GOP | Shifting Strength, 1928-2012

May 21, 2015–The stakes of the 2016 election are made clear in a Real Clear Politics chart by Sean Trende and David Byler.

It shows changes in party strength based on Federal and state elections–weighting equally the presidency, Senate, House, state governors and state legislatures.

Will GOP Grow in 2016?

The RCP blogpost on Tuesday extends the chart to offer three different scenarios for the outcome of the 2016 Federal elections - win, lose and draw. Their conclusion is that the 2016 election is important.

Some broad principles emerge from the chart:

• Voters tend to move away from the party of the presidency.
• After 1936, the GOP steadily improved its electoral position, with a slight blip in 1944.
• Only three incumbent Presidents widened their party's lead by much: FDR in 1936, Truman in 1948 and LBJ in 1964.
• All were Democrats and they widened their lead by being decisive in a crisis.
• When half-hearted policies don't work, it could be because they were inadequate.
• Political fortunes can change quickly if perceptions are altered by events.
• Voters were disappointed in six GOP presidents: Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, GHW Bush, GW Bush.
• Reagan and Clinton (despite his impeachment) held their own after the first mid-term.
• Voters are fickle, but they care about the economy.

Since I am writing about the financial crisis of 1929-33 and FDR's first Treasury Secretary, one of the three Republicans in FDR's first cabinet (the other two were Ickes and Wallace),  my focus is on the early years of the chart, especially what happened between 1928 - the first election year shown - and 1936.

The peak score of 50 in 1928 dropped down to -119 in 1936–a plunge of 169 index points. This is the largest shift in the electoral winds on the chart. Most of the time (60 percent of the time) the index varies between plus and minus 30 percent.

1912-1928

Why did that huge shift between 1928 to 1932 happen and what lessons does this shift offer for today? I am using as my guide Paul F. Boller, Jr.'s Presidential Campaigns (Oxford University Press, 1996).

Let's start at 1912, when Woodrow Wilson won the presidency because the Republicans were divided between Republican Taft and Bull Moose party leader Teddy Roosevelt. All three candidates were competing for progressive voters. Four years later, the country had shifted to the right and the race was about who could keep the country out of war (it took only till April 2 before Wilson had asked "the Gentlemen of Congress" to declare war). By 1920 the country had moved further to the right, fearful of the Russian Revolution and the League of Nations. Even though Wilson was not on the ballot, the vote was largely against him. The Republicans were confident of winning - and, sure enough, Warren Harding won 60.2 percent of the popular votes against James M Cox; 404 electoral votes to 127.

Harding died of a heart attack in office, and Vice President Calvin Coolidge took the reins. Coolidge ran in 1924 against a Democratic Party that was divided between Eastern voters who were "wet" and Western and Southern voters who were "dry". After a marathon of balloting, the two sides compromised on Wall Street lawyer John W. Davis to oppose Coolidge, who was a shoo-in with 54 percent of the votes.

In 1928, the first year of the RCP chart, Herbert Hoover campaigned on the theme of prosperity and efficiency, and Al Smith was tainted with being from Tammany New York and being Catholic and being a "wet". Hoover won with 58 percent of the vote and a 444-87 majority in the electoral college. However, it was clear that urban voters were growing fast, which meant that being "wet" might mean winning. (A cartoon of the period has Smith after the election calling the Vatican, with the one word comment: "Unpack.")

The Importance of 1929

The 1932 election reversed the 1928 numbers. The lopsided victory this time went to New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The country had lost its prosperity and Hoover lost the platform he had stood on four years before. The long-time Treasury Secretary, Andrew W. ("Andy") Mellon came under scrutiny and during the campaign the Democrats developed a capsule summary of the Hoover years:

Mellon pulled the whistle
Hoover rang the bell
Wall Street gave the signal
And the country went to hell.

Mellon resigned in early 1932 as Hoover was impeached. Hoover asked his end-of-term Treasury Secretary, Ogden Mills, to lend him a nickel to buy a soda for a friend, and Mills replied laconically: "Here's a dime. Treat all of them." What had happened, of course, was the Crash of 1929 and the  beginning of the Great Depression. To be fair, Hoover experimented with some public-works initiatives, but they didn't turn the economy around. A clueless Republican convention called for a balanced budget, requiring cuts or tax increases - as did the Democratic convention that followed. (FDR embraced the plan but wisely decided later to ignore it to bring down unemployment). The two leading candidates at the Democratic convention were FDR and former NY Governor Al Smith. FDR's staff spoke privately to the next-leading candidate, John Nance Garner, Speaker of the House, offering him the Vice Presidency in return for his support of FDR; he agreed. FDR was nominated and won with 57.4 per cent of the votes to Hoover's 39.7 percent, with the electoral college splitting 472-59.

Here is a larger version of the chart to help in reading the headings.

Changes in GOP Electoral Strength, 1928-2012, Chart by Sean Trende and David Byler, Real Clear Politics. 

TECH WARS | Is Über Creating More Congestion in NYC?

Density is good, severe traffic congestion bad. Congestion wastes fuel, adds
 to pollution, lowers the quality of life, depresses retail sales and the economy.
Will anyone pay enough attention before we have a Godzilla of Gridlock? 

Über may force another look at the toll-free status of four bridges across the East River.

Traffic congestion is a costly problem for New York City residents, workers and visitors. An aspect of the Tragedy of the Commons, scarce public goods like roadways in dense cities run the risk of overuse without restrictions or pricing.

New York City has a sophisticated traffic control system to ensure that the main arteries are flowing freely. In Manhattan, that's north-south. Traffic lights in Manhattan can be shortened, through a central control system, to restrict traffic in the east-west direction.

However, some arteries are east-west - for example around the entrances to the bridges and tunnels. I have been noticing that in high-traffic periods, the east-west traffic heading for the West Side Highway or the Lincoln Tunnel is backing up onto the avenues (I see it on Ninth Avenue), creating gridlock.

Is congestion getting worse? That's my perception, despite huge resources invested in traffic police and traffic-light technology.

Could Über be adding to the problem? Something like Über was inevitable, putting passengers and drivers directly in touch. It puts to use private vehicles at peak periods to supplement NYC's yellow and green taxis and on-call limos. BUT the result is more use of the public roads, more congestion. Like the frog in the saucepan pan with the heat slowly rising, we don't notice what is happening until a crisis occurs - the frog is boiled to death, or (equivalently) we have a mile-long gridlock in Manhattan that takes hours to clear up.

Former Mayor Bloomberg tried to get congestion pricing introduced in 2007-08. A broad approach to traffic pricing and mitigation is provided in the 12 principles of the late Columbia University Professor William Vickrey. I posted them at http://tinyurl.com/29vz7n. Singapore and London have introduced congestion pricing that seems to work.

A new group in New York City has come up with a "Fair Tolling" plan to introduce incentives to direct traffic to routes that make more sense than existing ones. The principal shift seems to be imposing tolls on the four toll-free bridges across the East River. Sam Schwartz, former City of New York Traffic Commissioner,  sees a big problem in these toll-free bridges:

The term I'd borrow from my father is that we have a cockamamie system of charging people that makes absolutely no sense, and in fact encourages people to drive through our densest part of the city: Manhattan.

This coming Friday millions of workers are going to be heading out to their Memorial Day Weekend vacation at the same time. Many cars come out of garages and parking lots for the long weekend excursions. This is the first of the three biggest weekends of the summer. It could be a test of the existing system.

LAW | Not Copyright's Finest Hour, 1939

We think of the copyright law as a blessed compromise between the need of the public for access to literature and the need of writers for revenue.

But David Post, via the Volokh Conspiracy on the Washington Post blogsite, today reminded us that the copyright law has been used to suppress speech.

In 1938, Alan Cranston (1914-2000) - then a correspondent for the INS just two years out of Stanford, later to serve with distinction in the U.S. Senate - violated the copyright of a world-famous person in the public interest.

The person whose rights were violated - according to a U.S. court decision - was Adolf Hitler and the book was an English translation of Mein Kampf. 

Cranston said his public purpose was  to “wake up the Americans to the Nazi threat.” Here is Cranston's story from an interview dated 2000, the year of his death:

I read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the book he wrote while he was in prison before he became the dictator, outlining his plans for Germany and the terrible things he intended to do in the world. There was no English language version of it. [O]ne day in Macy’s bookstore in New York I saw a display of Mein Kampf, an English language version, which I’d never seen before, which hadn’t existed. I went over to look at it out of curiosity and as I picked it up, I knew it wasn’t the real book. It was much thinner than the long book that I had read, which is about 350,000 words. So I bought it to see how come. And delving into it I found that it was a condensed version, and some of the things that would most upset Americans just weren’t there as they were in the version I had read, the original, in German.

So I talked to an editor friend of mine in New York, a Hearst editor named Amster Spiro, and suggested that I write and we publish an anti-Nazi version of Mein Kampf that would be the real book and would awaken Americans to the peril Hitler posed for us and the rest of the world. So we did that. I spent eight days [compiling] my version of Mein Kampf from the English language version that I now had, the original German language version, and another copy that had just appeared.

[Hitler’s] book was then selling for around three dollars a copy. Hitler was getting forty cents royalty for each copy that somebody bought … We proceeded to print in tabloid the version that I wrote, with a very lurid red cover showing Hitler carving up the world, and we sold it for ten cents on newsstands. It created quite a stir. Some Nazis went around knocking down newsstands that displayed it in St. Louis and the German part of New York and elsewhere in the country. We sold half a million copies in ten days and were immediately sued by Hitler’s agents on the grounds we had violated his copyright …

David Post adds that Hitler won his copyright case in the U.S. District Court, Second Circuit. His German publisher, Eher-Verlag of Munich, and the US publisher to which it had assigned the US copyright, Houghton Mifflin, persuaded the court to enjoin further publication of Cranston’s version in the United States and to order destruction of existing copies. Houghton Mifflin v. Stackpole, 104 F.2d 306 (2d Cir., June 9, 1939).

Hitler got to continue to receive royalties, and to control publication of his book, 10 weeks before he marched into Poland.

Early New Yorker Reads on the British Election

	David Cameron Carries On by Anthony Lane Cameron claimed that austerity policies were driven by necessity, whereas Ed Miliband argued that it was ideological. Economists will continue to thrash out the issue; meanwhile, the public has chosen whom to believe.
	What’s Next for the United Kingdom? by John Cassidy For a democratic union of two countries to survive, it needs majority support in both. This condition is still being met by Scotland and England, but only just.

Who would be a good speaker on this for Oxford Alums?

Recommendations so far are Piers Morgan (did not attend Oxford) or Stephen Fisher (Fellow, Politics Tutor at Trinity College Oxford, has been in BBC TV on the elections), Ian Williams, journalist at U.N.

Job Numbers Better, But Mind What's Going on Backstage

Behind the Numbers Unveiled Today.

Ta-da. The curtain rose this morning on job numbers, +233,000 in April on U.S. nonfarm payrolls from March, seasonally adjusted.

Better.

But watch out for the backstage revisions. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for February could be described as "essentially unchanged", shading up slightly to +266,000 from +264,000.

However, the change for March was lowered by nearly one-third, to +85,000 jobs from +126,000 jobs.

Without the March downward revision, the +233,000 jobs in April would have shed +41,000 of its growth and would be only +192,000. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

This is well below last year's average of +260,000 per month.

The details of the payroll-job numbers repay study for industry trends. The construction industry, even seasonally adjusted, showed strength in April at a healthy pace, growing by 45,000 jobs. But the growth is primarily in specialty contract jobs. Another barrier for workers without the specialty skills.

Mining support firms, oil and gas drillers, showed declines for the fourth month, suggesting a cooling of the fracking frenzy. The mining industry has lost 49,000 jobs since the beginning of the year, mostly in support functions.

Professional and business services employment rose 62,000 in April. The tech sector continues to show strength, the fifth Kondratiev wave that is showing more capacity to grow than 20th century forecasters predicted. In April, employment continued to trend up in computer systems design and related services (+9,000), in business support services (+7,000), and in management and technical consulting services (+6,000). http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm

The BLS describes the decline in the unemployment rate "essentially unchanged", but it's on the good side of that, falling to 5.4 percent from 5.5 percent in March, which is the lowest it's been since May 2008, before the Lehman meltdown in September of that year. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

WOODIN | 13. His Tragic Last Months (Updated Mar. 17, 2016)

Secretary Woodin and FDR, 1933.

The Pecora Committee did great work bringing public opinion on the side of reform of the financial markets.

The Glass-Steagall Act and the Securities and Exchange Act would not have passed so easily in 1933 were it not for Ferdinand Pecora's work in bringing forth revelations of the kinds of activities that created the Crash of 1929.

The Pecora Committee's Collateral Damage

Unfortunately, the Pecora Committee created collateral damage. In early May there was an enthusiastic endorsement of Treasury Secretary Woodin's work in calming the bank panics in the cover story on him in Time Magazine in early May.

But by the end of the month the Pecora Committee's revelations were in every newspaper in the nation. J. P. Morgan sold stocks below the market price in the late 1920s to people on his "Preferred List". Those people included Calvin Coolidge. They also included FDR's own Treasury Secretary, Will Woodin.

For Woodin it was a huge embarrassment:

• He already faced a chorus of intense criticism from the right, as fellow Republicans attacked him for joining the administration of a "traitor to his class," FDR.
• He now faced acute criticism from the left, as Democrats pilloried him for enriching himself at the hands of J. P. Morgan through special opportunities via Morgan's Preferred List.

To his great credit, FDR stood by his friend Woodin solidly throughout this period. So did FDR's cabinet. However, FDR's Vice President, former speaker John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner, urged Woodin to resign.

[To Come: This is the only chapter in the book that is too short. Needs more detail on Woodin's illness, his doctor, reactions of his family, reactions of Democrats and Republicans. Lots of clippings available about his death. Need to summarize, comment. Letters to and from FDR. His death in New York on May 5, 1934 with his wife Nan and daughter Mary (Perky) Miner by his bedside. Need a survey of the many obits. Condolence notes. This chapter does not require any more archival research and is therefore not a priority.]

Woodin and FDR - Last Letters

At the FDR Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., I found what appear to be the last letters between Will Woodin and FDR, in 1934.

[PHOTO CAPTION January 17, 1934. Woodin was recuperating at his son William H. Woodin Jr.'s home in Tucson, Ariz. He sent a letter to FDR from there.]

By this time Will Woodin had left office. Dean Acheson would have been his natural successor, but - as I understand the dynamics - he resisted too vigorously FDR's going off the gold standard.

Instead, Henry Morgenthau was selected, as a safe Treasury Secretary.

FDR wanted Treasury to be more powerful than the Federal Reserve System, but not more powerful than the White House.

Note that Woodin addresses FDR as "Governor"- their little joke, since Woodin worked for FDR when he was Governor of New York and the appellation brought back those days. Sometimes Woodin called FDR "Frank". Woodin was always addressed by FDR as "Will" and so signs himself.

His last paragraph picks up the theme of Congress being in the way of progress. He says to FDR:

Everything seems to be going wonderfully thru out the country and I don't see how the Congress can stop you. I don't see how you do it. Will write again soon. 

[PHOTO CAPTION January 22, 1934. FDR responds from the White House. He writes to celebrate Woodin's seeming improvement.] 

He says how much his friends miss him - the Cabinet and the "old crowd" - i.e., I take it, the people in New York State who got FDR elected.

FDR then moves on to the "banking bill". This bill was enacted within ten days, as the Gold Reserve Act.

It made it a criminal offense for a private citizen to own gold. All gold is owned by the U.S. Treasury, except for businesses that need it for industrial or dental uses, or collectors of rare coins.

The Act devalues the dollar. The value of gold is raised in dollar terms from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35 per troy ounce.

The world value of the dollar as measured in gold was thereby cut nearly in half.

All U.S. gold was entrusted to the U.S. Treasury, including gold and gold certificates in the hands of the Federal Reserve System.

The official Federal Reserve History describes the new law as emasculating the Fed's control over monetary policy until the 1970s. (The right of private citizens to own gold was restored in 1975.)

If that is how the law was perceived by the Fed, that was precisely FDR's intent.

In the letter to Woodin, FDR says that the Fed sees itself as "a central bank", whereas FDR does not. He describes the Fed as an institution with "comparative decentralization" that is subject to "a strong Treasury Department".

A supremely confident FDR shows a certain disdain at this time for the Congress that had distressed f him and Woodin in 1933. "Congress will pass the bill all right. The sooner the better." FDR was right on the mark this time, despite the revolutionary nature of the Gold Reserve Act. FDR was in the catbird seat and on the devaluation question I think history supports FDR's action as what was needed to spur the economy.

February 27, 1934. Still recuperating in Tucson, Woodin writes to FDR again. Woodin  has now given up talking about policy. The devaluation of gold is what his friends were all afraid of and he is probably happy not to be in the hot seat on that issue.

He is focused on the risky surgical operations that are ahead of him. 

I really believe the sooner I have this thing cut out or burned out the better for me. The whole thing must come from the rt tonsil so out she goes.

Woodin's descendants believe that he had a "strep throat" that would have been cleared up today by antibiotics. This letter suggests that "this thing" is not an infection, but a growth.

Woodin has been invited to the dinner honoring the first anniversary of the inauguration, and is sad not to be able to attend.

The second page is almost a farewell to FDR.

I leave here with fond and grateful memories of all your kind messages - telephone and letters – they have cheered me up a lot. You are the most wonderful and understanding man that ever lived. Always Devotedly your Will.

Woodin's farewell was prescient. He returned to New York City, was treated at the Eye and Ear Hospital and on May 3 was gone.

The letters that then followed from FDR were to Nan Woodin and to friends of Will Woodin who wrote to FDR.

There was a funeral service first at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Woodin's coffin was then transported by train to a commercial stop at Hazleton, Pa. and it was then transported by car for a burial service in Berwick, Pa.

Funeral in New York City

Charlie Miner says the cause of death would today be described as a strep throat, for which there was then no cure. However, Woodin had throat problems since he seas at college, and it might have been a cancer.

At Woodin's austere funeral service in the Fifth Ave. Presbyterian Church, the President, likewise challenged by illness, called Woodin “a martyr to public service.”

Funeral in Berwick

Woodin’s body is brought to Hazelton, Pa. by special train and from there is carried by car to the First Presbyterian Church in Berwick. Many flags along the streets are flown at half-mast. Hundreds view the body as it lies in state for 90 minutes. At the funeral service on Sunday May 6, 1934, only half those lined outside the church can get in - first those who have tickets and then the rest up to capacity. The remainder stand outside.

Before and after the service, Woodin's composition "The Unknown Soldier" is played by the organist Clark Fuller. There is no music during the 19-minute service, conducted by the Presbyterian pastor Rev. Dr. David M. Harrison. Methodist Rev. W. W. Sholl co-officiates with an introductory prayer. At the burial, "thousands" of people attend the four-minute committal service. His coffin is covered with daffodils and irises.

Bill Selden remembers Will's funeral.  Before my talk to the Berwick Historical Society at the Berwick Golf Club in April 2015, I received a  note from him. He later received a surprise award at the luncheon for sponsoring one of the rooms in the Jackson mansion, i.e., the Billiard Room.

Bill's note, which he has given me permission to publish, reports that he was born on March 25, 1921, so turned 94 last month. He grew up in the Borough of Staten Island, New York City until 1932, when he was 11 years old, so he was old enough to remember the first election of FDR.

Selden Sr. – 45 Years at ACF

His father, William H. Selden Sr., migrated in the reverse direction from William Woodin, moving with his family to Berwick from New York in 1932.

William Selden Sr. worked for ACF for 45 years, first at its NYC office on 30 Church Street starting in the early 1900s. In 1932, the year of FDR's election, he was transferred to the Berwick office of ACF, where he had the title Assistant Mechanical Engineer in charge of Estimating, although he never attended college.

Selden Sr. said, according to his son Bill: "Mr. Woodin was a fine man and a very capable executive of ACF."

Bill (Selden Jr.) meanwhile went to elementary school in Berwick and High School, then served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was 24 on V-J day. He went on to earn a doctorate in education and was named to the Academic Hall of Fame in Berwick.

His note provides the following memory of Will Woodin's death. I have added two parenthetical explanations to clarify that FDR did attend Woodin's prior funeral in New York City.

The day of the funeral in Berwick was Sunday. My father, my mother and I had dinner at the Hotel Berwick, which was then at the corner of Third and Market Streets in Berwick. Also at the hotel were most members of the President's Cabinet. The only one I recognized was James A. Farley, the Postmaster General. At that time there was talk that President Roosevelt would be attending Mr. Woodin's funeral [in Berwick]. However, at the last minute the President changed his mind. [FDR had already attended the funeral service for Woodin in New York.]

Condolence Notes

Many telegrams and letters are sent to Nan Woodin. A telegram from New York State Governor Herbert H. Lehman, FDR’s successor, reads in part as follows:

I know from my personal knowledge of the great sacrifices he [Will Woodin] made for the nation during the trying times of last year when disregarding his health he toiled ceaselessly to bring security to his country and fellow citizens (Columbia University Digital Collections, Lehman, 0979_0006).

Notes 


Hoover: New Republic

Bill Selden Memories: Hand-written note to the author from Dr. Selden.

Berwick Service: Source for Berwick service and burial includes: East Hampton Star, May 10, 1934, 1, 8.
Book Outline
The outline of my Woodin biography is here. (I am looking for a publisher.) 

Links to ChaptersOutline  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13 14 15  App. A  App. B  Acknowledgments

Photos for the Chapter

Letter to Woodin from FDR


[PHOTO CAPTION January 22, 1934. FDR responds from the White House. He writes to celebrate Woodin's seeming improvement.]

Letters to FDR from Woodin, 1934


[PHOTO CAPTION January 17, 1934. Woodin was recuperating at his son William H. Woodin Jr.'s home in Tucson, Ariz. He sent a letter to FDR from there.]







Susan Schwartz's article in the Press-Enterprise:

FDR Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.

Dr. Bill Selden (seated) remembers the high regard his
Dad (who worked for ACF for 45 years) had for Will
 Woodin.