1939: Republican Party

The Republican party began the year 1939 much encouraged by the elections of November 1938. In state and Federal elections, the story was the same; the Republicans, although still vastly overshadowed by the Democrats, had staged a very impressive comeback. When the 76th Congress convened in January 1939, for instance, the Republicans had 169 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives; and, in the Senate, 23 of the 96 senators were Republicans. Of course, the Republicans continued to be greatly outnumbered by the Democrats and it is only by comparison with the previous Congress that the reason for the Republican satisfaction can be understood. In the 75th Congress, 1936, the Republicans had had only 89 representatives, 17 senators.

By the time the Lincoln dinners were held on Feb. 13, 1939, the final figures for the 1938 elections were available and they further increased the optimism among the party leaders, an optimism which was reflected in their speeches. Analysis of the election returns showed that the Republicans had received 48 per cent of the major party vote in 1938 as contrasted with only 40.5 per cent in 1936. In 1938, in the numerical vote for the members of the House of Representatives, the Republicans polled 26,837,245 votes, as compared with 27,989,751 Democratic votes; whereas in 1936 the Republicans with 18,104,649 votes were far behind the Democrats with 24,906,389.

Fully as gratifying to Republican leaders as the gains themselves were their extent and location. For the party increased its strength in 36 states which lay in a broad northern belt all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Naturally, the Republicans interpreted the 1938 results as indicative of a nation-wide drift away from the New Deal; while the Democrats, on the other hand, minimized the importance of the Republican gains and explained them as the outcome of Democratic factional strife and local conditions.

The buoyant optimism of the Republicans was kept alive in the early months of 1939 by signs of the waning popularity of the Democratic party and of opposition to a third term for the President as revealed in public opinion polls. These hopeful portents for the Republicans were especially marked in the Northeast and the Middle West, regions of vital importance to any Republican victory in a national election. Then, too, in the above mentioned polls, it was definitely established that in Thomas E. Dewey, the spectacular racket-smasher of New York, the Republicans had a prospective candidate for the presidential nomination who powerfully appealed to the popular fancy.

Dewey, however, was not by any means the only outstanding prospect in 1939 for the Republican presidential nomination. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, in particular, were widely discussed and boosted as possibilities. Before the end of 1939 both Dewey and Taft were openly in the field for the nomination. Despite the fact that Senator Vandenberg had not formally declared his candidacy, the general opinion at the beginning of 1940 was that he was not averse to becoming his party's nominee. Ex-President Herbert Hoover was another remote possibility, who occasionally figured in early discussions of the Republican standard-bearer for 1940.

With little more definite to go by than the public opinion polls, political observers were inclined to believe that, as 1939 drifted along, the omens were not nearly so favorable to growing Republican popularity as they had been earlier. The most obvious reason for the reviving popularity of the Democrats was the outbreak of war in Europe. As a result, business conditions in the United States improved; also the Democrats rang the changes on the undesirability of a shift of political control during the war. The fall elections were largely local in character, so they afforded no satisfactory measurement of the relative national strength of the two parties. Republican spokesmen gathered what comfort they could from the defeat of old-age pension schemes in several states. They hailed the results as additional evidence of the public's repudiation of New Deal principles.

As 1939 drew to a close, the Republican National Committee, of which John D. M. Hamilton continued to be chairman, appeared to be giving up its attempt to hold the party's National Convention after that of the Democrats in 1940. Each major party apparently wanted the advantage of knowing its rival's presidential nominee before naming its own.

It is probably safe to assume that the lines along which the Republicans will wage the presidential campaign in 1940 were foreshadowed in the opening stages of the battle for the presidential nomination. Dewey ascribed the nation's economic doldrums to a spirit of defeatism among American business men, which in turn was a result of the fallacious and harmful principles of the New Deal. Remove the menace of the New Deal which was acting as a brake on business enterprise, ran Dewey's argument, and the American economic system would itself regain its former momentum. Taft emphasized the need for eliminating waste and inefficiency in government and of a balanced Federal budget as indispensable preliminaries to economic recovery. Vandenberg's position seemed to be one of frankly recognizing the virtues of certain innovations of the Roosevelt administration and of retaining them, while, at the same time, eradicating those features of the New Deal which are regarded as evil.