Monday, October 21, 2013 FLASHBACK SPRINGFIELD — Oct. 21, 1932
FDR brings his
idea of a new deal
to Springfield
Franklin D. Roosevelt,
the Democratic candidate for president in the
fall of 1932, stepped off
the special train at the
Alton station in Springfield. The simple act
alone reflected just one
of the contrasting qualities between him and his
opponent, the Republican incumbent president,
Herbert Hoover.
Roosevelt covered
13,000 miles on a
whistle-stop tour of
the country, making 16
major addresses covering
specific topics or issues.
Part campaign strategy designed to get his
message to voters, it also
showed “Roosevelt the
Robust” was up to the
rigors of being president.
Getting out to the
people and meeting them
face-to-face was a luxury
Roosevelt the candidate
could afford. For Hoover,
it was harder to find the
time. He had decided not
to campaign but instead
to stay in Washington to
deal with the economic
crisis. It wasn’t until late
October that Hoover
finally hit the trail making his own brief tour by
train through West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana.
In Springfield on Oct.
21, Roosevelt’s message
was directed to farmers
who suffered terribly
under Depression conditions. Commodity prices
were at their lowest levels
in 30 years, land values
had sunk and thousands
of farmers were forced
off their property when
they couldn’t meet their
bank obligations. Roosevelt promised government help if elected, and
he blamed the Hoover
administration for not
doing enough for the agricultural community. He
promised it a new deal.
That sounded good to
a suffering nation, even if
it wasn’t quite sure what
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER the new deal meant.
“Whatever the new
deal was, it was not going
to be what Hoover had
done. He was offering
to the American people
a government that was
going to be more activist,” says Roger Biles, a
professor of history at
Illinois State University.
“Hoover was reluctant
to go beyond a certain
point in involving government, and Roosevelt’s
principle message in
1932 is we’re not going
to be limited in the ways
Hoover was,” Biles said.
It emerged as the basic
theme of the Roosevelt
campaign.
“The country was in an
extraordinary situation
at that time, and it called
for extraordinary measures. The government
was going to have to step
up because nobody else
could.”
“The New Deal, never
on its own was able to get
all the economic indicators back up to pre1929 levels. It provided
significant recovery–not
complete recovery–but
significant recovery and
it helped millions and
millions of people and it
established a number of
safeguards in the American system, so that we
wouldn’t get into that position again,” Biles said.
He believes that overall,
PXX
On this day
During a campaign stop in Springfield, Franklin
Roosevelt told supporters there could be no national
prosperity if farmers were not prosperous. FILE/THE
1879 — Thomas Edison
perfected a carbonized
cotton filament light
bulb.
1915 — The first transatlantic radiotelephone
message was sent from
Arlington, Va. to Paris.
1959 — The Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright, opened in New
York.
1967 — Thousands who
opposed the Vietnam
War tried to storm
the Pentagon during a
march in Washington,
D.C.
STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
the record is more good
than bad.
“Either you see that as
the beginning of America
heading off down the
primrose path and that
everything that is bad
today is traceable back to
the 1930s, or you see it as
the beginning of a lot of
really useful changes.”
Hoover said that the
federal government
should never be a general
employer of labor and
firmly believed aid to
the unemployed would
weaken their “moral fiber,” an idea that Burton
Folsom agrees with. Folsom is a professor of his-
tory at Hillsdale College
and author of “New Deal
or Raw Deal?,” a critical
look at the Roosevelt administration’s policies.
“Hoover was against
raiding the public treasury to help the individual and he makes a big
deal out of it towards the
end of the campaign,”
Folsom says. He attributes today’s reliance on
help from government
programs to Roosevelt
and the New Deal.
For all the money
spent on New Deal programs, there were still
huge problems facing the
nation, he says.
“When Roosevelt
became president, the
budget deficit was a little
over $20 billion, that
was the national debt. It
was double that at the
end of two terms of his
spending and we still
had 20 percent unemployment,” Folsom says.
As a result of World War
II, it rose to $260 billion.
10 times higher than it
was when he took office.
Looking at the numbers,
Folsom says the New
Deal’s success is questionable.
— Rich Saal
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