Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Regional stress has been potentially central to the interpretation of the Roosevelt presidency since its very inception. Actually, Franklin D. Roosevelt had hardly been in the White House for more than a year when Oliver McKee, Jr already suggested that the enforcement of the president's initial reforms had reshaped the various regions of the country and their alignment in the nation's political landscape ( McKee 1934 ). Furthermore, moving from the ambit of public discourse to the realm of historiography, in the first scholarly survey of the Roosevelt presidency and its legislative outcome, Basil Rauch (1944) resorted to a regional perspective in order to legitimize the New Deal politically and ideologically by placing it within a US tradition of peaceful revolutions resulting from the alternate aggregation and disintegration of electoral coalitions forged out of the three main regional sections of the country: the Northeast, the South, and the West. Specifically, in Rauch's view, the Roosevelt coalition that paved the way for the enactment of the president's measures arose from an alliance of Western and Southern voters, along with the Northeastern working class, that replaced the Northeastern business-oriented Republican majority of the 1920s. The early product of a protest vote against the GOP in 1932 for the failure of the Hoover administration to cope with the economic Depression, ... log in or subscribe to read full text