FDR - Jean Edward Smith [260]
FDR intervened most vigorously in Maryland. Of all those the president sought to purge, Millard Tydings was the most guilty of party disloyalty. Congressman David Lewis, the House sponsor of Social Security, was persuaded to contest the seat, and Roosevelt barnstormed the state over the Labor Day weekend with Lewis at his side. He spoke six times, never mentioning Tydings by name but making it clear that he considered Maryland’s senior senator a political turncoat. “Any man—any political party—has a right to be honestly ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal.’ But the Nation cannot stand for the confusion of having him pretend to be one and act like the other.”98 Tydings, like George and Smith, made White House intervention the principal issue in the campaign. When the ballots were tabulated on September 13, Tydings defeated Lewis by 60,000 votes.
Roosevelt had taken on four senior Democratic senators and lost four times. In the House, both Eugene Cox from Georgia’s second district and Judge Howard W. Smith, who represented northern Virginia, were returned easily. FDR’s only victory in the 1938 purge campaign was the toppling of Rules Committee chairman John J. O’Connor in New York.* Roosevelt put the best face on it. “Harvard,” he said, “lost the schedule but won the Yale game,” meaning that O’Connor’s removal from his powerful post more than compensated for the New Deal’s other defeats.99
FDR’s intrusion into the primaries eroded his standing in Congress and further divided the Democratic party. Having put his prestige on the line and lost, Roosevelt placed New Deal candidates in jeopardy come November. Congressman Maury Maverick lost in Texas and Governor Frank Murphy went down in Michigan, as did George Earle in Pennsylvania. In New York the ticket won, but Governor Lehman’s margin of victory over Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey was less than 1 percent. Republicans picked up eighty-one seats in the House, took eight more in the Senate, and won thirteen governorships. Roosevelt was stunned. He told Farley he had expected to lose one seat in the Senate and perhaps sixteen in the House.100 The Democrats retained control of Congress, but it was no longer the party FDR had led for the last six years. “We have a large majority,” said Garner, “but it is not a New Deal majority.”101
Roosevelt was a lame duck. Farley and Garner were taking presidential soundings, Hull was restless, and liberals scanned the horizon for a possible successor. If the downward momentum continued, the Republicans had their best shot at the White House since 1928. “Clearly,” wrote Washington newsman Raymond Clapper, “President Roosevelt could not run for a third term even if he so desired.”102
* Led by Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina—an early Roosevelt supporter—conservative Democrats used the special session to reach out to the GOP and draft a bipartisan ten-point “Conservative Manifesto” that denounced sit-down strikes, demanded lower taxes and a balanced federal budget, championed states’ rights, and defended private enterprise against government encroachment. As one historian has written, “The manifesto constituted a kind of founding charter for modern American conservatism.” David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 340 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
† The other three were Vice President Garner, Joseph Robinson, and James Byrnes of South Carolina. See Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race 79 ff. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
* FDR’s bitterness was directed at Congress, not the Court. “Hughes is the best politician in the country,” he told SEC head William O. Douglas with undisguised admiration. By 1938 whatever animosity there may have been between the president and the chief justice had been dissipated, and they continued to enjoy cordial personal relations. William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man 327 (New York: Random