U.S. Elections of 1930, 1934, and 1938

The Events Congressional, state, and community elections held in even-numbered years between presidential elections

Dates November 5, 1934; November 5, 1938

Midterm elections are usually regarded as indicators of the success or popularity of the president elected (or reelected) two years previously. Voter turnout is generally lower in midterm elections, and often a party that has previously captured the presidency will lose seats in Congress. Presidential administrations rely on their parties to gain or keep seats in order pass their programs. During the 1930’s, these elections were critical to the implementation of New Deal programs.

After nearly a decade of enjoying steadily increasing prosperity, American voters were alarmed by the unexpected world economic downturn triggered by the stock market crash of 1929, and they naturally turned against the incumbent Republican Party in the national elections throughout the 1930’s. In the midterm elections of 1930, Republicans suffered their first major setbacks. By the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to the presidency in November, 1932, more than fourteen million Americans were unemployed. By late summer of 1934, a few months before the midterm congressional elections, eleven million of these citizens had gone back to work; some were employed in the private sector, but most were employed by New Deal programs such as the Civil Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.

The 1930 Election

Occurring almost exactly one year after the great stock market crash of October, 1929, the midterm elections of November, 1930, represented the first of a series of major setbacks to the Republican Party, which had held the White House since 1921. Going into these elections, Herbert Hoover was in the second year of what would prove to be a one-term presidency, and his party had substantial majorities in both houses of Congress. Republicans had been popular during the boom years of the 1920’s, but voters turned against them as the Great Depression was developing because of the apparent inability of the Republican-led Congress and the Hoover administration to reverse the national economic decline. The party was also in disfavor because of its support of the unpopular Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act that Congress had passed in June, 1930. That Republican-spawned law raised tariffs on imports to unprecedented levels to help protect domestic sales of American farm products, but it also prompted foreign retaliation against American exports and aggravated the national economic decline. The Republican Party was also losing supporters because of its identification with Prohibition, which was becoming increasingly unpopular. By late 1930, the Democrats were thus poised for major gains. In the November elections, Republicans lost eight Senate seats and fifty-two House seats to the Democrats but nevertheless retained narrow majorities in both houses. Voters were, however, discriminating, as virtually all the defeated Republican legislators were those identified with conservative economic policies. Most Republicans identified with liberal and progressive policies were reelected. In the national elections that were to follow, the Republicans would suffer broader losses, as the Democrats would go on to build large majorities in both houses.

The 1930 elections also had other important consequences. The Republicans lost six governorships to the Democrats and saw major declines in seats in state legislative bodies. Roosevelt’s reelection as governor of New York helped ensure he would be the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination two years later, when voters would turn against Republicans in much larger numbers.

The 1934 Election

Roosevelt hoped to make the 1934 election a referendum on the New Deal, so he campaigned around the country at various sites where New Deal programs had put people to work, including Bonneville Dam and Glacier National Park.

The challenge for Roosevelt was to present the New Deal as a successful, moderate program that most Americans would perceive as something beneficial and not extreme. By 1934, the administration faced criticism from the left, which considered Roosevelt’s policies to be insufficient for the poor and unemployed, and from the right, which perceived the policies to be too radical. Public figures such as Senator Huey Long, Francis E. Townsend, and Charles E. Coughlin had proposed alternatives to Roosevelt’s policies that would have ostensibly done much more than the New Deal did for the poor and elderly. From the right, some Republicans and conservative Democrats accused the administration of trying to make the United States more like the Soviet Union.

California’s Gubernatorial Election

One example of the ways in which both extremes posed an electoral threat for the proponents of the New Deal came in the California gubernatorial election. Muckraking writer and social critic Upton Sinclair ran for governor as a Democrat, proposing the End Poverty in California program, which would have departed considerably from traditional economic and business practices. Sinclair hoped for Roosevelt’s endorsement, but Roosevelt, fearful of doing anything that would prompt critics to label the New Deal as radical, quietly declined to help. Meanwhile, the California business community became alarmed. Louis B. Mayer, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) motion pictures, launched a fund-raising campaign for Sinclair’s Republican opponent Frank Merriam. MGM employees, including famous actors, who did not yet have a union, were required to contribute a day’s salary to the fund. Sinclair was defeated, although a third-party Progressive Party candidate siphoned enough prolabor votes that the results might have been different in a two-person race.

Harry S. Truman’s Election in Missouri

Not all elections around the country were specifically focused on Washington, D.C. Some races depended more on the work of local political machines than on the president. One of these races was for one of the senate seats from Missouri, which changed hands in 1934, bringing future president Harry S. Truman to Washington, D.C. Truman had been a county judge in Missouri with loyalties to the Thomas Joseph Pendergast machine in Kansas City. After an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign, he became the Pendergast candidate in the 1934 Democratic senatorial primaries. While he may have won the primary as the result of Pendergast’s help, he also had statewide popularity because of his role as president of the county judges’ association and because of his affiliation with the Masons. Roosevelt did not need to campaign in Missouri—in fact, Roosevelt took little notice of Truman until years later—because Truman’s Republican opponent, Roscoe C. Patterson, made the New Deal an issue and campaigned against it, invoking threats of dictatorship, socialism, and communism.

Results of the 1934 Elections

Usually the party of newly elected presidents loses seats in the following congressional election, and this was expected in 1934. Vice President John Nance Garner predicted the Democrats would lose only thirty-seven House seats, which would amount to a victory for the administration. Instead, the Democrats actually won nine House seats, while the Republicans lost fourteen; five others went to Progressive Party and Farmer-Labor Party candidates. In the Senate the Democrats increased their majority from fifty-nine to sixty-seven.

The results seemed to endorse the New Deal, and one critic of the administration called the election a coronation for Roosevelt. However, the election did not promise an easy time for additional New Deal legislation because some of the Democrats in Congress were conservative southerners, others were fairly militant young progressives, and others were more traditional progressives with ideas from earlier times. These different groups disagreed much of the time.

Prelude to the 1938 Election

Despite continuing opposition on both the right and the left, Roosevelt remained popular and was reelected in a landslide in 1936, gaining a larger Democratic majority in Congress at the same time. However, a number of events threatened continued success in the congressional elections for 1938. After the 1936 elections the administration became more sensitive to charges of excess spending and began to reduce funding for some of the New Deal programs that had kept people employed. Also, the public became more cautious with personal spending, keeping more money in savings but out of circulation. The result was a recession in 1937.

Meanwhile, in 1936, the Supreme Court had begun to declare a number of New Deal programs unconstitutional. With his reelection campaign safely over, Roosevelt responded in 1937. In February, he announced a plan to speed cases through the federal courts, including the Supreme Court. This bill proposed allowing the president to appoint additional justices to the courts, depending on the number of sitting justices who were more than seventy years old. The passage of the bill would have allowed Roosevelt to appoint six additional justices to the Supreme Court of 1937, presumably creating a majority in support of New Deal programs. Congressional reaction was hostile, especially because Roosevelt had announced the plan without first alerting congressional leaders. John O’Connor, a Democratic congressman from New York and chairperson of the House Ways and Means Committee, stalled the bill for a long time; eventually the bill was buried in committee by a vote in the Senate of seventy to twenty.

Roosevelt’s Purge

Roosevelt decided to use the elections of 1938 as revenge. In that year he began to summon individual congressmen and senators to the White House in order to raise questions about whom he would and would not support in the fall elections. An even more aggressive move was his attempt to use the primaries of that year to purge the party of anti-New Deal Democrats. In a February primary in Florida, he endorsed Claude Pepper, who won by more than 100,000 votes. Emboldened by that success, he actively campaigned against five conservative Democratic senators who opposed his court-packing plan: Millard Tydings, Guy Gillette, Frederick van Nuys, Walter F. George, and Howard W. Smith. Campaigning against George in Georgia, he first reminded voters that as a founder of the spa at Warm Springs he was almost a resident. Then he called the incumbent “my friend” and a good person but not a good senator. In a 1938 fireside chat he used the word “conservative” to describe those who were unwilling to try new ideas when needed, and “liberals” for those who were willing to change with the times. More serious charges of election manipulation were reported in Scripps-Howard newspapers.

In Kentucky, Governor Happy Chandler was prepared to oppose incumbent Senator Alben William Barkley, a Roosevelt favorite, in the primary. Administration critics alleged that Works Progress Administration supervisors in Kentucky were forcing workers to support Barkley as a condition for continuation in the program. However, few historians have given this story much credence.

Results of the 1938 Elections

Roosevelt’s endorsements resulted in the defeat of John O’Connor and may have helped the reelection of future vice president Barkley from Kentucky and the election of Congressman, and future president, Lyndon B. Johnson from Texas. However, over all, the 1938 election was a setback for the New Deal. Republicans gained eight seats in the Senate and eighty-one in the House. The results made passage of additional New Deal legislation difficult. However, by this time, Roosevelt was already beginning to worry about Adolf Hitler and the situation in Europe, and he needed support from different divisions in Congress in order to begin quiet preparations for a possible war.

Impact

The midterm elections of the 1930’s led to different results and reflected vastly different moods in the country. The 1934 election increased the support in Congress of Roosevelt’s administration and, with the results of the presidential election in 1936, made possible additional legislation, such as the Social Security program, to relieve the pain of the Depression. At the same time, these elections took some of the energy out of more radical plans by leaders such as Long and Townsend. By 1938, the country had become somewhat disillusioned with the New Deal, partly because of the disappointment caused by the recession of 1937. In addition, the results of the 1938 election reflected the country’s bitterness over Roosevelt’s efforts to manipulate the elections. Finally, the election of more Republican senators, who were mostly isolationist, complicated Roosevelt’s efforts to prepare the country for the coming war in Europe.

Bibliography

Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Detailed look at the programs that figured prominently in the elections of 1934 and 1938.

Black, Conrad. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom. New York: Public Affairs, 2003. Although concerned mainly with foreign policy, the book offers insights on both elections. Its more than 1,100 pages are followed by a 27-page bibliography.

Brand, H. W. Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Detailed, highly readable biography of Roosevelt’s entire life.

Dallek, Robert. Harry S. Truman. New York: Henry Holt, 2008. Primarily concerned with Truman’s presidency but includes a readable summary of the Missouri senatorial primary elections of 1934.

Davis, Kenneth S. FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937. New York: Random House, 1986. Events described herein mostly pertain to the election in 1934.

Ferrell, Robert H. Truman and Pendergast. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Shows how local issues affected midterm elections, in this case, the Democratic primary. Speculates that machine votes may have helped Truman win the Democratic primary in 1934.

Flynn, John T. The Roosevelt Myth. New York: Devin-Adair, 1948. Although strident in his bias against Roosevelt, Flynn does provide some alleged details about how the Roosevelt administration supposedly attempted to use the 1938 Democratic primary elections to punish opponents of the New Deal, especially those who opposed Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Court. However, the charges are not always well documented.

Fried, Albert. FDR and His Enemies. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Public figures who worried Roosevelt the most, especially heading into midterm and presidential elections, were Coughlin, Long, John L. Lewis, Smith, and Charles A. Lindbergh. Fried outlines Roosevelt’s responses to each.

Watkins, T. H. The Great Depression. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. Discusses the elections of 1934 and 1938. Includes a summary of the California gubernatorial race in 1934.