 00:09:57.785
The coalition was made up of a diverse assembly of various interest groups and voting blocs.

00:09:57.785 --> 00:10:00.211
Number one they had labor unions.

00:10:00.211 --> 00:10:11.755
Workers and union members who benefited from labor-friendly policies and job creation programs under the New Deal began to favor Roosevelt Blue-collar workers.

00:10:11.755 --> 00:10:30.375
These industrial workers who found employment through the New Deal projects, farmers who were beneficiaries of agricultural support programs, racial and ethnic minorities, african Americans, jews and Catholics and other minority groups who receive support through various New Deal initiatives.

00:10:30.375 --> 00:10:39.633
This is also where we see the African Americans absolutely loyal to Lincoln, going back to the GOP all the way to the Civil War.

00:10:39.633 --> 00:10:57.019
African Americans begin to get peeled off in great numbers and there also began to be a migration from the South to the North into big cities, african-americans naturally wanting to escape the Jim Crow.

00:10:57.019 --> 00:11:01.792
South Transportation also helped that migration happen.

00:11:01.792 --> 00:11:08.879
Academics and progressive thinkers would support Roosevelt's policies policies.

00:11:08.879 --> 00:11:17.707
White southerners, traditional democratic voters who continue to support the party due to its stance on various issues, they remain loyal.

00:11:17.707 --> 00:11:26.874
And then urban voters, residents of big cities, who are often part of political machines, they would end up to supporting Democratic Party.

00:11:26.874 --> 00:11:34.361
And it's not until, essentially, 1968 when this coalition starts to fracture and break up.

00:11:34.361 --> 00:11:55.900
And then it ultimately isn't until 1972 when we see the full decline of the New Deal coalition, when even a more radical left, what we call the new left now takes over and splits the Democratic Party when they're trying to back Jim McGovern or George McGovern in 1972.

00:11:56.345 --> 00:11:58.312
Now back to the 1932 election.

00:11:58.312 --> 00:12:08.434
Here is how Margaret O'Meara covers the legacy of the 1932 election, and she is our conventional liberal historian.

00:12:08.434 --> 00:12:12.796
Let's go to her book Pivotal Tuesdays for the first pull quote.

00:12:12.796 --> 00:12:26.813
The profound legacy of Roosevelt's New Deal has been dissected, debated and cataloged and contested by historians, journalists, political leaders and citizens in the eight decades since.

00:12:26.813 --> 00:12:44.326
What is uncontestable is that the government actions set in motion by Roosevelt in 1933 did pull the United States out of the Great Depression, although sometimes haltingly and unevenly.

00:12:44.326 --> 00:12:54.298
The 1932 election is a window into how and why the New Deal became possible and how it fits into the broader landscape of American history.

00:12:55.365 --> 00:13:03.488
The utter failure of capitalism in 1929 and the years that followed opened American leaders and voters to new ideas.

00:13:03.488 --> 00:13:11.332
The results were not only progressive, they were a radical reframing of the national government's role in American life.

00:13:11.332 --> 00:13:18.192
As we see from the 1932 campaign, roosevelt was not a revolutionary but an experimenter.

00:13:18.192 --> 00:13:23.990
He could at times be frustratingly vague and he could be cunningly political.

00:13:23.990 --> 00:13:26.278
He was not an ideologue.

00:13:26.278 --> 00:13:29.827
He wanted to fix capitalism, not overthrow it.

00:13:29.827 --> 00:13:46.490
Yet Roosevelt and the men and women of his administration, as well as their allies in business and labor, did manage to stake out a profoundly new role for the government, based on the premise that the state had a responsibility to ensure basic economic security for its citizens.

00:13:46.490 --> 00:13:55.085
It took ideas that had been floating out there ever since the days of the robber barons and turned them into federal agencies.

00:13:55.085 --> 00:13:56.849
It was a radical notion.

00:13:56.869 --> 00:14:15.347
In 1932 that became the status quo, and there is your conventional government classroom history of what happened during the Great Depression and our liberal historian Margaret O'Mara.

00:14:15.347 --> 00:14:41.115
What is uncontestable is that the government action set in motion by Roosevelt in 1933 did pull the United States out of the Great Depression, although sometimes haltingly and unevenly.

00:14:41.115 --> 00:15:00.738
You see, for the last close to a hundred years we have been given that story, and I'm going to say here unequivocally that story is like the story from our crazy uncle at the family reunion.

00:15:00.738 --> 00:15:03.293
It's not based in fact at all.

00:15:03.293 --> 00:15:06.735
We will address this head on in our next episode.

00:15:06.735 --> 00:15:10.147
It is quite powerful, so stay tuned.

00:15:11.528 --> 00:15:31.160
Let's go back to the book for Margaret Amara's second significant part of the New Deal, a second significance of 1932 was that it was a campaign that showed the growing importance of stagecraft and strategy in a new breed of campaign advisors.

00:15:31.160 --> 00:15:42.701
Roosevelt's political operative, jim Farley, wasn't just good at taking 30,000 mile trips across the country to visit the Democratic establishment.

00:15:42.701 --> 00:15:59.014
He and his boss proved effective at bringing new constituencies into the Democratic Party by a careful combination of retail politics and emotionally reticent and widely broadcast personal appeals by the candidate himself.

00:15:59.014 --> 00:16:09.678
They appealed to groups that previously had voted Republican, from native-born small farmers to urban progressives, to African Americans.

00:16:09.678 --> 00:16:24.390
The result was that the Democrats enlarged their electoral base in ways that allowed it to dominate national politics for 50 years, and there's no disputing that, absolutely and absolutely.

00:16:24.390 --> 00:16:43.623
Roosevelt's use of the radio, his conversational tone and the enlargement of the federal government began to pick off those native-born small farmers, those urban progressives and most especially the African-American vote.

00:16:43.623 --> 00:16:53.457
And then retail politics changed dramatically in 1932 and would forever be changed Now here's one last quote from Margaret Amera.

00:16:55.785 --> 00:16:57.791
The legacies of 1932 remain.

00:16:57.791 --> 00:17:03.630
Voters make their choices not just on what candidates say but on how likable they seem.

00:17:03.630 --> 00:17:12.518
Campaign strategists and pollsters slice and dice the electorate into every possible interest group and try to squeeze votes out of them.

00:17:12.518 --> 00:17:22.753
And regardless where Americans sit on the political spectrum, all have a relationship with the federal government that simply did not exist prior to 1932.

00:17:22.753 --> 00:17:38.531
The vast enlargement of the government under Roosevelt and the further expansion that occurred in the terms of both his Democratic and Republican successors, meant that what happened in Washington had ripple effects across the country and across the world.

00:17:38.531 --> 00:17:51.213
Whether American voters think the government should act to do more or do a lot less, they see the relationship between citizens and their government and their president as a highly personal one.

00:17:51.213 --> 00:18:02.900
And these legacies endured, intensified and became disrupted 36 years later, in the election year of 1968.

00:18:02.900 --> 00:18:07.209
And all of that is true.

00:18:07.209 --> 00:18:14.490
There was a vast enlargement of the federal government that, frankly, has never receded since 1932.

00:18:14.490 --> 00:18:19.480
In fact, it has grown and grown and grown some more.

00:18:19.480 --> 00:18:28.538
Now much of what is commonly believed about FDR and his presidency his time in office is simply wrong.

00:18:28.538 --> 00:18:40.454
After decades of liberal historians gushing over FDR, we are now looking objectively at anything he did or did not do.

00:18:40.454 --> 00:18:49.469
We're finally seeing real, objective historians doing the heavy lifting to figure out what really happened during his presidency.

00:18:49.469 --> 00:19:00.356
And so with that, let's hear in this conversation from a conservative historian's viewpoint, stephen Hayward, what say you?

00:19:03.266 --> 00:19:17.238
As our only four-term president, a chief executive who served through two great national crises, the Great Depression and World War II, it is inevitable that Franklin Roosevelt looms large in the history and development of the modern presidency.

00:19:17.238 --> 00:19:36.105
While Woodrow Wilson was the intellectual architect of the expansive modern presidency, fdr perfected it and gave it style, building on it and completing the work of Wilson had begun to expand the role of the president and weaken constitutional restraints on government.

00:19:36.105 --> 00:19:42.919
He also finished Wilson's work of making the Democratic Party a wholly liberal party.

00:19:42.919 --> 00:19:50.246
He inflated the role of charisma and personality pioneered by his cousin, theodore Roosevelt.

00:19:50.246 --> 00:19:56.196
He was our first mass media president making extensive use of the radio.

00:19:56.196 --> 00:20:05.178
Despite his sunny disposition, roosevelt was also deeply cynical and manipulative about politics.

00:20:05.178 --> 00:20:12.530
Indeed, it might be said that he regarded the Great Depression as the ultimate crisis that was too good to waste.

00:20:13.853 --> 00:20:15.517
Whitaker Chambers called FDR.

00:20:15.517 --> 00:20:24.598
Quote an artful and experienced ringmaster whose techniques may be studied again and again and again.

00:20:24.598 --> 00:20:31.136
And while FDR was playing ringmaster, the country was suffering in the Great Depression.

00:20:31.136 --> 00:20:41.160
What was he going to do to make things better, besides soothing people's fears and fireside chats?

00:20:41.160 --> 00:20:43.593
Let's go back to Stephen Hayward.

00:20:43.593 --> 00:20:57.181
The pro-Roosevelt histories have always made a virtue of FDR's pragmatism, often quoting one famous remark quote it is common sense to take a method and try it.

00:20:57.181 --> 00:21:00.275
If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.

00:21:00.275 --> 00:21:10.306
But above all, try something, all try something.

00:21:10.326 --> 00:21:12.550
But FDR's bold, persistent experimentation, as he called it, undermined business and consumer confidence.

00:21:12.550 --> 00:21:19.855
His punitive taxes and reckless attacks on the rich and preposterous businesses discouraged capital investment.

00:21:19.855 --> 00:21:23.046
His pro-union policies retarded hiring.

00:21:23.046 --> 00:21:37.519
His regulatory schemes to manipulate markets, such as the national recovery administration, the NRA, the agricultural adjustment act, the AAA, backfired badly and were struck down by the Supreme court as unconstitutional.

00:21:37.519 --> 00:21:41.413
In the case of the NRA, the Supreme court was unanimous.

00:21:41.413 --> 00:21:52.115
Unanimous, which means that FDR had gone too far, even for the liberal justices of Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

00:21:52.115 --> 00:21:54.065
Quite a feat.

00:21:54.065 --> 00:22:02.814
At the time, brandeis told an FDR aide I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything.

00:22:02.814 --> 00:22:04.785
Quite a statement.

00:22:05.780 --> 00:22:11.593
These and other New Deal measures represented the expansion of government by nearly a full order of magnitude.

00:22:11.593 --> 00:22:29.810
Amity Shales notes that the NRA generated 10,000 new pages of law in the US statute books, which had been only 2,735 pages long before FDR took office.

00:22:29.810 --> 00:22:40.814
In 12 months, shales points out, the NRA had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.

00:22:40.814 --> 00:22:52.593
Whenever a measure failed to work, instead of abandoning it or changing course, fdr always doubled down, seeking more political control over the economy and still higher taxes.

00:22:52.593 --> 00:23:08.433
When business investment froze under the weight of uncertainty of FDR's policies, he responded by proposing an undistributed profits tax, hoping to either force businesses to invest or confiscate their meager profits.

00:23:08.433 --> 00:23:20.829
So you can see FDR was no experimenter, he was a revolutionary, he was a radical.

00:23:20.829 --> 00:23:31.994
He just did it with a nice smile and great charisma and had nice fireside chats to soothe a very fearful country.

00:23:33.180 --> 00:23:41.632
Now Amity Shales is a great historian who we will hear from in our next episode, and she prosecutes the question did FDR really help us to get out of the depression?

00:23:41.632 --> 00:23:45.049
And she prosecutes it very successfully.

00:23:45.049 --> 00:23:48.327
Now the short answer is I'm sorry.

00:23:48.327 --> 00:23:51.384
No, he did not, but more to come on that.

00:23:51.384 --> 00:23:54.680
We want to devote a whole episode to that Now.

00:23:54.680 --> 00:24:07.310
One last item on FDR was his vicious assault on the judicial branch, a co-equal branch of the government, which, ironically, margaret O'Mara did not address at all in her book.

00:24:07.310 --> 00:24:16.884
But what?

00:24:16.884 --> 00:24:22.000
Let's go back to Stephen Hayward for what he says about this vicious assault on the judicial branch.

00:24:28.579 --> 00:24:31.472
Fdr lashed out at the Supreme Court for refusing to rubber stamp his unprecedented New Deal controls on the private sector during his first term.

00:24:31.472 --> 00:24:33.119
Though it should be noted that the court did not invalidate all of FDR's measures.

00:24:33.119 --> 00:24:50.093
It upheld some of the most dubious of them, including the confiscation and arbitrary revaluation of the price of gold and the cancellation of mortgage debt, both of which involved a plain violation of the Constitution's Contracts Clause.

00:24:50.093 --> 00:24:59.871
After the 9-0 decision that invalidated the National Recovery Administration, roosevelt complained that the court was stuck in the horse and buggy era.

00:24:59.871 --> 00:25:31.388
After his landslide re-election victory in 1936, some of Roosevelt's aides proposed that FDR back a series of constitutional amendments to provide Congress and the executive branch with the explicit power to regulate the economy more fully, in other words, that the Constitution should be changed through the mechanism that the founders had provided for just such new circumstances, as Roosevelt had now claimed existed.

00:25:31.388 --> 00:25:39.125
So after he won that landslide reelection, he was going full throated at the court.

00:25:39.125 --> 00:25:51.873
Later on we read this, which is compelling and certainly not something we've ever heard from our government-run classrooms, and liberal historians Check this out.

00:25:51.873 --> 00:26:00.692
Going back to Hayward Instead, fdr decided to try to outflank the Supreme Court politically.

00:26:01.720 --> 00:26:14.311
He made an unprecedented public attack on the Supreme Court, an institution whose traditions of restraint and aloofness from politics kept the justices from defending themselves.

00:26:14.311 --> 00:26:19.125
No other president in history had ever attacked the Supreme Court as FDR did.

00:26:19.125 --> 00:26:36.155
With no prior indication of his plan during the 1936 campaign and with no discussion or advance warning to his own party members in Congress, fdr sprang his infamous court packing plan in the spring of 1937.

00:26:36.155 --> 00:26:45.555
It stated intention to infuse new blood into all of our courts and to correct the current ill-balanced Supreme Court.

00:26:45.555 --> 00:26:57.682
Fdr wanted Congress to pass a law stipulating that for every federal judge or Supreme Court justice over the age of 70, the president could appoint an additional judge or justice.

00:26:57.682 --> 00:27:06.093
As of 1938, six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court were over 70 years old.

00:27:06.093 --> 00:27:16.090
Had FDR's plan been enacted, he would have immediately been able to command a court majority for anything he wanted passed.

00:27:17.294 --> 00:27:23.916
Raymond Moley said it was a plan to enable Roosevelt to control the court and suborn its independence.

00:27:23.916 --> 00:27:32.505
Plain and simple, it was a half-baked scheme which commended itself chiefly because of its disingenuousness.

00:27:32.505 --> 00:27:38.815
The idea was so unpopular that even FDR's own party rebuked him.

00:27:38.815 --> 00:27:57.671
The lopsided Democratic majority in Congress not only rejected the proposal handily, but the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a report that harshly rebuked FDR's reasoning and defended the court from FDR's attack, which it called a dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle.

00:27:57.671 --> 00:28:09.476
Seldom has any presidential initiative been so categorically rejected by a president's own party, by a president's own party.

00:28:10.359 --> 00:28:15.384
Roosevelt responded to this defeat with one of the worst temper tantrums in presidential history.

00:28:15.384 --> 00:28:27.211
He set out to purge the Democratic Party of senators and congressmen who had opposed the court packing scheme and other New Deal measures in the 1938 election.

00:28:27.211 --> 00:28:31.577
Holy smokes, holy smokes.

00:28:31.577 --> 00:28:34.464
Indeed, that was just incredible.

00:28:34.464 --> 00:28:41.002
No history teacher taught these events with this type of Keller commentary.

00:28:41.123 --> 00:28:57.073
Normally we get three or four statements in a paragraph and a history book that said ah, fdr kind of went a little bit overboard and then the court shot him down, and that's it, move on.

00:28:57.073 --> 00:28:57.974
Nothing to see here.

00:28:57.974 --> 00:29:00.124
But here's the cherry on top.

00:29:00.124 --> 00:29:02.189
You might think.

00:29:02.189 --> 00:29:05.383
Well, the country was saved, then right, that's what I always thought.

00:29:05.383 --> 00:29:08.650
The American Constitution was restored.

00:29:08.650 --> 00:29:10.681
Here's the irony.

00:29:10.681 --> 00:29:12.183
What does Hayward say?

00:29:14.428 --> 00:29:25.320
The final irony is that the Supreme Court buckled under Roosevelt's attack, dramatically reversing course in 1937, without any changes in the composition of the court.

00:29:25.320 --> 00:29:34.092
The justices suddenly started upholding New Deal measures that were nearly identical to those they had struck down just a few years before.

00:29:34.092 --> 00:29:37.730
It was called the switch in time that saved nine.

00:29:37.730 --> 00:29:57.786
In other words, fdr's court packing initiative actually succeeded in its main aim, which was to intimidate the Supreme Court into ceasing to act as a guardian of economic liberty and to limit, to act as a limit on the extension of federal government power.

00:29:57.786 --> 00:30:07.846
Ever since, the Supreme Court has been on a mostly downhill slide, allowing more and more scope to government power with only limited exceptions.

00:30:07.846 --> 00:30:27.938
The Supreme Court's abandonment of its role as a guardian of constitutional limits to government power and as a protector of especially economic rights has been called the revolutionary, the revolution of 1937, and with good reason.

00:30:27.958 --> 00:30:33.483
But the court packing scheme also revealed another flaw in FDR's character his impatience.

00:30:33.483 --> 00:30:38.769
The scheme was soon shown to have been utterly unnecessary.

00:30:38.769 --> 00:30:50.800
Within three years, he had been able to reshape the Supreme Court exactly as he wanted it through the conventional appointment process Between deaths and retirements from the court.

00:30:50.800 --> 00:30:59.567
Fdr had appointed eight of the nine justices sitting on the court by the time he died in 1945, the most of any president in American history.

00:30:59.567 --> 00:31:10.640
They were all liberals who seldom saw an extension of government power they did not approve, or an exercise of executive power they restrained.

00:31:12.664 --> 00:31:27.770
Wow, how in the world did the country withstand these vicious attacks on her whole system of government from an executive branch that was completely out of control and a judicial branch that cowered in the corner?

00:31:27.770 --> 00:31:33.740
The founders' notion of three co-equal branches of government was nowhere to be found.

00:31:33.740 --> 00:31:46.578
If you asked any sensible Americans from anywhere of 1935 onward during these vicious fights for government control, what is going on here?

00:31:46.578 --> 00:31:48.404
Liberty or tyranny?

00:31:48.404 --> 00:31:54.126
I would have to believe that many would say tyranny beyond measure.

00:31:54.126 --> 00:31:56.442
We don't recognize our government.

00:31:56.442 --> 00:32:01.086
Only the looming threat of war distracted the country.

00:32:02.434 --> 00:32:19.852
And after winning another term, his third term, roosevelt eventually should get credit for at least rallying a nation to defeat two very aggressive enemies Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and by not screwing them up as well.

00:32:19.852 --> 00:32:24.846
By all accounts, roosevelt's foreign policy was quite good.

00:32:24.846 --> 00:32:38.542
Though many speculate, he leaned heavily on one of the greatest statesmen in the 20th century, namely Winston Churchill, who we need to cover more of in these Mojo Minutes, so in today's Mojo Minute.

00:32:38.542 --> 00:32:41.776
It's very long, so thank you for staying with me.

00:32:41.776 --> 00:32:53.263
Let us appreciate the historians, like Amity Shales, who is actually beginning to tell the truth on these brutal eight years from 1932 to 1940.

00:32:53.263 --> 00:32:56.755
Let us learn what actually happened in history.

00:32:56.755 --> 00:33:14.387
Let us appreciate liberty that we still have a country and a republic after a brutal takeover and tyranny over four presidential terms on our domestic front, and let our liberty never be compromised again.

00:33:17.676 --> 00:33:18.922
Thank you for joining us.

00:33:18.922 --> 00:33:22.317
We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast.

00:33:22.317 --> 00:33:31.522
Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources.

00:33:31.522 --> 00:33:35.326
Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.

MM#341--Pivotal Tuesdays: The Election of 1932

Listen On

Recent Episodes