Looking through KO’s archives, it doesn’t take much time to find newspaper articles from Kingswood Oxford’s storied past about prior elections. I looked primarily at the Kingswood News, the newspaper of the all-boys school since they seemed to speak more frequently about electoral politics than Oxford’s newspaper did.
One thing that was quite interesting was that Kingswood had a very high percentage of Republicans during the FDR years. The earliest issue I could find that had students writing about the election covered the 1936 Presidential Election. In the midst of the Great Depression, incumbent FDR faced off against the Republican Governor of Kansas, Alf Landon. The final tally had Gov. Landon with only eight electoral votes, carrying the states of Vermont and Maine, and winning 36.5% of the popular vote. The final popular vote for Connecticut went to FDR, but by a smaller margin than that of the vote nationwide—55.3% to 40.4%.
The Kingswood News declared in the title of the piece that a “STRAW VOTE AT SCHOOL WOULD ELECT LANDON,” before quickly conceding that, “[a]s a matter of fact, the NEWS didn’t take any straw vote. What would have been the good of it, for everyone knows who the four or five democrats in school are, anyway. Besides, the NEWS thinks it may corner some distinction in being, perhaps, the only journal in the country not conducting a pre-election poll.”
The Kingswood News noted that the situation at the school was decidedly Republican, using as evidence the “vast numbers” of boys wearing sunflower pins. The sunflower was a symbol of Gov. Landon’s campaign, as he came from Kansas, the Sunflower State. Apparently, the ratio of sunflower pins to pins supporting FDR was approximately 179 to 5, with a mere 2.7% of the student body not supporting Landon. The News quipped that “[t]hursday morning, however, one would have thought that the school was going Democratic, after listening to appeals for permission to go downtown to hear President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This was not entirely because members of the school wanted to see the Nation’s Leader, but it is suspected that they wanted a vacation. School was not dismissed.” According to the FDR Presidential Library, the President visited Hartford for a speech on October 22, 1936.
Students were apparently not pleased that FDR won the 1936 election. In a 1940 issue, an opinion piece stated that “[we] here in the United States have an exceptional aversion to dictators of any size, shape, or form. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, or Franco are many Americans’ pet peeves. But the dictator that is right under our eyes is completely ignored. He is that egotistical politician, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
This opinion piece, strongly worded, goes on to claim that the Works Progress Administration (a New Deal-era agency that employed millions of Americans to carry out public works projects, including the construction of government buildings and roads) was created to secure the votes of the workers it employed. The piece endorsed corporate executive Wendell Willkie for President and insisted that his business experience was appropriate for government, as “[o]ur government is the biggest business in the world, and it should be run as such. In it there should be no room for politics. The Republican candidate will run it as a business, as he has shown through his actions and speeches. If we want this world to be safe for us, our children, and our children’s children, then we must get out and VOTE FOR WENDELL WILLKIE”
In the next issue of the News, the editors had to apologize “to the President of the United States, the Works Progress Administration, and the many Democrats affiliated with the school for the somewhat hasty denunciation of them which appeared in this space in our last issue. In rightful enthusiasm over the remarkable, and as we believed, original literary properties of this bit of Junior School correspondence, we neglected in an oversight to sign the author’s name, thus misrepresenting the work as that of the NEWS.”
That year, the Kingswood News decided to conduct a straw poll, with similar results to those that would have been expected for the 1936 election. Approximately 14 % of the student body of the Senior School supported FDR, and 83% supported Willkie. That year, Kingswood welcomed two English students who fled Europe in fear of violence from World War II.
