November 8, 1932: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Is Elected President

November 8, 1932: Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York is elected President of the United States, defeating the incumbent Republican, President Herbert Hoover. Due to the Great Depression, in just 4 years, Hoover went from winning 40 States to losing 42, from winning 444 Electoral Votes to 87 to losing 472 to 59, and from winning 58.2 percent of the popular vote to losing it 57.4 to 39.7.

This was not so much an enthusiastic hiring of FDR as it was a vindictive firing of Hoover. And, yes, Hoover can be blamed for how he handled the Depression: He didn't think he could do much, and the things that he did do, that worked a little, he should have done harder, and didn't. Indeed, much of FDR's New Deal was based not just on what he, and before him Al Smith, had done in the office of Governor of New York, but on some things Hoover did as President, like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).

But Hoover shouldn't be blamed for the Depression itself. There was no oversight for the economy. There was a Federal Reserve Board, but there wasn't yet a Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) to keep stock traders honest, or a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect banks. Those would come with FDR's New Deal the next year.

In addition, the farm belt had already been in a depression since the end of World War I, 11 years earlier, because the armed forces, its biggest market, had shrunk back to prewar levels. It would take World War II to make the U.S. military-industrial complex big enough to be a permanent market for American agriculture, from meat and grain to dairy and vegetables.

Hoover's predecessor, President Calvin Coolidge, possibly seeing the Crash of 1929 coming, said in 1927, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928." In layman's terms, he left Hoover holding the bag. No one blames the man who got a full term in 1924 on "Coolidge Prosperity" for the Crash that came less than 8 months after he left office. But they should.

Also with blame was Andrew Mellon. Appointed Secretary of the Treasury by Warren Harding, and kept all through the Coolidge years and most of Hoover's term, America's 3rd-richest man (behind John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford) was a Pittsburgh-based banking titan, whose name lives on after a merger with the Bank of New York: BNY Mellon. But he basically let big business do whatever it wanted.

And then there were the Wall Street speculators. As we've seen, Greed is not good.

FDR said, "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people." At the time, he didn't know what that "New Deal," a play on his cousin Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal," would be. But the voters didn't care: They wanted something done. Or, as FDR put it in his Inaugural Address, "They want action, and action now!"

And he gave it to them. And they rewarded him with a 2nd term, and a 3rd, and a 4th.

Time magazine named him its Man of the Year in 1932 -- and again in 1934, as his New Deal reforms took hold; and again in 1941, as he tried to resist the Axis Powers even though Congress wouldn't declare war until it was too late.

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November 8, 1932, like all modern U.S. Election Days, was a Tuesday. The baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season didn't start for another 2 days. So there were no scores on this historic day post for the event.