These historical comparisons are probably boring - I've received one comment so far - but they help me to get a handle on just why I think the Democratic Party is poised for a historic electoral victory next year. Part of the benefit of reading history is one sees certain similarities between events and time periods that surprise. That is not to say that history repeats itself; that is cheap and unintellectual. History contains unique events, unrepeatable. It is only the meaningful dimension, given not in and through the events themselves, but how we appropriate them and understand them, that becomes revelatory. With this in mind, it should be noted that, in 1932, despite the Republicans losing control of Congress in the 1930 elections, despite the burgeoning of all sorts of epithets with the word "Hoover" in them - Hoovervilles being the best known - it was almost universally recognized the Hoover would win re-election easily, and that Franklin Roosevelt was a political and intellectual lightweight, carrying much too much baggage to beat an incumbent President.
Since the end of the Civil War, there had been two Presidents elected from the Democratic Party. Grover Cleveland won as a result of his campaign to end corruption in the federal bureaucracy and as a champion of civil service reform. Woodrow Wilson won because Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican Party in 1912 because he was unhappy with his anointed successor William Howard Taft. Those two blips aside, the Republicans dominated national politics, and every two years, the same three words were whispered again and again, words that played on fears and historical memories that still carried clout - the Democratic Party was the party of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion". Many thought them weaknesses. Roosevelt saw them as strengths to be exploited.
The conventional wisdom concerning Hoover's inevitability is also based on the fact that, until the collapse of the economy, Hoover was perhaps most famous for his work feeding millions of war refugees in Belgium and Russia. Initially a civil engineer (why else name a dam after him?), it was his organizational skills that won him the nod from Wilson to co-ordinate relief efforts for those left destitute by the World War. He was universally acclaimed as the savior of much of Western European flood plain, as he cobbled together all sorts of private and public organizations to get help to those who needed it most. Hoover was viewed, indeed, as a dangerous "social engineer" by many conservatives in the Republican Party precisely for this reason; Coolidge was not pleased his former Commerce Secretary got the nomination and refused to campaign for him.
The Republican dominance had been so long, and stretched beyond the Presidency to Congress and the states outside the old Confederacy, that considering a massive shift in the political tide was, quite literally unthinkable. The Democratic takeover of Congress in 1930 was largely understood to be a reaction to the Depression; once the inevitable turnaround happened, the old status quo would return. This was the line put out by the overwhelming majority of major-newspaper editors, to a person Republican or even, like the Chicago Tribune's Col. McCormick, quite right-wing. Roosevelt was weak. Everyone knew he was a cripple. His campaign was short on specifics, except a promise to erase the federal budget deficit and repeal Prohibition. The Joe Lieberman of the 1930's, former Democratic governor and Presidential candidate Al Smith, came out strongly, almost violently, against Roosevelt at an infamous Jefferson/Jackson Day dinner in New York City in the autumn of '32. He saw Roosevelt as much too beholden to an odd conglomeration of city bosses and intellectuals (that Smith himself had been one of the former was, apparently, unmentionable), and would thus simultaneously alienate both urban and rural voters, the former by his allegiance with the egg-heads, the latter by his allegiance with corrupt machine politicians.
Roosevelt was much more clear-eyed than his cowardly co-Democrat. He saw that the Depression was such a radical break with our social past that it opened an opportunity for a radical break with our political past. In that regard, Oct., 1929 is similar to September 11, 2001. The former was only one cause, although certainly the most visible and dramatic of the world-wide calamity of the Depression. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington have little to do with our current predicament in Iraq. In both cases, the conventional wisdom insisted that we needed to allow the grown-ups who had run our country for years to continue to run things, because, while it was clear things were bad, they would only be worse if the Democrats were in control. There were even those who insisted there was little difference between Hoover and Roosevelt - a variation on the "Republicats" theme first heard in 200 and echoing down the years to today. Nation magazine editor Oswald Garrison Villard continually emphasized the weaknesses of both parties, refusing to endorse anyone, but pushing either Norman Thomas (for whom my maternal grandfather worked) or William Foster, the Socialist and Communist candidates, respectively.
One more point, with reference to our current predicament in regards the woefully weak capitulation on the Iraq supplemental. In 1931, Congress passed a modest bill for relief - $600,000,00 - that Hoover vetoed as much too expensive, and much too radical. Democrats in Congress failed to override the Presidential veto and Congress sent no more aid bills for Hoover's imprimatur. In light of what would pass under Roosevelt and overwhelming Democratic control in the years to come, the bill was both modest and likely to do little if anything to end the suffering of the majority of American people. Like the battle over the Iraq supplemental, the Democrats folded under the pressure of conventional wisdom, yet they would re-write the rule book within a couple years. I think that the bill should be opposed - please don't misunderstand me - but I also think this one loss only highlights the fact that the Republicans own this deadly fiasco in Iraq as much as they owned the Depression, a fact Democrats should highlight again and again.
While I do not think a Democratic sweep inevitable - nothing is certain in life except, alas, death - I do think the signs point to a major political loss, not just for now, but for years to come, as long as the public provides the spine for Democrats in the run up to the election next year.
Virtual Tin Cup
