May 31, 2007
FDR’s Electoral Margins III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:30 PM EST In pointing to Franklin Roosevelt’s dwindling reelection margins after 1936, John Steele Gordon "guess[es] that his drop in 1940 was largely due to people who disapproved of a third term and came out to vote for Wendell Willkie," and that the "1944 vote was surely affected by millions being overseas." Building on this observation, Alexander Burns writes that it "was a unique accomplishment for the President to move the country as far as he did without incurring a greater backlash from his base of urban ethnics and racial minorities, white Southerners, and union members." Though it’s surely bad form to use this space to plug one’s own work, I’m going to do so anyway. In my new book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Post-War Politics, I chart FDR’s declining popularity among New York City’s Irish and Italian Catholic citizens, who gave the President 73 percent and 78 percent of their votes, respectively, in 1936, 56 percent and 42 percent in 1940, and only 50 percent and 41 percent, respectively, in 1944. Given the central role that urban Catholic voters played in building the New Deal coalition, these figures are startling. Some of the drop-off surely owed to specific ethnic concerns. Roosevelt’s staunch opposition to the Italian government lost him a good measure of support in the city’s Italian neighborhoods, where he was actually warned not to campaign in 1940. By the same token, the open sympathy that leading New Dealers showed to anti-fascist Loyalists in Spain and to the anti-clerical, secular government in Mexico sat poorly with many staunchly anti-Communist Catholic voters, be they Irish, Italian or German in descent. In the late 1940s a leading city Democrat observed that in the early New Deal era "the Irish and the Jewish people stayed together politically.... That’s all gone. I think it’s largely ascribable to the Fascist growth in Europe. So there is a dangerous, disheartening, and rather tragic cleavage now between our Irish friends and our Jewish friends—and I am afraid that is going to deepen as time goes on." More fundamentally, many Catholic Democrats grew increasingly uneasy with what they viewed as a strong parallel between Communism and New Deal statism. Mr. Gordon’s observation that the "1944 vote was surely affected by millions being overseas" scratches the surface but could go a good deal further. The massive growth of the state during World War II saw an expansion of the federal income tax to cover most wage earners and the introduction of withholding taxes; the use of unpopular wage and price controls to keep inflation in check; and the imposition of rationing, which affected household use of such staples as sugar, coffee, meat, and fuel. On the home front, ordinary people accepted these privations with an unusual amount of stoicism, but popular grassroots resistance did exist, and toward the end of the war, civilians grew restive. FDR’s declining popularity surely owed in no small measure to the tensions created by the new, bureaucratic regulatory state, whose tentacles reached deep into people’s homes and workplaces during the war.
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