Throwback to 1922 Midterm Elections

With the United States’ Midterm Elections in less than a month, I figured it called for a Throwback Thursday post to revisit the midterms from a hundred years ago.

Agriculture, unionized labor, and debate over a World War I veterans bonus were the hot-button issues that defined the midterms in the 22nd year of the last century. But like every election, there were sleeper issues that played a role as well.

In 1922, the US was four years removed from World War I, three years removed from the Spanish Flu, and a year removed from one of the worst recessions in the country’s history. 

By 1922, Senators had only been elected by popular vote in four election cycles thanks to the Seventeenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1913. 

The 1922 midterms were also only the second election when women in every state had the right to vote thanks to the Nineteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1920. 

The State of the US Government in 1922

Entering the 1922 midterms, Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and White House. 

In the election of 1920, Republicans had picked up 67 seats in the House, raising their majority to a whopping 303–167, to this day, the largest majority their party has ever held in the lower chamber. 

Republicans also picked up ten seats in the Senate, bringing them to a 59–37 majority in the upper chamber. 

President Warren Harding won the White House in 1920 with more than 60 percent of the popular vote after two terms of Democrat President Woodrow Wilson. Harding ran on a platform of restoring America to its pre-war prosperity and normalcy. 

Democratic leadership, meanwhile, continued to advocate for American meddling on the international stage — a message that proved hugely unpopular with voters after the war.

President Harding’s Administration

Domestic Policy

Despite its wild success in 1920, the Republican Party had been fiercely divided between the conservative and progressive factions for nearly two decades. The rift grew so strong, that former President Theodore Roosevelt — a progressive Republican — split from the party and ran against his former Vice President Howard Taft in 1912, which handed the presidency to Wilson. 

Harding came from the conservative camp, which preferred a more hands-off approach to economics. During the Recession of 1920–21, his administration did nothing but lower taxes and raise tariffs to boost the economy. 

Ever mindful of budgets, it was under Harding’s watch that the General Accounting Office came into being.

His strategy paid off, and the recession ended before the midterms. However, although unemployment fell in 1922, it did not reach its pre-recession numbers until 1923. This caused an acute but minor headache for Republicans on the ballot. 

Other domestic policies by Harding included:

• Signing the Emergency Tariff in May 1921, which steeply raised tariffs mostly on agricultural products.
• Signing the Sheppard-Towner Act, the first of its kind, which provided matching federal funds to pre-natal and maternal care — something women reformers had pushed for before gaining the right to vote.
• Pardoning the socialist Eugene Debs and 23 others who had been charged under the Espionage Act mainly for their opposition to the war.
• Signing the Capper-Volstead Act, which allowed farmers to buy and sell collectively without being in violation of antitrust laws.
• Signing the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act two months before the midterms, which raised tariffs to the highest level in US history.

Strikes and Unions

The way the Harding administration dealt with labor disputes during his presidency alienated many union workers. Non-farm union membership reached a high point in 1921 of 19 percent, making their vote significant nationally but crucial in certain regions.

In June 1921, the Supreme Court — which had been shaped largely by conservative Republican presidents — held unions liable for damages they did to company property.

In April 1922, the United Mineworkers of America went on strike. By May, only non-union-operated mines functioned, and the price of coal soared. This tension led to the Herrin Massacre in Illinois, on June 21–22. Guards killed three union workers in a shootout, and the next day, union workers murdered 20 strikebreakers and guards.

The violence in Herrin caused Harding to intervene. Finally, in August, workers and management agreed to extend their pre-strike contracts into 1923. Congress passed and Harding signed into law the Federal Coal Commission — although it accomplished nothing for coal production or labor rights.

The Great Railroad Strike was the largest strike of Harding’s presidency. 

During the war, the government nationalized the railroads. Workers were happy with the arrangement because it gave them an eight-hour workweek. The Transportation Act of 1920, however, re-privatized the railroads and established the nine-member Railroad Labor Board to negotiate wages. Rail companies wanted to cut wages and subcontract to non-union workers. 

On July 1, 1922, six of the 16 railroad unions went on strike. Four hundred thousand workers walked off the job, making it the largest railroad strike since the famous Pullman Strike of 1894.

On July 3, Ben Hooper, Harding’s appointee as head of the Railroad Labor Board, announced that strikers had forfeited their arbitration rights — which the Transportation Act of 1920 guaranteed — and encouraged rail companies to replace them. Widespread violence erupted, resulting in sabotage, kidnappings, riots, and the deaths of more than ten people.

Attorney General Harry Daugherty staunchly opposed organized labor. He ordered US Marshalls to aid the railroads, who — like the National Guard —  tended to sympathize with the companies over the striking workers. Daugherty won a court-ordered injunction against the strikers on September 1, which killed the strike. 

The Veterans Bonus

Harding’s opposition to the promised veterans bonus caused a rift within his own party and riled voting veterans and their families.

In 1919, Members of Congress proposed a veterans bonus as a means for the country to pay its gratitude to the returning ‘doughboys’ of The Great War. This owed to genuine gratitude and recognition of the lobbying power of the American Legion.

Most states passed some form of veteran compensation package, but this strained their budgets greatly. The Recession of 1921 cooled the fiscally conservative-minded Harding to the idea, particularly since he was looking to cut taxes. He supported long-term medical care for wounded veterans and job training. But a cash bonus was out of the question as long as the economy slumped.

To avoid a Republican civil war over the issue, Harding proposed an impossible solution: a veterans bonus if Congress passed a national sales tax to offset it. Such a proposal was a non-starter for Congress, which opposed any form of increased federal taxation. Instead, they wanted the destroyed economies of Europe to hurry up and pay up their debts for Americans’ saving their hide.

The press largely took Harding’s side, but the public, not so much. Convincing ordinary citizens that paying veterans who’d risked their lives would be too much of a strain on the Treasury was difficult. 

Harding’s fiscal arguments delayed a vote on the bonus during his first year. But when a bill passed Congress in the midterm year, he vetoed it. The House easily overrode it, but the Senate failed to muster a two-thirds majority by four votes.

The press again praised the president’s convictions, but the voters delivered Republicans deep gashes in the midterms.

Election Results

Many voters had turned to Republicans in 1920 because they were fed up with Wilson. Despite Republicans’ following through with much of their agenda: cutting taxes and regulation, keeping America out of foreign entanglements, raising tariffs, etc., voters did not reward them.

This owed partly to socioeconomic factors of post-war America that were out of Harding’s control. As the country became more mechanized and urbanized, farmers — the traditional backbone of the American middle class — became squeezed. Every session of Congress became a tug-of-war between the dwindling farm lobby and the growing industrial lobby centered in the Northeast — which was mostly backed by Republicans.

The labor disputes that ended badly for unionized workers also did Republicans no favors. The coalworkers relented largely because their leader John L. Lewis believed that Harding’s coal commission would produce pro-worker benefits. In other situations, like the rail workers’ strike, the Harding administration and courts just outright crushed them.

The failed veterans bonus also played a role and provided fodder for the American Legion — as many impoverished farmers and strikers were veterans or had family members who served. Furthermore, wrangling over this issue delayed votes on bread-and-butter issues like tariffs and subsidies that farmers wanted. 

Other considerations are the ethnic and booze factors. 

Immigrant groups have always traditionally voted Democrat for the first few generations. Wilson alienated millions of these voters with his heavy-handed crackdowns on anti-war dissent — particularly on German-Americans. Many of these voters, however, failed to see anything in Republicans during Harding’s first two years that made them want to stay. 

Prohibition was ratified with the 18th Amendment under Wilson, but brewers and drinkers felt the full weight of the federal government under Harding. This raised anti-governmental sentiment, which tends to translate to anti-incumbent sentiment during election years.

An analysis by the Chicago Tribune estimated that Republicans would lose 25–30 seats. Instead, they lost 77, cutting their lead down to 18.

In the Senate, Republicans lost a net of seven seats, even though they flipped seats in Nebraska and Ohio. Democrats made gains in Indiana, Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and West Virginia. In Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party candidate Henrik Shipstead won.

The 1922 midterm results were unusually brutal for the party that holds the White House. Since that election, the party in power has only lost an average of 30 seats in the House and four in the Senate