The concept of anyone breaking into the South, especially the Deep South, against FDR is particularly ludicrous to me. Roosevelt nuked his Republican opponents there with margins we would call Stalineque today. And wasn’t the South the most hawkish region of the country even in those days?
The FDR trashing on this site gets old. Many of us are or were FDR/JFK Democrats. The south adored Roosevelt because he kept the people working and from starving. His Republican opponents were fools. Willkie ran around saying he was more for The New Deal than Roosevelt was. Dewey, Hoover? That who you FDR haters would throw up against Hitler and Stalin?
Roosevelt was a patriot and a fine leader. Southerners loved him. He was a rock, and he gave my parents confidence with the sound of his voice in radio chats.
He got elected four times, and he was a great president.
It was unfortunate that just as the South was reaching the point of becoming a more mainstream political area in the 1920s, open to at least voting GOP at the top-of-the-ticket, that it plunged right back into the party of darkness by 1932. There were still too many Southerners at the time that saw the GOP as the party of Lincoln, Sherman and the Negro, and wouldn’t support it no matter how better off they were for it.
South Carolina’s margins rivaled the kind of performance you’d see today in your most egregious urban slums, well above 90% Dem. Of course, FDR was fine to play both sides, suckering Blacks into supporting him with welfare (opposed by Black Republican leader Rep. Oscar DePriest of Chicago) while pandering to the worst of the White racists in the South. Truly reprehensible. It took decades for the Southern Whites to figure out FDR’s big gubmint Socialism (and what followed after FDR) was ultimately detrimental to them and started to break out of the voting habits.
But, of course, they weren’t going to be waking up by 1940 to the reality they’d been had by FDR’s failures. He should’ve been out on his ass by 1936 for worsening the Depression.