First, while I would be honored to become, or seem, one of the “pathetic dupes of New Yorker copyediting-department propaganda,” I must humbly decline.
I have not read the New Yorker since 1969, save for a short period of hospitalization and recuperation in 1990 when back issues were among the reading furnished me. (As I recall, there was an ongoing autobiographical series on the sexual awakening of some second-rate short-story writer in the issues I read at that time.)
FDR was a leading candidate in 1932 precisely because he was a Wilsonian progressive who had brought into his administration as Governor of New York a group of that ineffably liberal occupation the social workers, led by Harry Hopkins and Frances Perkins, who were accomplishing wonders in combatting the poverty of the 20s and the early Depression through, among other things, what would today be considered workfare. Recall the quote, “While you’re fixing the economy, people are starving today!”?
I’ll refer you to accounts of the Republican conventions of 1944, 1948, 1952, 1956, and 1960, the last three of which I recall watching on TV, where Hoover was wildly acclaimed and made speeches that received standing ovations (in two cases at least, I don’t recall what happened in 1952).
And, despite the amount of heat and wind this thread has engendered, I see a very low Winchell factor.
And now you know…
the rest of the story! 