GOVERNOR OF KANSAS (1933-1937)

REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE (1936)

Republican Candidate.

A middle-of-the-road Republican, Alf Landon took on a popular president in an election that gave the American people their first chance to express their opinion of the major expansion of the federal government that had taken place in the last four years. Unlike many fellow Republicans, Landon supported some New Deal programs and offered his own solutions for the nation's economic woes, but the voters in the 1936 presidential election overwhelmingly preferred President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "Alphabet Soup of Acts and Agencies" and handed him a landslide victory over Landon.

Background.

Born in Pennsylvania, Alfred Mossman Landon grew up in Marietta, Ohio. In 1904 his family moved to Independence, Kansas, and for the next four years Landon studied law at the University of Kansas. Though admitted to...