National Politics: Election 1944

NATIONAL POLITICS: ELECTION 1944

Dewey's Offensive

Though Dewey resisted the temptation to attack the president for the American military's unpreparedness at Pearl Harbor, he maintained that the Republicans could manage the war better. He focused on the issue of taxes and on the anti-Roosevelt passions of the Irish, Italian, and German Americans. He charged Roosevelt with a secret plan to keep men in the military after the war rather than risking widespread unemployment again. Other Republicans kept red-baiting the Democrats, and in the South Roosevelt was attacked for drafting blacks who challenged segregation. Seizing the race issue, the Republicans began an alliance with conservative Democrats that would eventually break the Democratic lock on the "solid South."

Political Action Committees

During the last six weeks of the campaign, the Political Action Committee (PAC) of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) registered nearly 7 million additional voters—important because of the millions of men serving overseas and because in general the larger the voter turnout the more likely Democrats to win. The PAC had been organized in 1943 by CIO official Sidney Hillman and Philip Murray of the United Auto Workers as a way of getting around the prohibition on union politicking in the Smith-Connally Act. The committee was organized to accept "voluntary" contributions from union members to be used as the committee saw fit. Thus, no union funds would be donated to candidates. The activities of the PAC involved a fundamental reordering of priorities for labor—away from concerns limited to the workplace and toward engagement in the national priorities of the Democratic Party. In the process it became one of the primary financial pillars of the party. Labor PACs contributed more than $2 million—more than 30 percent of the total Democratic campaign fund—in the election of 1944. The PAC also served as a target for the enemies of labor, who charged that Hillman was a Communist stooge. (Eventually, conservative opponents of the welfare state would organize their own PACs.) Republicans such as Clare Boothe Luce used thinly disguised anti-Semitism in attempts to discredit Hillman and the many Jews who were prominent in the CIO. Dewey charged that the CIO was dominated by Communists, insisting that the

House	78th Congress	79th Congress	Gain/ Loss
Democrats	218	242	+24
Republicans	208	190	−18
Independents	4	2	−2

Senate	78th Congress	79th Congress	Gain/ Loss
Democrats	58	56	−2
Republicans	37	38	+1
Independents	1	1	0

Democratic Party had been "taken over by Earl Browder and Sidney Hillman."

The Emergence of the Public-Opinion Poll

Although Gallup had been conducting interviews for some time, new methods of gathering information about voter preferences had been developed by 1944 and had led to the entry of other polling organizations into the field. Gallup found that by substituting "secret ballots" for personal interviews, where the individual was identified, poll takers could get more-honest responses. As a result of the guarantee of anonymity, the Gallup, Cantrill, and Roper polls began to reveal information that had previously gone unreported. For example, as much as 10 percent of lower-income voters were against Roosevelt because of the payroll withholding of income taxes. The Irish, Italian, and German communities blamed him for the war. The typical voter appeared to select candidates on the basis of only one or two particular issues. Using information provided by such opinion polls, the Roosevelt Administration discovered that it had to have a large turnout, one of the reasons the CIO-PAC was organized. The age of the pollsters had arrived.

Roosevelt's Slimmest Victory

The president began to campaign in earnest only at the end of September. Addressing the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Roosevelt ridiculed GOP claims that he mismanaged the war effort by saying that the Republicans were the very people who had opposed Lend-Lease and blocked every attempt to arm the United States. He praised labor for its contributions to manufacturing weapons, noting that all labor leaders, save John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, had condemned war-industry strikes. He hit his opponents hard for failing to pass a bill enabling soldiers overseas to vote by absentee ballot (a measure that clearly would have favored him), and he promised that the Roosevelt administration had a plan to discharge veterans as rapidly as possible after the war. In October Roosevelt lambasted "labor-baiters and bigots" who stuck the label "communist" on all progressives and foreign-born citizens with whom they disagreed. Events overseas helped Roosevelt as well. Operation Overlord, launched on 6 June 1944, had proved successful, and Allied armies were racing toward Germany. MacArthur made his famous return to the Philippines on 20 October, and a few days later the Battle of Leyte Gulf all but destroyed the Japanese navy. Roosevelt's appeal to the electorate not "to switch horses in the middle of the stream" was based on his able war record. On the eve of the election he promised a postwar economy that would provide "close to" 60 million jobs (a figure actually reached in 1947). Roosevelt's margin of victory—3.6 million votes—was his closest ever, probably because of the absence of millions of voting soldiers—and his electoral-vote margin was slim. Yet the Democrats made significant gains in both the House and Senate, and among the freshman legislators were Wayne Morse, J. William Fulbright, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and Adam Clayton Powell—all of whom would later play crucial roles in the Democratic Party.

The Urbanization of the Democratic Party

The key to Roosevelt's fourth-term victory was the urban vote. Residence had become a major determinant of voter preference. Roosevelt had taken the states with the largest numbers of electoral votes by winning in the biggest cities. War production had caused a tremendous, in some cases exponential, growth of cities, as new industries sprang up overnight and attracted millions of workers from rural areas to new urban megalopolises. Migration of workers to San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco had made California one of the most important states to win. The urban voter, overwhelmingly working class and newly dependent on the social safety net created by the New Deal, would become a mainstay of the Democratic Party for the next four decades, except in the Deep South, where white alienation from the growing civil rights agenda of the Democrats would lead increasingly to abandonment of the party and to national political realignment.

Sources:

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, 3 volumes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956-1960);

Schlesinger, ed., The History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (New York: Chelsea House, 1971);

Schlesinger, ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (New York: Chelsea House, 1973).