What the 1938 Elections Settled and Unsettled

When Franklin Roosevelt last summer attempted a Purge within his own party, it was a tacit declaration that for worthy adversaries he had to look to recalcitrant members of his own party. Wishfully foreseeing the dissolution of the G.O.P., he frankly invited the U. S. electorate to form two new parties which he named Liberal and Conservative. In his Liberal party he wanted Labor and the Farmers as well as underprivileged Forgotten Men. Last week’s election was the first national test of this projected grand sashay.

In the post-election words of Mayor LaGuardia of New York City, who sees eye-to-eye with Franklin Roosevelt on socio-political reform, “The political sashay has not been perfected.” On the plus side of their tally sheets the Democrats could chalk up only California, North Dakota and Maryland, where they won previously Republican governorships; Illinois, Iowa and Indiana, where they staved off Senate losses, and New York where they safely retained both Senate seats and re-elected their Governor by a squeak.

The concrete measure of Republicans’ success was that they swept New England solidly. Very nearly capturing the New York Governorship, they swept New Jersey. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, South Dakota, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon. They nearly won in Indiana, won all high State offices but the Governorship in Nebraska, gained the Governorship and barely missed another Senator in Iowa. All those victories were against Democrats. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, ruled by Farmer-Labor and Progressives who were more or less allies of the New Deal, they won two more Governorships, one Senatorship.

This added up to a greater sweep (81 seats in the House, eight in the Senate, eleven Governorships ) than Democrats executed in 1930 when they won 55 new seats in Congress preparatory to turning out Herbert Hoover two years later. It was the greatest Congressional turnover since 1894, when the Democrats lost 116 seats midway of President Cleveland’s second term. All this accomplishment left Republicans very definitely a minority party. Their chief triumph was that they were proved not extinct.

But the things that the election settled were not so significant as the things it unsettled. For Republican resurgence did a number of striking things to the accepted U. S. political picture.

Although Democrats still hold a handsome 263 out of 435 Representatives, 69 out of 96 Senators, 30 out of 48 Governors, the election clearly marked the reversal of a six-year political trend and political trends once started often go farther than anyone expects.

With few notable exceptions (Senators Wagner in New York, Downey in California, Bone in Washington), arch-New Deal Democrats were defeated. Democrats such as Governor Lehman of New York and Senator Clark of Missouri, both of whom differed with the President on the Supreme Court, as well as those like Senator Tydings of Maryland whom the President triedto purge, were conspicuous among the survivors—a triumph for the old-fashioned politics of Postmaster Farley over the politics of the White House Janizariat.

Whether due to division between the Farley group and the Janizariat, or to laziness after too much past success, the Democratic vote-getting machine which had worked brilliantly for eight years, conspicuously fell down on the job.

The Democrats whose years in power had given them many supposed strong men to lead them in 1940 found their ranks shot full of holes—their two most prominent New Deal Governors, Murphy of Michigan and Earle of Pennsylvania, defeated; the great machine of Paul V. McNutt in Indiana in such low gear that it barely succeeded in electing its candidate to the Senate over a portly old country editor; the Presidential hopes of their farm leader, Secretary Wallace, badly tarnished by the swing of corn and wheat farmers against AAA.

The Republicans, virtually destitute of vote-getting man power, suddenly found themselves with a string of leaders for 1940—few of them of national calibre but all successful local vote getters. Among them Saltonstall in Massachusetts. James in Pennsylvania, Taft and Bricker in Ohio, Heil in Wisconsin, Ratner and Reed in Kansas, Stassen in Minnesota, Carr in Colorado, Sprague in Oregon, not to mention Dewey of New York who, although he lost, came within 68,000 votes of election, closer than any Republican has been to the Governorship of New York in ten years.

Although the Republicans made a wide sweep, if 1938 had been a Presidential year they would, giving them the benefit of several doubts, have amassed only 218 of 531 seats in the Electoral College.

Republicans’ excuse for failure in previous elections—big cash distributions by the New Deal—was proved nonsense. They found it possible to win. In so doing some of them promised bigger & better expenditures for pensions. If Santa Claus could not be shot, they showed he could be kidnapped.

Third Parties suffered most from Republican success. In Minnesota the Farmer-Laborites, in Wisconsin the Progressives lost control of their States. In New York the new American Labor Party failed to re-elect the five members it placed in the State Legislature two years ago.

Labor’s only notable triumph in the election was in New York where A. L. P., failing as a party, contributed 410,000 votes to the re-election of Senator Wagner and Governor Lehman (both nominated on its ticket also), turning what would otherwise have been a Democratic defeat into a Democratic victory.

The Negro vote swung back to the Republican standard, especially in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan. In Harlem and Chicago, however, Negroes stuck to the New Deal, and in Philadelphia they elected the first Negro woman, a Democrat, to sit in a State Legislature: Mrs. Crystal Byrd Fauset, a fortyish social worker whose husband is a public school principal.

In Ohio, Michigan and in Pennsylvania, Democratic alliances with C. I. O. (in steel, coal, motors, rubber) failed to produce results. Of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, John L. Lewis’ United Mine Workers succeeded in carrying only four for Governor Earle. Flint, Mich., famed sit-down strike town of 1937, cut gentle Governor Murphy’s 1936 plurality of 13,000 to 1,400 this year and re-elected hard-boiled Sheriff Thomas Wolcott by the largest of Republican majorities. Of 43 members of Congress blacklisted by C. I. O. throughout the land, only two (both Democrats) were retired. Philip Murray, C. I. O.’s No. 2 man, said ruefully last week: “Industrial labor first must break down the anti-union prejudice of farmers.”

The discontent of farmers over AAA’s failure to elevate corn and wheat prices was a dominant election factor in the Midwest. In Indiana the McNutt machine behind Senator Van Nuys and in Illinois the Horner machine, allied for the emergency with the Chicago juggernaut of Mayor Kelly & Boss Nash behind Representative Scott Lucas, overrode farmer discontent. In Nebraska only Governor Cochran, who publicized his State’s economy and low taxes, survived a Republican sweep. In Iowa, Governor Kraschel was pitchforked out by 40,000 votes, mostly corn farmers’. In Kansas, the sentiment of wheat farmers was even more plain. Said Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace: “The outstanding conclusion … is that people do not like business depressions…. The new Congressmen will probably be correct in concluding that they have a mandate from the people to … bring about a greater income for farmers. . . . Here they come, fresh from the people. . . . Let’s see what they’ve got.”

The report of pollers that the great voiceless middle class had found the New Deal distasteful was confirmed by results: in New England, where if anywhere in the U. S. the middle class is in a majority, Republicans swept every State. In New Jersey the conscience of the middle class as much as the anger of Labor helped to re-elect Republican Senator Barbour over a Democrat backed by hard-boiled Boss Hague of Jersey City.

Franklin Roosevelt has taken the returns of other elections since 1932 as renewals of his “mandate from the people.” If last week’s returns conferred a mandate, it was upon the Congress, not the President.

Voters passed judgment with respect to sit-down strikes, court-packing, politics-in-relief. They implied their impatience with the delay of Recovery, with executive experimentation, with continued deficit financing. Chastised most emphatically by the general defeat of zealous New Dealers was the end-justifies-the-means attitude expressed by Harry Hopkins when he said, in an excited private argument with friends at the Empire City race track in October: “We will spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect.”