I have seen some alternate history scenarios where FDR is never elected as president - what would have happened if FDR was simply never born? How would have politics in the US evolved differently without him?
What if FDR was never born?
- Thread starter CarnelianClout
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Deleted member 186022
I'd imagine they would be the same as 'FDR is never elected' timelines apart from New York state politics.
Yeah the Great Depression would be longer, but I am certain someone would hopefully be elected and make similar policies like FDR.
I think I see a Kingfish in the future of the United States without an FDR-esque figure to calm the mood of the country.
Really, the two questions do not differ that much. Had he never been president, FDR's effect on history as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, vice-presidential candidate in 1920, and even governor of New York would not have been very great. (Al Smith had done so much to reform New York state's government that there wasn't all that much FDR could add.)
In point of fact, I can actually see another 1932 Democratic candidate propositioning him to run and that's William H. Murray. Whether Long runs in 32 or 36 remains the point of discussion, but Long himself was somewhat unnerved by Murray's skill at using the favored son campaign strategy stating: ""Alfalfa Bill" was very gracious ... While we talked at length, he dwelt upon the virtue in the possible candidacies of everybody except Franklin Roosevelt and himself, even suggesting me as a candidate. He understood the favorite son game. I soon saw that I was fencing with a past master in politics. Had I listened to him very long, he would have been at work to make a favorite son candidate out of me. I was then moving Heaven and earth to keep down other favorite son candidates. ... Favorite son moves were the most dangerous things we had to fight...."
In a scenario were FDR was never born, Long himself would probably propose the Share Our Wealth programs, but would probably come up with a snappier title for the programs. Dare I say... a New Deal?
How effective was Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy? As a VP candidate I believe he was the only reason that Cox did as well as he did, if memory serves.
"As well as he did" includes losimg every county in the three West Coast states, every county in New Yotk state (including all five boroughs of New Yoek City!) and being the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose Tennessee since 1868!
I don't think FDR helped Cox at all. In fact, one speech he made was a minor embarrassment: when he said, "The facts are that I wrote Haiti's Constitution myself and , if I do say it , I think it's a pretty good Constitution . " This allowed Harding to counter: " I will not empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down the throats at the point of bayonets." https://books.google.com/books?id=9TctWjHHOeEC&pg=PA286 (FDR's statement was untrue as well as unwise; he had merely signed a consitution drafted by the State Department.) I don't think the incident hurt Cox much but it certainly didn't help him.
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That is not accurate at all. There have been numerous studies over the decades since and there is plenty of reason to argue that the New Deal actually Extended the Depression, not fixed it. I mean, the unemployment never did drop below 14% until WW 2 hit.
Also, people seem to forget there was a Depression in 1920-21 that lasted less than 18 months, so all it takes is someone other than Hoover being in office and trying something different and you get the same results as the earlier depression, which means a recovering economy throughout the 30s unlike the malaise that permeated OTL USA.
kholieken
Banned
That is Libertarian myth. New Deal restored GDP and repair economy. There are many, many articles and books from economist and historian that view New Deal as ending Great Depression.
Again, I would note that while most of the alternatives to FDR were in some ways "more conservative" than him, there was one alternative who in OTL supported most of the New Deal--McAdoo. in OTL, FDR at the convention did worst in the "conservative" Northeast where the Raskob forces were strongest and best in the old McAdoo country in the West and South. McAdoo to get the nomination was willing to soften his old support of Prohibition (he now called for a referndum on it) and even conferred with Smith on a stop-FDR move!
To quote an old post of mine: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/mcadoo-in-32.298820/#post-8447629
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Obviously, McAdoo would have a lot of problems with bitter memories of 1924. Yet he could point out to Northeasterners that he did ultimately support Smith over Hoover in 1928 (though very late in the campaign). And by 1932, the Klan was a spent force in national politics, and McAdoo on the eve of the convention announced he was for a national referendum on the future of the Eighteenth Amendment. As Craig notes (*After Wilson*, p. 222), this was a considerable change from McAdoo's previous "bone-dry" position, and was doubtless made to encourage the idea of McAdoo as a compromise candidate if FDR should fall short.
Raskob would no doubt say the same thing about a McAdoo nomination he did about FDR's in OTL in a letter to Harry Byrd: "When the Democratic Party, born and bred in the fine, old aristocracy of the South, and always fostered and nourished by a conservative people, is turned over to a radical group, such as Roosevelt, Hearst [in the early 1930s Hearst had shown temporary signs of reverting to his earlier radicalism], McAdoo, Senators Long, Wheeler, and Dill, and is taken out of the hands of such men as you, Governor Ritchie, Carter Glass, Mr. Reed, Colonel Breckinridge, Governor Smith, John W. Davis, Pierre S. du Pont, Governor Cox...etc., one cannot help losing faith in the ability of that Party, under such leadership, to command that confidence necessary to elect." Craig, p. 247. Raskob did console himself that at least the conservatives got FDR to run on a conservative platform. Like FDR, McAdoo would no doubt pledge himself to the platform and thereby win the reluctant support of the conservatives during the campaign. But after winning the presidency--memories of 1924 might lead to him losing a few northeastern states like Massachusetts, which FDR narrowly carried, but I have no doubt that McAdoo would defeat Hoover overwhelmingly--I do not see him paying much more attention to the platform than FDR did. (In OTL, McAdoo as Senator from California from 1933 to 1938 was a supporter of the New Deal.)
Some historians have doubted the sincerity of McAdoo's progressivism, pointing to his role as a lawyer for big oil interests (something which hurt him badly in 1924, after the Teapot Dome scandal hit). Yet FDR was involved with plenty of business ventures, some of them speculative, in the 1920s--and in 1928 he wrote to businessmen that they should support Smith because Hoover as Secretary of Commerce had shown too great a tendency to meddle with business! All in all, I don't see any reason to think McAdoo would have been any less liberal as a president than FDR. Whether he had FDR's political skills is another matter--and he certainly wasn't his equal as a speaker. Also, he would have been 73 years old in 1936--but then so was Reagan in 1984. (McAdoo definitely would not have run for a third term in 1940--he was to die in early 1941.)
One might question whether the Georgia-born son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson (and favorite candidate of the Klan in 1924) could accomplish the political realignment of blacks which FDR (with Eleanor's help of course) was to accomplish in OTL. Yet after all, FDR accomplished this largely through his economic programs--which McAdoo supported. (Also, as commissioner of the nation's railroads during World War I McAdoo had issued an order dictating that blacks and women working for the railroads should get the same pay as white men for equal work. Admittedly, he may have done this at the behest of the railroad unions, who thought that if the railroads had to pay blacks equally, they just wouldn't hire them. But whatever the motives of McAdoo's equal pay order, it was welcomed by African Americans at the time.) Also, despite the fact that the Klan had backed him in 1924 (above all because of his stance on Prohibition) there is no evidence that he shared the Klan's anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic views. In 1911, he had chaired a national citizen's committee demanding the abrogation of the US-Russia passport treaty on the ground of Russia's limitations on travel rights for American Jews. (IIRC, that was actually what brought him to Wilson's attention.) In 1924 his backers included Catholics like James Phelan and Jews like Bernard Baruch.
To quote an old post of mine: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/mcadoo-in-32.298820/#post-8447629
***
Obviously, McAdoo would have a lot of problems with bitter memories of 1924. Yet he could point out to Northeasterners that he did ultimately support Smith over Hoover in 1928 (though very late in the campaign). And by 1932, the Klan was a spent force in national politics, and McAdoo on the eve of the convention announced he was for a national referendum on the future of the Eighteenth Amendment. As Craig notes (*After Wilson*, p. 222), this was a considerable change from McAdoo's previous "bone-dry" position, and was doubtless made to encourage the idea of McAdoo as a compromise candidate if FDR should fall short.
Raskob would no doubt say the same thing about a McAdoo nomination he did about FDR's in OTL in a letter to Harry Byrd: "When the Democratic Party, born and bred in the fine, old aristocracy of the South, and always fostered and nourished by a conservative people, is turned over to a radical group, such as Roosevelt, Hearst [in the early 1930s Hearst had shown temporary signs of reverting to his earlier radicalism], McAdoo, Senators Long, Wheeler, and Dill, and is taken out of the hands of such men as you, Governor Ritchie, Carter Glass, Mr. Reed, Colonel Breckinridge, Governor Smith, John W. Davis, Pierre S. du Pont, Governor Cox...etc., one cannot help losing faith in the ability of that Party, under such leadership, to command that confidence necessary to elect." Craig, p. 247. Raskob did console himself that at least the conservatives got FDR to run on a conservative platform. Like FDR, McAdoo would no doubt pledge himself to the platform and thereby win the reluctant support of the conservatives during the campaign. But after winning the presidency--memories of 1924 might lead to him losing a few northeastern states like Massachusetts, which FDR narrowly carried, but I have no doubt that McAdoo would defeat Hoover overwhelmingly--I do not see him paying much more attention to the platform than FDR did. (In OTL, McAdoo as Senator from California from 1933 to 1938 was a supporter of the New Deal.)
Some historians have doubted the sincerity of McAdoo's progressivism, pointing to his role as a lawyer for big oil interests (something which hurt him badly in 1924, after the Teapot Dome scandal hit). Yet FDR was involved with plenty of business ventures, some of them speculative, in the 1920s--and in 1928 he wrote to businessmen that they should support Smith because Hoover as Secretary of Commerce had shown too great a tendency to meddle with business! All in all, I don't see any reason to think McAdoo would have been any less liberal as a president than FDR. Whether he had FDR's political skills is another matter--and he certainly wasn't his equal as a speaker. Also, he would have been 73 years old in 1936--but then so was Reagan in 1984. (McAdoo definitely would not have run for a third term in 1940--he was to die in early 1941.)
One might question whether the Georgia-born son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson (and favorite candidate of the Klan in 1924) could accomplish the political realignment of blacks which FDR (with Eleanor's help of course) was to accomplish in OTL. Yet after all, FDR accomplished this largely through his economic programs--which McAdoo supported. (Also, as commissioner of the nation's railroads during World War I McAdoo had issued an order dictating that blacks and women working for the railroads should get the same pay as white men for equal work. Admittedly, he may have done this at the behest of the railroad unions, who thought that if the railroads had to pay blacks equally, they just wouldn't hire them. But whatever the motives of McAdoo's equal pay order, it was welcomed by African Americans at the time.) Also, despite the fact that the Klan had backed him in 1924 (above all because of his stance on Prohibition) there is no evidence that he shared the Klan's anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic views. In 1911, he had chaired a national citizen's committee demanding the abrogation of the US-Russia passport treaty on the ground of Russia's limitations on travel rights for American Jews. (IIRC, that was actually what brought him to Wilson's attention.) In 1924 his backers included Catholics like James Phelan and Jews like Bernard Baruch.
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That is leftist apologists bunk. A repaired economy would not have stayed over 14% unemployment for the entirety of his first 2 terms. It even spiked back up to 19% in 1937. That is not repaired, only a bandaid at best
I think the thing that most people are missing is that in terms of dollars and cents, the New Deal was a monumental failure (UCLA released a study some years back stating the New Deal extended the Depression by a decade - how much of that was due to the Roosevelt Recession of 1938 is another matter.). The success it’s associated with comes from the fact it stabilized the country and provided a lot of the logistical framework that American industry brought to bear in the Second World War not to mention cooling temperatures and preventing radicals like Pelley’s Silver Legion or Foster’s communists from getting more support.
I can’t exactly recall the source, but Norman Thomas all but stated the New Deal was “carrying the Socialist Party out on a stretcher.”
I can’t exactly recall the source, but Norman Thomas all but stated the New Deal was “carrying the Socialist Party out on a stretcher.”
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Ukrainian Victory
Banned
I fear that the American people might be too misogynistic to elect a female US President by the 1930s/1940s.Hmmm... the President Roosevelt in WWII is Eleanor?