In the key election in Oklahoma’s second District, Democrat William G. Stigler (a half-Choctaw) beat Republican Edwin Oliver Clark (a quarter-Choctaw) for Congress by 3,700 votes. The election was advertised as a crucial test of whether the long Republican trend could be stopped (TIME, March 27). Both sides had poured in money and big-gun campaign speakers.
Tone of the G.O.P. campaign was set by rich, aging Senator Ed H. Moore, who used to be a Democrat until he sickened of the New Deal. Cried he: “I hate and detest the New Deal with all my soul. It is a destructive vice in America. I want it eradicated completely.” Replied big-gun Democrat, Kentucky’s Alben Barkley: “I just asked them what part of the New Deal they would vote against . . . social security, the wage-hour act, bank insurance, soil conservation and all the rest.”
Two things happened: 1) Democrats, sparked by Governor Robert Samuel Kerr’s powerful Democratic machine, beat the bushes for votes; 2) Republicans, with the campaign largely handled by anti-New Deal and ex-Democrats, went far too far. They alarmed even some of their own party with the bitterness of the Hate-the-New-Deal campaign.
Democrats crowed over the result.* From the realistic, anti-Roosevelt New York Daily News, Republicans got hard-headed advice: “Republicans would do well not to console themselves too nonchalantly with alibis. This defeat ought to remind them that the fight to defeat a Roosevelt fourth term is not over by a long shot.” To the G.O.P., the lesson was clear —hatred is not enough.
*Reverberations reached as far as Moscow, whose press, addressing millions who had never heard of Oklahoma, let alone its Second District, gave prominence to the election result, and interpreted it as a pre-election approval of Franklin Roosevelt.
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