program jeopardized traditional American values. With a large number of Americans

benefiting from the Democratic Administration, these critics were in the minority.6

 The early success of the administration restored American confidence in the

government and the economy. Roosevelt captivated the nation and led the Democrats

to even larger electoral gains in the 1934 Congressional elections. In the process, he

launched a new era of interest group politics. The business community, which had

never had difficulty in gaining an audience with politicians, became just one of many

constituent groups in an array that now included labor unions and minority groups.

African-Americans who had previously voted for the Republicans as the "Party of

Lincoln" switched their allegiance en masse. Organized labor, outcasts during the

decades of Republican dominance, found the national administration sympathetic to

its cause and threw its weight behind the New Deal. Conservative Southern

Democrats, generally friends to neither labor nor blacks, tolerated the presence of

these liberal groups and supported Roosevelt's ideas in the hopes of fostering an

economic recovery in their region. Roosevelt and the national Democratic Party made

direct appeals to these groups for support and included them in critical decisions in

order to make government more responsive, but also to gain their votes. Roosevelt

shifted the focus of the Federal government exclusively from large capital interests to

include the working class and minority groups.

 The election of 1936 solidified this New Deal Coalition as an electoral force

when FDR defeated Kansas Governor Alfred Landon by 515 electoral votes.

Roosevelt believed that he had an indisputable mandate, but soon championed

6 Alan Brinkley, Voices ofProtest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York:
Vintage Books, 1983); Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists: 1932-45 (Lincoln, Neb.:
University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

7 Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists; Robert S. McElvaine, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Washington,
DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2002).