Sam Tanenhaus is an American historian, biographer, and journalist who writes often for The New York Times and the New York Review of Books. His biographies include those on Louis Armstrong, Whittaker Chambers, and William F. Buckley, Jr., which he’s currently working on. He has received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his work.
In a recent essay in the Book Review section of the Times, Tanenhaus asks “if there is a useful precedent for this most unpredictable of election seasons.” He rejects references to 1978 when the Republicans had to settle their differences at a divided convention, and to the riotous, violent Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. Instead, he turns to 1936, the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt was lining up to run for his second term, a year when populist demagogues were also in evidence in American politics.
In 1936, Tanenbaum writes, “the country was lifting itself out of the Great Depression, helped by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, but the climb back to prosperity was long and slow, and a mood of populist unrest began to steal across the land.” He then cites to the description of the period offered by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
In a recent essay in the Book Review section of the Times, Tanenhaus asks “if there is a useful precedent for this most unpredictable of election seasons.” He rejects references to 1978 when the Republicans had to settle their differences at a divided convention, and to the riotous, violent Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. Instead, he turns to 1936, the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt was lining up to run for his second term, a year when populist demagogues were also in evidence in American politics.
In 1936, Tanenbaum writes, “the country was lifting itself out of the Great Depression, helped by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, but the climb back to prosperity was long and slow, and a mood of populist unrest began to steal across the land.” He then cites to the description of the period offered by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
The followers of the demagogues mostly came from the old lower-middle classes, now in an unprecedented state of frustration and fear, menaced by humiliation, dispossession, and poverty. They came from provincial and traditionally nonpolitical groups in the population, jolted from apathy into near-hysteria by the shock of economic collapse. They came, in the main, from the ranks of the self-employed, who, as farmers or shopkeepers or artisans, felt threatened by organized economic power, whether from above, as in banks and large corporations, or from below, as in trade unions. To a considerable degree, they came form the evangelical denominations; years of Bible reading and fundamentalist revivalism had accustomed them to millennial solutions. They were mostly men and women of native-born old-immigrant (Anglo-Saxon and German) stock; if [Father Charles] Coughlin’s [right-wing] Irish Catholic supporters seemed an exception, the exception was more apparent than real, for the Irish were beginning to see themselves as part of the old immigration rather than the new. In sum, they seemed to represent Old America in resentful revolt against both contemporary politics and contemporary economics.
Sound familiar?
References:
Sam Tanenhaus, “What Do This Season’s Political Books Tell Us About the Election?”, New York Times, Book Review Section (June 16, 2016).
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval 69 (Houghton-Mifflin 1960).
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