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

13. Popular Election Comes of Age

131 ★ 13 ★Popular Election Comes of Age The decade of the 1940s was one in which Illinois was represented by two senators whose selection by the voters represented a maturing of the system of popular election. It was initiated by the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution thirty years earlier. Thereafter such decisions were to be made by vote of the people, rather than by the legislature. So long as U.S. senators were chosen by the legislature, the voting public had at best an indirect voice and influence in that process . True, persons wishing to be sent to the Senate could attempt to influence the election of legislators who would look on them with favor, but at the same time, other factors might prove to be of greater weight. When the procedure was changed by the Seventeenth Amendment to require the popular election of senators, it seemed for at least twenty-five more years that the voters were willing to allow party leaders, legislators, the governor, and the news media to continue to play leading roles in determining who would become members of the Senate from Illinois. The old ways died hard, and it was not until 1938 that the voters of Illinois seemed fully to understand the power that was theirs in this essential process. With that realization came the elec- 132 ★ POPULAR ELECTION COMES OF AGE tions of Scott W. Lucas in 1938 and C. Wayland “Curly” Brooks in 1940. Lucas ran and won as a Democrat in spite of the efforts of the Democratic organization in Cook County in behalf of another. As a Republican, Brooks was swept into office in 1940 in a popular wave of feeling for isolationism and pacifism. If the choice had still been in the hands of the legislature, then under Democratic control , he would not have prevailed. The fact that Lucas eventually became the majority leader in the Senate, the most prominent Senate post that an Illinoisan had achieved, suggests that popular election was capable of worthy choices. The record since supports that belief. Scott Wike Lucas (1939–51) Scott W. Lucas entered the Democratic primary in 1932 seeking to be nominated for the U.S. Senate. He did not have the support of the Democratic organization in Chicago, however, and did not succeed . He allied himself with incoming Governor Henry Horner and was appointed head of the State Tax Commission. Governor Horner urged Lucas to run for Congress in 1934, when the incumbent in his district did not; he did and won. He became a solid supporter of the New Deal program and was reelected in 1936. Lucas was capable of charting an independent course, however, as in 1937, when he asked the House, in regard to President Roosevelt ’s plan to enlarge the Supreme Court, “Is there a single Democrat in this historic hall who believes that continuation of this fight will accomplish a single constructive thing?” (D.A.B. VI, 391). Roosevelt’s proposal broke on the rock of the Senate. In that action , it did as much to preserve the separation of powers in the structure of national government as the Senate’s refusal to remove President Johnson had seventy years earlier. It is noteworthy, too, that never again was the Senate to approve any significant social measure that Roosevelt proposed. In 1938, Lucas again took on the Kelly-Nash organization of Cook County, with the backing of Governor Horner, who had broken with the machine two years earlier, and this time won the Senate nomination over the incumbent William H. Dieterich. It was a triumph of the power of the people over machine politics, as was Horner’s primary victory in 1936. 133 ★ Scott W. Lucas was born on February 19, 1892, in Cass County, Illinois, the youngest of six children. His father was a tenant farmer of little means. The fact that his father’s middle name was Douglas suggests a family attachment to the Democratic Party. That suggestion is strengthened by the fact that Lucas was named after Scott Wike, who had been a Democratic state legislator in Illinois and was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives at the time the future senator was born. Lucas grew up in and near the small towns along the stretch of the Illinois River lying below Peoria. During that time, he acquired a lifelong interest in hunting and fishing. He attended public...