Happy Days Are Here Again

I think people are getting overly-nervous about the upcoming election. Modern technology gives us the illusion of omniscience, but in the days before television people just had to accept that there was a lot they just didn’t know, and that it was all right. It’s still true! 

The 2024 presidential election is already the best of my lifetime; maybe the best ever. Never have the differences between tickets been starker. Kamala Harris/Tim Walz are the best set of candidates I’ve ever seen: Donald Trump/JD Vance are the embodiment of evil. Can’t get better than that! 

Most American historians think the 1896 clash between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan was the most exciting election in American history, with up to 90% turnout of eligible voters. I hope we can get turnout like that! 

When I get fidgety about the election I pull out my copy of journalist Jay Franklin’s “What We Are About To Receive,” published in 1932, and a follow-up to his 1931 book, “What This Country Needs.” The country desperately needed a new direction but would this set of candidates rise to the occasion? Jay Franklin was beside himself with anxiety. 

President Herbert Hoover: “Whatever the facts are, Herbert Hoover is himself. He does not pretend to be a hero, saint, or second Lincoln. He is neither an imitation Roosevelt nor a synthetic Wilson. He may or may not be a good President, a great man, or even a good engineer, but he acts and talks like no one else on earth and does not hesitate to follow his own line, against all advice and all indications of public opinion. … He is as undramatic as a porcelain bathtub, as unspectacular as a cash register, as unmagnetic as a telegraph pole….” 

Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “He is an irrepressible candidate. Scarcely a day goes by or an issue bobs up but Roosevelt hits the front page with a statement, or something. … There is a widespread conviction that Franklin Roosevelt lacks guts, that he can’t force the pace or take punishment, and that when cornered he will play dead dog. He is not a fighter. … Roosevelt represents the all but forgotten strain of chivalry, untempered by self-righteous morality, in the tradition of our public life. … On every other issue – tariff, farm relief, disarmament, foreign policy, banking policy, social unrest – he is as hard to pin down as a live eel on a sheet of oilcloth.” 

Franklin also looked at Al Smith and a number of other politicians. 

Franklin concludes: 

“We shall survive and the world will survive, no matter who is elected President of the United States on November 8, 1932. A hundred years from now our race will still be here, the petty problems of today forgotten, our ridiculous worries over taxation and prosperity rendered insignificant by the march of science and the progress of human events. To paraphrase Macaulay, sources of energy which are still unimagined, machines not dreamed of by inventors yet unborn, laws not even suspected by our wisest legislators, and new ways of thought and standards of conduct which will regard our most profound statesmanship as childish, will reduce our present miseries to a chapter, then to a paragraph, and finally to a footnote in history. 

Future schoolchildren may be compelled to memorize the name – together with those of our other presidents – of the man whom we elect in 1932; it is doubtful, nonetheless, that in 2032 more than one educated man out of a hundred will be able to state, offhand, what he accomplished in office or what his election signified. For we are still too young to have learned the only lesson of history, which is that politics, though lots of fun, is only the result and not the cause of human progress.” 

For myself, this is how I feel about this election: