by Ryan Rafaty for King’s Review
Dewey’s short piece, ‘The Need for a New Party’, could be read today nearly verbatim while retaining the same veracity and vigor that it had had during the Great Depression. Then, as now, masses of Americans were jaded, cynically convinced that both parties were beholden to big business and culture-war coalitions, having ‘lost all confidence that politics can accomplish anything significant’. At the time, President Hoover —an unapologetic defender of unfettered capitalism and racist immigration quotas who had sold the public a ‘self-confessed fraud’ — was in the White House. He was presiding over the decline of the Republican Party from majority to minority status, from which the party wouldn’t recover for decades. But not everyone in the GOP kept quiet while the ship was sinking.
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