1932 Republican Party presidential primaries (Eternal Scare)

Joseph I France 

Due to high of inpopularity of incumbent president, President Hoover decided not run for a 2nd Term. France was the first U.S. Senator to visit Russia after the Russian Revolution, and consistently advocated cordial relations with the Soviet Union.[8] In 1921 after having been sent to Russia to study economic conditions there, he met with Russian officials, including Lenin, to assist in the release of Marguerite Harrison, an American journalist and convicted spy.[9] Lenin wrote in a letter to Georgy Chicherin:

I have just finished a conference with Senator France. ... He told me how he came out for Soviet Russia at large public meetings together with Comrade Martens [an unofficial Soviet representative in the United States]. He is what they call a "liberal", for an alliance of the United States plus Russia, plus Germany, in order to save the world from Japan, England, and so on, and so on.[10]

The letter went on to relate that Marguerite Harrison was the sister-in-law of the Governor of Maryland and that Senator France's re-election was put in jeopardy by her incarceration. France attracted controversy in the United States by accusing Colonel Edward W. Ryan of the American Red Cross of fomenting the Kronstadt rebellion.[11]

France spoke at a 1920 meeting of the NAACP to support the enactment of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill.[12] France fought against voter disenfranchisement, and proposed an amendment to a railroad bill so that black train passengers paying a first-class fare could get first-class accommodations.[13]