{"id":538,"date":"2010-10-11T18:14:50","date_gmt":"2010-10-11T18:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/?p=538"},"modified":"2010-10-12T17:12:03","modified_gmt":"2010-10-12T17:12:03","slug":"election-of-1936-a-shift-in-hereditary-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/2010\/10\/11\/election-of-1936-a-shift-in-hereditary-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Election of 1936: A Shift in Hereditary Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

American Youth Congress poster, 1930s<\/p><\/div>\n

The election widely considered the most one-sided\u00a0in the history of presidential politics coincided with\u00a0a shift\u00a0from hereditary politics. Mass political student organizing ascended in 1936. But such a surge didn’t\u00a0necessarily\u00a0correlate with Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s <\/a>decisive victory over Alf Landon<\/a>, the Republican Governor of Kansas. Instead, students\u00a0rallied behind Norman Thomas<\/a>, the Socialist candidate.\u00a0During the American Left\u2019s peak years (1936-39), the movement mobilized at least 500,000<\/a> collegians\u2014roughly half of the American student body. In unprecedented numbers, female students were leaving the ideologically conservative party of their parents to join Thomas\u2019s Socialist movement.<\/p>\n

During the Great Depression, the majority of female students came from conservative middle-class families. Yet cultural changes caused students to stray from their parents\u2019 conservative values. A study<\/a> of college students\u2019 social attitudes in 1936 found that many began to adopt a more liberal mindset,\u00a0and accept dispositions formerly forbidden. Social changes such as \u201ca decline in religious interest,\u201d and \u201cthe lifting of taboos among women on sex attraction\u201d caused women to reevaluate their beliefs. Such\u00a0changes had repercussions on the political sphere leading up to Election Day.<\/p>\n

A\u00a01935 autobiographical sketch by Alice Dodge revealed\u00a0that despite her conservative upbringing, she ultimately joined the Socialist organization, Student League for Industrial Democracy. Her father nearly always voted Republican, as did her mother to display loyalty to her husband. Yet, Alice did not share the same compulsions as her mother. \u201cOne by one my parents have seen their four daughters emerge from Vassar no longer Republicans,\u201d Alice explained<\/a>, saying she\u00a0personally \u201cbelongs to the Socialist Party.\u201d<\/p>\n

November 3, 1936, Election Day, signified a sharp shift in inherited politics. In a letter to the editor in LIFE<\/em> magazine, a female voter reflected on the rise of student momentum. \u201cThe first time, in 1932, I voted for [Herbert] Hoover because my mother did,\u201d she said<\/a>, yet, \u201cthe second time, in 1936, I voted for Norman Thomas because at that time I was in a fever of youthful zeal to change the world overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n

In hindsight, it is easy to correlate Roosevelt’s triumph\u00a0with student organizing in the 1930s. However, Roosevelt was not the candidate who galvanized students in ’36. And since Roosevelt became the first Democratic presidential candidate in more than a decade to capture the\u00a0majority of\u00a0student voters\u201448.3 percent<\/a>\u2014it\u2019s natural to associate him with the mass student movement. This assumption is flawed.<\/p>\n

Although Thomas only received 187,720 votes<\/a>, his ability to mobilize students had a symbolic impact. In a letter to the editor of The New York Times<\/em> the day after the election, one voter expressed fear of the sudden influx of Socialist views\u00a0at the College of the City of New York. \u201cWhen one considers,\u201d he argued<\/a>, \u201cthat Mr. Thomas got 261 from a total of 2,233 votes, it can be well realized that the charge of communism and socialism today is well founded.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas agreed, and when he was notified of Roosevelt\u2019s overwhelming win, he said<\/a>, \u201cnever was our Socialist message more necessary than today.\u201d The student movement during the mid-1930s served as a precursor to the anti-war student movement of the 1960s. Norman Thomas attributed<\/a> his 1936 loss to the fact that \u201ctoo often we vote\u00a0our fears,\u00a0not our hopes.\u201d However, the 1936 election signified the moment that many college students began to vote with their hopes, by proving they did fear leaving the party of their parents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The election widely considered the most one-sided\u00a0in the history of presidential politics coincided with\u00a0a shift\u00a0from hereditary politics. Mass political student organizing ascended in 1936. But such a surge didn’t\u00a0necessarily\u00a0correlate with Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s decisive victory over Alf Landon, the Republican Governor of Kansas. Instead, students\u00a0rallied behind Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate.\u00a0During the American Left\u2019s peak […]<\/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-538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538","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=538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}