Reinhold Niebuhr, the first and only chairman of Union for Democratic Action.

One ratings system I have been very curious about from a historic perspective is the old Union for Democratic Action system, which they published in the left-wing magazine The New Republic. This organization, which was the predecessor of the left-wing Americans for Democratic Action, scored legislators on their commitments to the New Deal as well as to FDR’s foreign policy. They also embraced civil rights when it was simply an emerging issue on the left-right scale. Thus, among the votes they considered important enough to score were the 1943 and 1945 bills banning the poll tax in Federal elections, both sponsored by far-left Vito Marcantonio of New York. I was having some trouble finding concrete information on how they graded, but then I hit upon a jackpot…an article from a Greensboro, Alabama newspaper called The Southern Watchman.

The Southern Watchman complains about the trajectory of the Democratic Party as anti-Southern and bases this on the Union for Democratic Action-New Republic ratings of Congress as who is in line with FDR and the New Deal. Although the author cites, as one would expect, the poll tax ban as an example of an “anti-Southern” vote, the critique is more broad-based than civil rights as he also cites the opposition to the continuation of the Dies Committee (House Committee on Un-American Activities) and the opposition to the Hobbs Anti-Racketeering bill (regarded as anti-labor by the Roosevelt Administration and organized labor) as examples, both measures strongly supported by Southern members of Congress. This article also demonstrates that it is not true as commonly believed that FDR declined to support civil rights as president. His administration was supportive of banning the poll tax (although he had pointedly declined to opine on anti-lynching proposals). The Southern Watchman (1943) posits, “The truth of the matter is that our Southern representatives in Congress are not necessarily anti-Roosevelt or anti-Democratic; they are merely pro-Southern, and the national administration itself is guilty of being anti-Southern” (2).

Interestingly, in this article the author, whether he knows it or not, is predicting the distant future. He writes, “This condition cannot continue to exist. We cannot run with the hare and hold with the hounds. We may remain loyal to the National Democratic Party in the next presidential election, or the next after that, but this business of fighting it with one hand and befriending it with the other cannot go on forever. The South cannot continue to support, year in and year out, the party which at this moment is as radically anti-Southern as was the Republican Party in Grant’s day. We have got to recapture the Democratic Party, and reconstitute it as a party which respects the South, or we have got to disown it completely” (2). Most of the South has indeed since disowned the Democratic Party, a process that was largely actualized with the 1994 midterms. As we can see here, there were inklings of its start before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and even before President Truman announced his support for a civil rights platform and ordered the desegregation of the army in 1948. Indeed, four Southern states would prove willing to ditch the National Democrats as early as 1948, with Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina voting for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. However, the process was gradual, and Republicans wouldn’t start making even modest gains in the South outside of the traditionally Republican 1^st and 2^nd districts of Tennessee, which have stuck with the GOP in times good and bad, until the 1950s. Most Southern politicians would find it useful to remain in the Democratic Party simply for the institutional power that they retained, and numerous Southern Democrats had built up considerable seniority. Until 1975, seniority was the sole determinant of who would get powerful committee chairmanships, and Southern politicians benefited greatly. Indeed, I contend that the Democratic rules change in 1975 that made seniority not the sole issue that determined seniority to be the beginning of the end of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. The votes themselves are helpfully described in the article, although the vote totals are not always accurately reported. I have, however, used the highly useful Voteview function to create a spreadsheet that shows the scores and under Roll Call Descriptions shows the votes.

The UDA-New Republic’s inclusion of the poll tax ban as an issue to count for the liberal side, which only got 17 Republican nays, results in only a few representatives getting a 0%. These are:

Ben Jensen (R-Iowa), Ulysses Guyer (R-Kan.)*, Thomas Winter (R-Kan.), Frank Fellows (R-Me.), Clare Hoffman (R-Mich.), Donald McLean (R-N.J.), Francis Culkin (R-N.Y.)*, James Wadsworth (R-N.Y.), Frederick Smith (R-Ohio), Ross Rizley (R-Okla.), and Martin Dies (D-Tex.).

* – These representatives died during the session, only voting a few times.

This is a solid cross-section of some of the most right-wing legislators in this time. Clare Hoffman of Michigan was the most notable example of an extreme opponent of the Roosevelt Administration (and liberalism in general) and Frederick Smith of Ohio has one of the highest recorded DW-Nominate scores in history at 0.92.

Representatives who never got it wrong by this standard were:

George Outland (D-Calif.), Thomas Ford (D-Calif.), Cecil King (D-Calif.), George Sadowski (D-Mich.), Louis Capozzoli (D-N.Y.), Arthur Klein (D-N.Y.), Vito Marcantonio (ALP-N.Y.), Charles Buckley (D-N.Y.), James Fitzpatrick (D-N.Y.), Michael Kirwan (D-Ohio), Robert Furlong (D-Penn.), Henry Jackson (D-Wash.), John Coffee (D-Wash.)., and Howard McMurray (D-Wis.).

This is a good cross-section of the most left-wing representatives of the time, as Marcantonio was known as openly pro-Soviet and some others, such as John Coffee of Washington, were accused of being Soviet sympathizers. Howard McMurray of Wisconsin has the lowest DW-Nominate score in the 78th Congress.

Another interesting aspect is that 29 Republicans only sided with UDA-New Republic on the issue of banning the poll tax. The poll tax ban was by far the issue that was considered liberal by UDA-New Republic that got the most Republican support. Something to note about these votes is that Congress had not concluded when they were released. Thus, there were some important issues that were not included in this, such as the votes on anti-subsidy legislation as well as the vote on retaining the National Youth Administration. I would say this measure is not complete for 1943, but it nonetheless does a pretty good job of distinguishing the most liberal and most conservative legislators.

The ratings are below, + and – with underlines mean pairs for and against the UDA position:

References

78th Congress – Representatives. Voteview.

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https://voteview.com/congress/house/78/text

The South Isn’t Anti-New Deal — The New Deal Is Anti-Southern. (1943, August 21). The Southern Watchman, p. 2.

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