alternatehistory.com

It may seem startling to suggest that it was not the Great Depression that doomed Herbert Hoover's re-election campaign in 1932. Yet there was some contemporary survey evidence to that effect:

"In 1932, the American electorate was surveyed in a poll that has languished in the archives. The survey was conducted by Houser Associates, a pioneer in market research. It interviewed face-to-face a representative cross section about voter choices and issue attitudes. Although conducted on behalf of the Hoover campaign, the poll was not biased in his favor. The most striking revelation is that the electoral sway of the Depression was quite limited. The government was not seen by most voters as the major culprit or as having been ineffective in alleviating it. Even many FDR voters agreed. Moreover, there was no widespread “doom and gloom” about the future. What loomed larger in 1932 was the issue of Prohibition. The American people overwhelmingly favored repeal. The Democratic stand on it—that is, outright repeal—was a sure electoral winner, given Hoover’s staunch defense of Prohibition." https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...yqBtYIsVKIZxc0Os9EHhx7lGInAB6JfAN46qmtwrXZmv0

Actually, by 1932 it would be unfair to say that Hoover's position was "staunch defense of Prohibition"--rather, it was something worse, something that satisfied neither wets nor drys. Here is the 1932 GOP platform on Prohibition:

"...A nation wide controversy over the Eighteenth Amendment now distracts attention from the constructive solution of many pressing national problems. The principle of national prohibition as embodied in the amendment was supported and opposed by members of both great political parties. It was submitted to the States by members of Congress of different political faith and ratified by State Legislatures of different political majorities. It was not then and is not now a partisan political question.

"Members of the Republican Party hold different opinions with respect to it and no public official or member of the party should be pledged or forced to choose between his party affiliations and his honest convictions upon this question.

"We do not favor a submission limited to the issue of retention or repeal, for the American nation never in its history has gone backward, and in this case the progress which has been thus far made must be preserved, while the evils must be eliminated.

"We therefore believe that the people should have an opportunity to pass upon a proposed amendment the provision of which, while retaining in the Federal Government power to preserve the gains already made in dealing with the evils inherent in the liquor traffic, shall allow the States to deal with the problem as their citizens may determine, but subject always to the power of the Federal Government to protect those States where prohibition may exist and safeguard our citizens everywhere from the return of the saloon and attendant abuses.

"Such an amendment should be promptly submitted to the States by Congress, to be acted upon by State conventions called for that sole purpose in accordance with the provisions of Article V of the Constitution and adequately safeguarded so as to be truly representative."
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/doc...s3R0oimyBD5suA_gs27y7qSMrMNki5ljKAvLDoJp8XNMg

"Press reaction was quick and sharp. 'It is wet and dry; it opposes repeal and proposes it,' the [New York] Times reported. A follow-up editorial was more blunt: The Republican plank on Prohibition was 'perhaps the worst jungle of verbiage that even platform-makers ever devised in order to conceal their thought.' H. L. Mencken summed up the statement as “quite unintelligible to simple folk.”..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=_8MjDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA357

What if the GOP convention, instead of coming out for a rather vaguely defined "resubmission" had come out for outright repeal? Many delegates wanted that, but Hoover was firm in resisting it:

"As ever, Hoover feared the worst. On the day the proceedings formally opened, with Butler still driving hard for repeal, Hoover threw a bit of a tantrum. 'If the convention goes for repeal,' he announced to Ted Joslin, 'I shall refuse to accept the nomination.'

"Joslin knew his boss too well to rise to the bait. 'You can't do that, Mr. President.'

"'Yes I can,' came Hoover's petulant reply. 'I shall have to.'

"But he did not. Later that day Butler's bid for repeal was voted down 690 to 460. Hoover and his team had wrought the result through force and threat, but the opposition did not go down quietly. On June 15, the night before the vote on the party platform, wet delegates joined twenty thousand local citizens in the galleries of the new Chicago Stadium in a raucous demonstration, showering the platform committee with lusty boos and chanting, 'We want repeal.' Noted one reporter, 'It seemed as if the whole hall was in rebellion against the administration plank for resubmission.' It was an embarrassment, but the party chiefs controlled the key committees, and the uprising soon played itself out..." https://books.google.com/books?id=_8MjDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA357

It was of course a Pyrrhic victory for Hoover. When the Democrats held their own convention in Chicago, in the same "new stadium the Republicans used--there was more drama and a more suspenseful choice. But it was Roosevelt after all, and upon his nomination, he faced all the moral complexities of Prohibition and sliced them clean through. 'This convention wants repeal,' Roosevelt declared in his acceptance speech. 'Your candidate wants repeal.' Now the cheers were rising around him. 'The people of the Unitcd States want the Eighteenth Amendment repealed.' Roosevelt had to wait a moment to let the applause die down; then he added his coda: 'From this date on the Eighteenth Amendment is doomed.'

"Here was the strong, clear position that Henry Stimson had asked for, but which President Hoover was unable to deliver. Roosevelt did, however, and the impact was immediate. A New York Times editorial the next day commended the 'forthright and bold act of the candidate to take his stand squarely' in favor of repeal. It was brave, but more than that, 'It is wise of him to emphasize what may easily prove to be the winning issue of the campaign..." https://books.google.com/books?id=_8MjDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA358

And yet...I don't think that coming out for repeal would even have come close to saving Hoover. There are a couple of reasons I am skeptical of the poll "proving" Prohibition rather than the Depression the major issue of 1932:

(1) As the historian Allan Lichtman pointed out, there is not a single case of the party holding the White House getting a popular-vote victory in a recession (let alone depression) year. (1876 was the one case where a party holding the White House won the electoral vote in a depression year, but the circumstances were to say the least questionable. And anyway the economy in 1876 had actually started to recover from the depression of 1873-5.) People may say to pollsters, "I don't blame Mr. Hoover for the Depression, and in fact I think he's been doing the best he can to fight it-"-but they still might hope that somehow electing a Democrat might produce better results for the economy (though FDR's proposed economic policies in 1932 were unclear and sometimes contradictory, unlike his unequivocal anti-Prohibition stand).

(2) If Prohibition were the key issue, one would expect FDR to do best in the "wet" Northeast and worst in the "dry" South--and the exact opposite was the case. In such wet states as MA, CT, and RI FDR hardly improved on Al Smith's showing of 1928. (No doubt part of this was Catholics resenting that Al Smith was not renominated.) Indeed, if Prohibition were to be seen as the key issue, FDR would probably have never been nominated. FDR had the support of southern and western Democrats (who had supported McAdoo in 1924) who wanted "bread, not booze" to be the issue for 1932, while conservative "drys" in the Northeast wanted someone like Al Smith or Governor Ritchie of Maryland. (FDR had not always taken an "advanced" anti-Prohibition stance; in 1923 he warned Al Smith that signing the repeal of New York's prohibition enforcement act would hurt the party upstate. But by the early 1930's FDR had come out for repeal.)

So all in all I still think the Depression was the most important issue in 1932. But we should remember how important the Prohibition issue seemed at the time. Indeed, some observers were aghast at how prominent a role the Prohibition issue took. As John Dewey wrote, "Here we are in the midst of the greatest crisis since the Civil War and the only thing the two national parties seem to want to debate is booze." https://books.google.com/books?id=KLwq5Tmw4_gC&pg=PA263
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