and Congress. Snell backed Herbert Hoover for the 1928 GOP presidential nomination, albeit somewhat unenthusiastically. He would have preferred for President Calvin Coolidge to run for another term. Snell's relations with the engineer president soured slightly when Hoover tried unsuccessfully to seize the initiative in New York patronage. Snell's dream of eventually becoming Speaker was dashed with the onset of the Great Depression. In the wake of the 1930 midterm elections, the Republicans lost control of the House. After Longworth died in April 1931, Tilson and Snell tussled for the job of minority leader. Despite being favored by the president, Tilson lost the race to Snell, who appealed to both the Old Guard and to the insurgents. Tilson was too closely associated with the increasingly unpopular Hoover, and Snell had made some concessions to the progressive Republicans. Later career With Hoover's landslide defeat and the advent of the New Deal, Snell spent the rest of his days in Congress fighting the liberal programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His initial reaction to the New Deal was one of cautious but critical cooperation. Snell, in the midst of the economic crisis, supported some early measures of the New Deal, such as the 1933 Emergency Banking Act and the 1933 Economy Act, but he came out in cautious, conservative opposition to most of the president's program. He opposed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Elmer Thomas amendment favoring inflation, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, and other early New Deal measures. During the Court-packing battle of 1937, Snell agreed with Senate GOP leaders to allow the overwhelming Democratic majority to fight amongst themselves, which they did, sinking the plan. The so-called Roosevelt recession of 1937 also encouraged Snell and other conservatives to step up their resistance to the New Deal. In late 1937, Snell introduced legislation for a tax cut, and during the special session of Congress in the same year, Republicans and southern Democrats combined to recommit Roosevelt's Fair Labor Standards Bill, although it was enacted in the next session. In 1938 Snell and the GOP minority successfully opposed Roosevelt's original executive branch reorganization plan, and the midterm elections that year were a triumph for the GOP, as they flipped 82 Democratic seats and nearly doubled the size of the Republican House delegation. However, because of declining eyesight and hearing, and his belief that the Republicans would be unable to retake the House in