Mid-Terms Week: 1946 Changes Everything (1946)

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2022

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the run-up to the November election, we’re doing a number of episodes that may help you track and process the current news. This week, it’s Mid-Terms week, looking at a few of our favorite mid-term elections that planted historical seeds for this year’s contest.

Today, we look at the 1946 mid-term elections, where Republicans scored a sweeping victory and America offered a rebuke of the FDR era.

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Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.
0:06.7	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:08.6	We are in midterms week looking at some interesting stories about past midterms and today we go to
0:16.4	1946 a midterm election that I have always found very fascinating and yes one that has some parallels for today
0:22.3	I'll start here a couple months ago
0:24.4	Chris Hayes of MS NBC tweeted and this is I'm reading his tweet here I was just
0:29.6	checking out what happened in the 1946 midterms as the nation readjusted after a historic society-wide
0:35.4	disruption and inflation was 8 percent.
0:38.9	Don't Google it.
0:39.9	There he was probably talking to his crowd, liberals, you know, don't Google it, but folks, we did Google it and we're going to do more than that.
0:46.2	We're going to talk about it.
0:48.1	Because yes, this 1946 midterm was coming in the wake of a major disruption in
0:52.3	World War II and inflation was climbing,
0:54.7	though GDP was much worse than it is now,
0:56.8	so it's not a complete parallel economically.
0:59.3	But nevertheless, what happened?
1:01.0	The GOP ran roughshod after 14 years of Democratic control.
1:05.4	Truman was president at this point, but this was really in many ways the end and the
1:09.6	rebuke of the FDR era. The GOP gained 55 House seats, 12 Senate seats, not to mention that a man
1:16.8	by the name of Richard Nixon won his first race for Congress and a seat out of California.
1:21.6	Also JFK and McCarthy entered politics
1:24.3	in this election, so lots of seeds and legacies
	...

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