In 1930, the nation was entering an economic depression and Prohibition was increasingly unpopular. These developments were both bad news for Representative Louis Cramton of Michigan. Cramton, who had served since 1913, was a Republican and one of the most outspoken supporters of Prohibition in the House. Although the 7th district of Michigan was quite Republican, he was not safe from a primary challenge. Enter Jesse Paine Wolcott (1893-1969), a World War I veteran who had served as the prosecuting attorney of St. Clair County since 1927. The central issue of this campaign was Prohibition. He supported repealing it, while the bone-dry Cramton stayed the course. The primary was very close, but Wolcott came out ahead by 25 votes (Hill). A primary defeat would not be so significant in Michigan until Gerald Ford’s defeat of Bartel Jonkman in 1948.
Wolcott was initially regarded with suspicion and even hostility from some staunch conservatives. As he recalled, “I was called a radical when I first went to Congress. Some of my GOP colleagues would hardly speak to me” (Hill). Indeed, Wolcott did cast a few votes that were outside of the GOP orthodoxy in his first few years. He was always staunchly for veterans’ bonuses, going against Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt as well as many fiscal conservatives. Wolcott also supported additional funds for emergency highway construction for the purposes of increasing employment in 1932. During the Roosevelt Administration, he largely opposed the New Deal, including voting against the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Gold Clause Resolution, the Reciprocal Trade Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, the Public Utilities Holding Company Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, but voted for the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Gold Confiscation Act in 1934, and Social Security in 1935.
By 1944, Wolcott was the ranking Republican on the House Banking and Currency Committee, and as a result he was one of six members of Congress to serve as a delegate at the Bretton Woods Conference, which established the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. A non-interventionist before World War II, as were all Michigan Republicans of prominence, Wolcott did come to support some major measures after World War II, such as aid to Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan in the name of countering communism. He was also sufficiently influential to sway 61 Republicans to vote for a loan to Great Britain in 1946 (Hill). However, Wolcott opposed foreign aid beyond what he saw as necessary to address communism, including voting against Point IV aid to poor nations in 1950. Although he was overall opposed to price controls, he did see some value in keeping them to a limited degree during World War II. In 1946, Wolcott sponsored four amendments that made it to a vote on price control; the first was reducing the extension of price control by three months, the second adjusting ceiling prices to costs of production plus reasonable profit, the third a gradual reduction of agricultural subsidies, and the fourth reducing funds for farm subsidies (CQ Almanac). All were passed. However, Wolcott believed that controls and subsidies should gradually be ended, and thus opposed the Wadsworth (R-N.Y.) and Flannagan (D-Va.) amendments. The former, which was voted down, promptly removed controls on livestock and its products, and the latter, which passed, promptly ended meat subsidies and adjusted the price ceiling from there. Wolcott’s stances were not always in line with many in his party, as many wanted the end to come quicker, but for this stance he was awarded the Collier Award for Distinguished Congressional Service with a reward of $10,000 in cash, which he donated to Michigan State University to fund scholarships (Hill). The 1946 elections produced the first Republican Congress since the Hoover Administration, and it propelled Wolcott to the chairmanship of the House Banking and Currency Committee.
Robert La Follette Jr., Harry S. Truman and Jesse Wolcott.
Banking and Currency Chairman
The Banking and Currency Committee not only had jurisdiction over banking but also on economic controls and housing. Wolcott pushed an anti-inflation bill in 1947 that failed to pass under suspension of the rules that only extended economic controls over exports and rail transportation but left controls for the rest to voluntary agreements by industry as well as a housing bill in 1948 that had no public housing or slum clearance provisions but had provisions supported by the real estate industry (Americans for Democratic Action, 1948). Wolcott was opposed to the proposed Taft-Ellender-Wagner Act with public housing and although his committee voted to override him and report the bill, the House Rules Committee bottled it up. However, with the next Congress being Democratic, the bill would be signed into law by President Truman. During the 1948 presidential campaign, Truman condemned Wolcott as a “mossback Republican”, or an extreme conservative, as part of his campaigning against the 80th Congress (Hill). Although he was indeed a conservative, he was not a Clare Hoffman or Noah Mason, who were absolutely uncompromising in their views on economic controls and foreign aid, and most everything else. After the defeat of the Republican Congress and the election of Truman in 1948, Wolcott was once again in the minority, and he continued to vote against the Truman Administration on most issues. By 1952, he believed that economic controls had gone on long enough in the Korean War and voted to end both price and rent controls.
In the 83rd Congress, with Republicans again in control, Wolcott was once again chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee, but perhaps his most notable role was serving on the committee investigating tax-exempt institutions. This committee was controversial in its initiation and its implementation, and Wolcott signed onto to the majority report that accused the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations of funding “subversion”, charges which they strongly denied (Hill). This is a subject I have covered before, and I must note that subversion in this case did not necessarily have to mean “communism”. In 1956, Wolcott was one of 24 Republicans to vote against the proposed Civil Rights Act of 1956, backed by the Eisenhower Administration. This was rather unusual for him, as he had repeatedly supported other measures in the past, such as anti-lynching and anti-poll tax bills. In 1954, he faced a bit of a scare when he had his worst reelection performance, getting 52.8% of the vote. He had not fallen below 56% before and he usually won with at least 60%. Wolcott’s district, which included St. Clair, Sanilac, Huron, Tuscola, and Macomb counties, had previously long been a bastion of Republicanism but was now moving to the Democrats. Perhaps not wanting to face another difficult campaign, Wolcott opted not to run another term. His protégé, Robert McIntosh, did win in 1956, but he lost reelection two years later to Democrat James O’Hara, who would be in Congress for twenty years in part thanks to redistricting that split up his old district. On ideology, DW-Nominate figured his score at 0.324, while he only agreed with the liberal Americans for Democratic Action 10% of the time from 1947 to 1956. Most of Wolcott’s old territory is today back under Republican representation.
Although he thought he’d be retired with the end of his time in Congress, President Eisenhower called him back into service when he nominated him to be chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, an institution that he strongly supported, and it was a post for which he was supremely qualified. Although normally a proponent of limited government, Wolcott thought the government insuring of bank deposits to be a tremendous good, stating, “I like to think of FDIC as probably the greatest institution ever conceived by man for his own safety and protection, and the protection of bank depositors. I do not think there is any organization in the world which has done so much to establish and perpetuate and maintain an economy such as that which makes America the greatest nation in the world” (Hill). He capably served as chairman until the end of the Eisenhower Administration, and then continued to serve on the board until his retirement from public life in 1964. Sadly, Wolcott would not enjoy retirement long; in 1966 he suffered a stroke from which he never recovered (Hill). He died on January 28, 1969 at the age of 75.
References
ADA Voting Records. Americans for Democratic Action.
Retrieved from
https://adaction.org/ada-voting-records/
Congressional Supplement (1948). Americans for Democratic Action.
Retrieved from
Extension of Price Control. CQ Almanac 1946. CQ Press.
Retrieved from
https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal46-1411558#_=_
Hill, R. Jesse Wolcott of Michigan. The Knoxville Focus.
Retrieved from
https://www.knoxfocus.com/archives/this-weeks-focus/jesse-wolcott-of-michigan/
Wolcott, Jesse Paine. Voteview.
Retrieved from
Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History 