Literally James A. Garfield 🗽

Roosevelt was in the middle of his second term when he decided to take on the Southerners in his party who were obstructing his agenda. After 1936, Roosevelt was feeling strong. He had been reelected in a resounding victory against Republican Alf Landon (which came with a 334-88 House majority and 77-16 Senate majority), cementing his New Deal coalition, and had worked with Congress to pass a transformative series of bills that vastly expanded the federal government.

But in building this legislative record, Roosevelt had to constantly navigate the deep divisions within his own party. The Democrats were an unwieldy coalition: Northern liberals who called on government to create a social safety net, work with industrial unions, and regulate the worst excesses of the economy; Southern Democrats who accepted federal support as long as they could control the administration of these programs to prevent interference with race relations; working class, ethnic immigrants who had moved into major Northern cities at the turn of the 20th century; intellectuals and progressives; and Black voters who were beginning to drift away from the party of Lincoln.

Though Southern Democrats were shaken by the influence these latter factions played in the 1936 victories, they held disproportionate power in the party because they controlled many major committees in both the House and Senate. They had supported much of the New Deal, since poor white agricultural communities were often among the most in need of federal assistance. But they drew a firm line at any program that would give the federal government control over the work force or allow unionization to take root in the region. This was a key reason, for instance, that domestic and agricultural workers were initially left out of Social Security.

Southern white Democrats were becoming more oppositional toward the president and his agenda. In 1937, they were among the most ardent opponents of Roosevelt’s proposal to expand the Supreme Court by adding justices who would be less hostile to the New Deal, the so-called court-packing plan. Tensions deepened when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) made a major effort to organize Southern workers, and when Democratic leaders picked Kentucky’s Alben Barkley as Senate majority leader over the South’s preferred candidate, Pat Harrison of Mississippi. Harrison lost by a single vote after the White House pressured members to support Barkley. “We are engaged in a great battle over America. The lines are drawn,” warned North Carolina Sen. Josiah Bailey. “The socialistic forces of America are not confined to the Socialistic Party.” Roosevelt told Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau that the Southern wing was undertaking an effort to form a “Conservative Democratic Party.” Morgenthau agreed, saying, “There has got to be a fight and there has got to be a purge.”

Roosevelt decided to take matters into his own hands. Although presidents typically stayed out of their party’s primaries, he chose to intervene, believing it necessary to prevent the party from drifting to the right. During a fireside chat in June 1938, he told Americans that many Democratic primaries would revolve around a clash “between two schools of thought, generally classified as liberal and conservative.” As the “head of the Democratic Party,” Roosevelt explained it was his responsibility to champion the “definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform.”

He campaigned to defeat Democrats Walter George of Georgia, Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, Millard Tydings of Maryland, Guy Gillette of Iowa, as well as one problematic Northern Democrat—John O’Connor of New York, who chaired the House Rules Committee. Although he did not go after every conservative, success against a few would be sufficient to send a strong signal to the conservatives in his party that they had to be more responsive to him, akin to how the Supreme Court shifted toward more sympathetic rulings after he threatened to expand the bench.

The president was not subtle. At an event in Barnesville, Georgia, celebrating the launch of a new rural electrification program, FDR openly attacked George’s record and said that, if he could, he would vote for George’s opponent. More than 50,000 people packed into the Gordon Institute Stadium for the occasion. With George staring ahead and trying to avoid showing anger, Roosevelt declared, “my old friend, the senior senator from this state, cannot possibly in my judgement be classified as belonging to the liberal school of thought—and, therefore, the argument that he has long served in the Senate falls by the wayside.”

He did the same in a number of other states. At a brief stop during a train trip to South Carolina, Roosevelt said, “I don’t believe any family or man can live on 50 cents a day,” a veiled swipe at Smith, who had opposed Roosevelt’s minimum wage bill and, in explaining his position, had said that a “man could live on 50 cents a day in South Carolina.”

Michigan Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg warned that the “purge” that “has come to America has utterly sinister implications. It is one thing for a political leader to seek sympathetic political supporters, but it is a totally different thing for a president of this still free republic to seek control of the legislative and judicial branches of a constitutional government.”

According to Susan Dunn’s book Roosevelt’s Purge, the entire effort was handled poorly. Roosevelt approached the battles in a scattershot fashion, without a coherent plan, while his “elimination committee,” which oversaw the effort, performed badly. More importantly, Dunn writes, Americans did not want a president interfering in local elections.

The effort did not go well for Roosevelt, who learned the limits of presidential power. Four of the men who Roosevelt campaigned against went on to win. The president’s only successful effort came in New York against Connor.

O’Connor’s downfall was not enough to counter the media narrative that Roosevelt had suffered a major defeat. Southern Democrats performed extremely well in the midterm elections, and Republicans also made significant gains in both the House (81 seats) and Senate (eight seats). In the aftermath, a conservative coalition emerged, an alliance of Southern Democrats and Republicans that would serve as a bulwark against Roosevelt’s domestic ambitions and against liberalism more broadly through the 1960s.

Roosevelt continued to defend his decision. In a 1941 interview with Collier’s, Roosevelt said that he was “primarily interested in seeing to it that the Democratic party and the Republican party should not be merely Tweedledum and Tweedledee to each other. I was chiefly interested in continuing the Democratic party as the liberal, forward-looking, progressive party in the United States.”

Trump has proven himself to be far more formidable as a party leader. Much of his success, of course, stems from the fact that both political parties have become more internally homogenous since the 1970s. The type of Southern Democrats who posed problems for Roosevelt largely became Republicans after the 1990s. Neither party today contains the kind of internal fractures that existed in the 1930s. Moreover, the tools available to presidents to influence primaries, including political action committees, social media, and sophisticated computer-based data, did not exist 88 years ago.

The irony, though, is that, despite his defeat in 1938, Roosevelt ultimately helped build a far more enduring Democratic coalition. Over time, liberals within the party gained strength, and by the 1960s were able to break Southern resistance on several major issues, including passage of the Voting Rights Act, as well as the creation of Medicare, in 1965. Because Roosevelt remained a deeply admired figure in U.S. politics, the party’s association with him and his legacy has helped to boost its standing over the decades.

Trump, by contrast, has tied his party to a deeply unpopular leader and agenda. The GOP now finds itself in a position where individual members cannot easily break free from the president’s grip; doing so means that losing their next election is almost guaranteed (see Wyoming’s Liz Cheney). He shows little concern for Republicans’ long-term future and is willing to take steps that harm them in both the short and long run.