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10 Reluctant New Dealers Many students of the New Deal have noted that one of the reasons the New Deal fell short of its goals was that state Democratic leaders often lacked enthusiasm and gave only lukewarm cooperation.1 In West Virginia this was particularly so. In spite of the great popularity of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, the Democratic governors of the era, while proclaiming their loyalty to the president, often openly opposed New Deal programs. The historian James T. Patterson asserts in The New Deal and the States that the terms of Herman Guy Kump and his successor Homer Adams Holt "failed to bring progressivism to West Virginia and left the poverty-ridden state at odds with the Democratic party in Washington."2 Despite the conservatism of the governors, however, the Depression and New Deal transformed politics in West Virginia by empowering some groups who had wielded little influence in the past, including organized labor and, to a lesser extent, women and African Americans. These forces pushed the Democratic party to accept reforms previously considered unthinkable , and change did come to West Virginia.3 In the elections of 1930 and 1932, the long Republican dominance of the state came to an end, to be replaced by overwhelming Democratic control of all branches of the government. Through most of the decade, Republicans could do little more than criticize from the sidelines or from the pages of the still-substantial Republican press in the state. The eclipse of the two-party system, however, did not mean that the New Deal had easy sledding. In fact, while the two-party system faded, it was replaced by a complicated, many-sided Democratic factionalism that reflected historic class, economic, sectional, and philosophical differences that were complicated by personal conflicts and patronage battles.4 Calvert Estill, who had served as the first director of the Depart- 212 An Appalachian New Deal ment of Public Welfare during the Republican Conley administration and had been among the first strongly advocating taxation for relief and federal aid to the states, became a caustic critic of the New Deal as a columnist for the Ogden press. In 1939 Estill charged that the Holt administration, like its predecessor, disliked the New Deal, but, he wrote, "it has, of course, gathered at the banquet table and hovered around the flesh potSj it has gorged itself on the Roosevelt bounty-at the taxpayer expense."s Certainly the popularity of President Roosevelt and the burgeoning power of organizedlabor and other pro-New Deal elements in the state required that conservative Democrats temper their criticisms and even give occasional lip service to the ideals of the New Deal and its labor allies. The "liberal" or federal Democrats, on the other hand, while embracing the federal program and the abundant patronage opportunities that it provided, found themselves in a minority in Charleston, where the conservatives controlled the Governor's Mansion, the legislature, the Supreme Court of Appeals, and the statehouse patronage throughout the thirties. Three elected state executive officials, Superintendent William Woodson Trent, Secretary of State William Smithe O'Brien, and Treasurer Richard E. Talbott sympathized with the federal faction.6 Despite statehouse efforts to purge them in 1936, these three remained as a beachhead of the federal faction in the state capitol. Through most of the decade, the federal faction succeeded in congressional and senatorial elections but could not take over the legislature. Voters tended to elect federal faction candidates for federal posts and statehouse candidates for the legislature. Governor Kump's term had been tempestuous. He had faced the constitutional crisis of 1933 with energy and intelligence, but he never felt comfortable with the New Deal. He sought to promote an image of himself as fighting a lonely battle for state sovereignty against unscrupulous agents of the federal government and organized labor. In a Jackson Day dinner speech at Parkersburg on January 8, 1936, at the beginning of his final year as governor, he called for Democrats to stop fighting among themselves, but he could not refrain from his usual tactics of alliterative innuendo and vague but sweeping charges of conspiracy. Without offering any specifics, he charged that efforts had been made to interfere with the constitutional discharge of his duties. He claimed that he had "to fight every inch of the way .. . for the preservation of our statehood" during these "treacherous days." He called for the party to turn against "malevolent marauders mas- [3.140.242.165] Project MUSE...

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