An Unrealistic Communist Response to Electoral Failure, 1932
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In the US presidential election of 1932 the Communist Party USA ran its candidate, William Z. Foster, expecting to get a million votes. It received only 103,307, 0.3 percent of the popular vote. The Socialist Party was also disappointed, their candidate, Norman Thomas, receiving 2.2 percent. The incumbent president Herbert Hoover received 39.7 percent. The Democratic Party candidate, the governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt, received 57.4. Roosevelt had campaigned with cheer, always smiling and as the candidate of change, with a brass band playing "Happy Days are Here Again." The Communist Party thought their candidate, William Z. Foster, was the real candidate for change. They saw Governor Roosevelt as establishment. What the Communists were really seeing was the difficulty in winning votes for socialist revolution. The United States in 1932 was in the depth of the Great Depression, but the public would always go for reform before they would a seemingly utopian overthrow of the system. American communists did not dwell on the reality that Russia's masses did not enter the Bolshevik revolution attracted by Marxist political theory or that in the U.S. whatever revolutionist slogans they invented could not win a substantial percentage to vote for them over more respected reformist politicians. Rather than turning into reformers or foreseeing future failures for their party in electoral politics, they responded to their disappointment ideologically, denouncing the election as a capitalist fraud. | |
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