FDR - Jean Edward Smith [234]
When the campaign began in earnest on Labor Day, FDR left nothing to chance. He whistle-stopped across the country, delivering more than two hundred speeches in sixty days.* Roosevelt concentrated on the heartland. He was confident of carrying the Solid South and the big cities of the North but was determined to deny the farm belt to Landon and Lemke. He spent three days in Iowa, two in the Dakotas, two each in Nebraska and Wyoming, two in Colorado, and two in Kansas. Roosevelt spoke seven times in Landon’s home state before moving on to Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio.43 Wherever he went, jubilant crowds reached out to touch him. They waved and cheered and shouted thanks for saving a farm or getting a factory reopened. Even the weather cooperated. Rain began to fall on the parched Middle West as Roosevelt moved through. The president never mentioned his opponent by name. He touted the accomplishments of the New Deal, contrasted the do-nothing years of Herbert Hoover, and did not let his audiences forget the opposition of the “economic royalists” of the Liberty League.44
Roosevelt was a natural on the campaign trail because he enjoyed it. “He rode for hours in the 1936 campaign in motor processions, waving constantly to people along the roadsides, shaking hands with hundreds, and delivering often ten to fifteen speeches a day,” said Farley. “He never gave the impression of working hard; on the contrary he was stimulated and exhilarated.”45 Who else would join with an American Legion chorus in Syracuse to sing “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” or playfully invite hostile editors to the platform as FDR did with William Allen White in Emporia, Kansas?
The only glitch in the Democratic campaign came early on, when Farley, addressing a gathering of party faithful in Michigan, referred to Landon as the governor of “a typical prairie state.”
“Never use the word ‘typical,’ ” chided FDR. “If the sentence had read, ‘One of those splendid Prairie States’, no one could have picked up on it. But the word ‘typical’ coming from a New Yorker is meat for the opposition.”46
Landon recognized he had an uphill fight. He waged a low-key campaign, showed the Republican colors to advantage, and remained on good terms with FDR.† That was shrewd politics. Landon’s advisers calculated that rabid Roosevelt haters would vote Republican in any case and the campaign should aim at the ordinary citizen who liked the New Deal’s goals but disapproved of its methods. “None of my campaign speeches will be merely an attack upon the opposition,” Landon wrote Idaho’s senator William E. Borah in August. “I cannot criticize everything that has been done in the past three years and do it sincerely. Neither do I believe that such an attack is good politics.”47
If Landon took the high road, Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Coughlin, and the Union party took the low. Alarmed at Lemke’s failure to gain traction, Union party rhetoric escalated to a level of vituperation seldom seen in American public life. “I’ll teach them how to hate,” Smith boasted. “Religion and patriotism, keep going on that. It’s the only way you can get them really ‘het up.’ ”48 For Coughlin, teaching how to hate came naturally. Determined to outdo Smith, Coughlin not only attacked FDR as a liar, a double-crosser, and a Communist but placed much of the blame on the Jewish advisers who surrounded him. Called to task by the Church, Coughlin apologized for calling Roosevelt a liar but was soon at it again. In New York he declared the difference between Roosevelt and Landon a choice “between carbolic acid and rat poison.” In New Bedford, he called Roosevelt “the