Countless factory chimneys remained ominously cold, while more than 11 million unemployed workers and their families sank ever deeper into the pit of poverty. Herbert
Hoover may have won the 1928 election by promising
“a chicken in every pot,” but three years later that chicken seemed to have laid a discharge slip in every pay envelope.
Hoover, sick at heart, was renominated by the
Republican convention in Chicago without great enthusiasm. The platform indulged in extravagant praise of Republican antidepression policies, while halfheartedly promising to repeal national prohibition and return control of liquor to the states.
The rising star of the Democratic firmament was Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New
York, a fifth cousin of Theodore …show more content…
He once remarked that after trying for two years to wiggle one big toe, all else seemed easy.
Another of Roosevelt’s great personal and political assets was his wife, Eleanor. The niece of
Theodore Roosevelt, she was Franklin Roosevelt’s distant cousin as well as his spouse. Tall, ungainly, and toothy, she overcame the misery of an unhappy childhood and emerged as a champion of the dispossessed—and, ultimately, as the “conscience of the New Deal.” FDR’s political career was as much hers as it was his own. She traveled countless miles with him or on his behalf in all his campaigns, beginning with his run for the New York legislature before World War I, later considering herself “his legs.” She was to become the most active First Lady in history. Through her lobbying of her husband, her speeches, and her syndicated newspaper column, she powerfully influenced the policies of the national government. Always she battled for the impoverished and the oppressed. At one meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, she confounded local authorities and flouted the segregation statutes by deliberately straddling the aisle separating the …show more content…
Sadly, her personal relationship with her husband was often rocky, due to his occasional infidelity. Condemned by conservatives and loved by liberals, she was one of the most controversial—and consequential—public figures of the twentieth century.
Franklin Roosevelt’s political appeal was amazing.
His commanding presence and his golden speaking voice, despite a sophisticated accent, combined to make him the premier American orator of his generation. He could turn on charm in private conversations as one would turn on a faucet. As a popular depression governor of New York, he had sponsored heavy state spending to relieve human suffering. Though favoring frugality, he believed that money, rather than humanity, was expendable.
He revealed a deep concern for the plight of the “forgotten man”—a phrase he used in a 1932 speech— although he was assailed by the rich as a “traitor to
his