Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal

From the acclaimed author of 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents and 1960: LJB vs JFK vs Nixon—The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies comes a dazzling panorama of presidential and political personalities, ambitions, plots, and counterplots; racism, anti-Semitism, anti-socialism, and anti-communism, and the landslide referendum on FDR’s New Deal policies in the 1936 presidential election. Award-winning historian David Pietrusza boldly steers clear of the pat narrative regarding Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented 1936 re-election landslide, weaving an enormously more intricate, ever more surprising tale of a polarized nation; of America’s most complex, calculating, and politically successful president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the very top of his Machiavellian game; and the unlocking of the puzzle of how our society, our politics, and our parties fitfully reinvented themselves. With in-depth examinations of rabble-rousing Democratic US Senator Huey Long and his assassination before he was able to challenge FDR in ’36; powerful, but widely hated, newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who blasted FDR’s “Raw Deal”; wildly popular, radical radio commentator Father Coughlin; the steamrolled passage of Social Security and backlash against it; the era’s racism and anti-Semitism; American Socialism and Communism; and a Supreme Court seemingly bent on dismantling the New Deal altogether, Roosevelt Sweeps Nation is a vivid portrait of a dynamic Depression-Era America. Crafting his account from an impressive and unprecedented collection of primary and secondary sources, Pietrusza has produced an engrossing, original, and authoritative account of an election, a president, and a nation at the crossroads. The nation’s stakes were high . . . and the parallels hauntingly akin to today’s dangerously strife-ridden political and culture wars. FDR's 1936 Reelection Title Page Contents Characters Chapter 1:"Franklin Is On His Own Now" Chapter 2: "Try Something" Chapter 3: "One Bullet" Chapter 4: "Five Negroes on My Place" Chapter 5: "A Great Pity" Chapter 6: "Common and Half-Tight" Chapter 7: "Methodist Picnic People" Chapter 8: "A Voice Made for Promises" Chapter 9: "Shirt Mania" Chapter 10: "Heil Hearst" Chapter 11: "The Old Deal" Chapter 12: "Anno Domini Father Divine" Chapter 13: "Dumb-Bells, Freaks and Hicks" Chapter 14: "It's Myself" Chapter 15: "20,000 Morons" Chapter 16: "Boiled in a Bathtub" Chapter 17: "Keep on Running" Chapter 18: "Un-Americanism" Chapter 19: "I Welcome their Hatred" Chapter 20: "Send for a Priest" Acknowledgments Bibliography Index