EARLIER POTUS CONFRONTING THE COURTS: 4/8: Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal by David Pietrusza (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Roosevelt-Sweeps-Nation-Landslide-Triumph/dp/1635767776
Award-winning historian David Pietrusza boldly steers clear of the pat narrative regarding Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented 1936 re-election landslide, weaving an enormously more intricate, ever more surprising tale of a polarized nation; of America’s most complex, calculating, and politically successful president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the very top of his Machiavellian game; and the unlocking of the puzzle of how our society, our politics, and our parties fitfully reinvented themselves.
With in-depth examinations of rabble-rousing Democratic US Senator Huey Long and his assassination before he was able to challenge FDR in ’36; powerful, but widely hated, newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who blasted FDR’s “Raw Deal”; wildly popular, radical radio commentator Father Coughlin; the steamrolled passage of Social Security and backlash against it; the era’s racism and anti-Semitism; American Socialism and Communism; and a Supreme Court seemingly bent on dismantling the New Deal altogether, Roosevelt Sweeps Nation is a vivid portrait of a dynamic Depression-Era America.
1936 WPA
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Thatcher with David Petrucia. |
| 0:07.4 | His new book is Roosevelt Sweeps Nation, FDR's 1936 landslide, and the triumph of the liberal ideal. |
| 0:16.1 | The Communist Party of the United States of America, the Socialist Party, they have figures that lead them, |
| 0:23.5 | and they're important figures because of their connection to previous successes. |
| 0:28.8 | The Socialists had been successful since all that century, since the earliest vote, 1912, I believe. |
| 0:35.7 | David helped me. Was 1912 their top or was 1920 their top? I can't recall. |
| 0:40.7 | 1920 is when they top about 900. Well, it depends how you measure it. |
| 0:46.4 | 1920, they get the highest number of raw votes. 1912, they get the highest percentage. |
| 0:53.1 | And even as late as 1932, Norman Thomas, who is their perennial |
| 0:57.7 | candidate at this point, following their previous perennial candidate, Eugene V. Debs, |
| 1:03.4 | is still drawing 845,000 votes and drawing hundreds of thousands of votes in the, in a recent |
| 1:10.6 | New York City mayoral election. |
| 1:13.2 | So the socialists represent theory and book learning and classicism, |
| 1:19.0 | but they also appeal to what we would say is the proto-union faction in the large city of New York. |
| 1:26.6 | Roosevelt regards them as a challenge because they can |
| 1:29.3 | pick off pieces of New York State, pieces of the electorate in New York City in particular, |
| 1:35.7 | and might cost him those electoral votes. The communist part of the USA is harder to imagine |
| 1:42.4 | being a threat today, but at the time, it was led by a man |
| 1:47.4 | named Earl Browder. |
| 1:48.7 | And importantly, David, you've come up with a fact as to why Browder was still the head |
| 1:53.2 | of the party. |
| 1:55.1 | He was Stalin's choice. |
... |
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