The Pittsburgh Press (November 1, 1942)
Six big states watched –
National gain seen for GOP
Battle for New York control among features
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
New York – (Oct. 31)
The 1942 general election campaign ended tonight and Tuesday, the electors will express national political sentiment after nearly 10 years of President Roosevelt’s administration of government and 11 months of war.
Substantial Republican gains in state and national offices are forecast, but the GOP itself is not loudly claiming that it will win control of the House of Representatives this year.
There are literally thousands of political jobs to be filled, but the nation’s interest centers largely on election of Senators, Representatives and State Governors.
Maine stays Republican
In its traditional jump-the-gun polling Sept. 14, Maine elected a Republican governor, a Republican Senator and three Republican members of the House.
Next Tuesday, other states will elect 31 Senators for the full six-year term, four Senators to short terms, 432 full-term members of the House, two short term members, and 32 governors.
Although Republican spokesmen have generally not claimed that they would win the 52 House seats necessary to gain control of that body, they insist they will win the six big states – Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and California – and get an even break or better elsewhere outside the South.
Senate stays Democratic
The Senate will remain Democratic in any event since only one-third of its seats are regularly at stake in any election and the number of contests outside the South where the GOP has a chance this year is not sufficient to make any change in control.
In this first wartime election since 1918, there is a confusing multiplicity of issues and factors likely to upset pre-poll calculations based on previous experience.
Notable among these is the induction and enlistment of millions of young men into the armed services.
Loss may hurt New Deal
The New Deal-Democratic Party is said to be a party of youth. If so, the inability of tremendous numbers of these young soldiers to vote may give the returns an unexpected form.
Another factor is the shifting of the wage-earning population to war-work industrial areas. Tens of thousands of these workers have probably failed to qualify themselves to vote in their new communities or to have arranged to cast absentee ballots in their permanent precincts.
There is the third-term factor, for what it is worth, and the question whether Mr. Roosevelt’s triumphant disregard of tradition in 1940 left any hangover of resentment.
Anything might happen
And after decades of soft living for more of them, the American people will be voting Tuesday under circumstances of increasing dislocation of their lives, their methods of travel, their habits of eating and their standards of living – with much more to come.
Above all, Tuesday’s poll is a nationwide test of public opinion in the mist of life-or-death war. There are those who believe almost anything might happen when so harried an electorate votes.
The pre-Pearl Harbor dispute which burned deeply into the social, political and economic fabric of the nation was carried into the general election campaign. The Union for Democratic Action, an all-out war organization, undertook to proscribe a substantial list of Congressional candidates by calling on the voters to reject them as isolationists or appeasers.
Fish’s reelection seen
The primary campaign against these candidates did not demonstrate any popular intention to exact punishment for opinions expressed before Pearl Harbor. It remains to be seen whether the payoff polling will change that trend.
Target No. 1 for all concerned in the effort to remove pre-war isolationists from public life is Rep. Hamilton Fish Jr., who represents the New York district which includes Mr. Roosevelt’s country estate at Hyde Park. Polls indicate that Mr. Fish will be reelected.
There are similar contests elsewhere, notably in Illinois where Senator C. Wayland Brooks, and Representative-at-large Stephen A. Day, both Republicans, are under severe attack on charges of isolationism or less-than-adequate enthusiasm for administration war policies.
New York watched
But the stand-out local contest in this campaign is here in New York, where Thomas E. Dewey, the young gangbuster, looks like the winner in a gubernatorial contest mired on both sides in considerable intraparty difficulties.
Mr. Dewey won the Republican gubernatorial nomination in a walk despite opposition of Wendell L. Willkie, the 1940 GOP presidential nominee, who opposed him on the grounds of isolationism.
The Democrats nominated John J. Bennett Jr., who was the hand-picked selection of James A. Farley. Mr. Roosevelt and the federal organization, including Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York, both U.S. Senators, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York City and an assortment of more obscure New Dealers did what they could to prevent Mr. Bennett’s nomination.
Senator defeated
Their best was not enough, although the administration put up Senator James M. Mead (D-NY) as a last-minute candidate for the nomination.
Mr. Dewey’s brightening chances would attract attention merely for the fact that, if elected, he would be the first Republican governor of New York in 20 years.
But there is more to it. As Governor of New York, Mr. Dewey would be 1-2-3 – and no worse – in the betting for the 1944 Republican presidential nomination.
And that means, of course, that he and Mr. Willkie would have a two-year battle here in New York from the moment he took office until delegates to the 1944 Republican National Convention were selected. Mr. Willkie must also be considered a potential 1944 GOP nominee.
Party control at stake
The Democratic part of the New York State picture sparkles with even more political fireworks. If Mr. Farley can put Mr. Bennett in the governor’s chair, he and his candidate will control the state Democratic organization and they will do what they can to prevent a fourth term nomination for Mr. Roosevelt or the Democratic nomination for President or any 100% New Dealer such, for instance, as Vice President Henry A. Wallace.
But if Mr. Bennett is defeated, the responsibility for losing New York State to the Republicans must be assumed either by Mr. Farley or Mr. Roosevelt. The President was slow to endorse his party’s nominee here and when he did finally speak, it was in so faint praise that it became necessary before the campaign ended for the President to announce again, and more emphatically, that he wanted Mr. Bennett elected.
Farley’s future at stake?
Mayor La Guardia and some others hereabouts believe that defeat of Mr. Bennett would eliminate Mr. Farley from politics. In the event of Mr. Dewey’s victory, the administration would attempt to take over control of the state committee here with a view to controlling the important New York delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1944.
Mr. La Guardia is doing what he can to break Mr. Farley politically.
The Mayor is a member of the American Labor Party which has been doing balance-of-power chores for the New Deal-Democratic organization here for four years. This year, the ALP has put up its own gubernatorial candidate, a relatively obscure lawyer named Dean Alfange, and the 200,000 or so votes which are expected to be cast for him will be skimmed right off the top of the poll Mr. Bennett might otherwise hope to have.
Lesser of two evils?
Some observers contend that refusal of the ALP to withdraw its gubernatorial candidate means that a political decision has been made to the effect that as between giving Mr. Farley control of the state and the 1944 convention delegates, the lesser of two evils would be the election of Mr. Dewey as governor.
Mr. Dewey is a major factor because some substantial elements of the Republican Party are looking to him as the man to stop Mr. Willkie in 1944. But those same elements are looking at another man, too. He is Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio, who is up for reelection this year. Mr. Willkie, Mr. Bricker and Mr. Dewey promise to be big names in the political reports during the next couple of years.