FDR, New Deals, and the Limits of Power 187In the 1930s, there was a serious “left” in the U.S.—many millions of
Americans who thought FDR was too friendly with big business, the corpo-
rations, and the bankers and not doing enough to help the common man who
was being destroyed by the depression. They believed that the very few who
had great riches needed to be taxed or somehow forced to use their wealth
to help the poor [much like the “99 percent” in the Occupy Movement of
2010]. Union memberships reached all-time highs with many who joined
identifying as Socialists or Communists. In the 1932 presidential election,
Norman Thomas and William Z. Foster, the Socialist and Communist candi-
dates, combined for nearly a million votes. Four years later, progressive can-
didates who criticized the New Deal got over 1.1. million votes. Floyd
Olson, the governor of Minnesota from the Farm-Labor Party, went so far as
to say “I am not a liberal, I am what I want to be - I am a radical... What is
the ultimate we are seeking? The ultimate is a Cooperative Commonwealth.”
But it wasn’t just governors and politicians who were attacking from the left;
there was a strong cultural left as well. Just as today’s artists like Bruce
Springsteen, Chuck D, or Ani DiFranco or satirists like Stephen Colbert speak
out on social issues, singers, playwrights, and others spoke out in the 1930s.
FIGuRE 4-8 Huey Long