Roosevelt’s Purge: How FDR fought to change the Democratic Party

Susan Dunn “Roosevelt’s Purge: How FDR fought to change the Democratic Party” Harvard Univ. Press, 2010, 277 pps  

Susan Dunn’s book describes the peculiar make-up of the Democratic Party in the 1930s.  Because of the civil war, the South, in spite of their conservative beliefs, remained in the Democratic Party simply because it was not the party of Lincoln.  Yet, as these southerner’s political beliefs were more closely aligned with Republicans, they often voted with them, opposing their own President.  Further aggravating the situation was the fact that many of these southern Democrats had high seniority and therefore controlled many important legislative committees.  Roosevelt wanted them out and began to actively intervene in state primaries to get rid of them.  He had reason to believe that he could call the shots. He had won the South in 1936 by the kind of margins that would make a Soviet leader blush: 87% of the vote in Georgia, 96% in Mississippi, 98.6% in South Carolina.  Yet, his efforts to purge them failed miserably—it would later take the race-issue to finally effect the separation of conservatives out of the Democratic Party.  

For FDR, his failed purge may have been a blessing in disguise. As the focus of his presidency quickly changed to containing Nazi Germany, Roosevelt's closest allies would be the very conservatives he opposed in 1938. He would never again attempt to intervene in a party primary. He had learned a lesson that needs re-learning from time to time: Political purges are more effectively done by the voters, not by the power brokers in Washington.

My Notes:

Pg. 58:  In 1938 Roosevelt became fed up with catering to conservative Democrats.  After the defeat of his proposals for executive reorganization and court-packing, he decided to drive his conservative opponents out of the Democratic Party by intervening in state primaries and opposing them. 

Pg. 81:  By 1937 the conservative Democrats and Republicans felt the nation was fed up with the New Deal.  No longer did they feel as demoralized as they had been the year before.  At the Democratic Convention in 1936, their power had ebbed when the convention abolished the ‘two-thirds’ rule that had given the South a virtual veto on the presidential nomination.  But now their fortunes seemed to be turning.  In 1937, they had defeated the president’s court packing plan, opposed his Fair Labor Standards bill, secured a Senate resolution branding sit-down strikes ‘illegal and contrary to public policy,’ watered down Senator Wagner’s bill for slum clearance and low-cost housing, and blocked an anti-lynching measure.*

*Lynching took the lives of more than 4,700 people from 1882 to 1968, most of them black men.   The anti-lynching bill would have put lynching under federal jurisdiction when a state failed to provide its citizens with their constitutional rights as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.  The bill had passed in the house but was defeated by a Senate filibuster. Florida Senator Claude Pepper played a key role in the defeat.

Pg. 60:  Roosevelt was stricken with polio in 1921.  He began going to Warm Springs, Georgia in 1924, building a second home there and financing a modern treatment center for himself and other polio victims, mostly children. 

Pg. 67:  The National Recovery Administration boosted the standard of living; the Tennessee Valley Authority brought flood control, jobs, and low-cost electricity to some of the poorest regions of the country, from Virginia to Mississippi; the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed roads and airports; the Agricultural Adjustment Act stabilized crop prices and increased farmers’ incomes; the Farm Credit Association and the Farm Security Administration prevented foreclosures and permitted tenant farmers to purchase their own land; the Soil Conservation Service instructed farmers in scientific farming methods; the Rural Electrification Agency spread electricity and modern conveniences from refrigerators to radios to millions of rural homes; and the Public Works Administration put people to work transforming the nation’s landscape—constructing schools, hospitals, highways, and parks.  The PWA built dams—like the eight mile-long Santee Dam in South Carolina—and bridges—like the Overseas Highway connecting Key West to the Florida mainland.

Pg. 70:  Roosevelt’s key proposal in 1937 to end starvation wages in the South and support those unable to organize was the Fair Labor Standards Act, also known as the Wages and Hours Bill.  But in 1937 this bill ran into a wall of opposition—especially in the South.  Politicians and businessmen bitterly objected to the bill’s provisions for a 40-cents-per-hour minimum wage, a forty-hour maximum work week, and a minimum working age of sixteen. 

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 looked after the rights of workers who were able to organize—and strike—if they wanted to.

Pg. 113:  The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was passed in 1938.  The FLSA introduced the forty-hour work week, established a national minimum wage of 25 cents per hour, guaranteed "time-and-a-half" for overtime in certain jobs, and prohibited most employment of minors in "oppressive child labor.”  The FLSA affected 700,000 workers, and President Franklin Roosevelt called it the most important piece of New Deal legislation since the Social Security Act of 1935.  Most agricultural workers as well as domestic service workers and small businesses were exempted. 

Pg. 128:  Dr. Francis Townsend concocted an old age pension plan in 1933 which proposed giving all Americans over the age of sixty a monthly check of $150, funded by a 2 percent national sales tax.  In 1935, partly in response to the Townsend Plan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed his own old-age policy.  The president's policy included a program for poor older people with matching payments from the federal government, known as Old Age Assistance, and a national old-age annuity program that later was called by Social Security. The president's programs were included in the Social Security Act, which passed in August 1935.  Roosevelt’s average Old Age Assistance benefit was about $20 per month as late as 1939, and the program known as Social Security was not due to take effect until 1942.

Pg. 239:  In 1944 the Supreme Court—now packed with FDR’s appointees—struck at the Democratic party practice of Texas and in other southern states which barred blacks from voting in Democratic primaries, with the party claiming that it was a ‘voluntary association’ that could select its own members.  And of course, in the one-party South, the only meaningful election was the primary.  In the landmark case Smith v. Allwright, the Court outlawed ‘white only’ primaries, ruling that a party was not a private organization and that a state could not nullify the right of citizens to participate in the choice of elected officials.  This decision shook the fortress of white supremacy and opened the Democratic Party in the South to change.

Pg. 271:  While the Democratic Party created by slave owners and inherited by white supremacists, has become the political party of liberals and moderates, of ethnic diversity and inclusion, the Republican Party founded by abolitionists, has recently gone the opposite way and come to resemble a rightist party dominated by its conservative southern base.  In 2010 it had few of the Yankee moderates, liberal ‘Rockefeller’ Republicans and progressives in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, who had balanced its conservative wing in the past.  Indeed, in some Republican circles, the name Theodore Roosevelt has itself become anathema, a toxic reminder of ‘big government,’ and ‘socialism.’