Hance and Bush, 1978.

Numerous political figures in 1978 who had been significant in the South were not staying for another term. One of them was the Appropriations Committee chairman George Mahon of Texas. He had survived the challenge to his authority in 1975, but by 1978 he was 78 years old and although still vibrant, he had been in office for over forty years and in his last reelection bid his Republican opponent had come within ten points of defeating him despite his plum position in Congress and having a conservative reputation. His district was moving more and more Republican in its presidential voting behavior (the last Democrat its voters pulled the lever for was LBJ) and Republicans thought they had a good chance of flipping the district with George W. Bush, son of the at-the-time CIA director George H.W. Bush. The man in the Democrats’ corner was State Senator Kent Hance (1942- ).

Bush campaigned against President Carter’s price controls on gas and against the federal bureaucracy and was certainly more conservative than Hance, but Hance was more politically experienced and had a few angles to attack Bush. In many places, such as his place of birth of New Haven, Connecticut, Bush’s Ivy League education would be a political benefit to him, but he was running in West Texas, and this made him vulnerable to charges that he was a rather dreaded class…an outsider. As Hance, who by contrast graduated from Texas Tech said, “In the Panhandle, if it’s Texas Tech versus Yale, Tech will beat Yale every time. That’s not even a close game” (Hart). Hance used Bush’s Yale education against him, and claimed that, despite the fact that he had grown up in and attended school in Midland, that he wasn’t a “real Texan”. There was also a lot of talk going on about his father’s and his father’s friends’ connection to the Trilateral Commission, a group that was and remains viewed with a lot of suspicion in numerous conservative quarters as an outlet for plotting world government, and it dogged him throughout the campaign to the point he lost his cool with conservative radio personality Mel Turner when he brought the subject up. Bush would have a lot of trouble shaking off this image as an outsider. Matters were not helped when Bush in his first TV ad was jogging, an exercise that was not commonplace in West Texas in 1978 (Romano and Lardner). Perhaps all this could have been overcome, except the Hance campaign had one more blow to deal.

The Hance campaign in the final days mailed thousands of letters addressed “Dear Fellow Christians” and pointed to an ad the Bush campaign had run in University Daily (a Texas Tech student newspaper) offering free beer at one of his campaign rallies (Hart). Bush disavowed any knowledge of this ad, but Hance’s campaign was able to portray him among some religious voters as corrupting the youth. Hurting Bush as well was that he declined to point out that Hance had ownership of property near Texas Tech that he leased to a bar, telling his staff, “Kent lives here. If I win, he has to come back to live. I’m not going to ruin the guy in his home town. He’s not a bad person” (Romano and Lardner). In doing so, he could have pointed to Hance as a hypocrite and potentially neutralized this attack. Hance contrasted himself to Bush in a debate 10 days before the election, that his “daddy and grandad were farmers. They didn’t have anything to do with the mess we’re in right now, and Bush’s father has been in politics his whole life” (Romano and Lardner).

The outcome of the election I already spoiled, but on Election Day, Hance prevailed 53-47%. Although Bush had done well in Midland, the voters wanted someone they saw as more authentically Texan. Bush blamed his loss on “provincialism” but learned a number of key lessons in this election (Romano and Lardner). First, know your audience, second, don’t cross Christian fundamentalists, and third, when your opponent attacks…strike back! He followed these lessons to the letter in his future campaigns, and that Congressional race was the last time he ever lost an election.

Although Hance was a win for Texas Democrats, he didn’t turn out to be much of one for the national Democrats. He proved similar to Mahon in his time in office, forming a moderately conservative record, and in 1981 he collaborated with Republican Barber Conable (R-N.Y.), the GOP’s chief man on the Ways and Means Committee, on tax reduction legislation championed by President Reagan. For national Democrats, Hance was simply the best option they had. Hance’s win only delayed Republican takeover of the district by six years as in 1984 he opted not to run for reelection to run for the Senate (he lost the primary to Lloyd Doggett, who is currently a representative) and his seat was won by Republican Larry Combest, an aide to Senator John Tower. The seat has been in Republican hands since. Given that neither of them got personal in the 1978 campaign, Hance himself would befriend Bush and switch to the GOP after his departure from the House. He would try twice to win the GOP primary for governor, in 1986 and 1990, but lost, serving instead as Texas Railroad Commissioner from 1987 to 1991. Hance would also donate to the Bush campaign for governor in 1994. From 2006 to 2014, he served as Chancellor of the Texas Tech University System. Honestly, it is interesting to ponder that if Bush had won a seat in Congress in 1978 if he would still have ended up becoming president.

References

Hance, Kent Ronald. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/person/14633/kent-ronald-hance

Hart, P. (1999). Not So Great in ’78. Texas Monthly.

Retrieved from

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/not-so-great-in-78/

Romano, L. & Lardner, G. (1999, July 29). Young Bush, a Political Natural, Revs Up. The Washington Post.

Retrieved from

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072999.htm

A thought came to my mind recently…could I name all the major candidates of presidential elections in American history off the top of my head? I certainly couldn’t fully do so for 1836. The reason it was fuzzy to me is because there was not just one major candidate vs. another. There was much more to it than that!

In 1836, Jackson, honoring the two-term precedent, decided not to run for another term, leaving the presidency to his chosen successor, Vice President Martin Van Buren. The Whig Party had been founded since the 1832 election to oppose Jackson, and they were entering the business of fielding a presidential candidate…or should I say candidates? The Whig Party was unified on opposition to Andrew Jackson, but opposition alone doesn’t make for a long-standing coalition. Thus, the Whigs had no convention and no party platform. They also had not a whopping four candidates! The Whigs were, unofficially, hoping to throw the election to the House of Representatives by denying Van Buren a majority in the electoral college. This was not exactly planned, but simply the best that could be conceived in the circumstances. The four nominees were William Henry Harrison of Ohio, Hugh White of Tennessee, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and Willie Mangum of North Carolina. These represented the different groups that were in opposition to Jackson for one reason or another. Mangum, for example, also got the nomination of the Nullifier Party. Harrison snagged the nomination of the Anti-Masonic Party.

The End Result

The results were clean for Van Buren himself, who pulled off 50.8% of the popular vote and the electoral college and critically pulls off a narrow win in Pennsylvania. He wins a majority in both the North and the South. For the Whigs? Mangum only wins South Carolina, Webster his home state of Massachusetts, Hugh White his home state of Tennessee plus Georgia, but Harrison wins the rest of the states that vote Whig. There is, however, a minor wrinkle for Van Buren’s ticket. His running mate, former Kentucky Senator Richard Mentor Johnson, was quite controversial due to his slave mistress who he acknowledged as well as their daughters and his questionable claim that he killed Indian chief Tecumseh (United States Senate). Virginia’s electors refuse to cast their electoral votes for him, and thus the election is thrown to the Senate, which votes for him 33-16. However, by far the best performer among the Whigs was William Henry Harrison, and this sets him up to be the party’s candidate in the next election.

References

Blakemore, E. (2015, October 13). The Election Season That Was Weirder Than 2016. Time Magazine.

Retrieved from

https://time.com/4070370/2016-1836-presidential-election/

The Senate Elects a Vice President. United States Senate.

Retrieved from

https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/senate-elects-vice-president.htm

I guess New York Republican politicians have been a considerable subject of interest lately for me. Perhaps my mind is more on New York given the House special election for George Santos’s seat, which got reconfigured into a district that voted for Biden by 9 in 2020. The last few I covered differed a bit from conservatism and had ideological changes in their careers, but today’s Republican was pretty consistent.

In 1938, House Minority Bert Snell decided to call it quits, and elected in his place was Wallace Pierce. However, Pierce was not doing so well and died at the start of 1940. Although the son of New York state Republican politician Frederick Kilburn, Malone banker Clarence Kilburn (1893-1975) didn’t think he’d go into politics until as a prominent citizen he was approached to run for public office and was elected to Congress. He occupied an interesting place in American politics and one that would prove quite favorable post-war: conservative on domestic policy and internationalist on foreign policy. The 1950s as a political era was often inclined towards both, and the Conservative Coalition had a stronger bond on domestic than foreign policy. Although a staunch foe of the New Deal and its works, Kilburn voted for the peacetime draft as well as Lend-Lease in 1941. He recalled about the New Deal, “I didn’t think much of it. I never have thought much of it. It turned out that some stuff was good and some of it was terrible. And his packing of the Supreme Court was God awful, that’s all. Trying to pack it. He did not succeed” (Langlois & McGowan, 84). Kilburn thought a bit better of FDR personally but saw him as a political animal. He recalled that “He was a very charming kind of fellow, as far as that goes, but he was a politician first, last, and all the time. He did some great things, I admit that, but he was thinking politics all the time” (Langlois & McGowan, 84). After the war, Kilburn backed the conservative objectives of the 80th Congress but also voted for Greek-Turkish Aid and the Marshall Plan, regarding them as post-war necessities. He would support foreign aid but sometimes also supported cuts. Kilburn thought quite highly of Roosevelt’s ideological opposite, Barry Goldwater. He recounted, “I thought Goldwater was quite a good man myself. They all got after him to beat the band just because they said he was too conservative, but they didn’t study what he had said, but a lot of his stuff they adopted later on. People don’t realize that” (Langlois & McGowan, 168).

Kilburn seems from his account to be a solid conservative but also a bit pragmatic. He asserted that the Joint Economic Committee in Congress, set up by Senator Robert Taft (R-Ohio) in 1945 to study the economic issues of the nation, started out as “objective” but that it turned political when Senator Paul Howard Douglas (D-Ill.) became chairman, and then there would be majority and minority reports issued (Langlois & McGowan, 120-121). I wonder if he means that it got more distinctly liberal, as Douglas had a liberal record and was at times accused of being a socialist. Perhaps Douglas simply made it more political.

As a banker, Kilburn sat on the House Banking and Commerce Committee as the counterpart to Chairman Wright Patman (D-Tex.), who, true to the Jacksonian legacy of the Democratic Party, was an arch-antagonist of bankers. Kilburn would enjoy sparring with Patman on the matter and said of him that “he was just death to the Federal Reserve and death to banks, he hates the Federal Reserve — well, he gets up and makes some of the most ridiculous statements, you know” (Langlois & McGowan, 114). He did enjoy some interesting friendships among ideological opponents, including with East Harlem’s Vito Marcantonio. Kilburn, a self-identified conservative who was highly conscious of the use of taxpayer funds and defender of market capitalism was friends with the pro-Soviet Marcantonio. He recalled an occasion in which he drew a primary challenger, and Marcantonio offered to either speak for or against him, whichever would help him more (Langlois & McGowan, 90). Although many New York politicians were opposed to the St. Lawrence Seaway, Kilburn, like Bert Snell, was in favor. In 1954, he played a significant role in advocacy for the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway (Langlois & McGowan, 152).

Kilburn vs. Civil Rights

Among Republicans in New York, Kilburn had without doubt the most negative record on civil rights. In 1945, he opposed banning the poll tax (a bill sponsored by Marcantonio) and the Powell Amendment to the School Lunch bill to bar racial discrimination in 1946. He would oppose banning the poll tax by legislative means twice more. Kilburn also opposed both the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, rationalizing that despite the existence of the 15th Amendment, regulation of elections lay with the states. When interviewed in 1970, the subject came up and he said about it, “Well, I thought a lot of it was bunk and a lot of it was for demagogues” and “I didn’t think a civil rights bill, the provisions of it, would do any good. It didn’t do them any good here in New York State because everybody has the right to their own circle of friends and if they don’t want to be friends with people they don’t have to — if they don’t they don’t –whether they are black or yellow or what” (Langlois & McGowan, 139). He also outright got it wrong on lynching statistics. Kilburn asserted, “…you look back over the history of the negroes, 100 years ago and 75 years ago even, you had lynching stands up and there hasn’t been a lynching in the south for years and years. There is more lynching’s up north” (Langlois & McGowan, 139). From 1882 to 1968, the Tuskegee Institute’s data indicated that far more lynchings occurred in the South, and upon basic Google research, the few recent ones were happening in the South. However, his record wasn’t all negative: he voted against the Poff motion to recommit the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to delete the section making defiance of court orders for desegregation a crime and cast a pair for the 24th Amendment, banning the poll tax for federal elections and primaries.

Later Years

Among the issues Kilburn opposed, perhaps the greatest focus was on public housing, and in 1959 he attempted to kill public housing in the Housing Act of 1959 by inserting the Herlong (D-Fla.) substitute which contained no additional public housing and restricted urban renewal. Save for measures regarding foreign aid, Kilburn was an intractable foe of the agenda of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, including voting against Kennedy’s most popular bills; the overwhelmingly bipartisan passed legislation for educational TV and for job training in 1962. The taxpayer had quite a friend in Kilburn given how much he resisted most domestic spending. In 1964, although he was widely thought to be privately supporting Goldwater given that his record was most in line with his and holding back for Governor Nelson Rockefeller, he publicly expressed his thoughts that Pennsylvania’s Governor William Scranton, a centrist, would be the most electable candidate (The New York Times). That year, he opted to retire as he didn’t want to stay in office until he or his wife fell ill, and he found that he no longer had enthusiasm for serving.

In retirement, Kilburn approved of President Nixon and Vice President Agnew and echoed a grievance that may sound quite familiar today, “…he [Spiro Agnew] was taking on the television commentators who make instant…some of the[m] burn me up. I sit here and watch the president make a speech and right after he is done, five minutes the fellow knows all about it and what the answer is and where Nixon is wrong and everything. What the hell does he know about it? Nothing, cripes sake” (Langlois & McGowan, 124-125). Kilburn died on May 20, 1975.

References

Kilburn, Clarence Evans. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/person/5235/clarence-evans-kilburn

Kilburn Explains His Leaving House; Dean of State’s Group Says He’s Lost ‘Excitement’. (1964, February 9). The New York Times.

Retrieved from

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/02/09/archives/kilburn-explains-his-leaving-house-dean-of-states-group-says-hes.html

Langlois, W.J. & McGowan, R. (1970, August 31). Transcript for Mr. Clarence Kilburn, Congressman. Reynoldston Research and Studies Collection.

Retrieved from

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByWDcVL3qJKRRlJBWHNrUW5ReXVvMF9HZFFzM3JiQQ/view?pli=1&resourcekey=0-wXdwC_cZBdVNO1GrlS-2yA

Lynchings: By State and Race, 1882-1968. The Tuskegee Institute.

Retrieved from

https://archive.tuskegee.edu/repository/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Lynchings-Stats-Year-Dates-Causes.pdf

1952 was a good election year for the Republicans as the returns produced unified government for them for the first time since 1928, and an election would not do so again for them until 2000. The usually staunchly Democratic New York City saw growth in their representation in Congress, and one of the newly elected was Paul Fino (1913-2009) of the Bronx.

Fino’s district was comprised of many ethnicities, idealized in the United States as the “melting pot”. Representing such a diverse constituency, he was a bit far from your typical Republican. On many domestic issues he proved a maverick; he voted for the Area Redevelopment bill, food stamps, and public housing. Fino also could differ from his party on foreign aid and to the right; he opposed the creation of the Development Loan Fund in 1957 and that year voted against Walter Judd’s (R-Minn.) proposed increase in foreign aid backed by the Eisenhower Administration. During the Kennedy Administration, Fino was one of the most supportive Republicans; he supported the Kennedy-backed Area Redevelopment Act, a strong minimum wage, the Housing Act of 1961, and a federal aid for school construction bill that failed to pass the House. He was strongly supportive of organized labor and voted against the Landrum-Griffin substitute labor bill in 1958 and for repealing the “right to work” section of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1965. Fino retained Republicanism on questions of government ownership of public power sources, supporting a cut in the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1957, opposing the TVA Bonds bill in 1959, and opposing public power for the facility at Hanford in Washington in 1961. In 1964, Fino proposed a national lottery to fund hospitals, arguing that it could net up to $10 million annually (Hevesi). Fino’s DW-Nominate score was a 0.048, placing him in the center. His modified Americans for Constitutional Action scores ranged from a 13% in 1960 to an 85% in 1968.

Most curiously, Fino, who had up to 1965 voted for all civil rights legislation, was the only Republican in Congress to vote against the GOP substitute for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and for initial passage only to vote against the conference report, doing so because the Senate adopted an amendment permitting Spanish-speaking citizens to vote in New York without meeting a literacy requirement as required by the New York State Constitution, although the New York State Legislature in the process of changing that (Congressional Record, 19196). However, he did have a conservative streak, and he turned against anti-poverty programs as well as Mayor John Lindsay. In 1967, Fino, as chairman of the Bronx Republican Party, called for Republicans to oppose Lindsay, and placed a billboard by Willis Avenue Bridge reading, ““Fun City Line Stops Here. Republicans of Bronx County Want No Fun Riots, Fun Taxes, Fun Crimes, Fun Mayor” (Hevesi). Although Fino’s New York Times obituary notes that he was to Lindsay’s right, and this was true in 1967, it interestingly wasn’t true in the first three years of Lindsay’s Congressional career, being fiscally to Fino’s right. Perhaps the most notable thing about Fino for politics aside from his butting heads with Lindsay was a man he hired: Kevin Phillips.

Phillips had made a study of ethnicity in US politics and predicted the rise of a Republican majority based on ethnic tensions, namely Irish and Italian ethnics coming out against spending on welfare programs that disproportionately benefited black and Latino constituents. Irish and Italian ethnics formerly clashed with WASPs which put them in the Democratic Party, but their conflict towards them waned and it waxed for black and Latino groups, ascendant in the Democratic coalition (Boyd). Phillips advised Fino on his conservative swing, and in 1966 he won big in the Irish wards. He would later serve as a strategist on the Nixon campaign and his push for the campaign to win peripheral South states was successful. Phillips would prove predictive about the South’s overall move to the GOP in the long-term.

In 1968, Fino was at his most conservative and voted against adopting Senate amendments for fair housing in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, despite having voted to keep the fair housing title in the proposed Civil Rights Act of 1966. In 1968, Fino resigned his House seat after being elected to the New York State Supreme Court, and served as a justice until 1972. While on the bench, he became notable for being tough on crime, handing down strict sentences for drug offenses (Hevesi). The Bronx has not since Fino’s departure from Congress had Republican representation…quite the contrary in fact, as its current representative is AOC.

References

Boyd, J. (1970, May 17). Nixon’s Southern strategy. The New York Times.

Retrieved from

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/17/archives/nixons-southern-strategy-its-all-in-the-charts.html

Fino, Paul Albert. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/person/3158/paul-albert-fino

Hevesi, D. (2009, June 18). Paul Fino, Politician Who Battled Lindsay, Dies at 95. The New York Times.

Retrieved from

Voting Rights. (1965, August 3). Congressional Record. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Retrieved from

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1965-pt14/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1965-pt14-5-2.pdf

Barry Goldwater, ACA’s champion for the 1964 presidential election.

9/2/2024 Note: The bottom analysis is partly incorrect. Although the ACA scores reported would produce the 26 votes I noted below, from acquiring the 1963 ACA-Index it turns out there was a 27th vote for the Senate. In a flaw in ACA’s calculations for 1963, however, this vote somehow doesn’t get counted for 1963 but does for the legislator’s overall score. Thus, James Howard Edmondson (D-Okla.) manages to in his first year per ACA score a 26 for 1963 and a 25 cumulative despite having only been counted for 1963. I have corrected this mistake. Forget the part below about there being no 27th vote.

I have finally done it. I have finally determined the 1963 and 1964 ACA-Indexes for the Senate. Before proceeding with explanations and scores, I will highlight the multiple difficulties I had in completing them (although primarily for 1963), and it seemed downright impossible before I found that H.L. Hunt’s conservative publication Life Lines had published all the scores, which, yes, served as my lifeline here.

One of the sources I use is from Voteview Legacy which reported overall scores for 1964 from senators. Some of these scores are reported incorrectly. For instance, Senator J. Howard Edmondson’s (D-Okla.) score for 1963 and 1964 combined is reported as a “20”, but it is actually a “21”. Wayne Morse (D-Ore.) was a source of confusion as well. The numbers for 1964 came together a bit before 1963 because I simply found there was no other possible combination that produced the scores for some senators that I found reported for 1964 from numerous publications. The errors regarding 1963 were:

Arkansas’ J. William Fulbright’s and John McClellan’s votes are swapped by Voteview and Govtrack for roll call 227 in 1963, regarding guarantees for wheat sales to the USSR and Hungary and this is confirmed by the Congressional Record (Congressional Record, 25145). This is the most obvious error to catch of the ones I found, given Fulbright’s and McClellan’s stances on the other roll call counted on this issue, roll call 203.

Daniel Brewster of Maryland is incorrectly reported by Voteview (and by extension Govtrack) as having paired against rather than voted for Senator Lausche’s amendment for roll call 139 in 1963. Congressional Quarterly and the Congressional Record correctly report that he voted “yea” (Congressional Record, 18254).

Perhaps the most shocking error I found was on the Congressional Record, the ultimate resource to verify voting records. This error regards roll call 90, in which Frank Church of Idaho is recorded as “yea” in both Congressional Quarterly and the Congressional Record, but in the record regarding that vote, Senator Church made it clear that he was pairing for, rather than voting for, yet his vote was incorrectly recorded as “yea” (Congressional Record, 14478). This makes Church’s official ACA score a 0%. A most rare occurrence indeed!

Note, 9/2/2024: This paragraph is incorrect. “Vote X” as I put it turns out to have been a final vote on a foreign aid bill. Smith and Proxmire’s scores are actually reported incorrectly by ACA.

The total number of “issues” widely reported as being counted by ACA for the Senate was 27, but the scores of the senators as provided by Life Lines, which also reported a number of 27, were not possible for 27 votes. For instance, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine and Bill Proxmire of Wisconsin missed no votes yet their scores were 35% and 42%. Yet the scores they counted that were reported in other places were consistent with what was reported in other sources, such as old newspapers of the day. Before I learned of Smith’s and Proxmire’s impossible scores with 27 votes, I was feeling that there was a missing vote, a “Vote X” you might say. It turns out if the number of votes is brought down to 26, the figures provided work perfectly. “Vote X”, like the alleged planet, didn’t exist. This raises the question, was the count of issues widely reported incorrectly or was there an issue that ACA included that wasn’t a vote and did not count towards their scores? If so, what was the point of including that issue? Anyway, on to the votes.

Just a reminder, the scores I put up here are not necessarily how ACA scores them, but how senators voted, paired, and sometimes announced on such issues. This is a more complete measure of the ideology of the senators than just counting votes, and pairs themselves are essentially to be sure that a measure doesn’t lose because of legislative absences, thus vote outcomes have greater legitimacy. I research these scores because I am interested in what conservatives of the time regarded as important, not merely looking at Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores and reversing them, and indeed we see differences in policy emphasis. For instance, although ACA counts three civil rights votes in 1964 out of 18 total, ADA counted a whopping eight civil rights votes out of 19 total. Interestingly, ACA counted none of the civil rights votes ADA did.

The 1963 ACA-Index is particularly tough on the Senate, although this is because some issues came to it that didn’t come to the House that year. Of the senators, only two get 100% in modified scoring to account for pairings in Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) and Carl Curtis (R-Neb.). Even John J. Williams (R-Del.), who the first ACA-Index gave a 99% based on his 1955-1959 voting record, scores only a 73%, which is easily his lowest ever score. Far more senators get zeroes, these are:

Bob Bartlett, D-Alaska
Carl Hayden, D-Ariz.
Abe Ribicoff, D-Conn.
Daniel Inouye, D-Haw.
Vance Hartke, D-Ind.
Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.
Phil Hart, D-Mich.
Pat McNamara, D-Mich.
Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn.
Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn.
Edward Long, D-Mo.
Mike Mansfield, D-Mont.
Lee Metcalf, D-Mont.
Harrison Williams, D-N.J.
Maurine Neuberger, D-Ore.
Joseph Clark, D-Penn.
George McGovern, D-S.D.
Estes Kefauver, D-Tenn.
Jennings Randolph, D-W.V.
Gaylord Nelson, D-Wis.

While no Republicans scored zeroes, Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York come the closest with 11% each. While such a score was pretty expected of Javits, Keating had quite the decline in his score, and possible factors for this are his upcoming reelection as well as appealing to the Liberal Party for their nomination (which Javits regularly won). The Democrat who gets closest to 100% is, unsurprisingly, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina who scores a 96% and would in the next year switch to the GOP. President Kennedy scores a 0% based on official positions. This strangely enough included two votes that occurred after he was assassinated, as he was known to have supported wheat shipments to the USSR and Hungary.

The 1964 ACA-Index is a bit smaller than the 1963 one with 18 votes counted, and Southern Democrats have a significant uptick in their score, in part due to the fact that three votes on civil rights are counted this year: Senator Ervin’s (D-N.C.) proposal to delete Title VII (employment discrimination), Senator Byrd’s (D-W.V.) proposal to delete Title II (public accommodations), and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Al Gore Sr.’s score, for instance, shoots up from 4% in 1963 to 50% in 1964. Senators Edwin Mechem (R-N.M.) and Milward Simpson (R-Wyo.) score 100%. Once again, many more score zeroes, and they are:

Bob Bartlett (D-Alaska)
Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.)
Pierre Salinger (D-Calif.)
Abe Ribicoff (D-Conn.)
Daniel Inouye (D-Haw.)
Birch Bayh (D-Ind.)
Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)
Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.)
Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.)
Edward Long (D-Mo.)
Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.)
Lee Metcalf (D-Mont.)
Harrison Williams (D-N.J.)
Mike Monroney (D-Okla.)
John Pastore (D-R.I.)
Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.)
Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.)

Although no Democrats scored a 100% and no Republicans scored a 0%, the closest to 100% for Democrats were Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Harry Byrd and Willis Robertson of Virginia at 94%. The Republicans who came closest to 0% were Thomas Kuchel of California as well as Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York, all scoring 6%. To highlight the degree to which the Republican Party was less conservative then than now is the fact that Kuchel, a protege of then Chief Justice Earl Warren, was #2 in Senate Republican leadership as minority whip. President Johnson scores a 0% based on official positions. Interestingly, the one vote that Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) gets wrong by ACA standards is the one George McGovern (D-S.D.) gets right, the issue of federal pay raises. 

The Criterion ACA Used to Determine Scores:

Key for scoresheets:

+ – Voted for the ACA position.

– – Voted against the ACA position.

+ – Paired or announced for the ACA position.

– – Paired or announced against the ACA position.

? – No known opinion.

Republicans are in bold italics and Democrats are in plain text.

1963 ACA-Index, Senate:

1964 ACA-Index, Senate:

References

ADA World Voting Record – 88th Congress, 2nd Session. (1964, October). Americans for Democratic Action.

Retrieved from

Click to access 1964.pdf

Department of Agriculture and Related Appropriations (1963, September 26). Congressional Record. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Retrieved from

Click to access GPO-CRECB-1963-pt13-10-2.pdf

Departments of Labor, and Health Education, and Welfare, and Related Agencies Appropriations, 1964. (1963, August 7). Congressional Record. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Retrieved from

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1963-pt11/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1963-pt11-3-2.pdf

Foreign Aid and Related Agencies Appropriations, 1964. (1963, December 19). Congressional Record. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Retrieved from

Click to access GPO-CRECB-1963-pt19-6-1.pdf

History’s Issue: Bondage or Freedom? (1964, October 28). Life Lines, 6(130).

Retrieved from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28145667?seq=1

HR. 5888. Appropriate $5,495,827,250 for the Depts. of Labor, HEW, & Related Agencies. Proxmire amend. to reduce all funds. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/rollcall/RS0880090

HR. 6754. Appropriations for the Agricultural Dept. Lausche motion to suspend the rules so he could offer an amend. raising the 2% interest rate on loans by the REA to 3%. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/rollcall/RS0880139

HR. 9499. Pastore motion to adopt Senate Appropriations Committee amend. which deleted a House provision prohibiting Export-Import Bank guarantees of private credit for sales to Communist countries. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/rollcall/RS0880227

Red Struggle Requires Hate Philosophy. (1964, May 29). Life Lines, 6(65).

Retrieved from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28145603

It is often said that for legislators that instead of changing Washington, they are changed by Washington, and one of the people it proved most true for was Ithaca’s Howard Robison (1915-1987). In December 1957, Congressman W. Sterling Cole, a domestic conservative and internationalist who specialized in atomic energy, resigned his office to accept heading the International Atomic Energy Agency. Elected in his place was Robison, whose conservatism was quite apparent; Robison was given a 100% by Americans for Constitutional Action based on his votes in 1958 and 1959. Notably, none of the votes counted for these years involved foreign policy or civil rights. In the following year, he would score an 80% as he voted for a Citizens Commission on NATO and for increasing foreign aid. As foreign aid began to be counted every year as an issue and civil rights came more to the forefront, Robison’s scores would go down. The change was a bit less dramatic by Americans for Democratic Action’s standards, as they counted 1950s votes on civil rights as well as foreign policy. In 1959, for instance, Robison scored 22% by ADA because of his votes for Hawaiian statehood (neither statehood for Alaska or Hawaii were considered issues of sufficient ideological importance by ACA) and foreign aid.

Although an opponent of JFK, Robison’s moderation began during his administration. He voted against the Mason motion in 1962 to merely extend the Reciprocal Trade Act as a substitute for Kennedy’s Trade Expansion Act, supported foreign aid, and voted for aid for college construction. Still, in 1964, Robison was regarded as a conservative for his voting on domestic issues. As reader Linda M. Kelley of the Star-Gazette complained in a letter to the editor for endorsing him as a counterweight to Lyndon B. Johnson, “Howard Robison does not support the President’s aims. Mr. Robison’s conservative voting record bears this out. Mr. Robison could care less for progressive legislation” (Star-Gazette). This record, however, satisfied his Republican district, and he was reelected in that difficult year for the GOP with 58.4% of the vote. Although Robison opposed much of the Great Society’s major planks such as the Economic Opportunity Act and food stamps, he did support Medicare after backing a GOP substitute and would become more accepting of such legislation over time.

By January 1968, it had become clear that Robison was moving in a more liberal direction when he thought of Governor Nelson Rockefeller as his ultimate preference for president (The Ithaca Journal). The moderate to liberal wing of the party in that day was also referred to as the “Rockefeller Republicans” Examples of his record getting more liberal include Robison’s 1971 votes against a school prayer amendment and Rep. John Ashbrook’s (R-Ohio) anti-busing amendment. He was also wavering in his support of the Vietnam War.

This phenomenon was noted by multiple groups. His 1970 opponent for reelection, David Bernstein, asserted that “the anti-conservationist of 1968, has turned into Howard Robison, the pro-conservationist of 1970” (Press and Sun-Bulletin, 1970). Conservatives in New York especially noticed, and in 1972 he got a challenge from Conservative Party candidate Patrick O’Neil, who said, “the old Howard Robison stood firmly for a limited government, for free enterprise, for countering communist aggression, and for a militarily prepared America and for vigorous exploration of space. The new Howard Robison, the man I must face this November, would scorn the old Howard Robison as a curmudgeon and a fuddy-fuddy-duddy; I praise the old Howard Robison and I represent the principles for which he stood” (Press and Sun-Bulletin, 1972). Americans for Constitutional Action, in contrast to his first two years in Congress, scored Robison a 54% in 1973 and a 29% in 1974. To what degree this is a change in ACA’s grading and to what degree this is a change in Robison is disputable, but what is not disputable is that Howard Robison did change. Although it would be strange for all of our legislators to not change an iota in their time in Congress as some may wish, he did have one of the more significant changes on Capitol Hill.

In 1974, Robison announced that he would not be running for reelection and cited his disappointment with President Nixon as a major reason (Los Angeles Times). Another reason was that Robison’s district, once a staunchly Republican territory, was reconfigured and although he had won reelection handily in 1972, the environment in 1974 was different, and indeed, he was succeeded in this new district by Democrat Matthew McHugh, who held the district for 18 years. Robison died of a heart ailment on September 26, 1987.

References

ADA Voting Record – First Session, 86th Congress. Americans for Democratic Action.

Retrieved from

https://adaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/1959.pdf

Congressman Robison: Likes Rockefeller For President. (1968, January 13). The Ithaca Journal.

Retrieved from

https://www.newspapers.com/image/255263626/?terms=%22Howard%20Robison%22&match=1

Former U.S. Rep. Howard W. Robison. (1987, October 3). Los Angeles Times.

Retrieved from

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-03-mn-2687-story.html

O’Neil Battles ‘New’ Robison, Thought Old One Was Fine. (1972, May 5). Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, New York).

https://www.newspapers.com/image/255505257/?terms=%22Howard%20Robison%22&match=1

Robison Endorsement Termed ‘Ridiculous’. (1964, October 31). Star-Gazette (Elmira, New York).

Retrieved from

https://www.newspapers.com/image/276187433/?terms=%22Howard%20Robison%22&match=1

Robison, Howard Winfield. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/person/7995/howard-winfield-robison

Robison’s Wild Rivers Stand ‘In the Dark,’ Bernstein Says. (1970, August 25). Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, New York).

Retrieved from

https://www.newspapers.com/image/255599946/?terms=%22Howard%20Robison%22&match=1

If you examine Wikipedia’s page on who is regarded as a socialist in politics, present and historical, there are numerous names that come up. Today, we have the most people who identify as socialist as we ever have had in Congress. However, the most curious entry historically is Horace Greeley. There are several historical facts that suggest that he was. First was the fact that Karl Marx at one point worked for Greeley’s newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune. Another is that Greeley would in his paper include articles advocating for utopian socialism. However, Greeley being a socialist has interesting historical implications. After all, if he was a socialist, this means a major backer of the Whigs and the Lincolnian Republican Party was a socialist and that the candidate for president of the Liberal Republicans and the Democrats in 1872 was a socialist. The implications beg the question if this is in fact an accurate portrayal of Greeley.

Greeley certainly was not a socialist in the three months he was in Congress as a Whig, evidenced by his DW-Nominate score of 0.429 (higher than the “grim reaper of socialism” Mitch McConnell), and he was also inclined to put in his paper articles on matters that stoked his curiosity. Indeed, journalist William Harlan Hale (1957) wrote of Greeley’s editorial policy as having a “hospitality and willingness to give free run to new ideas…”. While Greeley and the Tribune certainly did have an ideology, their ideology isn’t the only political matter that would make print. Indeed, Greeley seems to have been quite an open-minded person about numerous matters, but this didn’t mean he and Marx were in accord. Hale (1957) noted about Marx regarding his employer, “Marx disagreed with many of the Tribune ’s policies—although he avoided an open break, fearful of losing his meal ticket. One particular anathema to him was the idea of a protective tariff. Yet Greeley, whose dallyings with socialism had never interfered with his enthusiasm for American business enterprise, felt that protectionism was just the thing. When he heard this, Marx erupted darkly to Engels, “Das alles ist very ominous””. The protective tariff was one of the foundational policies of the Republican Party and a policy long opposed by figures on the American left as being highly favorable to business interests. Marx himself didn’t figure prominently in Greeley’s life nor was he considered of great influence; Greeley did not include a single mention of him in his memoirs (Hale). Furthermore, although it is true that Greeley did place the label of socialist on himself, it didn’t mean perhaps what you think it does. Another mark against Greeley being a socialist was his opposition to worker’s rights (Garvey).

Greeley’s So-Called “Socialism”

Greeley’s “socialism”, as described by his biographer Lurton D. Ingersoll, would be regarded as heretical by socialists as it does not entail at all the ownership of the means of production by government and lacks an emphasis on redistributing wealth. As Ingersoll (1873) writes in his biography of Greeley, “His socialism was guilty of this charge; it made him “a leveller.” It made him entitled to this eulogium: he proposed to level up, not down. He did not propose to take riches from the rich; there never was a moment when he advocated any rapacity of any sort: he did propose to give comforts to the poor, and this by means of Association supplying the place, to a large extent, of capital. He certainly did sometimes inveigh against organized Society with fierce invective, but with no more intention of tearing society up by the roots than he had of eradicating slavery from America by force of arms when he sustained the Wilmot Proviso in 1848” (152-153). Indeed, Greeley’s “socialism” sounds a lot like what many young people naively believe it to be based on its proponents’ messaging; simply seeking to uplift the less fortunate. Ultimately, I contend that Greeley had as much in common with today’s socialists as the philosophy of “Nationalism” of Edward Bellamy, author of the best-selling 1888 socialist utopia novel Looking Backward, 2000-1887, has with the philosophy of those who don MAGA hats.

References

Brophy, L.P. (1948, July). Horace Greeley, “Socialist”. New York History, 29(3), 309-317.

Retrieved from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43460290

Garvey, G. (2012). Horace Greeley and the Politics of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Civil War Book Review, 14(1).

Retrieved from

https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2657&context=cwbr

Greeley, Horace. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://www.voteview.com/person/3773/horace-greeley

Hale, W.W. (1957, April). When Karl Marx Worked For Horace Greeley. American Heritage, 8(3).

Retrieved from

https://www.americanheritage.com/when-karl-marx-worked-horace-greeley

Ingersoll, L.D. (1873). The life of Horace Greeley: founder of the New York Tribune, with extended notices of many of his contemporary statesmen and journalists. Chicago, IL: Union Publishing Company.

In 1958, Representative Henry J. Latham of the northeastern portion of Queens was calling it quits to serve on the New York Supreme Court. That year shaped up to be, as I have written before, a horrible one for the GOP, but like John Lindsay had kept Manhattan’s “Silk Stocking” district in GOP hands, Seymour “Sy” Halpern (1913-1997) kept this one in the fold in a close race.

Although in Halpern’s first year, Americans for Constitutional Action gave him a 63%, his score tumbled to a 20% in the following year and he would gain a reputation as quite a liberal Republican. The liberal lobbying group Americans for Democratic Action in 1961 and 1962 gave him 100% for his record, and he could be basically considered a Kennedy Republican. Americans for Constitutional Action would give him a 0% in 1969. Halpern’s DW-Nominate score was a -0.094, which for a Republican, is incredibly low and he was only outdone in liberalism by this standard by Senator Jacob Javits. Indeed, Halpern basically accepted New Deal policies and more with perhaps mild revisions. This was quite a contrast to his predecessor Latham, who scored an 89% and 100% in 1957 and 1958 by ACA, but whose overall record since 1945 could be described as moderately conservative. He was something of an unconventional legislator in other ways. In one instance, to verify that the conditions of the Creedmoor State Hospital for the mentally ill were as dismal as alleged, he dressed himself with rumpled clothes and went unshaven to pose as a patient’s relative (Thomas). On foreign policy, Halpern could prove a bit more conservative. Although he consistently backed foreign aid legislation, he was supportive of some foreign aid cuts as well as of anti-communist amendments, such as opposing guaranteeing funds for exports of agricultural commodities to the USSR in 1963.

Halpern would be among the sponsors of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Medicare (his proudest accomplishments), voted against Republican substitutes to Medicare and the Voting Rights Act, and would be one of only four Republican representatives to consistently back rent subsidies. Although Halpern supported every civil rights measure in the 1960s, he voted for two amendments limiting busing in 1972, the Ashbrook “neighborhood schools” amendment and the Green amendment permitting a revision of busing cases based on anti-busing legislation under consideration. Despite his liberal record, he refused to consider joining the Democratic Party. After all, the party was a family tradition and his father, Ralph, had served for a term in the New York State Assembly. Furthermore, the Republican Party at the time could attract liberals who were unalterably opposed to political bossism, which in New York City took the form of the infamous Tammany Hall, which produced such massively corrupt figures as Fernando Wood, William “Boss” Tweed, and Mayor Jimmy Walker. His voting record, in addition to his attentiveness to constituent service on matters great and small, certainly helped him survive the 1964 Democratic landslide, which toppled six New York House Republicans. He would regularly win both the Republican and Liberal Party nominations.

Conflict of Interest? & The End

Before the 1970 midterms, a report by the Wall Street Journal came out that Halpern was over $100,000 in debt (he made only $42,500 annually as a member of Congress) that included a $40,000 loan at a highly favorable interest rate from a bank that had lobbied extensively against a measure that Halpern also opposed (Thomas). Despite this report, he and his constituents shrugged and he was easily reelected with 77% of the vote, with his only opposition being a member of New York’s Conservative Party.

In 1972, Halpern’s district was merged with that of Democrat Lester Wolff, so he opted to retire instead of running against him. With his departure left the last remaining Republican in New York City’s House delegation. When he had first been elected to Congress in 1958, he was one of six Republicans representing New York City. Halpern subsequently worked in the advertising business and died of pneumonia on January 10, 1997 at 83. While New York City does now have one Republican representative in Nicole Malliotakis of Staten Island, Staten Island has now become pretty much the only place Republicans in New York City have an edge. Halpern is also, like the others in this series, instructive regarding the alleged habitation of RINOs in the current GOP, a habitation which often is implied to constitute a MAJORITY of the current GOP elected officials. There is a certain lack of self-awareness among many extremists, in that they see everyone who does not think like them extremists on the other side. If I fully expounded my views on economics and probably social issues, many would think I was extreme, and I would tell them that they are right to think so, because I have the awareness to know! This is the fruit of living in areas throughout my whole life in which the Democratic Party has had varying degrees of electoral advantage…I’m not normal, I know it, and I still think I am right. Anyway, there is no currently serving Republican legislator federally who is as liberal as Sy Halpern was.

References

ADA Voting Records. Americans for Democratic Action.

Retrieved from

https://adaction.org/ada-voting-records/

Halpern, Seymour. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/person/3967/seymour-halpern

Thomas, R.M. (1997, January 11). Seymour Halpern, 83, Dies; Served Queens in Congress. The New York Times.

Retrieved from

After the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump looks like he is going to make history in being one of only two Republicans nominated three times by the party, and if he wins the election, only the second president in history to serve non-consecutive terms. It will be a comeback like Cleveland’s. How did that go, anyway?

1888 was a year of sore disappointment for Democrats. In the previous presidential election, 1884, they had elected their first president since James Buchanan in 1856 (Andrew Johnson, although a Democrat, was not elected president). That year, the Republicans won back the White House with Benjamin Harrison. The victory was won in Cleveland’s home state of New York, thanks in large part to his campaign manager, Matthew Quay, carefully examining Tammany Hall activity thereby hindering their operations. What’s more, a letter appeared in the final two weeks of the election by British ambassador Sir Lionel Sackville-West to a “Charles F. Murchison” in response to his letter in which he identified himself as a naturalized American citizen from Britain regarding which candidates was best for British interests, in which he held that Cleveland was the optimal pick. This original letter was written by George Osgoodby, a California Republican, with the aim of getting a response to motivate Irish-Americans to vote Republican, which they did that election (Mitchell). In other words, a dirty trick played perhaps a decisive role in Harrison’s 1888 victory. However, by 1892 the political environment was quite different.

The 1888 election had produced unified government for the Republicans, and they pushed a controversial agenda in the 51st Congress. Passed was the unpopular McKinley Tariff as well as ways of spending the revenue from the tariff and out of the budget surplus that attracted public criticism. Republicans also pushed the Lodge Federal Elections bill to make the 15th Amendment an enforceable reality in the South. In addition to the use of violence and intimidation, means of depriving blacks of the ballot in the South included, according to Wendy Hazard (2004), “the stuffing of ballot boxes, tampering with returns, doctoring registration rolls, changing polling places without prior notification, and locating the polls miles from where African-Americans lived” (2). This measure was in equal parts a voting rights and an anti-fraud measure, so it would also cover political machines in major cities, but it died in the Senate due to Western Republican defections (Soderstrum). Democrats saw this as a blatantly partisan bill and unified in opposition, with Grover Cleveland making it a major issue of the 1892 campaign, denouncing as the “Force Bill”. Cleveland’s campaign also focused against tariffs, trusts, the 10% tax on state bank issues, and corporate control over public lands (through railroad grants).

The process of choosing a party nominee worked a bit differently back in 1892 than it does now with party primaries and caucuses, as nominations were decided at the party convention. Like with Trump, Cleveland did have those who challenged him, including Senator David Hill of New York and Iowa’s Democratic Governor Horace Boies. These people represented factions of the Democratic Party displeased with Cleveland’s policies in some way or another. Hill represented Tammany Hall’s dissatisfaction with Cleveland’s opposition to bossism. Boies represented the dissatisfaction of many Western and Southern Democrats over his opposition to free coinage of silver. However, Cleveland was seen as highly electable…after all he had been president before and won the popular vote in the 1888 election. What’s more, free coinage of silver was a plank guaranteed to lose in New York. Hill had the benefit of the great orator Bourke Cockran speaking against nominating Cleveland again, asserting that he was popular “every day in the year, except one, and that is election day… It is a popularity based upon the fact that his opponents speak well of him, but will not vote for him. So it is delusive. It may “arouse enthusiasm four months before election” but produces “disappointment for four years after election” (Troy). Despite this, the first ballot at the convention was not close; Cleveland pulled away with 617.33 votes, with his nearest rival, Hill, only mustering 114 votes and Boies following with 103. To win support from the supporters of free coinage of silver, Cleveland picked Adlai Stevenson I, a supporter of the policy, as his running mate. Stevenson would be doing much of the campaigning that year, as President Harrison was largely not campaigning due to his wife’s deteriorating health and Cleveland didn’t want to capitalize on his opponent’s absence himself. This election was also marked by the entry of a third-party candidate in Populist James B. Weaver. By the way, a third-party candidate who pulls significant support from the electorate is historically a bad development for the president’s party and 1892 was no exception. Weaver would win 22 electoral votes and the states of Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska, and Nevada while getting one electoral vote from North Dakota and Oregon each. Democrats had already had a strong House majority from the 1890 midterms and this was reduced although retained in 1892 and Democrats won the Senate that year.

References

1892 Democratic Party Platform. The American Presidency Project.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1892-democratic-party-platform

Hazard, W. (2004, August 1). Thomas Brackett Reed, Civil Rights, and the Fight for Fair Elections. Maine History, 42(1).

Retrieved from

Click to access 289200384.pdf

Mitchell, R. (2018, June 20). The fake letter historians believe tipped a presidential election. The Washington Post.

Retrieved from

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/06/20/the-fake-letter-that-historians-believe-tipped-a-presidential-election/

Soderstrum, T.J. Force Bill (1890). Reference Encyclopedia.

Retrieved from

https://reference.jrank.org/populism/Force_Bill_1890.html

Troy, G. (2018, January 28). W. Bourke Cockran, The Forgotten Democratic Congressman Who Championed Churchill & Free Trade. The Daily Beast.

Retrieved from

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-forgotten-democratic-congressman-who-championed-churchill-and-free-trade

There are not many politicians who can claim to have served in politics in the 1870s and 1920s, but along with Joe Cannon, a figure who I have previously discussed and find to be of great use in historical research, there is Isaac Sherwood (1835-1925) of Ohio. Since the Harding Administration has a much closer connection to our contemporary politics than the Grant Administration in relatability, we can have an idea how someone who voted a very conservative line could have voted in the time in which you had many Lincoln Republicans, of which Cannon and Sherwood were. Yet, Cannon and Sherwood went down different paths.

Isaac Sherwood in his youth.

Sherwood’s political career began when in 1860 he was elected probate judge of Williams County, Ohio, but on the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion, he joined the Union Army. Although he started as a private, he was an accomplished solider and by the end he was a brevet brigadier general. Sherwood resumed his political career when in 1868 he was elected Ohio’s Secretary of State and won reelection in 1870. Two years later, Isaac Sherwood is elected to Congress as a Republican. That election year is also Joe Cannon’s first. In this term, he proves supportive of inflationary currency and opposes legislation favorable to railroads. Sherwood doesn’t run for reelection in 1874, and while out of office he reevaluates his political affiliation and affiliates himself for a time with the Greenback Party, which pushed for fiat currency. However, by 1879, with Reconstruction behind the nation and economic issues more pressing, he becomes a Democrat. However, Sherwood doesn’t make his return to Congress until the 1906 election, by which time he is 71 years old.

Isaac Sherwood as an older man.

Sherwood throughout his life retains a degree of independence, and although he is of the Democratic Party, he remained faithful to his views on race relations as a Lincoln Republican; in 1915 he is one of only seven Democrats to vote against banning interracial relations in Washington D.C., and in 1916 he voted against a motion providing for segregation in D.C. probation offices. Other examples of independence during the Wilson Administration include his votes against federal licensing of cotton warehouses and for civil liberties protections during wartime. Sherwood proves a supporter of women’s suffrage as well, voting for amendments in 1915, 1918, and finally its adoption in 1919. Although there are many reforms he supports, one of them isn’t Prohibition, and he votes against the amendment as well as the enforcing Volstead Act. However, the controversial vote that causes a lot of voter anger against Sherwood is his vote against American entry into World War I. Numerous legislators suffered political consequences for this vote, an example being Republican Henry Cooper of Wisconsin, who had served since 1893 and lost renomination in 1918, only to win another election in 1920. This, plus the Republican wave of 1920, has him lose reelection to Republican William Chalmers. Although by 1922, Sherwood is 87 years old, he nonetheless runs for another term, and wins. In his last term, he supported measures reducing the power of railroads, including the Howell-Barkley bill and the Barkley proposal to prohibit railroads from adding the Pullman car surcharge to tickets. In 1924, he again loses reelection to Chalmers and dies only seven months after leaving Congress at the age of 90.

Sherwood was among the last of Union veterans to serve in Congress, with the final one, Senator Francis Warren of Wyoming, dying in 1929. It is almost unreal that Sherwood first is elected to a major political office at 33 and leaves his last at 89. If I were to defend the pop history party switch narrative, Sherwood would be an example I would cite, as he was a Lincoln Republican who moved to the Democrats over economics, similar to Benjamin Butler, thus one may argue that Republicans abandoned an egalitarian economic philosophy in the name of benefiting big business. However, one would still have to explain why he wasn’t a Teddy Roosevelt Republican (who Democrats of today would allegedly be in accord on so much) and why he supported Woodrow Wilson, a figure young Democrats are very keen on running away from given his racism, even though Wilson was thought of for the longest time as a liberal. What’s more, FDR, who I regard as the patron saint of modern liberalism, was Wilson’s protege and ideal of a young, energetic bureaucrat.

References

Sherwood, Isaac R. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://www.voteview.com/person/8463/isaac-r-sherwood