The Heroic and the Notorious: U.S. Senators from Illinois

12. Democrats Come to Power

124 ★ DEMOCRATS COME TO POWER 12 ★Democrats Come to Power The intraparty wars that engaged Republican leaders and office seekers during the third decade of the twentieth century were merely a prelude to the economic and social upheavals that came with the Great Depression of the 1930s. One of its results was a reversal of the traditional dominance in Illinois politics that had been in effect, with little exception, since the Civil War. Following the stock market crash of October 1929, one of the first indications of that coming to power was the election to the Senate once more of the perennial Democratic candidate J. Hamilton Lewis. This time for Lewis it was by a different method of choice—by vote of the people rather than by the legislature. The resurgence of the Democratic Party in 1932 and 1934, both nationally and in Illinois, represented a revitalization of both Jeffersonian Republicanism and Jacksonian Democracy. The coalition that swept its representatives into power in Springfield and Washington consisted of blue-collar labor, the poorly educated, organized labor, the economic underprivileged, and marginal and subsistence agrarians. It found its philosophers in the academy and many of its leaders in affluent families long Democratic on ideological grounds. The Republicans in defeat were the “Yankee” element that had placed its trust in efficiency, education, capitalism, and good gov- 125 ★ ernment. In Jensen’s words, the “traditionalists” rode a wave of economic depression to victory over the “modernists” (121). Following the Civil War, the Senate was in retreat from its Golden Age, which had lasted from 1819 to 1859. The South may have lost on the battlefield, but as time went on, it prevailed in the Senate. Robert Caro speaks of the Senate as the South’s “revenge for Gettysburg” (xxiii). Through the workings of the seniority system in determining committee chairmanships, the “solid South,” consistently Democratic, returning its senators to office over and over, became more and more a Senate force. As the clouds of worldwide depression darkened the economic sky during the 1920s, the Senate remained an agent of reaction as far as economic remedies were concerned. Under the guise of reforming the protective tariff, it made its rates only higher. It provided no creative spark in the relief of human suffering and no action at all in the field of civil rights. Few blacks voted in the South during the 1920s. By 1930, desperate times had come to the farms, mines, factories , and centers of capitalism of the United States, and through the ballot, change was in the wind. James Hamilton Lewis (1931–39) Among the forty-six men and one woman who have been elected to serve in the U.S. Senate from Illinois, J. Hamilton Lewis is a rarity in more ways than one. He is one of only three persons who served two or more nonconsecutive terms. Of the three, John A. Logan and he are the only ones to be selected for a third term. What is more, Lewis is the only senator to be chosen for a first term by the state legislature and two later terms by public vote. Lewis owes his length of Senate service—fourteen years—spread over just slightly less than four decades, as much to the peculiarities of party politics as to his popularity. As reported in an earlier chapter, Lewis was chosen for a six-year term in 1913 by a legislature that took almost three months to make up its mind. This occurred primarily because of a split in the Republican ranks brought about by the formation of the Theodore Roosevelt Progressive Party. Lewis might not have won the seat without help from the Progressives in the legislature. He failed in the popular vote in a reelection bid in 1918, with the Progressives effectively out of the picture, as the Republicans regained control in Illinois of almost JAMES HAMILTON LEWIS 126 ★ DEMOCRATS COME TO POWER every elective state office. His bid for governor in 1920 fell before a Republican avalanche. Lewis reentered the picture in 1930, when Democrats again were on the rise due to a worsening economic situation, blamed on the Republicans, plus internal strife among G.O.P. leaders. He then rode the crest of Democratic victories during the 1930s, due in large part to the coattails of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The flamboyant Lewis—pink whiskered and outrageously tailored —had by 1930 proved himself a capable...