I have many peeves with contemporary politics, and one of them is excessive RINO calling. Hence my motivation for this series of historical RINOs to demonstrate that today’s Republican partisans should have some gratitude that the GOP is as conservative as it is now. Today’s entry is Iowa’s Smith Wildman Brookhart (1869-1944).
In 1920, Brookhart, an attorney, veteran, and noted marksman, challenged Senator Albert B. Cummins, a celebrated Iowa Republican, in the GOP primary. His central theme was the senators’ sponsorship and drafting of the Esch-Cummins Railroad Act, which restored railroads to private control and was on net favorable to them. Overall a moderate in his career, Cummins had started out as a progressive insurgent within the GOP but had since moved increasingly towards the conservatives. However, Republican voters renominated Cummins, for 1920 was a good year for Republicans and conservatives. Interestingly, Brookhart afterwards served as the president of a group much celebrated by the political right until 1925 given his hobby: the National Rifle Association. He wouldn’t have to wait long for another shot at the Senate.
On February 24, 1922, Republican Senator William Kenyon, himself among the moderate to liberal wing of the party, resigned so he could serve as a judge on the Eighth Circuit. The dissatisfaction regular Republicans had with Kenyon was not quite like what they would have with Smith Brookhart after his election. He was firmly in the Robert La Follette/George Norris camp, and with six candidates running for the Republican nomination, Brookhart consolidated his support among progressive Republicans and won with 41% of the vote. In the Senate, he stood for increasing income taxes, estate taxes, challenging big business, veterans’ bonuses, and promoting organized labor. Brookhart even went as far as to support government control of the railroads (McDaniel). He was also outspoken for a strong enforcement of Prohibition, a popular stance at the time in Iowa. However, Brookhart occasionally could support something fiscally conservative, such as his vote to cut spending on Rivers and Harbors appropriations in 1923. In 1924, he ran for a full term and much to the consternation of national Republicans, endorsed Progressive Party candidate Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. Senate Republican leadership excluded him, La Follette, and two other senators from the party conference and stripped them of their committee assignments (U.S. Senate). Brookhart wasn’t in the Senate to make nice with the conservative establishment. Indeed, Time Magazine noted in 1936 that his “pugnacious cowhide radicalism nettled patrician Senators”. Although Brookhart had officially won a close election contest that year by under 800 votes, his opponent, Democrat Daniel Steck, who had gotten significant Republican crossover support, challenged the results.
The challenge was reviewed before the Senate, and surprisingly Steck was chosen as the winner on a vote of 45-41 on April 12th, 1926, and Brookhart was unseated. Although most Democrats voted for their man in Steck, 9 voted against and among Republicans 16 defected to vote for Steck. While progressive Republicans unified behind Brookhart, conservative Republicans were divided on whether to oust a boat-rocking ideological foe or take the unprecedented actions of unseating a senator after he has been serving as well as overruling Iowa state election laws, thus the conservative Republican vote was split, causing the loss. This made Steck the first Democrat to represent the state since the 1850s. Brookhart’s ally, Senator George W. Norris (R-Neb.), condemned the result, stating that “this powerful partisan political combination brought about by Republican leaders nullified the voice of the voters of Iowa, threw out a Republican, and put in a Democrat” (U.S. Senate). However, Brookhart was not easily out of the game. In 1926, he challenged Republican incumbent Cummins again, and he won by double digits partly on account of the latter’s age. Indeed, Cummins died one month after losing renomination. Brookhart proceeded to win a full term by over 12 points.
Brookhart continued his rebellious ways in his full term in the Senate, and one might think that this would have helped him for his next reelection with Republican Herbert Hoover deeply unpopular, but this was not to be. He might have survived if not for a revelation of nepotism…that he had placed two brothers, two sons, and one daughter on the Federal payroll, and he lost renomination (Time Magazine). Brookhart ran for reelection nonetheless as a “Progressive” but only scored 4% of the vote. Had he won the Republican primary, it is quite possible he would have been reelected. Brookhart’s DW-Nominate score was a 0.131, low for a Republican, although surprisingly high given how many major issues on which he went against his party.
After his loss, Brookhart accepted a position in the Roosevelt Administration as an advisor on Russian trade, a role he served in until 1935. Even the New Deal’s approach on agriculture had gone too far for him, as he was supportive of a solution that involved the market as opposed to production controls (McDaniel). In 1936, he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination to the Senate, hoping to oust the anti-New Deal Republican incumbent Lester J. Dickinson in the primary on a platform of a fine-tuned agricultural parity formula. He also charged Dickinson with turning against the New Deal after “voting for most of it” (The New York Times). There was some truth in Brookhart’s charge: Dickinson had voted for both the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933. However, the opposition to Dickinson was split five ways, and Brookhart lost. In 1942, Brookhart suffered a stroke and he declined until his death on November 15, 1944.
References
Again, Brookhart. (1936, April 20). Time Magazine.
Retrieved from
Brookhart Enters Iowa Senate Race. (1936, April 7). The New York Times.
Retrieved from
Brookhart, Smith Wildman. Voteview.
Retrieved from
https://www.voteview.com/person/1070/smith-wildman-brookhart
McDaniel, G.W. (1990, April). The Search for Smith Wildman Brookhart: A Pilgrim’s Progress. Books at Iowa, 52. The University of Iowa.
Retrieved from
https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/scua/bai/mcdaniel.htm
The Election Case of Daniel F. Steck. v. Smith W. Brookhart of Iowa (1926). U.S. Senate.
Retrieved from
Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History 