the sensitive lad makes a rare appearance on Skins's island

[franksolich]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9467534

Oh my.

A blast from the long-ago past.  One of the Andyites.

goodboy (1000+ posts)        Wed Nov-03-10 04:15 PM
THE SENSITIVE LAD, THE PIANO-PLAYING PRIMITIVE
Original message

"Why isn't the mainstream media talking about the fact that the Dems lost 80 seats in Congress after Social Security was passed?"

A quote I just read by Kevin Trezise.

franksolich knows why, but never mind.

rainy (1000+ posts)      Wed Nov-03-10 04:34 PM
Response to Original message
 
1. I heard that this morning on NBC that Dems lost right after SS was passed.

i.stalin (1 posts)      Wed Nov-03-10 04:58 PM
Response to Original message
 
2. Dems lots 80 seats in '36?

It's not being mentioned by anyone because it's not true.

SS was passed in '35, at which time Dems held a whopping 322 seats. During the '36 elections the Dems gained twelve seats and the Farm Labor party gained two. The Republicans lost fifteen.

Social Security was popular, as were most of the New Deal programs of the era.

Yeah, after the presidential election of 1936, the (R)s were down to 17 seats in the U.S. Senate, and 89 seats in the House of Representatives.

After the mid-term elections of 1938, the (R)s increased their numbers, uh, quite a bit.

goodboy (1000+ posts)        Wed Nov-03-10 05:15 PM
THE SENSITIVE LAD, THE PIANO-PLAYING PRIMITIVE
Response to Reply #2

3. 1938, Democrats lost 80 house seats.

Not to nit-pick, but actually it was 81.

[diesel driver]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9467534

Oh my.

A blast from the long-ago past.  One of the Andyites.

franksolich knows why, but never mind.

Yeah, after the presidential election of 1936, the (R)s were down to 17 seats in the U.S. Senate, and 89 seats in the House of Representatives.

After the mid-term elections of 1938, the (R)s increased their numbers, uh, quite a bit.

Not to nit-pick, but actually it was 81.

Never let facts get in the way of a DUmmie thread.

[true_blood]

Facts and DUmmies is like water to oil.

[jukin]

Facts and DUmmies is like water to oil.

I don't blame the DUmbass on this one.  I bet Today actually did say what he claims.  makes a much better background story for the donks's historic loss.

[franksolich]

I don't blame the DUmbass on this one.  I bet Today actually did say what he claims.  makes a much better background story for the donks's historic loss.

The deal is, the Social Security Act had nothing, zero, zilch, nada, to do with the Dems losing 81 seats in the House of Representatives to the (R)s in 1938.

The Social Security Act was some years earlier, and passed with a lot of strident noises in opposition, but the controversy was long over by November 1938. 

The Dems lost 81 seats in the House to the (R)s in 1938 because of other issues; recovery from the Great Depression wasn't happening, nervousness about the international situation.....and cosmetic issues such as Roosevelt's court-packing plan.  But mostly because the country was still mired in the Great Depression.

And the loss was inevitable--perhaps not to that degree, but some loss was inevitable--simply because that's the way history rolls on, the party in the White House losing seats in mid-term elections.

And there's the natural law of things; all things seek an equilibrium, a balance, and Congress had been rather extremely lopsided one way for a few years.  Just as at present.

Roosevelt in 1938 got involved in trying to "purge" recalcitrant congressmen--surprisingly, a number of his own Dems--and there was near-universal resentment about that, but the only races that public resentment affected were those of the congressmen involved, those voters sticking with their congressmen rather than the president.

Roosevelt utterly flopped in the purge; he couldn't even get rid of his own congressman in Hyde Park.

Passage of the Social Security Act some years previously played no part in the elections of 1938.

 

[franksolich]

Okay, here it is.

What I recall of the elections of 1938 is from Time and Life magazines of that era, which I used to collect.

All I could remember at the moment though, was Hamilton Fish, Millard Tydings, and Walter George.

So I went to look it up.

The second sentence however seems erroneous; other sources say 89 (R) congressmen and 17 (R) senators.  I dunno why the precise number isn't universally agreed upon.

And then further on down, it was not 71 Dems who lost their seats; it was 81.

When Republicans and Democrats faced off for the 1938 midterm elections, it had been a decade since Republicans had done well in congressional elections. They had lost seats in both houses of Congress in 1930, 1932, 1934, and 1936, bringing their totals to a mere 88 in the House and 16 in the Senate. In the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide reelection victory in 1936, it was an open question whether the Republican Party was capable of serving as a viable opposition party.

As FDR began his second term, his program was hardly complete. He aimed for a "Third New Deal" of further government economic controls and redistributionism, and seemed to have the votes in Congress to push it through.

Then, a series of events damaged Roosevelt’s standing and rejuvenated the GOP’s chances.

First, overestimating his popularity and persuasive powers, Roosevelt embarked on his "court packing" scheme, bringing a backlash even among many Democrats in Congress. The attempt seemed to verify Republican charges that the President was engaged in a campaign for one-man rule.

Next, the nation was hit with a sharp economic downturn, a recession inside the Depression that soon came to be known as the "Roosevelt recession." The 1937-38 downturn pushed the unemployment rate back near the 20 percent level, and accentuated the question of whether FDR’s economic policies were actually helping or hurting recovery.

During 1937-38, America was also rocked with a series of sit-down strikes and instances of union violence, mostly instigated by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Many Americans associated the surge in aggressive unionism with Roosevelt’s encouragement of unions in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.

Finally, in mid-1938, Roosevelt embarked on a campaign to deprive a number of anti-New Deal congressional Democrats of renomination in local Democratic primary elections. With a few exceptions, FDR failed, and incurred three costs: he turned a number of Democratic skeptics into irrevocable enemies, he appeared impotent, and he once again contributed to the picture of himself as power-hungry, perhaps dangerously so. It was particularly significant that in 1938, when the Moscow show-trials were running full-time, the press labeled FDR’s intra-party efforts a "purge."

Altogether, while there were few signs that Americans were ready to thoroughly repudiate Roosevelt or the New Deal, there were many signs that they were ready to rein the president in. An August 1938 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Americans wanted FDR to pursue more conservative policies.

When the election results were in, Democrats had lost six Senate seats and 71 House seats in what former Roosevelt advisor Raymond Moley called "a comeback of astounding proportions." Republicans nearly matched the Democratic national House vote total, 47 percent to 48.6 percent; if one takes into account overwhelming Democratic predominance in the one-party South, the GOP clearly led the House vote in the rest of the country. Democrats also lost a dozen governorships, including such crucial states as Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Furthermore, Democratic losses were concentrated among pro-New Deal Democrats. Once the dust had settled, the Senate was about evenly divided between pro- and anti-New Deal forces, and the "conservative coalition" of Republicans and conservative Democrats was also solidified in the House, and started any given issue within range of victory. As political scientist David Mayhew has observed, the conservative coalition proceeded to dominate Congress for the next twenty years, until the election of 1958.

Political correspondent Arthur Krock held that "the New Deal has been halted; the Republican party is large enough for effective opposition; the moderate Democrats in Congress can guide legislation." In addition, "the country is back on a two-party system… and legislative authority has been restored to Congress." Republican spirits were revived, and the momentum of the New Deal halted.

The result in Congress was not a wholesale reversal of the New Deal but a stalemate in which Roosevelt was unable to make significant new departures, and indeed found himself in a defensive posture vis-à-vis Congress for the first time since assuming office. Congressional investigations began to embarrass the administration; Congress passed the Hatch Act (limiting political activity by federal employees) and Smith Act (cracking down on internal subversion) over FDR’s objections. For his part, Roosevelt offered no major new reform proposals in 1939 for the first time in his presidency.

If it makes sense to consider the 1930 midterm as the leading edge of the New Deal policy era, the midterm elections of 1938 clearly served as the endpoint of that era. Roosevelt was not rejected as Hoover had been—indeed he went on to win the next two presidential elections. But he never again dominated American domestic politics in the same way as before.

http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/busch/06/1938.html