Presidential Candidates, 1936

Report Outline
President Roosevelt and New Deal in 1936 Campaign
Borah, Hoover, and Republican Party Liberalization
Candidacy of Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas
Knox of Illinois and Vandenberg of Michigan
Dickinson of Iowa and Other Compromise Candidates

President Roosevelt and New Deal in 1936 Campaign

The Republican national convention will meet on June 9 in Cleveland to formulate a party platform and nominate a candidate for the presidency. Two weeks later, on June 23, the Democratic national convention will open in Philadelphia. Although the nominations will not be made until four months hence, the 1936 campaign, which Postmaster General Farley predicted before the Democratic National Committee on January 9 would be “the bitterest and certainly the dirtiest political struggle that any of us here can remember,” is already in progress. It was formally opened on the Democratic side at the Jackson Day dinners on January 8. Senator Borah (R., Ida.) became the first publicly announced Republican candidate on February 4, when he made known his intention to enter the Ohio primaries. The presidential aspirations of Borah and several other Republicans, however, were already a matter of common knowledge. A more active stage of the campaign will be reached next month when New Hampshire on March 10 holds a primary election for choice of delegates to the national conventions. Similar elections will follow in succeeding weeks in more than a dozen other states.

President Roosevelt and New Deal in 1936 Campaign

Despite threatened insurgency on the part of Alfred E. Smith and prominent Democrats of the American Liberty League and despite the opposition of Governor Talmadge of Georgia and a group of southern Democrats, the renomination of President Roosevelt by the Philadelphia convention is regarded as a foregone conclusion. No President since the Civil War, willing to run for a second term, has been denied renomination with the exception of Johnson in 1868 and Arthur in 1884, both of whom had succeeded to the office from the vice-presidency. The 1936 campaign, moreover, will revolve around the New Deal as the leading issue. The Democratic party could scarcely enter the contest without the principal architect of that edifice at the head of its ticket.

In a resolution adopted on January 9 the Democratic National Committee reaffirmed its “unanimous and unfaltering loyalty to our great President” and congratulated the nation on its opportunity “to ratify the acts of the administration that has lifted us from the depths of depression and despair to the highland of hope and confidence.” In mid-December the Postmaster General and chairman of the National Committee had asserted in a speech at Brooklyn, New York, that Roosevelt would receive as many electoral votes in 1936 as in 1932, when he carried all but six states.