EARLIER POTUS CONFRONTING THE COURTS: 6/8: 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
⏱️ 9 minutes
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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 WITH MOTHER SARA
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel with David Petrucia, Roosevelt Sweeps Nation, and we go to the nominees for the Republican Party in 1936 to face the president running for re-election. |
| 0:16.2 | The president weighed down by all these opponents, and we need a Republican opponent because that will be the |
| 0:21.6 | major party. And the first Republican opponent in the president's mind is, I want to run against |
| 0:27.1 | Hoover. Does the Republican Party want to run Hoover, David? Well, you might not want to re-litigate |
| 0:34.1 | 1929 and 1932 again. |
| 0:38.1 | So while there's a little bit of nostalgia for him and he gives a whiz-bang talk at the |
| 0:44.3 | Republican National Convention, no. |
| 0:47.8 | The answer is absolutely not. |
| 0:50.2 | We don't want to go there again. |
| 0:52.5 | And Hoover reluctantly backs away. I say reluctantly because he's making better |
| 0:58.1 | speeches now. You note that he's not stuck the way he was in 28, very hard, very difficult |
| 1:05.0 | and what you say, slow-paced presentation. He's making much furrier remarks, but we need to go to the other choice, |
| 1:12.9 | at least early in the year. |
| 1:15.0 | William Bora, known as the Lion of Idaho, |
| 1:18.1 | another character that you can't make up, David. |
| 1:20.3 | So much of this strikes me all these decades later |
| 1:22.9 | as characters out of a novel, not out of history. |
| 1:26.8 | What do we need to know about Bora? |
| 1:28.3 | And did Roosevelt want to run against Bora? |
| 1:31.7 | Bora was a old line progressive, but the very definition of a maverick. |
| 1:39.8 | He rarely supported a Republican candidate for president. |
| 1:45.0 | And often when he didn't, he just sit it out in terms of peak. |
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