It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYc, good

It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. Now we continue our

WNYC Centennial series a hundred years of a hundred things. We're up to thing

number 13 and today as the Democratic Convention opens in

Chicago it's a hundred years of Democratic presidential candidates and we have

the perfect guest for this Michael Kazon professor of history at Georgetown, editor Emeritus of

Dissent magazine whose most recent book is called What It Took to Win a History of the Democratic

Party published in 2022.

Now in keeping with the theme of the book,

we've pulled archive clips of every Democratic presidential

candidate who did actually win the election

from the past hundred years. The first was FDR in

1932. Here's a clip from his acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic

Convention in which he is promising to repeal the 18th Amendment, that is repeal prohibition.

Let it also be symbolic that in so doing, broke traditions let it be from now on the task of our party to

break foolish traditions.

We will break foolish traditions and leave it to the Republican leadership far more skilled in that art to break promises.

This convention wants repeal. Your candidate wants repeal.

Your candidate wants repeal. once repealed. And I am confident that the United States of America wants repale.

I say to you now that from this date on the 18th Amendment is doomed. I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.

Give me your help not to win votes alone,

but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people. All right. He even got the term new deal in there while talking about repealing prohibition

...