While many politicians are said to spit on their fingers and hold them up to the wind to ascertain where to stand, this could seldom be said for Millard Tydings. served in the US Army from 1916 to 1919, where he served with distinction. War service, of course, is an excellent addition for a political resume, and he was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1919, serving as speaker from 1920 to 1922. Tydings most notably in this role opposed the ratification of the 19th Amendment, a fact that would for a time upset his liberal feminist wife (Conroy). This interestingly was not unusual for Democrats in Maryland of the time: of the four Democrats in the House and Senate from that time, only J. Charles Linthicum voted for. He likewise opposed Prohibition. In 1922 Tydings moved up to the Maryland State Senate but wasn’t there for long as that year he defeated Republican Congressman Albert Blakeney (R-Md.) for reelection in the midterms.
In Congress
As a representative, Tydings was one of the more conservative Democrats and this worked well for Maryland voters at the time: Senator William Cabell Bruce, elected in 1922, was much the same as Tydings, and in 1926 he ran for the Senate, defeating Republican incumbent Ovington Weller. In 1931, Tydings opposed restoring funds for the Sheppard-Towner Act, participating in a filibuster against it (Lemons, 786). This foreshadowed his stance on the programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Tydings was a seemingly more vociferous foe of Roosevelt than he had been for Hoover, and was the only Democratic senator to vote against all three of the following acts: the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the National Industrial Recovery Act. He didn’t vote on the Social Security Act and voted against the Wagner Act, the latter being regarded as the Magna Carta of labor union rights. TIME Magazine (June 13, 1938) said he was the “Inheritor of the late Governor Ritchie’s conservative mantle…”. He was outspoken against Roosevelt’s efforts at increasing power with the “court packing plan” and his proposed executive reorganization, both battles he won in the 75th Congress due to dissenting Democrats. His political opponents, such as New Dealer journalist Drew Pearson, called him “Mi-Lord Tydings” as they regarded him as an American aristocrat. He had a working-class background and would in 1936 marry into money through Ambassador Joseph Davies’ daughter, Eleanor. In 1934, Tydings introduced a resolution condemning Nazi oppression of Jews in Germany, and requesting President Roosevelt to inform the German government of the U.S.’s disapproval, which would not make it out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. One of his most notable achievements was the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934, which provided for a gradual independence for the Philippines, to be completed in 1946. Despite World War II in the meantime, the plan was kept and the Philippines was independent in 1946.
FDR’s Purge Effort & Post-War Politics
In 1938, FDR saw a chance to remake the Democratic Party and aimed to do so by targeting primarily senators for defeat in the primary. TIME Magazine (June 13, 1938) explained the president’s logic: “The Roosevelt reasoning is supposed to be that, since some Senate seats must probably be lost anyway, he would be wise to pick even losing nominees, in order to retain control of State machinery for the more important political year of 1940”. Of all the Democrats, Tydings was the one for who FDR’s wrath was most justified as his record had been the least loyal of the targets. Roosevelt personally loathed him and told Interior Secretary Harold Ickes to “Take Tydings’ hide off and rub salt on it” (Rosenfeld). Roosevelt also got a top recruit in Congressman David J. Lewis, an administration loyalist who played a major role in the drafting and passage of Social Security. However, what Roosevelt didn’t count on is that in this time state parties didn’t appreciate federal interference, and this theme was used effectively against Roosevelt’s efforts. All senators Roosevelt targeted won renomination and reelection.
Although an antagonist of FDR’s New Deal, he was on board with the administration on foreign policy: he supported repealing the arms embargo, the peacetime draft, and Lend Lease. However, he thought that permitting merchant ships to enter belligerent ports in 1941 was a step too far. Tydings’ views on foreign policy would become even more favorable to the Democratic Party after the start of World War II. Although Tydings was regarded as a conservative Democrat, by the Truman Administration he was perhaps a bit less so: Americans for Democratic Action gave him the following ratings adjusted to not count absences:
1947 – 60%
1948 – 67%
1949 – 50%
1950 – 53%
He was staunchly internationalist, supporting Greek Turkish Aid, the Marshall Plan, and Point IV foreign aid to poor nations while being somewhat opposed to the Fair Deal. In 1950, he opposed liberalizing housing credit and supported legalizing “basing point” pricing (pricing that includes freight costs, thus allowing for differences based on difficulty) while opposing limiting the Social Security Administrator’s authority over states and supporting extending rent control.
Millard Tydings vs. Joseph McCarthy
On February 9, 1950, a senator who at this point had been known most for launching an ill-conceived investigation into the military for alleged mistreatment (which didn’t happen) of Nazi defendants in the Malmedy Massacre trial and for accepting a $20,000 loan from Pepsi’s Washington representative after which he pushed against sugar rationing, made his big splash with his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia titled “Enemies from Within”, in which he famously held out a document, stating that in his hand he had a list of 205 communists within the federal government. There was a letter written by Secretary of State James Byrnes to Rules Committee Chairman Adolph J. Sabath (D-Ill.) in 1946 that 284 employees were recommended against permanent employment, but only 79 were out of the government (POTUS Geeks). There were a few problems with using this letter as a baseline for communists in government. First, these people were not necessarily communists, rather people thought of as security risks for one reason or another. It could have been political, but it could have also been due to gambling, alcoholism, or suspected homosexuality. Second, by the time of the Wheeling speech, only 65 of these people remained in government and they had undergone additional security checks. McCarthy would later clarify that there were 57 of such people, a figure which came from the “Lee List”, a list of individuals flagged by House Appropriations Committee investigator Robert E. Lee (Griffith, 51). The State Department had informed the House that of the 108 people Lee listed, 57 remained by 1948. These people were not flagged as “communists”, rather as “security risks” and the reasons included alcoholism and marital infidelity.
The Senate formed a committee to investigate these charges and the Democratic leadership selected Tydings to head it, as the thinking was, he couldn’t be accused of having communist sympathies given his reputation as a conservative Democrat. However, the committee devolved into partisan bickering. The majority report concluded McCarthy’s charges to be a “fraud and a hoax” while McCarthy ally William Jenner (R-Ind.) charged that Tydings had engaged in the “the most brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history” (Fried, 124-125). The Senate voted three times on accepting the report, with each vote being a purely partisan split. Even Margaret Chase Smith (R-Me.), who issued a declaration of conscience against McCarthy’s methods and would vote to censure him charged the committee of having “…made the fatal error of subjectively attempting to discredit McCarthy rather than objectively investigating and evaluating his charges” (Schapsmeier & Schapsmeier).
The 1950 Election: McCarthy Tries to Purge Tydings
1950 was a bad year for Democrats and liberals in particular: they lost a net of five Senate seats and of six incumbents to lose reelection, five were Democrats including Majority Leader Scott Lucas of Illinois. While many attributed Republican gains in the 1950 election to the growing influence of Senator McCarthy, and there is a bit of truth here in Maryland given McCarthy’s sending of his staff to run Butler’s campaign as well the distribution of a composite photo (i.e. “photoshop”) of Tydings and CPUSA Chairman Earl Browder, there were other factors at play here. First of all, it was a midterm and the president’s party historically doesn’t tend to do well in such elections. Furthermore, Tydings had alienated a number of key Democratic groups, including organized labor with his vote for the Taft-Hartley Act and with blacks; his record on civil rights legislation was spotty as in 1950 while he had supported cloture for a compromise Fair Employment Practices law, he had also voted for Senator Richard Russell’s (D-Ga.) proposal to weaken the implementation of army desegregation. This was a time in which the black vote was Democratic leaning but not monolithic, and this was thanks to the Dixiecrats as well as people like Tydings. Thus, the wrong Democrat or the right Republican could lose or win the black vote respectively. Such was the case with Millard Tydings, and McCarthy saw an opportunity and took it. The Republicans did in 1950 what FDR could not in 1938: on election day Butler won by over 43,000 votes.
In December 1950, Tydings filed a complaint with the Senate over the election over unfair and illegal campaign practices that he believed influenced the result. These included excessive campaign spending and major unlisted out-of-state contributions. Of particular note was the role played by Jon M. Jonkel, a public relations director, in the campaign, as he had formed the strategy as well as been responsible for mismanagement regarding campaign finance records, of which he would be convicted in Maryland courts (U.S. Senate). Butler was found at fault for failing to properly oversee his campaign. He had allowed McCarthy to play an outsized role in his campaign including with illegal financial transactions with out of state donors and outright falsehoods, but no action was recommended against him absent a standard laid out for Senate campaigns (U.S. Senate).
Although in 1956 Tydings had planned to have a rematch with Butler and won the primary, his health was declining and it became clear to him that he wouldn’t be able to effectively serve, thus he dropped out. The Democrats were a bit divided in this traditionally Democratic state between the more conservative and segregationist wing and the liberal wing. Instead of picking Tydings’ wife Eleanor, they picked segregationist George P. Mahoney, who had previously lost the 1952 Senate race. This, plus Eisenhower’s resounding win, helped bring Butler, a staunch conservative normally ill-positioned to win in the state, another term. Tydings wouldn’t have survived another term in the Senate, as he died on February 9, 1961. His adopted son, Joseph Tydings, would serve in the Senate from 1965 to 1971, and politically be far more like his liberal mother than Millard.
Overall
Millard Tydings is the sort of Democrat who really doesn’t exist in federally elected office today and wouldn’t make it in either party, especially given how voters are now far more sensitive to how their party’s president feels about a candidate. I admit I have some level of admiration for him winning four terms in the Senate despite often moving against the popular opinion of his times. As he said about serving in the Senate, “If I can’t vote my convictions here, to hell with this job!” (TIME, Sept. 12, 1938)
References
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