FDR - Jean Edward Smith [236]
Roosevelt’s confidence about the one-party South proved out. He carried South Carolina with 98.6 percent of the vote, Mississippi with 98.0, and Georgia with 87.1. “Who are the fourteen persons who voted against you in Warm Springs?” asked Farley. “You ought to raise hell with them.”57 Roosevelt’s top-heavy majority in Congress increased further. In the House, the Democrats gained eleven additional seats, giving them a 331–89 majority. In the Senate, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 76–16, with four independents who were solidly behind the president: Henrik Shipstead and Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, and George Norris of Nebraska. Norris had represented Nebraska in the Senate since 1913 but because of his support for the New Deal had been denied the GOP nomination in 1936 and was running as an independent. Roosevelt was particularly concerned about Norris, and the last thing he did before going to bed election night was to call Nebraska to inquire about the Senate race. “Of all the results on November third,” he wrote Norris later, “your re-election gave me the greatest happiness.”58
The 1936 election marked the birth of the Roosevelt coalition—a unique alliance of big-city bosses, the white South, farmers and workers, Jews and Irish Catholics, ethnic minorities, and African Americans that would dominate American politics for the next generation. Gone from the Democratic party was the old hard-money, probusiness crowd: men like John Raskob and Jouett Shouse; John W. Davis and Newton D. Baker; and the checkbooks of the du Ponts and General Motors. In their stead were organized labor, led by John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman; disaffected businessmen like A. P. Giannini of the Bank of America, who feuded with the financial establishment; and leaders of new industries, typified by Thomas Watson of IBM. Lewis, a lifelong Republican who had supported Hoover in 1932, marshaled the battalions of the CIO behind Roosevelt and contributed $770,000 (roughly $10 million currently) to the president’s campaign.59 Labor’s votes helped swing Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana behind FDR. Pennsylvania went Democratic for the first time since James Buchanan. African Americans deserted the party of Lincoln; for the first time since Emancipation, blacks voted Democratic.60 Not because FDR was in the forefront of the fight for civil rights. He was not. But no segment of American society had suffered more severely from the Depression, and the New Deal provided relief.
Roosevelt made no changes in his administration for the second term. Hull remained at State, Morgenthau at the Treasury, and Homer Cummings continued as attorney general. Frances Perkins, Harold Ickes, and Henry Wallace, the three most ardent New Dealers, stayed at their posts, as did Daniel Roper at Commerce and the elderly Claude Swanson at Navy. James Farley continued to wear two hats—postmaster general and party chairman—and at the War Department former Kansas governor Harry Woodring had succeeded George Dern, who had died in August.* In the White House, Louis Howe was gone, but otherwise FDR’s personal staff, essentially an extended family, remained intact. Missy and Grace Tully ran the office seamlessly; Hackmeister handled the phones; Pa Watson, Steve Early, and Marvin McIntyre did the president’s bidding; and Admiral Ross McIntire looked after his health. On Capitol Hill, Joe Robinson of Arkansas continued as Senate majority leader, William Bankhead of Alabama was now speaker, and Sam Rayburn had become House majority leader.