President Franklin D. Roosevelt sitting behind desk
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The Democrats whose years in power had given them many supposed strong men to lead them in 1940 found their ranks shot full of holes—their two most prominent New Deal Governors, Murphy of Michigan and Earle of Pennsylvania, defeated; the great machine of Paul V. McNutt in Indiana in such low gear that it barely succeeded in electing its candidate to the Senate over a portly old country editor; the Presidential hopes of their farm leader, Secretary Wallace, badly tarnished by the swing of corn and wheat farmers against AAA.
The Republicans, virtually destitute of vote-getting man power, suddenly found themselves with a string of leaders for 1940—few of them of national calibre but all successful local vote getters. Among them Saltonstall in Massachusetts. James in Pennsylvania, Taft and Bricker in Ohio, Heil in Wisconsin, Ratner and Reed in Kansas, Stassen in Minnesota, Carr in Colorado, Sprague in Oregon, not to mention Dewey of New York who, although he lost, came within 68,000 votes of election, closer than any Republican has been to the Governorship of New York in ten years.
Although the Republicans made a wide sweep, if 1938 had been a Presidential year they would, giving them the benefit of several doubts, have amassed only 218 of 531 seats in the Electoral College.
Republicans' excuse for failure in previous elections—big cash distributions by the New Deal—was proved nonsense. They found it possible to win. In so doing some of them promised bigger & better expenditures for pensions. If Santa Claus could not be shot, they showed he could be kidnapped.
Third Parties suffered most from Republican success. In Minnesota the Farmer-Laborites, in Wisconsin the Progressives lost control of their States. In New York the new American Labor Party failed to re-elect the five members it placed in the State Legislature two years ago.
Labor's only notable triumph in the election was in New York where A. L. P., failing as a party, contributed 410,000 votes to the re-election of Senator Wagner and Governor Lehman (both nominated on its ticket also), turning what would otherwise have been a Democratic defeat into a Democratic victory.
The Negro vote swung back to the Republican standard, especially in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan. In Harlem and Chicago, however, Negroes stuck to the New Deal, and in Philadelphia they elected the first Negro woman, a Democrat, to sit in a State Legislature: Mrs. Crystal Byrd Fauset, a fortyish social worker whose husband is a public school principal.
In Ohio, Michigan and in Pennsylvania, Democratic alliances with C. I. O. (in steel, coal, motors, rubber) failed to produce results. Of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, John L. Lewis' United Mine Workers succeeded in carrying only four for Governor Earle. Flint, Mich., famed sit-down strike town of 1937, cut gentle Governor Murphy's 1936 plurality of 13,000 to 1,400 this year and re-elected hard-boiled Sheriff Thomas Wolcott by the largest of Republican majorities. Of 43 members of Congress blacklisted by C. I. O. throughout the land, only two (both Democrats) were retired. Philip Murray, C. I. O.'s No. 2 man, said ruefully last week: "Industrial labor first must break down the anti-union prejudice of farmers."