President Franklin D. Roosevelt sitting behind desk
When Franklin Roosevelt last summer attempted a Purge within his own party, it was a tacit declaration that for worthy adversaries he had to look to recalcitrant members of his own party. Wishfully foreseeing the dissolution of the G.O.P., he frankly invited the U. S. electorate to form two new parties which he named Liberal and Conservative. In his Liberal party he wanted Labor and the Farmers as well as underprivileged Forgotten Men. Last week's election was the first national test of this projected grand sashay.
In the post-election words of Mayor LaGuardia of New York City, who sees eye-to-eye with Franklin Roosevelt on socio-political reform, "The political sashay has not been perfected." On the plus side of their tally sheets the Democrats could chalk up only California, North Dakota and Maryland, where they won previously Republican governorships; Illinois, Iowa and Indiana, where they staved off Senate losses, and New York where they safely retained both Senate seats and re-elected their Governor by a squeak.
The concrete measure of Republicans' success was that they swept New England solidly. Very nearly capturing the New York Governorship, they swept New Jersey. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, South Dakota, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon. They nearly won in Indiana, won all high State offices but the Governorship in Nebraska, gained the Governorship and barely missed another Senator in Iowa. All those victories were against Democrats. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, ruled by Farmer-Labor and Progressives who were more or less allies of the New Deal, they won two more Governorships, one Senatorship.
This added up to a greater sweep (81 seats in the House, eight in the Senate, eleven Governorships ) than Democrats executed in 1930 when they won 55 new seats in Congress preparatory to turning out Herbert Hoover two years later. It was the greatest Congressional turnover since 1894, when the Democrats lost 116 seats midway of President Cleveland's second term. All this accomplishment left Republicans very definitely a minority party. Their chief triumph was that they were proved not extinct.
But the things that the election settled were not so significant as the things it unsettled. For Republican resurgence did a number of striking things to the accepted U. S. political picture.
Although Democrats still hold a handsome 263 out of 435 Representatives, 69 out of 96 Senators, 30 out of 48 Governors, the election clearly marked the reversal of a six-year political trend and political trends once started often go farther than anyone expects.
With few notable exceptions (Senators Wagner in New York, Downey in California, Bone in Washington), arch-New Deal Democrats were defeated. Democrats such as Governor Lehman of New York and Senator Clark of Missouri, both of whom differed with the President on the Supreme Court, as well as those like Senator Tydings of Maryland whom the President tried to purge, were conspicuous among the survivors—a triumph for the old-fashioned politics of Postmaster Farley over the politics of the White House Janizariat.
Whether due to division between the Farley group and the Janizariat, or to laziness after too much past success, the Democratic vote-getting machine which had worked brilliantly for eight years, conspicuously fell down on the job.