AHC: Kill the Republican Party during the Great Depression

<snip>Well, Huey Long dies before '36, so that probably does not happen, but I also wonder if the Democrats would have handled the initial stages of the Depression better by doing what Roosevelt did and basically freezing the run on banks via direct order.

Huey Long died by an assassin's bullet. An assassin whose motives AIUI are little understood to this day, as Long's bodyguards rapidly emptied their revolvers into the killer's body. So saving Long isn't a hard AH thing to do.

Well, if you want to get really loopy (as in President Long), make the Businessman's Plot (Smedley Butler, Seven Days in May stuff) a reality.

Caught trying to overthrow the US government, the business men's association with the Republican Party (if that ain't the way it wuz... etc) cause the Republicans to be seen as the New American Fascists. The smear might attract real fascists, and soon, the Partei is so full of fruitcakes, it collapses under the weight of absurdity.

:eek: Shades of Oliver Stone

Swing enough Congressional elections slightly the other way and by 1936 you get the GOP down to 8 or 9 Senators, 40 members of the House, and 4 governors. Then if you can avoid the backlash from the court packing (maybe still have an attempted reform but a smaller reform plus Joseph Taylor Robinson living long enough to get it through) and have FDR not raise taxes in '37-38 which put the country back in recession, and you might get a general anemia from the GOP in the '38 midterms.

To really wreck the Republican Party have the Hughes Court go hog wild striking down every single last provision of the New Deal, right down to appropriation bills, if possible. That puts even more wind in FDR's sails in his battle with SCOTUS.

After all, when it comes to judicial activism, the Hughes Court is right down there in the abyss with the Courts of Taney and Rehnquist. Note: The Roberts Court has been pretty awful, but Roberts himself has been just a little bit canny about some of his votes (frex the ACA).

Maybe FDR reacts to Court by seeking Constiutional amendments

I've wondered about that.:confused: What was to stop Hughes and his Four Horsemen from declaring FDR's Court Packing Bill unconstitutional? They can't rule on bills affecting their own structure?:confused: Even if the Court IS going nuts, I think that FDR's packing b8ill wouldn't likely make it past all those state legislatures, UNLESS the SCOTUS fails to go though its "stitch in time saves nine" moment. Then FDR might just get his fresh 15 Justices.:cool:

I can't see this happening, the window is too narrow. There wouldn't be enough time to generate the disenfranchisement and alienation of the base necessary to cause the party to disappear. They would only have four or five years to do it.

The Whigs managed it in five years, but there was nothing divisive like Slavery on the table at the time. The modern Republicans look like they might manage it, but it took them 12 or 13 years to get to that point.

By 1933 or 34, events in Europe and Asia would force the Establishment into some kind of compromise that would keep the GOP alive to avoid the confusion and anarchy that the collapse of a major party would bring.

Maybe embracing Isolationism Uber Alles and all that that entails? NO Republican Interventionists? Wendell Willkie dies five years sooner?

The nature of the US electoral system means that the natural default is two major parties. (1) To kill off the Republicans, you therefore need another party to take their place as the opposition to the Democrats (note that this party does not need to be to the Right of the Democrats; they could just as easily be to the Left. The point is that someone needs to be the focal point for people grumpy with Democratic policies).

Era of Good Feelings. Granted, we were a growing country back then. There could be a transition period in which the Democrats could become split between "Pro-Super New Deal (Long)" and "Anti-Super New Deal" (FDR).

Perhaps keep Huey Long around, and have Share Our Wealth take off. The Democrats emerge in the new framework as the more centre/centre-right option, in opposition to Long. The Republicans are now reduced to being a Vermont Regional Party, while their former voters end up going to the "lesser evil".

Sounds like a good description of the late 19th Century/early 20th Century circumstances of the Democrats, Republicans, Populists, and Progressives (1).

1) Granted, the Populists and Progressives really didn't exist at the same time, even if people were members of each party at different times in their lives.
 
Now how to push the party over that precipice? If Calvin Coolidge III doesn't die in 1924, President Coolidge may have run for another term in 1928. Things would largely proceed as per OTL except now the choice of nominee in 1932 is very much in doubt. There are just enough members of the various wings after the 1930 midterms to make things go bad. Who best to march valiantly into the breach? Whoever it is, the party gets walloped worse than they did OTL.

Under that scenario, I think you would have Hoover be the nominee - and do significantly better than OTL. Hoover's reputation as the Great Humanitarian would still be intact, and he'd be able to differentiate himself from the deeply unpopular Coolidge.

If you want to engineer a 1932 split in the Republicans, I think you have Hoover being a bit more energetic* in his Depression response - at least so that he gets completely offside with the liquidationist wing of the party.

*I realise Hoover in OTL did more than later legend suggests.
 
The historian Michael Holt once argued (in *The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party*) that one reason neither major party since the emergence of the Republicans as the leading opposition party to the Democrats in 1856 [1] has undergone the fate of the Whigs is, believe it or not, the Australian ballot:

**
"During the twentieth century, American electoral politics has always been
organized around the same two major parties--Republicans and Democrats--in
large part because the adoption of state-printed ballots in the 1890s
measurably increased the difficulty of launching a third party to
challenge them. Since those major parties had an automatic slot on the
ballots and since the legal hurdles for other parties to get on those
ballots were so high, Republicans and Democrats effectively monopolized
voters' choice. During this century, therefore, the Republican party has
been the only realistic alternative to the Democrats. Thus it, and not
some other party, has usually benefited when voters sought to punish
Democrats and to replace them in office.

"In the 1850s and for most of the nineteenth century, however, the rules
of the political game encouraged rather than inhibited the creation of new
parties. Instead of state-printed ballots that gave legally recognized
major parties pride of place and disadvantaged other groups who sought to
be listed on them, political parties distributed and printed their own
ballots. As a result, it was far easier for new parties to challenge the
old ones. As Whigs would learn to their dismay, therefore, politics in
the 1850s was not a zero-sum game...Unlike their twentieth-century
Republican successors, in sum, Whigs could not monopolize opposition to
Democrats and that simple, if easily overlooked, fact more than anything
else explains the death of the Whig party."
https://books.google.com/books?id=hMkYklGTY1MC&pg=PA772

***

I discuss Holt's argument at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/hv7W-s__VeU/fGGAg9HyMgoJ

[1] It was pretty clear by the beginning of 1856 that the Whigs were dying, but the question of *which* new party--the Republicans or Americans (Know Nothings)--would displace them would only be settled that year.
 
Top