Roosevelt Garner

White lithograph of a building's dome on blue background at the center, surrounded by a red circular border with white text

This button was for the 1932 election campaign of Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner. They ran against incumbent U.S. President Herbert Hoover and Vice President Charles Curtis. The country was still gripped by the Great Depression, and many blamed Hoover and his policies for not doing more to help the country out of it. Self-built shanty towns that housed the homeless were even named "Hoovervilles" after the president. Backed by the campaign song "Happy Days Are Here Again," Roosevelt won by a tally of 472 electoral votes to 59 for Curtis, getting 57.4% of the popular vote to Curtis' 39.7%. It was the first election since 1852 in which a Democrat won a majority of both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Roosevelt began to enact his New Deal policies after the victory and won a second term with Garner in 1936, a third term (with Henry Wallace as VP) in 1940 and a fourth (with Harry S Truman as VP) in 1944, presiding over the United States for most of World War II. Truman succeeded to the presidency after Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Hailing from Texas, Garner had served in the U.S. House of Representatives as minority leader and speaker of the house. He is one of only two vice presidents (Schuyler Colfax under Ulysses S. Grant was the other) to have previously been speaker of the house.