The New Deal Coalition and the Twenty Years the GOP Spent in the Wilderness

In 1936 the Republican nominee for President carried exactly two states. One was Maine. The other was Vermont. A Democratic wit of the day is said to have summed up the new national mood by saying that as Maine goes, so goes Vermont. It was funny at the time, and it is still funny, unless you were a Republican, in which case it was a long, cold winter that lasted most of two decades.

I want to talk about that winter, because every political movement has one, and the ones that come back are the ones that figured out what to do while they were out. From March 1933 to January 1953, Democrats held the White House. Republicans were the minority in Congress for almost all of those years. And yet the party that came out the other side was ready to win with Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and, in time, to build the coalition that elected Ronald Reagan. How? Let me walk you through the coalition that beat us, the mistakes and the victories along the way, and the things the party kept alive.

The coalition that beat us

Franklin Roosevelt did not just win elections. He assembled a coalition, a set of groups that had different reasons to vote Democratic and that held together for a generation. Here is the list, with what each group got and why it stayed.

Add Social Security, passed in 1935, which created a new group of beneficiaries tied to the party that had created it. The pieces were different, and some were uncomfortable allies: a Southern segregationist and a Northern union organizer in the same party is an odd marriage. But it held, because each had something the other needed, and because the Depression had made a lot of people grateful.

I'm not going to tell you that coalition was a trick or a bribe. Millions of people were out of work, and a government that put them back to work earned their votes. The conservative case against the New Deal was never that voters were fools. It was that the program's long-term costs, its growth of federal power, and its habit of treating emergency measures as permanent would catch up with the country. Conservatives who understand why people voted for Roosevelt are better equipped to make that case.

The scoreboard

Here are the presidential results of the period, with the electoral votes added up so you can see the damage. In those years there were 531 electoral votes in all.

In 1932 Hoover carried six states: Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. In 1936 Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas, carried the two northern New England states and nothing else. Roosevelt's 523 electoral votes was the largest total up to that time. In Congress the damage was almost as bad: after 1936, Republicans in the Senate numbered in the teens, and in the House they were a small fraction of the chamber.

The fight that gave the party its first breath

The first sign of life came from an unexpected place: Roosevelt's own overreach. In February 1937, fresh from his landslide, he proposed to add new justices to the Supreme Court, up to six, one for each sitting justice over the age of seventy. The Court had struck down parts of the New Deal, and the President wanted a friendlier bench. The proposal came to be called court-packing.

Here is the part conservatives should relish. The defeat of the plan did not come mainly from Republicans. The Senate Judiciary Committee, run by Democrats, issued a report against it in June 1937, calling the plan a dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle, and the Senate killed it in July. Republican leaders had decided to keep a low profile and let Democrats lead the opposition, on the sound political theory that when your opponent is hanging himself, you hand him more rope and say nothing. The Court, for its part, had begun upholding New Deal measures in the spring of 1937, in decisions like West Coast Hotel v. Parrish and NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin, which led to the quip that "a switch in time saved nine." The full story is in FDR Tried to Pack the Supreme Court in 1937 and His Own Party Said No.

What the fight proved was that the Roosevelt coalition had a seam. Conservative Democrats from the South, who had backed him on relief and agriculture, did not want an all-powerful President or an all-powerful federal government. They were potential allies.

The recession, the midterms and the conservative coalition

Then the economy turned down again. In the fall of 1937 the country sank into a sharp recession, which critics named the "Roosevelt recession." Voters who had been told the worst was over were not happy. In 1938 Roosevelt also tried to defeat some conservative Democrats in their own primaries, and the effort mostly failed, which irritated the party's Southern wing further.

In the November 1938 midterms, Republicans gained more than seventy seats in the House and several in the Senate. It was one of the largest swings in the nation's history, and it did not give Republicans control of either chamber, but it changed the balance of power. Late in 1937 a group of Southern Democrats and Republicans had circulated a document that came to be called the "Conservative Manifesto," calling for balanced budgets, less federal interference with business, and less power for the executive. After 1938 that informal alliance, the conservative coalition, could and did block new liberal legislation for years. The House Rules Committee, where a Virginia Democrat named Howard Smith was a power, became a graveyard for bills. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of the former President, became the Republican leader in the Senate in all but name, and a fixed point for conservatives. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, later the House Republican leader, did the same in their chambers.

Notice the strategy. Republicans did not have the votes to repeal the New Deal. They had the votes, with allies, to stop its expansion. A minority party's first job is to stop the harm it can stop, and to wait for the majority's mistakes. For how a minority can still use the tools it has, see What the Minority Party in Congress Can Still Do When It Doesn't Run the Floor.

The internal fights: Willkie, Dewey and the "me-too" quarrel

A minority party also fights itself, and the Republicans of the 1940s did. In 1940 the party nominated Wendell Willkie, a utility executive who had never held office and who had been a Democrat until a few years earlier. He was an internationalist, and he won the nomination because he looked like a fresh face against the war clouds. He lost to Roosevelt, who won an unprecedented third term. In 1944 and 1948 the nominee was Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York.

Dewey's approach, accepting much of the New Deal and promising to run it more efficiently, drew a bitter complaint from the party's right wing, which called it "me-too Republicanism": a party that agrees with the other side on everything but the price cannot ask voters for a reason to switch. Taft's followers made that argument at every convention. It was a fair point. It was also true that you cannot win a majority by promising to repeal what a majority has come to depend on. That tension, between principle and electability, is the central one in every minority party's life, and it has not gone away.

The party also had to settle its foreign policy. Many Republicans in the 1930s were isolationist. Pearl Harbor ended most of that debate. In January 1945, Senator Vandenberg gave a speech in the Senate accepting that the United States had to take a leading role in international affairs after the war, and he went on to help build the postwar order. That story is told in Vandenberg's Conversion and the Republicans Who Built the Postwar Order.

The Republicans return to Congress, briefly

In 1946, under the slogan "Had Enough?", Republicans won both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1930. The 80th Congress in 1947 and 1948 passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman's veto, which amended the Wagner Act, and sent to the states the 22nd Amendment, limiting Presidents to two terms. (That story is in Why a Republican Congress Wrote the 22nd Amendment After Four Terms of FDR.) Truman campaigned against the "do-nothing Congress" in 1948, and in an upset that stunned the experts, he beat Dewey and Democrats regained the House and Senate. The wilderness seemed to have a few more years to run.

What the party kept alive

Here is what I think was the most important thing that happened to the Republicans in those years, and it did not happen in Congress. While the party was losing elections, conservatives were building the intellectual infrastructure that would carry the movement for the next half-century.

• In 1944 Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, a warning that central planning, however well meant, threatens freedom. A condensed version in Reader's Digest in 1945 reached millions.
• In 1946 Leonard Read founded the Foundation for Economic Education to teach free-market ideas. In 1944 the weekly Human Events began to publish, and in 1947 Henry Regnery started a publishing house that would bring out conservative books.
• In 1953, just past the end of our period, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind gave the movement a history. Within a few years, William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review. You can read that story in From National Review to the Sharon Statement and How the Movement Took the GOP.

That is the lesson that most political commentators miss. The Republicans in the wilderness did not simply wait. They wrote, taught, organized and recruited. When the coalition finally cracked, there was an idea waiting to fill the space.

The return: 1952

In 1952 the party finally found a candidate who could break the pattern. Dwight Eisenhower, the general who had commanded the Allied invasion of Europe, beat Senator Taft for the nomination in a bruising convention fight in Chicago and then beat Adlai Stevenson in the general election, 442 electoral votes to 89. (Check it: 442 plus 89 equals 531.) Republicans also won the House and the Senate by narrow margins, though they lost both in 1954. Eisenhower won the presidency by being the one Republican the country trusted. He did not repeal the New Deal; he accepted and managed it. The Taft wing wanted more. The argument is still with us.

Even then, the wilderness was not over. Republicans spent most of the next four decades as the minority in the House, until the elections of 1994, which are told in The 1994 Contract With America and the End of Forty Years of House Rule. And the coalition that Roosevelt built eventually came apart, as the story of the Reagan Democrats shows in The Reagan Democrats of Macomb County and the Voters Who Changed Sides.

Six lessons for a party out of power

I'd draw six, and you can use them for a state party or a precinct club as well as a national party.

1. Stop what you can stop. The conservative coalition could not repeal the New Deal. It could block expansion, and it did.
2. Let the majority overreach. The court-packing fight is a case study. The best opposition is sometimes to do nothing while the other side hangs itself.
3. Do not fake it. "Me-too" Republicanism lost. Voters want a reason to change. If you agree with the other side on everything, you are asking them to switch parties for nothing.
4. Build the ideas. Hayek, FEE and the early conservative press made the later victories possible. Read, write and teach. See how supporters can help a minority party between elections, step by step.
5. Find the seams. Roosevelt's coalition held together a segregationist South and a union North. When a coalition has seams, a patient party can pull them apart. Later Republicans did exactly that with the working-class voters Roosevelt had won.
6. Rebuild from the precinct up. The party that lost 1936 won 1946. The rebuilding was done by volunteers. For the practical version, see a playbook for rebuilding the volunteer base after a hard election night.

The bottom line

• From 1933 to 1953 Democrats held the White House, built a coalition of Southern whites, city machines, unions, farmers and Northern Black voters, and left Republicans with two states in 1936.
• Republicans survived by stopping the expansion of the New Deal with conservative Democrats, by letting Roosevelt wreck himself on court-packing, and by building books, journals and institutions while they waited.
• The party's internal fight, between "me-too" moderates and principled conservatives, never ended. A party needs both principle and the ability to win.
• When you feel discouraged about the political winds, remember that the party that looked finished in 1936 won both chambers in 1946 and the White House in 1952.
• Do something local this month: join a county committee, write a letter, host a reading group. The wilderness years are when the next majority is built.