1916 and 1920
1932
"...
fuck you - shut the hell up and fuck you - what those invalids don't understand is, their puppeteers aren't aiming for the - I said shut the hell up - they aren't after the President, they are after you - Dyer's just standing in their way!..."
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Leonidas C. Dyer's 1936 running-mate, speaking at a campaign rally after being interrupted by a heckler
After the 1932 elections, Leonidas C. Dyer entered office with sizable congressional majorities for Republicans (along with some other progressive pro-Fair Deal third party senators). He and his allies in Congress quickly took action to enact a wide array of agenda for economic relief via various public works projects and unemployment benefits, as well as financial industry reforms to prevent the issues that led to the great depression in the first place, an end to prohibition, and the establishment of federal old-age insurance. By 1934, the unemployment rate was still quite high but had dropped substantially, falling around 10 percentage points from a peak in 1932 of 25%. The full extent of the Fair Deal's role in that decline is debated among economists, but the general consensus is that the Fair Deal overall played at least some nontrivial role in the economic recovery, and back in the 1930s, this view was certainly common among the general public. Dyer and his allies in congress saw high popularity due to the Fair Deal legislation and programs. In the 1934 congressional midterm elections, the Republicans and their allies made gains in the senate and house, extending dominance outside of the south and, despite Democratic voter suppression and gerrymandering in the south, even made modest gains in the south, in part due to the Fair Deal having sizable crossover support among poor white people in the south
After the 1934 elections, Republicans initially intended in plans for the 1936 presidential election to focus on the same sort of strategy they ran with in 1932, to defend their gains in the upper south (and seeking to gain or increase control in those areas at the state legislature level) and perhaps also aim for Texas and Arkansas (both of which Democrats somewhat narrowly held in 1932) while ignoring the deep south. But certain developments had been occurring within the Democratic Party
The Democratic Party had been dominated by conservative voices since before the civil war, with the exception of the progressive era with the rise of William Jennings Bryan in the party and then Wilson's turn towards support for some progressive policies. The late 1910s and 1920s had seen the conservative wing of the party take back dominance, but the Great Depression had led to a resurgence of more moderate to progressive leaning Democrats. On one hand there were the "Me too Democrats", who generally supported many Fair Deal policies but attacked some for excess and corruption and campaigned saying they could administer the Fair Deal more efficiently. On the other hand, there was also a wing of the party that took things even further, with a populist argument that the Fair Deal
didn't go far enough, that it and Dyer were too friendly to the interests of big business, too cautious in regards to deficit spending and regulations, and so on. The Democratic Party in the early 30s remained generally controlled by the conservative wing, but the rise of these moderate and populist factions caused a sizable amount of infighting, and helped the Republicans make gains in the south in the 1930, 1932, and 1934 elections. And after 1934, the south was more or less split three ways, with the conservative Democrats being the largest group, but with the populist Democrats having a sizable minority of support as well as outright control in a few southern states
The Governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, was the most prominent politician from that populist faction, and most prominent critic of Dyer from the left. Known by some to be an outspoken man of the people, and by others to be a corrupt and dangerous demagogue, he was at any rate the controller of a highly effective political machine in his own state, as well as influential among the progressive wing in several other southern states. Long was widely expected to make an attempt at the Democratic presidential nomination for 1936, to try and wrench the party away from the conservatives. He was, however, doubtful that the party establishment would allow a fair fight, and was privately becoming doubtful that his party had electoral viability at that point even with a potential sharp realignment, given Republican popularity
Shortly after the 1934 elections, Long put out feelers to the Republicans. Dyer and other high-level Republicans were highly skeptical, but were willing to engage in some preliminary discussions with the governor. Long came to the Republicans with proposals to essentially tear his own party in two, and ally his wing with the Republicans, giving the hypothetical Republican-Longist alliance the potential to sweep the south (and thus the country) and to rip the south from the conservative Democratic dominance. Of course, Long came with demands of his own, including extending the Fair Deal (he'd preferred his own Share Our Wealth Program but was willing to settle for Fair Deal extensions and a shift away from Dyer's insistence on balanced budgets rather than deficit spending), and of course the requirement that Long himself replace La Guardia for the Vice President nomination. Republicans were very weary of this proposal, with many being satisfied with their existing dominance of the north and being fearful of putting Long a heartbeat away from the Presidency (especially with the disabled Dyer) as well as potentially in the position to take control of the party after Dyer's two terms (surely, many thought, a cripple like Dyer wouldn't even want to try what Teddy Roosevelt did, to run for a third term, right?). But Long was able to throw in a major offer
The south had been dominated by white supremacist political leadership and broader social organization since the end of Reconstruction in the 1800s. Since the fall of Reconstruction, some among the Republicans had wished to make a renewed push for civil rights for Black Americans - indeed, Dyer had been one such Republican, having pushed very publicly for anti-lynching laws in the early 1920s. Now, Long was somewhat different from the average southern Democrat. He was no bold civil rights advocate, but nonetheless opposed the Klan, refused to utilize race-baiting as a political strategy, and enacted programs in his state for economic relief that Black people were actually allowed to benefit from (as opposed to in southern states with more conservative leadership) - he was not, then particularly opposed to the idea of racial equality, even if it wasn't chief among his political concerns. And he'd correctly guessed that Dyer's silence on racial issues as Missouri governor and in the 1932 campaign was more a matter of political pragmatism than any real shift in personal beliefs. So, in return for accepting his demands, he offered to do all he could after the 1936 elections to wrangle his populist Democratic allies in the south to vote for civil rights legislation, and (without publicly campaigning on it during the election) doing all he could before and during the 1936 elections to ensure the election in the south of more populist democrats who would be willing (or able to be pressured via carrot and/or stick) to vote for civil rights legislation. Despite complaints from advisors and Republican leadership, Dyer accepted this deal, intensely craving to achieve civil rights victories, as well as to simply punch back hard at the people who had nearly killed him. La Guardia accepted Dyer's deal, having frankly been rather bored by the office of the Vice President, being willing to return to New York politics and appreciating the potential political ramifications of the deal
As the 1936 elections drew closer, some predicted (and in the case of conservative democrats, shrieked and frothed at the mouth over the idea) that Dyer would make a push for civil rights if he won a decisive victory. The Republican admission of three states (AK, HI, and DC) further fueled those fears among some, with the admissions of those states being seen as a potential means to shift Congressional control further in favor of progressive Republicans and potentially overcome a filibuster by southern democrats and the remnant conservative faction of Republicans (which was the actual intent), but publicly Republicans opposed this suggestion, instead just defending the admissions with nationalistic rhetoric of American expansion. Furthermore, in an attempt to maximize potential to expand political support in the south (and with some inspiration from Lincoln's own run on the "National Union" ticket rather than "Republican" ticket in 1864), Dyer himself ran with Long as independents, and organized a "Share Our Fair Deal" coalition of the willing including the Republicans, the emerging Longist faction of the Democrats, and several other smaller parties and independent candidates, on which supporters of the Fair Deal and Dyer-Long ticket could run without having to be quite so attached to the Republican name (which was not well loved in the south). The mainline Democratic nomination also benefitted the Dyer-Long ticket: it was predicted that a moderate "Me too Democrat" would win the nomination, given the national mood, but with the rupture with the Longists, the Democrats instead nominated an ardent anti-Fair Dealer (and one who even went so far as criticizing former President Copeland's relief measures as having been too much government intervention), former North Carolina senator Josiah Bailey
As such, with the popularity of the Fair Deal, the crossover support Long was able to pull, and the unpopularity of mainline Democratic conservatism, the Dyer-Long ticket was able to absolutely crush the mainline Democratic ticket. The 1932 Republican victory had already been the largest landslide since 1820 (in the popular vote, at least), but the Dyer-Long 1936 win was even larger, winning nearly 70% of the vote and all but two states. And their coalition rode their coattails to further increase their numbers in Congress and the state level. In the south, as Long had promised, the conservative democrats had been dealt a heavy blow
After the elections, the Dyer administration quickly worked to pass legislation to implement various expansions of the Fair Deal that the Longists had demanded, and quickly did an about-face on civil rights, shifting from previous silence to an aggressive push for major legislation. The administration succeeded on both fronts, passing the Civil Rights and Voting Protections act to ban discrimination (on the basis of race, and in what some historians suggest was a failed "wrecking amendment", also on the basis of sex, along with other factors like religion and national origin) and ban measures intended to suppress the nonwhite vote, while also significantly expanding the Fair Deal
The south saw a swift and major backlash against the administration with the passage of civil rights, but the effect of millions of nonwhite people finally being able to vote provided something of an electoral counterbalance against that. Furthermore, the expanded Fair Deal measures were successful in dragging unemployment down even further, largely returning the economy to a state of normalcy (albeit with a much larger government), which served as another nail in the coffin for the mainline Democratic Party outside of the south, and also helped the Fair Deal coalition maintain decent support among poorer (or poorer-until-very-recently) southern white people and remain competitive throughout the south even in areas Republicans hadn't dreamed of standing a chance in immediately after the 1932 elections
The Republican Party and its allied Fair Deal coalition felt on top of the world, having saved the economy and having achieved a huge victory for civil rights 60 years after the death of Reconstruction, and a victory that seemed likely to be rather more durable than Reconstruction itself was. But there were still concerns. Long's demagoguery had certainly helped politically in the short term, but many in the Republican Party and other allied parties feared the potential for Long to use his position as a stepping-stone to greater power, and that he might take the country in a rather more authoritarian direction. After all, as many whispered, Dyer wouldn't live forever... could the crippled man even make it to the end of his second term, some wondered. And while America saw a bright recovery that didn't need to trample on civil liberties, in the rest of the world, various countries saw an increasing slide to authoritarianism and totalitarianism, with fascism and fascist powers on the rise. America had a solid isolationist lean since the Great War, but even if things did go ideally domestically, a growing number of Americans worried that the country might be dragged into foreign conflicts, regardless of what the general public wished. There was much uncertainty in regards to the future...