FDR - Jean Edward Smith [258]
The next primary was in Iowa on June 7, 1938. FDR was determined to defeat incumbent senator Guy Gillette, a leading spokesman for midwestern farm interests who had made the cardinal error of opposing the president’s Court-packing plan. The fifty-nine-year-old Gillette, who had represented Iowa in the House before moving to the Senate in 1936, had supported most New Deal measures.81 But for Roosevelt the litmus test of party loyalty was the Court battle, and Gillette had been on the wrong side. Hopkins, an Iowa native, became the president’s surrogate. He convinced Congressman Otha Wearin to challenge Gillette in the primary, publicly endorsed Wearin (as did James Roosevelt), and mobilized whatever federal employees he could on Wearin’s behalf. All to no avail. Gillette enjoyed the support of the state organization; Agriculture secretary Henry Wallace—the most prominent Iowan in Washington—declined to support Wearin; and Gillette’s Senate colleagues rallied to his side. Taking aim at Hopkins’s role, Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler declared that “Congress in appropriating for the relief of the underprivileged never intended that these funds should be utilized to slaughter a member of this body.”82 Gillette won in a landslide, receiving more votes than his three primary opponents combined. “I will not,” he told Iowa voters, “be a rubber stamp member of Congress.”83
Stung by Gillette’s victory, Roosevelt entered the fight himself. On Friday, June 24, having just signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, FDR devoted his second fireside chat of the year to an attack on the “Copperheads” in the Democratic party who resisted change.* “We all know that progress may be blocked by outspoken reactionaries,” said Roosevelt. But those who posed as progressives and then voted against change were a more serious threat. “As head of the Democratic party … charged with the responsibility of carrying out the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform, I feel that I have every right to speak in those few instances where there may be a clear issue between candidates for a Democratic nomination involving these principles.”84
Roosevelt’s first stop was Kentucky, where Alben Barkley was in the fight of his life against the popular governor, Albert B. “Happy” Chandler (later commissioner of baseball). Farley advised hands off. “I am fond of both Barkley and Chandler,” he told FDR. “I wish they could both win.”85 But the president was determined that Barkley be returned. Speaking to voters in Covington, Kentucky, on July 8, he devoted his entire address to praising Barkley’s liberal outlook and legislative experience. “I have no doubt whatsoever that Governor Chandler would make a good Senator,” said FDR. “But I think my good friend, the Governor, would be the first to acknowledge that as a very junior member of the United States Senate, it would take him many, many years to match the national knowledge, the experience and the acknowledged leadership in the affairs of the Nation of that son of Kentucky, of whom the whole Nation is proud, Alben Barkley.”86
At the direction of the White House, Hopkins unlimbered the administrative apparatus of the WPA on Barkley’s behalf, and on primary day Barkley defeated Chandler easily.87 The blatant involvement of the WPA (as well as Chandler’s use of state workers) triggered a senatorial investigation that culminated in the passage of the 1939 Hatch Act, barring political participation by federal employees. “These facts [in Kentucky] should arouse the conscience of the country,” said Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, who chaired the investigation. “They imperil the right of the people to a free and unpolluted ballot.”88
FDR identified ten senators he hoped to purge in the primaries. Gillette, the first to face the voters, won handily. Four were ultimately deemed too secure to challenge.* One, George L.