LAUSR

Three days before the 1936 presidential election, Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for president, addressed a packed house at Madison Square Garden in New York City. In his address, Roosevelt rejected the legacy of "hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing [Republican] Government" that had looked with indifference upon the suffering inflicted by the Great Depression and promised that under Democratic leadership government officials would "keep our sleeves rolled up" to sustain the economic recovery and provide work for needy Americans (Roosevelt 1936a). Having made this pledge, Roosevelt proceeded to the climax of his address, the content of which rendered the speech one of the most famous in the history of American presidential campaigns. Reminding listeners that his administration had constantly "struggle[d] with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, [and] war profiteering," he declared: We now know that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred. (Roosevelt 1936a, emphasis added) The crowd of twenty thousand supporters, which had repeatedly interrupted the address with wild applause, "exploded in delirious enthusiasm. Their thunder rolled around the hall" (Brands 2008, 454). Roosevelt's remarks at Madison Square Garden capped an election campaign characterized by repeated attacks on "economic royalists" and "privileged princes" (Milkis and Nelson 2005, 277; Brands 2008, 453). And his 1936 campaign has been remembered as a high-water mark of Democratic rhetorical antagonism toward wealthy opponents of vigorous federal efforts to regulate the economy and provide working Americans with security against the risks of unemployment and old age (Skowronek 1997, 303). In fact, the predominant view among scholars of presidential politics is that the populist antagonism toward the rich embodied in Democratic rhetoric during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and epitomized in Roosevelt's 1936 campaign increasingly gave way from the 1940s onward to more consensual rhetoric emphasizing the unity of interests between economic classes (Gerring 1997; 1998; Bimes and Mulroy 2004). The assertion that the Democrats have abandoned populist themes in favor of speech more accommodating to the wealthy has also become the conventional wisdom among contemporary journalists and pundits. Speaking about the "New Liberalism" of the Democratic Party, New Yorker essayist George Packer reminded listeners of Roosevelt's fervent rhetorical attacks on the well-to-do, concluding that "[i]t's hard to imagine [Democratic President Barack] Obama saying anything close to that" (Packer 2009; see also Westen 2011). Have Democrats in fact abandoned class populism, becoming more accommodating in their address toward the affluent over time? In an age of high and rising economic inequality, this is not an idle question. Indeed, it points to an important debate about the soul of the contemporary Democratic Party. Critics of contemporary Democratic politics charge that the party's abandonment of class populism has resulted in an insipid, technocratic mode of address that effectively enshrines the interests and values of the well-to-do (Hacker and Pierson 2010; Bonica et al. 2013). If Democrats have in fact abandoned populism in favor of a passionless consensus rhetoric that resonates with the interests of the wealthy, then the case for their subservience to the powerful would be strong indeed. Additionally, such findings would suggest that one of the most effective rhetorical techniques for discussing economic inequities has been lost from mainstream American political discourse, at least for the time being. The impoverishment of class rhetoric in presidential campaigns would seem to preclude frank and accessible discussion about why economic inequality has increased, how this development has been tied to political (as well as economic) decisions, and in what ways this problem might be addressed in the political arena. …