JM:
Maybe you're baffled because you didn't live through a time when gov't agents had beaten many, shot their neighbors, and destroyed their dwellings. Those who lived during the Hoover regime did...and they remembered.
FDR was a great manipulator, the first Prez to really understand and use (his Fireside Chats) the press. With the publicity given to his Public Works Projects, and the press given to Eleanor's good works, it's not at all surprising that he was re-elected.
Public opinion in this country seems to always swing like a pendulum...and often too far in each direction. The repression of the Labor movement by Hoover resulted in the U.S. having a great number of card-carrying Communists...and I'm not referring to just Hollywood. Hell, even the fascist Henry Ford OK'd a group of his workers going to the USSR to set up assembly lines. So, while FDR was/is viewed by some as a traitor to his class, IMHO he may have saved this country from going even more socialist.
If you'd like to get a different perspective on the working man's lot during those times, you might read Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Dos Passo's Midcentury, or Pietro Di Donato's Christ In Concrete...with Dos Passo's being the most well rounded and informative, and Di Donato's the most emotionally powerful, IMHO. |
