1938: Republican Party

A comparison of the 1928 election returns with those of 1932 reveals a truly astonishing loss of popular support by the Republican party. In 1928, Herbert Hoover, the victorious Republican candidate for the presidency, polled 21,392,190 votes; while, in 1932, Hoover, again the Republican candidate, but this time defeated, received only 15,761,841 votes. The transformation of a Republican plurality of approximately six million into a Democratic plurality of seven million clearly indicated the Republican party's loss of popular confidence. The Congressional elections of 1932 were equally disastrous to the Republicans. They hardly returned enough members to Congress to fulfill the parliamentary ideal of a vigorous minority opposition. In the House, there were 313 Democrats to 117 Republicans, and, in the Senate, 59 Democrats to 36 Republicans. The general explanation of this abrupt and sweeping reversal of the fortunes of the Republican party was not only the severe economic depression which began toward the end of 1929, but the failure of the national administration to make more effective, if not more vigorous, efforts to alleviate the widespread distress.

President Hoover, during the final months of his administration after the election, expressed his desire to cooperate with the incoming administration. This spirit of desire to cooperate in a national crisis on the part of the Republicans continued when the Democrats took over the control of the Federal Government in March, 1933. By 1934, however, the crisis had apparently passed and the Republicans assumed a more aggressive and critical attitude toward the New Deal, as the Democratic administration was commonly called. Republican leaders and candidates generally avoided direct criticism of the measures designed to furnish work or cash relief to the unemployed, and animadverted upon the serious danger of an economic collapse owing to a fallacious national fiscal policy, and upon the threatened disappearance of the traditional principles and practices of the Federal Government. They expressed alarm that measures which had been acceptable only as temporary expedients in a great emergency were about to be incorporated into the permanent policy of the Government. That the country was unmoved by their arguments is evident from the fact that in the 1934 Congressional elections, the Democrats returned 322 members to the House as opposed to 103 Republicans, and the Republicans lost additional seats in the Senate also where there were 69 Democrats to 25 Republicans.

In 1936, the Republicans nominated Governor Alfred M. Landon, of Kansas, for President, and Frank Knox, Chicago publisher, for Vice-President. John Hamilton of Kansas was elected Chairman of the Republican National Committee. In the election campaign of 1936, there was some criticism of the Social Security Act, passed in 1935, but on the whole the Republican candidates and campaign speakers did not concentrate their attack upon specific reform measures of the New Deal. They rang the changes upon the growing menace to traditional American liberties and institutions. Many Republicans, if not expecting victory, at least were hopeful of a fairly close result. And their hopes were buoyed up by predictions of Republican success by the hitherto reliable straw vote of the Literary Digest. They were, therefore, stunned when their party was buried by a landslide of unprecedented proportions. Landon obtained the electoral votes of Maine and Vermont only, a total of 8 against 523 for Roosevelt. The popular vote for Roosevelt was 27,476,673; for Landon, 16,679,583. In the House, the election returned 333 Democrats to 89 Republicans; and, in the Senate, there were 76 Democrats to 15 Republicans.

After the election, there was an increased feeling among many Republicans that their party should become more progressive and liberal, without, at the same time, abandoning its position of defending traditional American institutions and principles. There was also a strong feeling that the leadership of the so-called 'Old Guard' should be transferred to younger, more popular, and less conservative figures. Many of the most prominent Republican candidates of the 1938 election conformed to these qualifications, among them Thomas A. Dewey of New York, Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, and Robert A. Taft of Ohio.

In the 1938 congressional elections, the Republican party effected an impressive comeback. In this, they were aided as much, if not more, by events outside their control, as they were by a different type of candidate and by a more liberal spirit within the party. There is little doubt that the attitude of state and Federal governments toward the sit-down strikes of the winter of 1936-37 and the President's proposal to reorganize the Supreme Court had caused many persons to shift their allegiance from the Democratic party. Then, too, the renewed intensity of the economic depression in the fall of 1937 probably caused many others to lose faith in the New Deal as a means of restoring former prosperous conditions. Whatever the reasons for the reversal in 1938 of the political trend which had persisted for eight years, Republicans, generally, found the results very heartening and they look forward hopefully to 1940; although they fully realize that the result, while not the Democratic landslide of 1936, was still a sweeping Democratic victory. The Republican gains were especially pronounced in the populous industrial states of the Northeast and Middle West. Besides recapturing several state governments, the Republicans gained 81 additional seats in the House, where the election returned 262 Democrats to 170 Republicans; and the Republicans also gained 8 seats in the Senate where they now have 23 members.