{"id":132,"date":"2010-09-22T23:55:08","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T23:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/?p=132"},"modified":"2010-10-12T16:55:34","modified_gmt":"2010-10-12T16:55:34","slug":"student-involvement-in-the-1932-presidential-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/2010\/09\/22\/student-involvement-in-the-1932-presidential-campaign\/","title":{"rendered":"1932 Election Day Voter Fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

New York Times headline, November 9, 1932<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/a><\/a>On election eve in 1932, over the Columbia Broadcasting System, Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thoma<\/a>s<\/a> made his final appeal to a crowd of eleven thousand socialists supporters on November 7,\u00a0arguing<\/a> that \u201cneither of the old parties has any program for bringing us out of our misery and fear.\u201d Scholars contest<\/a> that Thomas\u2019s campaign for massive federal aid\u00a0for the unemployed and a drastic reorganization for the ailing economy was \u201cmore of a protest movement than an electoral race.\u201d Thomas needed to convert the immense feeling of unease regarding American capitalism into votes for an alternative political party. Ultimately, it would come down to the quantity and aptitude of the Socialist vote, which Thomas believed had the power to alter to future of American politics. So the night before the election, Thomas\u00a0promised<\/a> his audience that \u201cevery vote will count.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, Thomas was wrong\u2014every vote did not count. Thomas failed to foresee that hundreds of thousands of votes went uncounted on Election Day. In districts lacking voting machines, election officials\u00a0often disregarded votes for third-party candidates. It was evident<\/a> that\u00a0a lack of Socialist Party poll-watchers\u00a0directly resulted in untallied votes for Socialist candidates. <\/strong>A socialist poll-watcher in a south-side Chicago polling site observed the familiar occurrence when Democrats and Republicans chose not to count Socialist votes. When challenged, one poll-watcher said<\/a>, \u201cWhen you Socialists have no poll-watchers, we do the same to you. But since you\u2019re here, we\u2019ll split up the Communist vote among the three of us.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

With early precincts in, a New York Times<\/em><\/a> <\/em>story was <\/em>headlined: \u201cThomas may get 1,500,000.\u201d In hindsight, Thomas only received<\/a> 900,000 votes.\u00a0Had every vote been accounted for, estimates suggest Thomas could have reached 2,000,000\u2014which was Thomas\u2019s original campaign goal. With early returns on Election Day, Thomas said<\/a> that 1,000,000 votes will be \u201cmoderately encouraged,\u201d over 1,500,000 votes Socialists will be \u201cdecidingly encouraged,\u201d\u00a0 but every vote over 2,000,000 will be \u201ctremendous jubilation.\u201d With the total votes cast for presidential candidates at nearly 40 million<\/a>, Thomas deemed his hopes modest. Yet, he was realistic regarding his chances of winning the 1932 election, and though disappointed, he did not show it. \u201cThe fine young intellectual element which composes the nucleus of Socialism today and which will be indicated by the vote cast for\u00a0me\u00a0today,\u201d Thomas said<\/a> in his so-called victory statement on Election Day, \u201cis the most hopeful factor in America.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Thomas\u00a0ran for President as the Socialists Party\u2019s candidate in every election between 1928 and 1948.\u00a0\u00a0He devoted his career to matching the impact he had in the 1932 election, yet was never nearly as successful. After Thomas’s presidential attempts, American Socialism began to slowly collapse. As a result, Thomas is remembered<\/a> for being a tireless symbol of the American Left, advocating for unpopular causes such as civil rights, but also for presiding over the end of Socialism in America. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On election eve in 1932, over the Columbia Broadcasting System, Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas made his final appeal to a crowd of eleven thousand socialists supporters on November 7,\u00a0arguing that \u201cneither of the old parties has any program for bringing us out of our misery and fear.\u201d Scholars contest that Thomas\u2019s campaign for massive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":586,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/586"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}