FDR - Jean Edward Smith [231]
Landon’s greatest advantage was that he was not Herbert Hoover. His liability (aside from Roosevelt’s immense popularity) was his blandness. For better or worse, Landon personified Kansas: honest, decent, self-contained, hard-working, and dull. After listening to Landon on the radio, Harold Ickes said, “the Democratic Campaign Committee ought to spend all the money it can raise to send him out and make speeches.”25 Unlike the GOP platform, Landon did not seek to dismantle the New Deal and generally refrained from attacking FDR personally.26 He deplored the Liberty League and vainly sought labor’s support. As his running mate he chose the affable Chicago publisher Frank Knox, another Bull Moose, who had charged up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt. In World War I Knox had enlisted as a private at the age of forty-three, seen combat in France, and ended the war as a colonel of field artillery. He was more energetic and more stridently nationalist than Landon, and still looked on TR as his political idol. What the nation needed, he told an audience in 1935, was “fewer and better Roosevelts.”27
Three days after Landon was nominated, Gerald L. K. Smith announced from Chicago that he, Father Coughlin, and Dr. Townsend were joining hands to form a new political party—the Union party—dedicated to defeating Franklin Roosevelt and “the communistic philosophy of Frankfurter, Ickes, Hopkins, and Wallace.” Smith claimed more than 20 million adherents ready to join forces and elect two-term North Dakota congressman William Lemke, a weathered agrarian populist who had devoted his brief legislative career to rescuing the nation’s farmers from mortgage indebtedness. “I look upon Roosevelt,” said Lemke, “as a bewildered Kerensky of a provisional government. He doesn’t know where he came from or where he is going. As for Landon he represents the dying shadow of a past civilization.”28 Added together, Lemke’s farm constituency, Coughlin’s urban Catholic base, Townsend’s following among the elderly, and the remnants of the Share Our Wealth movement made the Union party, at least on paper, a formidable opponent.
If Roosevelt was concerned, he did not show it. The Democrats met in Philadelphia on June 23. The first order of business was repeal of the two-thirds rule, which had given the South a veto over presidential nominees since the days of Andrew Jackson. “Now that the party is in power and there is no question about my renomination,” FDR told Farley, “we should clear up the situation for all time.”29 Roosevelt gave notice to the party well in advance of the convention that he sought a rule change, and Farley entrusted the task to Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, whose father had fallen victim to the two-thirds rule in 1912.30 Clark was selected to chair the convention’s committee on rules and resolutions and, as South Carolina’s James Byrnes said afterward, pursued his goal “with all the energy of an avenging fury.”31 The committee voted 36–13 to abrogate the two-thirds rule, and the committee report was accepted by acclamation. To mollify the South (and with Roosevelt’s blessing), a provision was included that in future conventions a state’s Democratic voting record would be considered