Republican Presidential Campaign Despairs
Friday 16th
October 1936
Senator Alf
Landon, the increasingly obviously doomed Republican Presidential candidate,
stepped up his attack on President Franklin Roosevelt. He described Roosevelt
as the “Kerensky of the American revolutionary movement” although he did not
seem able to identify its Lenin or Trotsky. He promised that Roosevelt would
bring the country to a point where “every owner of a life insurance policy or
bank account will see his savings evaporate”. As this had already happened to
many Americans in the wave of bank failures of the Great Depression, this
rather lacked impact.
This was clearly
a move of desperation. The all-out denunciation of Roosevelt’s New Deal as a quasi-socialist
programme marked the final abandonment of any Republican sympathy for the
programme’s social goals. Originally Landon had been touted as a representative
of a “Liberal” tendency within the Republican Party.
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