FDR's Purge | The Oval Office
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2017
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode of Whistlestop travels back to June 24, 1938, to a fireside chat with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as he prepared to attempt to purge the congressional leadership in order to push forward the executive office’s agenda.
Whistlestop is Slate's podcast about presidential history. Hosted by political correspondent and Political Gabfest panelist John Dickerson, each installment will revisit memorable (or even forgotten) moments from America's Presidential carnival.
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Podcast production and edit by Jocelyn Frank. Research by Brian Rosenwald.
Email: whistlestop@slate.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation. |
| 0:09.4 | Recently in American politics, two members of the Republican Party have announced that they will not run for re-election, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee. They're both senators, actually. |
| 0:20.1 | Flake said he couldn't abide by a party, |
| 0:21.8 | which supported Donald Trump. Corker of Tennessee said he didn't want to be thinking about getting |
| 0:26.4 | reelected when there was so much work he should do. His reelection would have been ugly and brutal |
| 0:31.5 | with the president targeting him as well as the president's former chief strategist, Steve |
| 0:36.2 | Bannon. Corker didn't want to be so timid, worried about |
| 0:39.7 | re-election. He wanted to do his job. Their departures mark a success for the president in remaking his |
| 0:44.5 | party in his image. He is purging the ranks. It's not a concerted effort to campaign against the |
| 0:50.5 | members of his own party, but rather a collateral effect of the way the president is |
| 0:54.4 | running in office or participating in his office or running his office. Indeed, the one race |
| 1:00.8 | actually in which the president did weigh in, his candidate lost, but he lost to the one backed |
| 1:05.8 | by former chief strategist Steve Bannon. That was the Alabama race in which Roy Moore beat Luther Strange. |
| 1:13.5 | Bannon, the president's former chief strategist and still outside advisor, is on the hunt |
| 1:19.4 | for establishment Republicans. It's a season of war against a GOP establishment. |
| 1:24.8 | If Bannon has his way, all the corporatist, globalist, administrative, |
| 1:28.5 | state-loving, swamp, dwelling, adjective attracting members of the Republican Party, |
| 1:33.0 | will be banished by catapult or something worse. This effort to remake the party in Donald Trump's |
| 1:39.2 | image, to pursue the Trump agenda, whatever it may be, nationalist, populist, insular. |
| 1:45.9 | It reminded me and got me thinking about the election of 1938, |
| 1:49.7 | when FDR tried to purge the conservative members of his own Democratic Party. |
| 1:56.6 | On June 24, 1938, Franklin Roosevelt gave one of his famous fireside chats. It was June, |
... |
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