October 19, 1936

“Tomorrow is the college straw vote with a machine from Po’keepsie and everything. Feeling runs high amid a surfeit of sun-flowers. Miss [Cornelia] Raymond stopped wearing hers when told they were made in a sweatshop but I guess she’ll vote for Landon just the same.”

Nine hundred sixteen students and 109 members of the faculty took part in the presidential straw poll on October 20th, with the faculty voting to re-elect Democrat and Vassar honorary trustee Franklin D. Roosevelt and students—along, apparently, with Cornelia Raymond ’83—favoring the Republican candidate, Kansas Governor Alf Landon. Sixty percent of the students voting chose Landon, 28 percent voted for Roosevelt, and the Socialist, Communist and American Labor (Union) party candidates, Norman Thomas, Earl Browder and William Lemke received seven percent, four percent and one percent of the student vote, respectively. The faculty vote favored Roosevelt over Landon 54 to 20 percent, with four votes going to Thomas—whose daughter Rebekah was a freshman—and three for Browder.

The Miscellany News

A comprehensive poll released by The Daily Princetonian later in October, showed that the President held a narrow lead over Governor Landon among 80,598 collegians in 34 states: 38,977 to 35,702. In this poll, 905 Vassar students voted two to one for the Republican. The New York Times