Politics and Depressions

Report Outline
Congressional Elections of 1930
Politics and Business Conditions
Mid-Term Congressional Elections Since 1874
Special Focus

Congressional Elections of 1930

Next autumn four hundred and thirty-five men and women—the entire membership of the House of Representatives—and thirty-five members of the Senate of the next Congress will be chosen by the American electorate. To date primary elections for the nomination of candidates for the House have been held in Indiana, and for the House and Senate in Illinois and South Dakota. The Illinois senatorial primary resulted, on the Republican side, in an overwhelming victory for Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick, now a member of the lower body, over Senator Deneen, who stood as a candidate for renomination. On the Democratic side the nomination went to former Senator James Hamilton Lewis. If Mrs. McCormick wins over Lewis in November, she will be the first woman elected to the United States Senate. In South Dakota, where loyalty to the policies of the national administration was made a leading issue in the primary, Senator McMaster, progressive, was renominated by the Republican voters. His success has been taken by the Republican insurgent group in the Senate as a vindication of the course they have pursued during the present Congress.

The next senatorial primaries will be held in Oregon on May 16 and in Pennsylvania on May 20. In Pennsylvania the candidates for the Republican nomination are Senator Grundy who was appointed by Governor Fisher last December after the Senate had refused a seat to William S. Vare, and Secretary of Labor Davis. Grundy has the support of Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, who is a political power in western Pennsylvania, while Davis is backed by the strong Vare organization of Philadelphia. Other spirited primary contests are in prospect in Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Alabama, and Ohio.

Issues of the 1930 Campaign

The entire campaign this year, from the primaries to the general election, promises to be hotly contested, for the final outcome will determine whether the Republicans or the Democrats will control Congress during the last two years of the Hoover administration. Furthermore, the issues that are up and on which candidates must take their stand are of unusual popular interest. The main issues upon which the voters will pass this year are: (1) Prohibition, which has been kept to the fore by the Literary Digest poll, public hearings before committees of Congress, and spirited debates in the House and Senate; (2) the question of political responsibility for prevailing unemployment and business depression; (3) the tariff, over which the industrial East and the agricultural West are sharply divided; and (4) the question of American acceptance of membership in the World Court under the Root formula.