LeBaron Bradford Colt (1846-1924) has a first name that is most unusual and a last name that is most recognizable. His last name automatically makes you think of a gun, and this is because his uncle, Samuel Colt, invented the revolving cartridge chamber in 1836, the key mechanism of the Colt revolver. This gun could fire six times without having to reload, a major advancement in firearms at the time, and was the first revolver in the US viable for mass production. The Colt revolver helped give the US army an advantage in the Mexican-American War and in westward expansion in general. Colt himself, however, did not see battle. Rather, he attended Yale University and then Columbia Law School, starting to practice law in the early 1870s in Chicago. He would ultimately settle and practice in Rhode Island, and would opt to start a political career, serving two years in the Rhode Island House of Representatives. Colt’s legal abilities were clearly highly thought of by President Garfield, who nominated him to the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island in 1881, for which the Senate confirmed him. President Chester Arthur would promote him to the First Circuit Court in 1884 and the Senate would again confirm him.
Senator Colt
Colt being a highly respected judge and out of political thicket for a long period of time helped gain him support for election to the Senate in 1913, by which time he was 66 years old. There, he was an opponent of the agenda of President Wilson generally during Wilson’s first term, voting against tariff reductions and against the Federal Reserve. He generally opposed measures that had a class tinge to them, such as a 1916 proposal to make income tax records open to public inspection. Colt also voted in favor of strengthening American defensive capability with the war in Europe raging. Appropriately, one of the committees he served on was the Judiciary Committee. Interestingly, after Wilson was reelected in 1916, he played ball with the Wilson Administration a bit more. That year, he sadly faced a loss with his son, LeBaron C. Colt, succumbing to a combination of a severe cold and possibly internal injuries as a result of an auto accident in which his car plunged into Narragansett Bay (Fall River Globe).
Colt supported entry into World War I and was one of the Republicans who sided with President Wilson on the Sedition Act, including voting against the France Amendment which would have provided a protection for telling the truth. On matters of economics, he was strongly conservative. On July 21, 1917, he was one of only 12 senators to vote against granting authority to President Wilson to control coal prices in wartime. Although Rhode Island was becoming less reliable for Republicans, especially with the Constitutional amendment for the popular vote of senators, Colt nonetheless won reelection in the good Republican year of 1918.
On the debate on the Versailles Treaty, Colt was among the mild reservationists, or those who supported the treaty but with reservations less impactful than those proposed by Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Mass.). He was nonetheless among all save one of the Republican senators who voted against the Versailles Treaty with no reservations. Colt also voted for the Prohibition and women’s suffrage amendments. During the 1920s, he was largely a supporter of the conservative agendas of Presidents Harding and Coolidge, and even changed his previous support of the popular bonus bill to opposition in an effort to uphold Coolidge’s veto in 1924. Another notable part of his legacy was that as chairman of the Committee on Immigration, he was opposed to the trend of trying to drastically curb immigration and opposed Japanese exclusion. Far from the same could be said for all New England Republicans; Senator William Dillingham (R-Vt.) had chaired a commission that called for strongly restrictive immigration policy on Eastern and Southern European immigrants, and Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Mass.) was a consistent and fervent supporter of immigration restriction. Colt was one of only two Republican senators to vote against the Immigration Act of 1924, which instituted the national origins quota, which prescribed immigration limitations based on the proportion of nationalities in the United States in 1890, which served to severely curb new immigration from people in Eastern and Southern Europe. Vito Famiglietti of the Sons of Italy wrote in praise of Colt that “although himself of old American stock, always comprehended the aims and aspirations, as well as the difficulties and problems, of immigrant peoples” (Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame). Colt would die four months after casting this vote of a heart attack on August 18, 1924. His DW-Nominate score overall indicated conservatism, with it standing at 0.426.
Frank Hague (1876-1956) is a forgotten name among many outside Jersey City today, but he was among the foremost political bosses of his time and the control he exerted over Jersey City was so extensive and the means he used to win were such that they surpassed election law. He had a strong quid pro quo relationship with FDR and used Hudson County to decide races for governor in New Jersey.
Early Life and Political Start
Born to a working class Irish family in the Horseshoe area of Jersey City, Frank Hague did not excel at school, in fact, he was expelled for his bad behavior at 13, thus he only had a sixth grade education. Indeed, some of Hague’s enemies would later swear that he was barely literate and could read no more than headlines in a newspaper (Fleming). Although school ended early for him, his political career started early too. At the age of 20, after securing a loan from bar owner Ned Kenny, he began his campaign for constable and won by 3 to 1 margin. Through his effectiveness at voter turnout for Boss Bob Davis, he was rewarded with the post of deputy sheriff and continued to rise in the political organization of Jersey City, including delivering his ward to the Democrats when Republican Mark Fagan won the mayoral election. Hague had an early scandal when in 1904 he and Deputy Sheriff Thomas “Skidder” Madigan covered for Red Dugan, a friend of his, who had been passing fraudulent checks in Boston by providing a false alibi under oath (Watkins). Dugan would subsequently admit he had done it, and the Boston court wanted to indict Hague for perjury but couldn’t extradite him. This didn’t hurt Hague with many working class Irish voters, as helping a friend, especially doing so at the behest of said friend’s mother, which Hague said was the case, was a sufficient excuse (Watkins). He made a break with Boss Davis in 1906 over an appointment and he sided with reformer H. Otto Wittpenn for mayor, who when he won in 1907 he appointed Hague city custodian. He also made an important connection with Wittpenn’s secretary, A. Harry Moore, who would become a close ally, as well as with John Milton, who would serve as his lawyer throughout his political career. After Davis died in 1911, Wittpenn sought to lead the Democratic Party in Hudson County only for Hague to turn on him and accuse him of bossism, yet Wittpenn would win. He would also critically back a new reform figure in New Jersey politics in Governor Woodrow Wilson, including his destruction of the machine of Boss Smith of Newark (Fleming). Indeed, in this time, Hague was thought of as a reformer or at least he put on the mask of one.
Hague: The Reformer?
In 1911, Hague won the post of street and water commissioner, in which he quickly cut the budget from $180,000 annually to $110,000 and fired half the staff, only to quietly bring in more than the number he fired with his own men after he won praise in the press (Watkins). He also quietly and with success requested the city council to reverse the budget cuts. Hague then set his eyes on the police department, which had become a bad joke under Boss Davis, who freely allowed all sorts of vice. Hague did so by ruthlessly enforcing regulations, including having 125 officers tried in a day for violating them, and ruthlessly demoted or fired police officers (Fleming). These men were replaced by men Hague could count on. These men would serve as a surveillance network within the police force, and soon petty bribery was stamped out. Laws against prostitution and after-hours drinking were enforced, and women were barred from saloons with legal (and possibly extralegal) punishments threatened for violations by saloon owners (Fleming). Streets were also literally cleaned. While previously the streets would have a fair amount of garbage at any one time, Hague mandated the spraying down of the streets with a fire hydrant every night (Watkins). In 1913, his efforts were crucial in netting the Democratic gubernatorial candidate James Fielder a victory. Hague managed to produce a 25,959 vote lead in Hudson County (Fleming). After this, he was widely acknowledged as the leader of the Hudson County Democratic Party. Despite being a Democratic leader, there were occasions in which he tacitly supported a Republican candidate. The first instance of this was to counter his chief rival, Otto Wittpenn.
The 1916 Election: Hague Makes a Deal
In the 1916 gubernatorial election, Hague got some bad news in the Democratic primary: Otto Wittpenn was the winner! Fearing that his influence would be countered if he managed to be elected governor, he got into contact with Republican candidate Walter Edge’s campaign manager, Nucky Johnson. Hague worked out a deal with Johnson to get Edge elected governor, and this would be done by Hague not pushing for Wittpenn’s election partly in exchange for the Holland Tunnel, to be constructed, to end in Jersey City (Murphy). Edge was elected governor with Hudson County reporting a mere 7,430 vote lead for Wittpenn, the worst for a Democratic nominee for governor in decades (Fleming). His electoral career was over, and in the following year’s municipal election, Hague won after Mark Fagan decided to step down.
Mayor Hague
Although Hague was now in power, he did not have some of the conventional skills of a leader. I mentioned earlier that his education was limited, and even though he got training for public speaking once mayor, he would still have problems. Hague was on record, for instance, saying that “One hundred ten thousand voters has endorsed my administration”, that Jersey City was “the most moralest city in America”, and once ended a speech with “And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for the privilege of listening to me” (Fleming). Fortunately for Hague, he was not short of other means for power.
The source of Hague’s power as the mayor of Jersey City and the leader overall of Hudson County lay in the economic circumstances of Jersey City. All railroad lines that had terminals in Jersey City with cargo intended for New York City had to go through the Port of Jersey City to be shipped across the Hudson Bay, as no freight lines existed between the two cities. This gave Hague the power to control the conditions in which such goods would be transported out to New York City. This was a rich source for kickbacks and shakedowns that immensely profited Hague and others who wielded control over the Hudson Waterfront (Murphy). He also maintained his power through expanding the number of public employees. Jersey City had the highest number of public sector employees of any city of that size, some of these were rewards for help in political campaigns and some had no duties, rendering them welfare by another name (Watkins). This extensive public payroll had to be funded somehow. He did so through multiple means. One was requiring that public employees kick back 3% of their pay to fund the Hague machine. Another was through raising taxes. After 20 years of Hague’s rule of Jersey City, taxes had been increased threefold, property assessments had doubled, and the city’s debt was increased by 500% (Life Magazine). He also, popularly for many of his constituents, sought huge tax increases on major businesses. In 1917 and 1918, he dramatically increased annual tax assessments on Standard Oil (from $1.5 million to $14 million), the Public Service Corporation (from $3 million to $30 million), and railroads (from $67 million to $160 million), to which they promptly went to the State Board of Taxes and Assessments, which canceled all his increases (Fleming).
This State Board was a problem, and he needed it replaced, and to replace it, he needed an ally, not Walter Edge, as governor. Hague denounced the board as beholden to special interests and pushed for the election of Jersey City’s First National Bank president, Edward I. Edwards, an important ally (Fleming). Major turnout in Hudson County netted Edwards the governorship. Indeed, Hague’s turnout machine was unrivaled in its time; 92% of eligible voters in Hudson County were registered and 85% or more went to the polls (Murphy). However, Hague was able to secure even more votes than that. It was not legal for names to be removed from Hudson County’s voter registration rolls, thus deaths or moves had to be noted on the rolls, but the Hudson County Board of Elections was deliberately lax on doing this. After all, the appointees to this board were on paper Republicans but in truth, owed their jobs to Hague. This was a rich source of data to produce fraudulent ballots when they were needed (Murphy). Hague needed to use such trickery to the fullest when it came to the 1920 municipal election, in which Democrats were very unpopular with Irish voters given their anger at President Woodrow Wilson, and they were facing an electoral slaughter. Hague’s machine desperately wanted to elect Skidder Madigan to the post of sheriff of Hudson County. Madigan, Hague’s old pal when they were both deputy sheriffs, could be counted on to select grand juries that were to Hague’s liking, in other words, those who would not vote to convict on any activities of Hague’s machine or would vote to convict those that Hague needed convicted. However, Madigan had a problem that year aside from being a Democrat, and that was he couldn’t read or write (Fleming). The Hague machine went all out to get him elected sheriff while other candidates went down to defeat. Violence, fraud, every trick that needed to be pulled was pulled to elect Madigan (Fleming). He also appealed to the Irish voters of the city, capitalizing on their resentments of Republican WASPs and of big businesses.
Hague’s regime, however, did come with its benefits. The poor were assisted in finding jobs and given free food, clothing, and coal (Watkins). The city streets were, as mentioned before, literally clean. Prostitution was no longer a significant presence in Jersey City, and the mob was kept out. Police, fire, and emergency services were pushed to efficiency, and Hague would sometimes personally test this efficiency by making emergency calls from a public phone booth at night. If the responding people did not come in a timely manner that satisfied Hague, he would berate them and occasionally even punch them in the face (Watkins). One example was when he was angered that an ambulance he called had taken 15 minutes to arrive. When he began berating the head intern, the young man responded, “It took me a while to wake up”, to which Hague answered by knocking him down into the gutter (Fleming). It was also due to Hague that Journal Square, the Pulaski Skyway, and the Jersey City Medical Center and a maternity hospital named after Hague’s mother, Margaret were constructed. A major benefit of living in Hague’s Jersey City was that medical care could be obtained by a fee of $35 but it would be waived if you said you couldn’t pay for it, and some of the best doctors in the nation were employed at the Jersey City Medical Center. This resulted in a hospital that cost $3 million to operate annually and received only $15,000 in revenue (Watkins). Public funds made up for the rest.
Don’t Mess With Hague
The consequences for challenging Hague could be quite serious. In 1937, a man named John Longo sought to challenge Hague from within the Democratic Party and formed an anti-Hague slate, but this was met with arrest and a Hague judge sentenced him to nine months imprisonment on fabricated charges (Watkins). He would be screwed over again by Hague after getting an appointment as deputy clerk in 1943 for Hudson County. He would once again be arrested, and six witnesses committed perjury against him, resulting in another Hague judge sentencing Longo to prison between 18 months and 3 years (Watkins). Hague also employed violence to keep power; he had campaign workers and police beat up people who opposed him. This included one particularly notorious incident in which 245 Princeton students were sent by the Honest Ballot Association to monitor a 1920s election, which resulted in all students being blocked from the polling places and five were beaten so badly they had to be hospitalized (Watkins). Hague’s use of police to violently enforce his will was reinforced with incentives. The police force of Jersey City was the highest paid and most staffed of any police force of a city that size (Fleming). As previously mentioned, Hague could engage in physical violence himself. In one incident, he knocked out cold one of Jersey City’s commissioners, Michael Fagen (Fleming).
Further Rise to Power
In 1924, Hague’s power grew when Al Smith, thankful for his efforts on his behalf to secure the Democratic nomination (albeit unsuccessfully), managed to get him the vice chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, and he would remain in this position until 1952. This gave Hague considerable influence over who the Democrats would select for president, and he certainly played his part in getting Al Smith the nomination in 1928.
Hague Fixes the 1928 Republican Gubernatorial Primary
Frank Hague’s influence did not exist only within the Democratic Party…he extended his grip to the Republican Party in a number of ways as well. A particularly notable event was the 1928 Republican primary, in which the favorite was widely regarded as former judge Robert Carey, who was a prominent critic of Hague and promised to take on his machine. He didn’t want to risk this man winning the election, thus he managed to get 20,000 of his supporters registered as Republicans to vote in the primary, resulting in the victor being State Senator Morgan F. Larson, a mild presence. As it turns out, Hague’s scheme was 100% legal, as New Jersey law permitted a person who had not voted in the last primary to switch party registration without penalty, thus Hague, anticipating 1928 as an important election, had 20,000 of his followers not vote in the preceding primary (Fleming). It was a good thing for Hague that he had done so, as Larson won the election.
More will come on Hague in a follow-up post, as he is a considerable subject.
References
Fleming, T. (1969). The Political Machine II: A Case History “I Am the Law”. American Heritage, 20(4).
James Weldon Johnson, Executive Secretary of the NAACP Who Pushed for Anti-Lynching Legislation.
I have recently been doing a dive into trying to create what a theoretical Senate vote on the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill would have been had it came for a vote. Although the NAACP’s Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson and other black civil rights activists laid the blame for the failure of the Dyer Bill on the Republican Senate majority for not pushing it as hard as the Southern Democrats had been resisting it and indeed this impacted the GOP’s popularity with black voters, I wonder now if such an evaluation is based on good legislative math. Let’s start with the composition of the Senate. At the time of the filibuster, Republicans held 59 seats, or 61% of the Senate and the Democrats 37. The votes needed to end debate on the filibuster was 64, as the cloture rule in the Senate in 1922 was that 2/3’s of the Senate could vote to end a filibuster. Thus, the Republican leadership could have won cloture had they no defections plus five Democratic senators, or 14% of Democrats. In the House, 93% of Republicans and 7% of Democrats had voted for the Dyer bill. However, Republicans did have defections. The most prominent was the famously independent-minded William Borah of Idaho, who had initially supported the bill until turning against it as he thought it unconstitutional. Indeed, in the Senate Judiciary Committee the vote to report the bill was 8-6 with the votes all being Republican and the dissent being five Democrats plus Borah. While we’re at counting the opposition, we can count all Southern Democrats (22 senators) by default, as all House Southern Democrats were against too. We can also count Senators James Reed of Missouri and Thomas Walsh of Montana, as they voted against the Dyer bill in committee. We also can probably safely include Augustus Stanley of Kentucky and Robert Owen of Oklahoma as opposed, as with only the exception of Rep. Ben Johnson of Kentucky Border Democrats in the House opposed. We can also probably count Henry Myers of Montana as against, as his record on race was worse than Walsh’s, having voted to exclude black women from the 19th Amendment’s coverage. Thomas Bayard Jr. of Delaware can probably be counted too, as his father was a strong opponent of civil rights measures, and he cast a vote for segregation in bathing houses in D.C. in 1924. However, it should be noted for the latter that Henry Ashurst did too, and he was known to support. William King of Utah and Key Pittman of Nevada can likely be counted as well in opposition, given that their votes on Seante consideration of anti-lynching legislation in the 1930s indicated opposition. There are also two other Republicans who can be placed in the opposition column. There is James W. Wadsworth Jr. of New York, who seriously doubted the bill’s constitutionality (The New York Age). He would subsequently oppose anti-lynching legislation in 1937 and 1940 as a member of the House. There is also George W. Norris of Nebraska, who is known to have opposed anti-lynching legislation, fearing that its enactment would result in another War of the Rebellion (Barnes, 6). Two other possibilities for opposition on the Republican side are Frederick Hale of Maine and James Couzens of Michigan. Hale was one of three Republicans in 1938 to vote to set aside the Gavagan Anti-Lynching bill for appropriations legislation, and Couzens voted with George Norris to adjourn on the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching bill in 1935. So we have three, possibly even five votes against the Dyer Bill in the Senate.
For support, we can count Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts who pushed for the bill, Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas who performed the parliamentary maneuvering to get the bill on the floor, and Senator Samuel Shortridge of California who was assigned to manage the bill. Along with Shortridge, the Republicans who voted for the Dyer bill in committee can be counted, who were Frank Brandegee of Connecticut, Albert Cummins of Iowa, Richard Ernst of Kentucky, LeBaron B. Colt of Rhode Island, Thomas Sterling of South Dakota, Knute Nelson of Minnesota, and William Dillingham of Vermont.
Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Mass.), the leader of the Senate Republicans who supported the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill.
Although George Moses of New Hampshire sat out of the vote, he publicly stated his support. Others who publicly stated their support were Senators Medill McCormick of Illinois, James Watson of Indiana, Joseph I. France of Maryland, Charles Townsend of Michigan, Selden Spencer of Missouri, Joseph Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, John Harreld of Oklahoma, and Howard Sutherland of West Virginia. We can also count based on the NAACP’s James Weldon Johnson’s reporting, that Senators Frank Willis of Ohio, Harry New of Indiana, Walter Edge of New Jersey, Ralph Cameron of Arizona, Charles Rawson of Iowa, Holm Bursum of New Mexico, George Pepper and David Reed of Pennsylvania, Charles McNary of Oregon, Arthur Capper of Kansas, Wesley Jones of Washington, Francis Warren of Wyoming (who as territorial governor of Wyoming had tried to stop the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre of Chinese laborers), and Frank Gooding of Idaho were for, although it was the former three who were willing to speak on it. Among the Democrats we can count David Walsh of Massachusetts for it, as he condemned the Southern filibuster of the bill (The Appeal). Senator Henry Ashurst of Arizona was also known to be in favor (Fort Worth Star-Telegram).
The Republicans likely also get Atlee Pomerene of Ohio and Peter Gerry of Rhode Island in support. Pomerene supported an anti-discrimination amendment in education legislation in 1914 and Gerry was one of the few House Democrats to vote against a ban on interracial relations in Washington D.C. in 1915. This analysis leaves some mystery senators, who I wasn’t able to find having issued opinions. It is, however, heartening for this conservative to know that some of the most extremely conservative figures of that time such as Brandegee, Moses, and Dillingham were supporting this bill. To me this indicates that “law and order” as a conservative position is really for all. Although given the House passage of the Dyer bill, most to all of the remaining Republicans would have voted for it, there is the mystery group of Democrats in Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, Andrieus Jones of New Mexico, and John B. Kendrick of Wyoming. Of these, Hitchcock is the most likely vote for, as he supported that 1914 anti-discrimination amendment I mentioned. Although the votes of Jones and Kendrick against a Southern push to exclude black women from the 19th Amendment may be considered suggestive, bear in mind there were known opponents of this bill, such as Charles Culberson of Texas, who voted against that too.
So if we do the legislative math in what I think the most favorable way plausible is for the Dyer Bill, meaning that it wins the votes of seven Democratic senators and keeps Republican defections down to three, this still only produces 63 votes for the bill, meaning that it loses cloture by one vote. The only way the bill wins is if Delaware’s Thomas Bayard or another one of the people I regarded as an opponent flipped and produced the 64 needed for cloture. However, eight Senate votes is pretty lopsided compared to the House’s Democratic vote, even though the Northern wing of the Democratic Party wasn’t as crippled in the Senate as it was in the House in the 67th Congress. Also, there is another interesting tidbit I found. Although he was never a senator, the influential William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic nominee for president and Secretary of State under Wilson, publicly stated his opposition to the Dyer bill (Ocala Banner).
References
Barnes, H.W. (1969). Voices of Protest: W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Smith College.
To Amend H.R. 7951, By Denying Appropriations For Educational Purposes to Any State in Which A Distinction of Race or Color is Made in the Admission of Students, Except Where There Are Separate Colleges for White and Colored When Such Funds Shall Be Equally Divided. Voteview.
Will Support Dyer Bill; Senators Lodge, Calder, Moses, Sutherland and Watson Will Support Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. (1922, February 23). The Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City, OK), p. 4.
In 1944, Congressman Thomas Ford of Los Angeles opted to retire. The race for his seat was tight despite the district consistently reelecting the staunch New Dealer Ford. The Democratic candidate was Helen Gahagan Douglas (1900-1980), who had been a Broadway actress in the 1920s and a Hollywood actress in the 1930s and most notably played the inspiration for the look for the Evil Queen in the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) from her villainess role in She (1935). Although in her younger years she had been a Republican as was her family tradition, after meeting and marrying actor Melvyn Douglas, he introduced her to Democratic politics, and she became a big supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The couple became good friends of the Roosevelts, and Eleanor mentored her in politics. She would serve as a member of the advisory committee for the Works Progress Administration and the State committee for the National Youth Administration. Douglas ran for Congress in 1944 as a staunch liberal and won the district by three points. During the campaign for Congress, Douglas got intimate with one Lyndon Baines Johnson. The two had bonded over their mutual admiration for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and they had an affair that lasted for about five years, this being an open secret in Washington (Kendall).
As a member of Congress, Douglas voted a staunchly liberal line on domestic issues and for the most part, on foreign policy. She did differ on aid to Greece and Turkey from most liberals in her opposition, as neither Greece nor Turkey were proper democracies. Douglas did vote for the Marshall Plan, in contrast to politicians associated with the 1948 Progressive Party such as Senator Glen Taylor (D-Idaho) and Representative Vito Marcantonio (ALP-N.Y.). She was a spokeswoman for liberal causes ranging from price control to civil rights and rather than try to master the rules of the House she used her status as a former Hollywood actress to her advantage in publicity. In 1948, Douglas brought groceries before the House of Representatives to highlight rising prices and used this as an argument to implement price controls, and declared, “We’re going to reach the point where we have more babies than we have baby food. They are wonderful. Babies and mothers. But if we keep running the price up on milk and baby food, we’re going to raise a puny lot to run the world” (Nichols). That year, she also introduced a petition to get the Taft-Ellender-Wagner Housing bill out of the House Banking and Currency Committee. Its chairman, Jesse Wolcott (R-Mich.), was a staunch opponent of public housing. Douglas castigated the GOP Congress for its refusal to enact public housing legislation and strong price control, asserting that “…the fact remains that the Democratic party is concerned with the basic needs of the people and the Republicans respond today, as in the past, to the demands of special interests. This Republican Congress has been reckless, and has acted in utter disregard of the basic needs of the people, ignoring the two most vital problems, the cost of living and housing” (Wyant). Douglas voted 98% of the time with the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action, her only dissent being on aid to Greece and Turkey. Journalist William K. Wyant Jr. (1948) wrote that she was “the Democratic party’s answer to Claire Booth Luce – the lovely lady who provided a note of satire and sex appeal for the Republican National Convention”. Douglas was also a consistent critic of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, having voted against its establishment as a permanent committee in 1945. She believed that “The fear of communism in this country is not rational. And that irrational fear of communism is being used in many quarters to blind us to our real problems” (U.S. House of Representatives). Although her staunchly liberal record on domestic issues and her liberal internationalism were popular in her Los Angeles district, as she won by increasing margins in her 1946 and 1948 reelections, whether it would prove popular statewide is a different story.
The 1950 Election: “Pink Down to Her Underwear”
In 1950, Senator Sheridan Downey, who had gotten to the Senate by toppling an oak in the Democratic Party in William McAdoo in the 1938 election, was facing a bruising renomination bid against Douglas, but then he dropped out with the official explanation being that it was for his health and endorsed Manchester Boddy for the Democratic nomination. Boddy was the publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News and had had a mixed political record, having been a Republican in the past who had opposed FDR’s election in 1932 only to subsequently have his newspaper give support to the New Deal and be the only major liberal paper in Los Angeles at the time. However, Boddy’s campaign suffered from a late start and disorganization, and he did not establish a solid campaign platform aside from advocating for public generation and distribution of power. Boddy’s campaign bears more importance for having tagged Douglas as the “pink lady”, presaging the mood of the general election. Although she won the Democratic nomination, her prospects were damaged by Boddy’s campaigning against her as soft on Communism. Additionally harming Douglas’s prospects of victory from the start was Downey publicly stating that if she won the nomination that he would support Republican Richard Nixon.
In the general election, Richard Nixon continued the campaign to portray her as pink, famously calling her “pink down to her underwear” and made effective use of a flyer known as the “Pink Sheet”. This flyer was titled the “Douglas-Marcantonio Voting Record” and compared her record to that of radical American Labor Party Congressman Vito Marcantonio of New York, who was openly pro-Soviet. It noted that she, like Marcantonio, had voted against establishing a permanent House Committee on Un-American Activities along with multiple citations the committee issued, both having twice voted against a free press amendment which would have blocked postwar aid to the USSR, against the Mundt-Nixon 1948 bill, against other anti-subversive measures, against aid to Greece and Turkey. This was what the flyer referred to as the “Douglas-Marcantonio Axis” and pointed out that Nixon had voted the opposite way. Although critics held that the voting record posted was selective and that Nixon voted a few hundred times with Marcantonio, on key issues there is a contrast and to demonstrate this I will use a standard employed by liberals at the time. If we look at the records of the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action, their voting records show that of their top issues, Marcantonio and Douglas voted on the same side 82% of the time, while Marcantonio and Nixon voted on the same side 12% of the time. Ironically, Marcantonio was seen by ADA as voting to her right in the 1947-1950 period given his opposition to President Truman’s foreign policy and him voting against a contempt citation for conservative activist Edward Rumely in 1950. Furthermore, DW-Nominate places the two much closer to each other than Marcantonio with Nixon, with Douglas having a score of -0.588, Marcantonio having a score of -0.415 (although this accounts for his first term as a Republican of the Fiorello La Guardia school of Republican progressivism as well as his opposition to Truman’s foreign policy), and Nixon having a score of 0.162. Douglas’s campaign was further compromised by the general conservative mood of the 1950 election, and it certainly didn’t help that one of her Hollywood backers, one Ronald Reagan, switched sides late in the campaign. Nixon also catered to anti-Semitic voters by occasionally “accidentally” calling her “Helen Hesselberg” before correcting himself, or her husband’s original last name. Nixon won the election by 19 points and won all but six counties, and her loss was the end of her political career. Douglas could not even get an appointment from President Truman, even though she had very often voted in line with his administration (Truman was more liberal than people probably think). Douglas was embittered by the Nixon campaign’s tactics of character assassination, believing that it was unnecessary as she probably would have lost anyway. She would subsequently work to oppose Nixon whenever possible and popularized the nickname “Tricky Dick” for Nixon.
Douglas would get an appointment by President Johnson as “Special Ambassador” for the inauguration of William Tubman as president of Liberia, but the two would break after she came out against the Vietnam War. In 1972, Douglas campaigned for George McGovern and in 1974 she supported an impeachment trial for President Nixon. She must have taken some satisfaction at that time in seeing bumper stickers reading, “Don’t Blame Me – I voted for Helen Gahagan Douglas!”
The End
In 1973, Douglas was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. Although the cancer went into remission, it came back with a vengeance in 1977, and she died on June 28, 1980, of breast and lung cancer. Douglas was eulogized by Senator Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), who was also of a strongly liberal philosophy, stating, “I believe Helen Gahagan Douglas was one of the grandest, most eloquent, deepest-thinking people we have had in American politics. She stands among the best of our 20th-century leaders, rivaling even Eleanor Roosevelt in stature, compassion and simple greatness” (Kelly).
References
ADA Voting Records. Americans for Democratic Action.
Wyant, W.K. (1948, July 11). Mrs. Helen Gahagan Douglas Is Democrats’ Answer To GOP’s Clare Boothe Luce. Springfield News-Sun (Springfield, Ohio), p. 4.
In 1950, the Congress had one figure who stood out as a radical member of Congress in Vito Marcantonio. A former Republican who had been a protégé of progressive reformer Fiorello La Guardia, Marcantonio was a member of the American Labor Party and on domestic policy he was staunchly left-wing and on foreign policy he sided with what the CPUSA wanted. Although never a member of the party, he was regarded as a friend and fellow-traveler.
Despite his radicalism, Marcantonio was a considerable force in his day, and in 1942 he won the nominations of both the Republican and Democratic Parties as back then you could run for the nomination of multiple parties, a practice known as cross-filing. He had also sponsored bills in 1943 and 1945 to ban the poll tax for Federal elections and primaries and had helped many constituents with their individual problems as a member of Congress. Many constituents who were not radical were willing to overlook his radicalism given his constituent service. He also served as a measuring stick for radicalism that politicians used to campaign against other politicians, most notably used by Richard Nixon against Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate election. Marcantonio, by the way, didn’t mind the use of his record as a way to politically attack others. However, the New York State Legislature set up Marcantonio’s defeat with the passage of the Wilson-Pekula Act in 1947, barring people from running for nominations of parties of which they were not a member unless they had received permission from the party to do so. This law was without doubt directed at Marcantonio and it was commonly known as the “Anti-Marcantonio Law”. Thus, Marcantonio could no longer employ the strategy of cross-filing. The appeal of Marcantonio finally ran out in 1950, as the election year had a conservative bent and the Democrats, Republicans, and the Liberal Party agreed to back Tammany Hall aligned Democrat James George Donovan (1898-1987) to defeat Marcantonio. Marcantonio condemned Donovan as a “Sutton Place Dixiecrat”, blasted the “big money” behind him, and called Americans for Democratic Action, a left-wing but anti-communist organization, a “sinister group” (The New York Times). It was true that Donovan was to the right of your standard New York City Democrat, as his record would prove. Marcantonio could overcome a lot and had in the past, but he couldn’t overcome being the sole vote against the United States getting in the Korean War and the two major parties tag-teaming him. Donovan won the election by 15 points. In the aftermath of the election, Donovan said of Marcantonio, “He was full of 50-cent cures. He ran a tough political machine and a good show, but he didn’t give these people a thing” and went on to state, “I didn’t know him personally, but I detested what he stood for. He could not have held on without the full-time effort and money of the Communist Party apparatus” (McHarry).
Although a Democrat, Donovan was more independent from party-line than the standard New York City Democrat. He was, for instance, the only New York Democrat to support the Tidelands bill, which established the States as holding title over offshore oil deposits rather than the Federal government and he was the sole New York Democrat to support the creations of the Cox and Reece Committees to investigate tax-exempt institutions. He also was strongly in favor of anti-subversive legislation and opposed the Supreme Court curbing State power to combat subversion, and in 1956 proposed a bill clarifying that States have the power to prosecute treason and sedition after a Supreme Court ruling restricting them (The Record American). Donovan, however, voted for much of the standard Democratic line, including supporting public housing, price and rent control, and opposed the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act as did nearly all New York Democrats. In 1952, Donovan won reelection with 93% of the vote against American Labor Party candidate Vito Magli. He voted 68% of the time with the positions of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action and his DW-Nominate score was a -0.102, considerably short of the standard New York Democrat on liberalism. However, by 1956, Marcantonio was dead and the Liberal Party as well as the Tammany Hall machine had tired of Donovan’s record. His purpose of having defeated a notorious radical and kept him out of office satisfied, Tammany Hall ensured his defeat for renomination. Instead, Donovan ran for reelection as a Republican, but he pulled only 42% of the vote against regular Democrat Alfred Santangelo. Donovan was subsequently made director of the Federal Housing Administration of New York and afterwards continued his work as an attorney in New York City until his retirement in 1965. Although not by party affiliation an independent, Donovan demonstrated an independence in his record and this in the long-term was not appreciated enough for him to win beyond three terms in Congress.
References
ADA Voting Records. Americans for Democratic Action.
Trump is president for a second time, and while there hasn’t been anyone with his exact last name in Federal office before, there was an oddly named fellow named Philadelph Van Trump (1810-1874), although unlike Trump he was never a Republican.
The mid-19th century was a strange time in American politics. Before the existence of the Republican Party the major rival of the Democratic Party was the Whig Party. The Whigs were a broad coalition of politicians who had come together in opposition to President Andrew Jackson and his groundbreaking use of executive power. Indeed, in 1850 you could find Abraham Lincoln in the same party as Alexander Stephens, who would be vice president of the Confederacy. However, over time the differences within this coalition only grew. The most vital of these issues was of slavery, with an increasingly intractable divide between “conscience Whigs” and “cotton Whigs”. Van Trump started in the Whig Party and in 1852 he participated in last Whig National Convention, which nominated General Winfield Scott. However, the Whigs tried too hard to appeal to everyone and thus ended up having little appeal; the ticket only won the states of Massachusetts, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Vermont, a result that, with the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, spelled the death of the Whig Party. Many Whigs flocked to the rapidly growing American (“Know Nothing”) Party, as did Van Trump, and in 1856 he ran for governor of Ohio on the American Party ticket. However, this made the gubernatorial race three-way, splitting the Democratic vote and resulting in the election of Republican Salmon P. Chase. In 1860, Van Trump strongly supported the Constitutional Union Party’s ticket which ran John Bell for president and Edward Everett as vice president. The platform was maintaining the union but leaving slavery alone. Van Trump’s movement between parties is one way in which he actually was similar to current President Donald Trump, as Trump has in the past been in the Democratic Party as well as in the Reform Party for when he was running for that party’s nomination for president in 2000.
During the War of the Rebellion, Van Trump was a staunch opponent of President Lincoln and the Republicans. From 1862 to 1867, he served as a judge of the court of common pleas, commanding a lot of respect in this role for acting as he saw fit under the law even under threat of imprisonment. As the newspaper The Stark County Democrat described in his obituary, “His career as a Judge was a marked one, and perhaps no jurist ever more completely commanded respect of the bar. He was profoundly learned in the law, possessed iron firmness and the greatest suavity. The celebrated kidnapping case of Dr. [E. B.] Olds came before him, but he fearlessly enforced the law, although surrounded with bayonets and himself threatened with military arrest and imprisonment. But for the hasty intervention of the Supreme Court, he would have imprisoned Gov. [David] Tod under the kidnapping act” (DiBacco). For context, Dr. Olds was considered among the leading Copperheads of Ohio, or those who wanted a peace agreement with the Confederacy for an amicable break. Governor Tod had recommended him for arrest for his activities, which were regarded as siding with Confederates, and he was himself arrested for kidnapping briefly until freed by the Supreme Court (Roseboom & Wisenburger, 190-192). His efforts at higher judicial office met with little success, as he thrice lost elections to the Ohio Supreme Court. Instead of again seeking a post on the court, in 1866 Van Trump ran for Congress and won in the at-the-time Democratic 12th district.
Congressman Van Trump
During his time in office, Van Trump not only opposed the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson but also delivered a speech against it in Congress. As a member of the Committee on Railroads, he was a consistent opponent of the Republican policy of generous land grants to railroads. Van Trump was also consistently against high tariffs, an economic bread and butter policy of the GOP at the time. However, during his time in office he developed heart disease, and he did not seek reelection in 1872. Van Trump’s DW-Nominate score was -0.591, or one of the most liberal per that system in his time. He did not live long in retirement, dying on July 31, 1874. Van Trump also has a rather interesting connection to Washington State, where I live, in that his son, Philemon Beecher Van Trump, was the first person to document climbing Mt. Rainier in 1870.
Van Trump was different in many ways than current President Trump, and yet another one of those was in his riches. As his obituary in The Stark County Democrat read, “he died comparatively poor because he was too generous to accumulate wealth” (DiBacco).
References
DiBacco, T.V. (2018, May 4). The other Trump in history. Orlando Sentinel.
When it comes to conservatism, one state we don’t think of so much these days is Illinois. It is difficult for Republicans to win statewide thanks to Chicago, which has been unshakably Democratic since the days of Mayor Richard Daley, and Democratic politics seem to have, at least at the moment, an iron-clad grip. One figure who would be tremendously out of place in the modern politics of Illinois was Noah Morgan Mason (1882-1965).
The 12th of 13 children of a working-class family in Glamorganshire, Wales, the family immigrated to the United States when Mason was 6. Although he had to drop out of school to work on the family farm at 14, his mother saw something in the young boy that told her that he was destined for a greater future than his father, and thus she pushed him to go to college, and he did, graduating from Illinois State Normal University. Mason would dedicate himself to education, and at 22 he was the principal of Jones School in Oglesby, serving for five years, after which he became the city’s school superintendent (Hill). This prominent role led him to politics, and in 1919 he ran for and won the post of city commissioner for Oglesby. In 1926, Mason tried for the first time to win a seat in the Illinois State Senate but lost. However, this would be the only race he ever lost, and he would be elected to the State Senate in 1930.
As a state senator, Mason voted to repeal Prohibition. Although he had time and again expressed his personal opposition to drinking, he recognized that a majority of his district had voted for a referendum to repeal Prohibition, and he believed that he should abide by the wishes of his constituents in what he regarded as the Jeffersonian and Lincolnian tradition (Hill). Indeed, Mason was attentive to the wants and interests of his conservative constituency, and it kept him in office, but higher office was on his mind.
His opportunity for higher office came in 1936, as Congressman John T. Buckbee was ailing. When talk of Mason running to succeed him came about, he denied that he would seek the office unless Buckbee decided to retire due to ill health (Hill). This showed respect for the ill incumbent, and Mason would win the nomination to succeed him after he died in office. Although the 1936 election would elevate Democrats to the height of their power, Mason won his election too, and he presented quite an alternative.
Mason vs. The New Deal
From the very start of his Congressional career, he made his position clear as a committed conservative with his maiden speech to the House focusing against the expansion of the Federal government and in opposition to President Roosevelt’s “court packing plan” (Samosky, 36). Although solidly conservative in his record from the start, he was not necessarily averse to compromise. For instance, Mason, along with all but one of Illinois’ representatives, voted for the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act in 1937 while a majority of House Republicans voted against. He also voted for the original House passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act while opposing the final version. Mason would oppose work relief measures as well, and saw the work relief program as a corrupt way to strengthen the power of the Democratic Party. He accused its director, Harry Hopkins, of having transformed the program into “the most powerful political instrument of partisan advantage ever devised in the United States of America” and would in 1944 accuse him of condoning or encouraging “intimidation, bribery, and wanton violation of the Corrupt Practices Act” (Hill). Mason also condemned numerous Brain Trusters for radical backgrounds and statements. He regarded guaranteed minimum income, employment for all by the government, and confiscation of all property except houses and subsistence farms as “State socialism”, comparing such ideas to the practices of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia (Samosky, 41). Although Mason represented a rural district, he stood opposed to New Deal agricultural policy, which he saw as heavy on government control. He instead advocated the adoption of the McNary-Haugen measure that the farm bloc had attempted to pass in the 1920s over the opposition of President Calvin Coolidge (Samosky, 36).
Although strongly opposed to the New Deal’s political machinery, domestic spending, strong hand on businesses, ever-expanding Federal government, the infiltration of the government by Communists, and organized labor policies, he did not only see the bad in the New Deal. In January 1944, he stated that he considered the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Social Security, and the Fair Labor Standards Act to have been overall positive albeit flawed (Samosky, 42). Mason was, however, unconditionally opposed the Office of Price Administration during World War II and was against the price, wage, and rent controls established. He held that “Rationing merely distributes scarcity” and opposed economic controls as he saw them as hindering personal initiative (Samosky, 36). Mason would be similarly opposed to President Truman’s Fair Deal as he was Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Mason vs. Foreign Aid
Noah Mason’s stances on foreign policy would strike many as parochial. He was not only opposed, as were a majority of Republicans, to FDR’s foreign policy before World War II, he also opposed the bipartisan foreign policy consensus after World War II. Although Mason seemed to support the idea of an international peacekeeping body in theory given his vote for the 1943 Fulbright Resolution, in practice he was against, as he was one of 15 representatives to vote against the United Nations Participation Act in 1945. Given this vote, he certainly could not have been counted on to vote for aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947 or the Marshall Plan in 1948, and he didn’t. Mason did not ease up on his opposition to foreign aid during the Eisenhower Administration, and if anything, his opposition got stronger. He could not be counted on to support any elements of Eisenhower’s agenda that were moderate or liberal. Mason considered foreign aid to be a grand giveaway that added to the national debt and thus added to how much Americans would have to be taxed in the future, stating that it “shunted off upon our children a debt of $300 billion – a greater debt than all the other countries in the world combined” (Samosky, 48). Despite Mason being an outsider on many issues, his Illinois constituency appeared to be content with his stances, as they kept reelecting him.
Mason vs. Subversion
Noah Mason was a strong foe of radical forces that pushed discordance in society and government. In 1938, he made a speech to La Salle, Illinois’ Elks Club in which he condemned organizations such as the Silver Shirts, the Ku Klux Klan, and the German American Bund for stirring up racial and religious hatred as well as Communists and individuals in government he regarded as pushing class hatred (Samosky, 44). Fittingly, Mason was placed on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (The Dies Committee) in that year, serving in this post until 1943, and he would vote to make the committee permanent in 1945. He was a reliable vote for most measures intended to curb subversion. However, Mason made an interesting exception when on April 8, 1954 he voted to require a Federal court order for a wiretap in national security cases, contrary to the position of the Eisenhower Administration. He also praised Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) as a “fighting Irishman” and a “red-blooded, two fisted American” (Samosky, 45).
Mason: For and vs. Eisenhower
President Eisenhower and his greatest backers were what were known as “modern Republicans”, in other words, accepting of the continuance of much of the New Deal with more fiscal discipline, for foreign aid, and easing up on protectionism. Mason was no such figure. He consistently opposed foreign aid bills, opposed federal aid to education, was one of 35 representatives to oppose a reciprocal trade bill in 1953, and opposed a bipartisan bill that year admitting more European refugees. Although born in Wales into a working-class family, Mason was for strong immigration limits, stating, “We’ve got to keep America American” (Alsop, J. & Alsop, S.). He saw restricting immigration as a way of protecting American values from potentially subversive influences, and saw his role as one of a preserver of the values that resulted in the flourishing of the United States. As a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, Mason sought to overhaul the tax code. As journalists Joseph and Stewart Alsop (1953) reported, he said that he wanted to “relieve the overtaxed by taxing the untaxed”, which meant per the Alsops “reducing income and corporate taxes, while levying a manufacturer’s sales tax, taxing co-operatives, and depriving the churches, charitable foundations and universities of most of their existing exemptions”. Eisenhower by contrast wanted an extension of the excess profits tax, which of course Mason was completely opposed to.
As journalists Joseph and Stewart Alsop (1953) noted in their article on him as an example of difficulties President Eisenhower was having with the conservative wing of the GOP, “President Eisenhower’s problem with his own party is agreeably symbolized by Noah Mason…” and concluded with, “…the question remains – and it is pressing question – whose party is it, Noah Mason’s or Dwight Eisenhower’s?” He would, however, vote to sustain Eisenhower’s cost-conscious vetoes. Mason also maintained a strong devotion to a conservative view of Federalism. This meant that the Federal role was to be as limited as he saw fit under the Constitution, and this perspective translated into his positions on civil rights.
Mason vs. Civil Rights
Among House Republicans, by the Eisenhower Administration he was one of the most unbending opponents of civil rights legislation. Mason voted against the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, which were watered-down, and no Senate Republicans had opposed, and was one of nine Republicans to vote against even considering the latter bill. He hadn’t opposed all civil rights proposals in the past, indeed in 1937 and 1940 he had voted for anti-lynching legislation, and he had voted for unsuccessful Powell Amendments in 1946 and 1956 to counter segregation in public education. He also had accepted the premise that non-discrimination by government and in societal opportunities was a good as posited by President Truman (Samosky, 39). However, what he opposed outweighed what he supported considerably. Mason opposed four of five measures against the poll tax he registered a vote or opinion on. This included the 1962 CQ Almanac recording that he had either announced or answered a CQ poll that he was against the 24th Amendment. He also opposed Fair Employment Practices legislation and opposed the 1960 Powell Amendment to counter segregation in education. During the debate over the 1957 Civil Rights Act, Mason contended that “each and every” right was “a State function, a State responsibility, a State obligation” and was “definitely left to the States by the Constitution” (Samosky, 39). He further delivered a speech before Congress in which he connected Federal civil rights legislation to the New Deal’s Federal intervention into the business of States. He painted a happy picture of the United States in this speech, that is, until in “…came our New Dealers, our Fair Dealers and our Modern Republicans with ideas and proposals to change our constitutional form of government into a welfare state, a centralized Socialist-Labor government, without our sovereign States relegated to a subservient position, exercising only those powers and duties that might be assigned them by an all-powerful, arrogant, dictatorial, centralized Federal Government – divorced from those powers, duties, and privileges guaranteed to the State by Our Federal Constitution” (Mason). Mason had no personal love for segregation, but he saw civil rights legislation as supported by the Eisenhower Administration as yet another manifestation of this trend he speaks against. This was not the only way that he could be in the minority of his party. He was also one of 24 House Republicans to vote against the admission of Hawaii in 1959. Although not a civil rights measure itself, the admission of Hawaii as well as Alaska added four pro-civil rights senators, thus many Southerners were in opposition. Indeed, if a bill was passed with but a small contingent of opposition from the right, Mason was likely to be among the dissenters.
Mason vs. the Majority
Image from Chronicling Illinois, citation in References.
Given that he rarely compromised in his views, especially in his later years, Mason could often be found against the majority on legislation, especially since he was one of the most conservative people in the Republican Party, which during his time in Congress only had a majority in two sessions. Some votes in which Mason was desperately in the minority aside from previously mentioned legislation included:
. On April 19, 1944 he voted against extending the Lend-Lease Act one year, which was passed 334-21.
. He voted for the Rankin (D-Miss.) motion to defeat the entire bill extending the Office of Price Administration, which would have killed all controls, and was defeated 20-370 on April 18, 1946.
. On July 18, 1955, he voted against an expansion of Social Security benefits, which passed 372-31.
. On July 20, 1955, he voted against increasing the minimum wage from 75 cents to $1 an hour with no coverage expansions, which passed 362-54.
. On August 26, 1960, he paired against the Kerr-Mills Act, a popular substitute for proposed Medicare legislation which provided Federal funds to States for medical costs of poor elderly people, which passed 369-17.
. On April 20, 1961, he paired against increasing Social Security benefits, the measure passing the House 400-14 on April 20, 1961.
. On June 6, 1962, he voted against a school lunch bill that passed 370-11.
. On September 24, 1962, he voted against authorizing President Kennedy to mobilize 150,000 reserve troops in response to increasing Soviet presence and armaments in Cuba, which passed 342-13.
However, something that should be noted about Mason was that despite his extreme views, he was a personable communicator of them and liked by his colleagues. Indeed, he was known to be a good-natured and friendly figure. Perhaps you could call him a happy warrior. In 1955, the New York Times characterized him as a “white-haired, genial battler” (Samosky, 39). Indeed, given how much Noah Mason opposed legislation just generally, I think an appropriate characterization for him is the “Amiable No-Man”. And he would be saying no a lot to the last president he served with.
Mason vs. The Kennedy Administration
Unsurprisingly, Noah Mason was opposed to almost every aspect of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, from public works legislation to the Peace Corps. However, he made one notable exception, and it was perhaps based on his background as an educator. Mason voted for the bill providing a five-year program for Federal aid to States for educational television in 1962. His most notable and final battle was that year and it was on a subject that he never compromised on…trade.
Noah Mason was consistently and unalterably protectionist in his views on trade, and expressed such views on the House Ways and Means Committee and cast such votes. In 1962, he waged his last major battle in Congress against the Kennedy Administration’s Trade Expansion Act, which granted the president more authority to negotiate mutual tariff reductions of up to 50% and to aid workers harmed by such reductions by more generous unemployment benefits among other measures (CQ Almanac). He motioned to recommit the bill to substitute it with a one-year extension of the existing Trade Agreements Act, which was defeated 171-253 on June 28th, and the Trade Expansion Act was signed into law. That year, Mason announced that he would not be up for another term, and told the House in his speech that “I plan to become a missionary to the liberal heathen on the Hill…preaching the gospel of conservatism to those who will listen. They may yet be saved to a happier future in which taxes will go down and not always up; in which the national debt will grow smaller and not bigger, in which the army of bureaucrats will get their proper comeuppance” (Hill). The latter part of this statement makes me think he would have certainly approved of the discharges of Federal employees that have occurred lately. Mason’s career, at least the last six years of it, was seen as incredibly positive by conservatives, with him agreeing with Americans for Constitutional Action 97% of the time, only differing with them on a vote to retain the Soil Bank Program in 1957 and on the aforementioned educational television legislation. By contrast, he only agreed with Americans for Democratic Action, which judged his record from 1947 to 1962, 7% of the time. Mason’s DW-Nominate score was a 0.63, which placed him consistently among the top ten most conservative members of the House in his time.
The conservative revival that Mason had been hopeful for would have to wait until after his death, as he lived only two years after his retirement, dying on March 29, 1965, of heart failure, a year that perhaps was the apex of American liberalism in the 20th century. I cannot imagine that he would have supported the legislation enacted later in the year, including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare. Surely, he would have been heartened had he lived to see the rise of Reagan, even if he probably would have been disappointed with the budget deficits. Perhaps Mason is from the great beyond disappointed in where Illinois has gone, with a mere 3 of 17 representatives being Republicans thanks to redistricting, and even his old district is now represented by Democrat Lauren Underwood. He would certainly, however, be more heartened by the Republicans are they are today, as the party, 72 years after the Alsop brothers asked the critical question of whose party it was, it is clearly more of Mason’s today than Eisenhower’s.
References
Alsop, J., & Alsop, S. (1953, June 30). Mason Symbolizes Ike’s Problem. St. Petersburg Times.
ADA Voting Records. Americans for Democratic Action.
Northerner Backs the South – States’ Rights and the U.S. Constitution Versus Civil Rights and the Court. (1957, June 7). The Times (Shreveport, LA), p. 15.
Many Americans have a desire for an independent candidate for public office. One who stands separate from political organizations or certain powerful lobbies. Although we have had no president since the rise of the Republican Party who wasn’t a Republican or a Democrat, there have been the occasional elected officials who were independent. In the last Congress, there were a whopping four senators who were identifying as independent, but two had long been known as Democrats in Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Now the Senate has Maine’s Angus King and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders. Ohio at one time had Congressman Henry Frazier Reams (1897-1971).
The 1950 election produced victories for the Republicans, but one result stood out, and that was in Ohio’s 9th district, based in Toledo. Democratic Congressman Thomas A. Burke, a staunch liberal, was likewise a firm friend of organized labor. However, attorney Frazier Reams, left the Democratic party in August to challenge Huber, accusing him of being a tool for prominent CIO labor leader Richard T. Gosser, while also blasting the Republican machine in Toledo (The Tennessean). Normally independents don’t get a whole lot of traction, but voters were responsive to Reams’ message. Rep. Michael J. Kirwan (D-Ohio) as chairman of the Democratic National Committee derided him as a “carpetbagger” given that he was from Tennessee, but he had in truth lived in Toledo for over 25 years and Reams responded by subsequently carrying a carpetbag with him to campaign events and rallies (Everett). Burke lost reelection that year, with Reams getting votes from both Democrats and Republicans. After his victory, he said, “The people merely proved that they were tired of special interests, whether on the Left or the Right, together with all the power-politics represented by both sides” (The Nashville Banner). Reams indeed sought to transcend left and right. He pledged after his victory that he would “sit in the middle of the aisle” (CQ Press). In office, Reams seemed to back a lot of the Democratic agenda on economic policy, supporting the retention of price and rent controls and backed the furtherance of government programs such as public housing and an increase in Social Security benefits. However, he did seem to be against measures that were criticized as being socialist, such as on public power. Reams also sided with Ohio Republicans in favor of using the Taft-Hartley Act’s injunction in the 1952 steel labor dispute and in 1953 he supported the Republicans in their push to end the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He overall backed Americans for Democratic Action’s positions 76% of the time, and his DW-Nominate score was a -0.151. When it comes to independents, Reams reminds me a bit of Angus King, Maine’s independent senator, who considerably more often votes with Democrats (indeed he caucuses with them) but is not fully a party-line person. Reams could, however, not defy the two-party gravity for long.
In 1954, Reams lost a three-way election to Democrat Thomas Ashley. As Time Magazine (1954) reported, Reams miscalculated in his approach, writing “Reams made the mistake of thinking that Republican Candidate Irving Reynolds was his toughest opponent. Reams and Reynolds engaged in a bitter personal campaign, both dismissing the Democrat as “young Ashley”. Young Ashley, who had a nervous habit of giggling on television appearances, won by 4,000 votes over Reams and 8,000 over Reynolds”. The district has had a long Democratic history since, as the only non-Democrat to win the seat since was Republican Ed Weber in 1980, who was defeated in 1982 by Marcy Kaptur, who still holds the seat. However, a Republican may very well succeed Kaptur as Ohio has gotten more Republican over the years, and Ohio’s 9th is just the sort of district that has been moving increasingly into the Republican column. Reams himself would continue the practice of law and would head up his own broadcasting company, Reams Broadcasting Corporation. His last years were spent in Oakland, California, where he died on September 15, 1971.
References
ADA Voting Records. Americans for Democratic Action.
The New Mexico territory began as a conservative Republican stronghold and this was reflected in the first senators the state elected in Thomas B. Catron and Albert B. Fall. However, over time the state’s politics were increasingly inclined towards the Democrats, with the only Republican elected to Congress after the onset of the Great Depression being the progressive Senator Bronson Cutting, who would die in an airplane crash in 1935. From then on it was Democrats all the way, including in gubernatorial races. That was, until the election of Edwin Leard Mechem (1912-2002) as governor.
New Mexico in 1950 was considered quite Democratic, and at that point Republicans often had trouble recruiting candidates for major public offices. However, “Big Ed” (he was a large man) Mechem, a 38-year-old Las Cruces lawyer, stepped up to the plate against Democratic Congressman John E. Miles. Miles, who had had a long career in New Mexico politics, had good reason to think that he was going to win this one, and it didn’t hurt that he was politically moderate, potentially offsetting him being tied closely with the increasingly unpopular Truman Administration. However, Mechem delivered a powerful message against corruption in New Mexico politics and proposed reforms to the structure of the state’s government. New Mexico had had a long history of corruption in state politics, with money often having a strong influence on elections and charges of voter fraud were frequent; Senator Dennis Chavez may have won reelection in 1946 due to voter fraud (Hill). The climate of 1950 was decidedly conservative, and although New Mexico Democrats defeated Republican challengers for Congress (the two Democratic candidates were far from liberal stalwarts), Mechem won the 1950 election with 54% of the vote in an upset. Despite Mechem being quite conservative and the state of New Mexico being Democratic, he proved the state’s biggest vote-getter for the Republicans. He was not the first member of his family to serve as the state’s governor, as his uncle Merritt had done so from 1921 to 1923, also as a Republican.
As governor, Mechem proved a reformer, restructuring New Mexico government and standing independent of political machines. He also was quite politically savvy, and journalist James B. Barber of the Carlsbad Current-Argus noted that he was “a politician who can stumble into a vat of limburger cheese and come up reeking of [Chanel] No. 5. Some of it is luck, maybe, but there’s a lot of political savvy, too, in this big stubborn Las Cruces lawyer, who seldom takes advice from anyone” (28). He won reelection in 1952, running only two points behind Dwight Eisenhower. Mechem had a rather amusing tendency, as Barber noted, to issue forth a deep laugh from his chest that came out “ho ho ho” when he was dodging an inconvenient question (24). However, Mechem was term-limited, and instead of running for governor again, he tried to win a seat in the Senate. His opponent was Senator Clinton Anderson, a shrewd politician who was considered the foremost figure of the state’s Democratic Party. This would produce for him the worst defeat of his career, as the 1954 midterms resulted in the loss of control of Congress for the Republicans, and he would only net 43% of the vote. Mechem was not out of the game for long, and in 1956 he was again elected governor, defeating incumbent John F. Simms with 52% of the vote.
The 1958 election was particularly bad for Republicans, with Mechem losing by only a point to Democrat John Burroughs, but in a rematch in 1960 he campaigned against Burroughs’ forming his own political machine and came out ahead by less than a point. The Gallup Daily Independent had endorsed his bid for a comeback, citing his record as an efficient governor without ties to political machines (4). Although a victory, voters were less enthused about Mechem than in the past, and in 1962 Democrats managed to get New Mexico Representative Jack Campbell, a man known for being free of the control and influence of machines, to run against him. Campbell defeated him by 6 points. However, fate granted him an opportunity. On November 18th, the long-ailing Senator Chavez died, and Mechem pulled a maneuver that seldom works out in the long-run for politicians: resigning the governorship and having his successor appoint him to the Senate. This move was highly controversial in New Mexico as the voters had just rejected him for another term in public office only for him to move into the Senate.
Senator Mechem aligned himself closely with the staunchly conservative Barry Goldwater and his record proved among the most conservative in the Senate, opposing all major New Frontier and Great Society measures considered in his time in office as well as the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action rated him zeroes in both 1963 and 1964, not an easy feat to accomplish. He sided with Americans for Constitutional Action (Mechem would later serve on its Board of Trustees) 98% of the time by contrast, with the only position he had taken they considered liberal being voting against Senator Proxmire’s (D-Wis.) proposal to cut to Labor-HEW Appropriations in 1963. This meant, rather controversially for his state in which there were many Latinos, that he was one of six Republican senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mechem also opposed most sections of the bill and was the only Republican to vote in favor of Senator Gore’s (D-Tenn.) motion to recommit the bill to ease the provision cutting off aid to segregated schools. Mechem’s DW-Nominate score was a 0.585, placing him as the fourth most conservative senator in the 88th Congress. Although he had voted his conscience as his voting was far from tailored to win reelection in New Mexico at the time, this was politically tough as he was up for election to a full term in 1964, and that year was worse for the average Republican candidate than 1962 had been.
The 1964 Election: “Big Ed” vs. “Little Joe”
The 1964 election was one of great contrasts, both in the presidential election and in the New Mexico Senate election. “Big Ed” was facing a challenge from Joseph “Little Joe” Montoya, who represented one of New Mexico’s two At-Large districts. Little Joe supported JFK’s New Frontier legislation and LBJ’s Great Society, Big Ed did not. Little Joe supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Big Ed did not. A lot of support for Mechem’s campaign likely came from people remembering him as a good and effective governor of the state, but the candidacy of Barry Goldwater was tough for him to work with, especially since he voted with him on almost all key issues.
Although Mechem tried his best, he was defeated by nine points in 1964, with Montoya getting excellent results in Spanish-American areas. Mechem’s move to the Senate had only temporarily stayed the execution of his political career, and he demonstrated that he was the rule and not the exception when it came to governors getting themselves appointed to the Senate. As a side note, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin is an example of how to do it right; after Senator Robert Byrd died in 2009, he appointed an interim successor and ran in a proper election to finish the late Byrd’s term in 2010 and won despite West Virginia no longer being competitive for Democrats in presidential elections and the 2010 midterms being what President Obama called a “shellacking” for the Democrats. Journalist Will Harrison (1964) wrote of the outcome for Mechem, “The Nov. 3 election was very likely the end of Ed Mechem’s political career. It is possible that he might have beaten Montoya in a head-to-head run without the presidential influence, but the writing was on the wall for Mechem in 1962 when Jack Campbell demonstrated that a clean, aggressive Democrat could beat him without outside influence. Mechem’s 1962 loss of Albuquerque and his home county of Dona Ana, and the loss of such formerly reliable areas as San Juan and Santa Fe were signals that he had reached the end of his string” (4). Harrison was right; the New Mexico voters had tired of “Big Ed” Mechem, and he would never again be elected to public office. However, one important person had not tired of “Big Ed”, and that was Richard Nixon.
Judge Mechem
In 1970, President Nixon nominated Mechem, who he dubbed “Mr. Republican” as a Federal court judge for the district of New Mexico, and he was confirmed. While a judge, Mechem’s judicial record was not influenced by his political leanings; he ruled that age discrimination was occurring at Sandia National Labs, that sex discrimination was occurring in the Albuquerque police department, that the Socorro County jail had been indifferent to the medical needs of a prisoner who died, and made several rulings favorable to American Indians (Hill). Mechem assumed senior status (a state of semi-retirement for judges) in 1982 but would continue to work as much as he could for the last twenty years of his life. He died on November 27, 2002, at the age of 90 from his longtime heart condition.
Future of New Mexico Politics
Interestingly, not too long after Mechem’s 1964 defeat, the politics of New Mexico improved considerably for Republicans and conservatives, with Richard Nixon winning the state in 1968, two Republicans being elected to Congress that year, and the 1972 election resulting in the election of Republican Pete Domenici to the Senate, who represented the state for 36 years. New Mexico today is now politically what it was during the time of FDR, Democratic all around for major offices, and the last Republican the state voted for in a presidential election was George W. Bush in 2004. Is a comeback in store for the Republicans in New Mexico? Undoubtedly at some point, but when that’s going to be is anyone’s guess.
Correction, 3/4/25: I had originally written of Joe Manchin’s election in 2010 to the Senate as for a full term, but it was actually to complete the late Senator Byrd’s term. Manchin ran for a full term in 2012. My thanks to Daniel Fox for spotting this.
References
ADA Voting Records. Americans for Democratic Action.
Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History 