Would Sherman Whipple Have Defeated Henry Cabot Lodge in 1922?

Introduction

Henry Cabot Lodge, major Republican figure in the last decade of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th, the man who rallied Republicans against Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations proposal and facilitated decades of isolationism between the wars, was elected to six terms in the Senate from Massachusetts. Only twice, however, did he actually face the voters: after the Seventeenth Amendment was passed, he was re-elected by 32,939 votes over former Boston mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald in 1916, and, after the League of Nations treaty, was re-elected by only 7,354 votes over Colonel William A. Gaston in 1922, a very narrow scrape for a leading senator and long-time incumbent.

With such a narrow win, counterfactuals become very attractive. How could the Democrats have beaten Lodge for his final term? Several historians and biographers have suggested that, with a candidate other than Gaston, the Democrats would have been victorious. J.J. Huthmacher wrote that,

“Given a little more unity and organization among the Democrats, or a more attractive Democratic candidate, Senator Lodge would certainly have been among the victims of the anti-incumbent upsurge of 1922.”[i]

Lodge’s biographer, John A. Garraty, wrote similarly of Gaston, that,

“Though he was well known throughout the state, and superficially the strongest of the Democratic candidates, his nomination was a mistake politically, for it blurred the issues in the coming election. The banker could not attack Lodge’s vulnerable points, for he himself was equally conservative, just as much a Boston Brahmin, and even wealthier than the Senator. He had voted against Wilson in 1916, had been a foe of Wilson’s league plan, and he and his managers refused to make foreign policy an issue.”[ii]

There was a candidate who may have filled this role of “a more attractive Democratic candidate”: Sherman A. Whipple, prominent Boston lawyer, who finished second to Gaston in the Democratic primary. Some observers thought at the time that Whipple would have won: the New York Tribune reported shortly after the primary that:

“Friends of Senator Lodge in Washington… said that the Walker vote represented the protest in the Republican Party against Senator Lodge and that had Sherman L. Whipple, Boston attorney, been nominated against the Senator he probably would have received a large proportion of this protest vote. They added that Whipple had not been active in politics and would not have been objectionable to many Republicans who do not like Senator Lodge.”[iii]

Could Whipple have denied Lodge his final term in the Senate? Could the liberals and Woodrow Wilson supporters have had some measure of revenge through this Boston attorney? I investigate in this hard-hitting and timely blog post.

The Campaign

Lodge was a prime Democratic target in the 1922 midterms, as the party rebounded from its shattering defeat in 1920. Irish political machines across the nation had sat on their hands in that election to punish the Wilson administration for its unsatisfactory resolution of the Ireland question during the Paris peace conference; but Harding’s neglect of the issue, empowerment of the British navy through his naval treaty, and other slights brought them back into the Democratic fold without issue.[iv]

Lodge was challenged in the Republican primary by Joseph Walker. A liberal, Walker had been the Speaker of the House from 1909 through 1911, subsequently bolting to the Progressive Party to follow Theodore Roosevelt. He ran against Lodge himself after failing to convince former Governor Sam McCall to enter the race. Walker attacked Lodge on the League of Nations, on his support for big business on tariff and tax issues, on his weakness on Prohibition, and on his opposition to various progressive reforms. Lodge, knowing the threat he faced that year, ran a thorough but stingy and all-volunteer campaign, without a staff or headquarters. He won the primary by a sizeable margin, but Walker took almost a quarter of the vote, 68,848 votes to Lodge’s 210,699.[v]

A concern for Lodge in both the primary and the general was that he did not receive enthusiastic support from the ascendent Coolidge machine, the Western Massachusetts-based operation inherited from the late Senator Murray Crane. Coolidge’s supporters, who elected their own State Committee chair in 1921, weren’t opposed to Lodge, but were not enthusiastic supporters either.[vi]

The Democrats, meanwhile, were sorting their own affairs. Former Boston mayor Fitzgerald, out of office since 1914 but still a major factional leader, had considered a run for senate, but switched to the gubernatorial race when crusading attorney general J. Weston Allen challenged incumbent governor Channing Cox in the Republican primary. Fitzgerald perceived the possibility of a split in enemy ranks. What happened in fact was that Allen’s insinuations of corruption spurred the heretofore colorless Cox into a spirited defense, and, in one telling, forced the governor to mobilize an effective campaign for re-election (Allen did roughly as well as Walker did; he and Walker both ran best in Western Massachusetts).[vii] Before he could deal with Cox, however, Fitzgerald had his own spirited Democratic primary: also running for the nomination were former governor turned perennial candidate Eugene N. Foss, Western Massachusetts district attorney and future governor Joseph B. Ely, and Worcester mayor Peter F. “Peter the Great” Sullivan, about whom I have written elsewhere. Fitzgerald won with a fairly decisive 69,319 votes (43.9%), while Sullivan, cleaning up in Central Massachusetts, took 53,699 for 33.9%, Ely, winning Western Mass, took 21,522 and 13.6%, and Foss, a spent force, received 13,576, for 8.6%.

(My apologies: my geographic file does not have the four Quabbin towns.)

Four Democrats also vied for the opportunity to challenge Lodge: William A. Gaston, banker and industrialist, Sherman Whipple, prominent Boston attorney, John Jackson Walsh, former State Senator, and Boston University professor of English and nature writer Dallas Lore Sharp. Gaston and Whipple were old hands, both having been nominated for Senate against Lodge (Gaston in the 1905 battle in the legislature; Whipple in the 1911 battle). Gaston had also been the nominee for governor in 1902 and 1903; Walsh had been in 1920.

Gaston was considered a conservative and Whipple a liberal. Ever since Gaston declared his campaign in April, Republicans had been chumming the waters, saying that liberals, women, temperance supporters, and Wilsonites wouldn’t vote for Gaston, who didn’t present any contrast with Lodge.[viii] Nevertheless, Gaston, an old party hand, had considerable institutional support and a large checkbook to work with. Whipple, however, had his own powerful supporters, including the vote-getting apparatuses of Boston mayor James M. Curley, with whom he had worked in a legal fight to reduce the Boston Elevated Railway’s ticket price, and West End ward boss Martin Lomasney.[ix]

Whipple pushed the argument that he drew a better contrast with Lodge than Curley did, telling one audience that Republicans

“professed confidence that the Democrats of Massachusetts will on Tuesday nominate a man who will be weak with the voters and not appeal to them on principles for which the party stands… To defeat Sen. Lodge you mut select a man who is the opposite to the senior Senator, a man who is progressive, not a man who himself represented big corporations and who is a part and parcel of the big interests.”[x]

Walsh, who had had a meteoric rise after defeating a prominent Republican, Simon Swig, for the state senate, attacked both Gaston and Whipple as elitists, saying that there were “already too many millionaires in the United States Senate.” This strategy had worked for him in his gubernatorial campaign two years earlier when he upset previous nominee and Framingham businessman Richard H. Long, but it was good for only a third-place finish against Gaston and Whipple: Gaston won with 88, 134 votes (51.5%), Whipple received 62,847 (36.7%), Walsh received 18,571 (10.8%) and Sharp won less than one percent, 1,626 votes.[xi] Curley was apparently unable to turn out enough Boston voters for Whipple to bring him victory.[xii]

Many activists were disappointed that both major-party nominees were conservatives. Gaston’s business career, especially that concerning the Boston Elevated Railway, had alienated labor voters through union-busting and carried the transportation monopoly’s old whiff of scandal. He and Fitzgerald did not agree on campaign tactics, including on repudiating the same crooked officials (namely Suffolk County District Attorney Joseph Pelletier, who resigned after a scandal but won renomination) who had featured in Allen’s attacks on Cox in the Republican primary. Gaston’s supporters did what they could, but his newfound opposition to recent tariff legislation and support of workplace reforms rang hollow. “We should elect our candidates… from a business standpoint,” he said in his nomination speech. “I have nothing to say against my opponent, Senator Lodge, as to his ability and integrity. But as a business representative of our business he has been a failure.” Meanwhile, Massachusetts’ other senator, Democrat David I. Walsh, was slow to campaign against his colleague Lodge, and only took to the trail late in the campaign.[xiii]

That did not mean that Lodge was free and clear, however. Walker, instead of endorsing Lodge, backed Prohibition Party nominee John F. Nicholls, as did other liberal Republicans; a group of prominent “Woodrow Wilson Democrats” also came out for Nicholls, who expanded his platform to attract more liberal support.[xiv] There were several other minor party candidates: William E. Weeks, Mayor of Everett, was the Progressive Party nominee, John Weaver Sherman was the Socialist Party nominee, and Washington Cook, brother of Republican state auditor Alonzo Cook, ran on a liberal and pro-Prohibition platform. Republicans thought that many of those who voted for Walker or who declined to vote for either in the primary would come out for Lodge in the end; Democrats, however, had (with Gaston’s millions) a cash advantage for the first time in many years and registered a considerable number of voters, more than the Republicans, between the primary and the general. Both senate candidates were expected to run behind their gubernatorial running mates.[xv]

Ultimately, Lodge squeaked out an extremely narrow victory over Gaston, even as Cox was beating Honey Fitz by over 60,000 votes (his biographer reports, dubiously, that Honey Fitz blew his chances only with a last-minute gaffe)[xvi] and the other Republican statewide candidates were winning by between 130,000 and 170,000 votes (except for auditor Alonzo Cook, long a party pariah, who won by just under 90,000). Lodge took 414,130 (47.6%) to Gaston’s 406,776 (46.6%), a margin of only 7,354 votes. Nicholls took 24,866 votes for 2.9%, and the other three independent and minor party candidates combined for 23,607 votes, 2.7%.

(I didn’t enter the town-level data, but Wikimedia has a lovely map).

Lodge said of his victory that “‘Tis not as deep as a well nor as wide as a church door, but it is enough.”[xvii] The Democratic party was recovering from its nadir in 1922, but was still in the doldrums of the Harding years. Huthmacher wrote that,

“Their senatorial nominee, whose background and outlook offered no real alternative to his opponent’s, was unable to exploit effectively the national issues at hand. Their candidate for governor, whose personal characteristics at least aroused the enthusiasm of Irish party stalwarts, conducted an essentially issueless campaign.”[xviii]

The Counterfactual

To get the obvious out of the way early: there are many paths to change the outcome of an election decided by less than eight thousand votes. Only 15% of the voters who chose to vote for one of the minor-party or independent candidates needed to vote for Gaston to deliver him a victory; and Lodge’s margin could have been halved by Boston alone if Gaston had received the same number of votes in the city as Fitzgerald. Would Whipple have brought in more third-party voters? Would he have found the extra votes in Boston?

In reverse order: one can’t be certain that Whipple would have outperformed Gaston in Boston, but it seems very plausible. Two of the city’s leading party bosses, Mayor Curley and Martin Lomasney, were Whipple supporters in the primary and, after his defeat, dawdled through the general election with perfunctory support. Curley, who was no longer backing the winning horse, wouldn’t have minded watching both Fitzgerald and Gaston go down to give him a clear shot at the 1924 gubernatorial nomination.[xix] It seems likely that he and Lomasney would have brought more effort to bear for their chosen nominee, and added their strength to that of the Fitzgerald machine. Fitzgerald outperformed Gaston in Suffolk County by about five thousand votes; in Boston, Gaston received 103,354 while Fitzgerald received 107,812. However, Cox outperformed Lodge by about 2,700 in the county, or by 58,194 to 55,842 in city. Many Bostonians blanked the senate race.

As this indicates, urban voters are not a monolith, and it cannot be taken for granted that small tweaks would have increased Democratic tallies at the push of a button. Fitzgerald, for example, did better than Gaston did among Irish voters; Gaston, meanwhile, did better with what Huthmacher calls “New Immigrant” voters, those who had emigrated more recently, who reacted against Lodge’s support of immigration restrictions. Furthermore, the turnout scenario as it stood favored Democrats: cities saw 74.8% turnout, while towns, whose suburban and rural voters favored Republicans, saw only 69% turnout. Boston actually saw higher two-party turnout than in the presidential election two years earlier; cities with high concentrations of “Newer American” voters saw only slightly lower turnout (3.3%), while Republican-leaning old-stock cities saw turnout down 12.5%, and in a sample of old-stock towns it was down 20.8%. An enthusiastic Curley and Lomasney may have helped along the margins, however, and along the margins was all that Gaston needed.[xx]

Whipple may not have needed it, however. The third-party candidates were fairly explicitly to the left of Lodge and Gaston, and many of their votes could have gone to nominee Whipple instead. Rather than pump up the Boston numbers, Whipple could have drawn more liberal votes across the state. Western Massachusetts, the Cape, and Martha’s Vineyard were the places where Lodge underperformed Cox by the largest margins, and were six of the seven counties where Nicholls notched his highest percentages (see note for specifics).[xxi] Though it is tempting to source a potential Whipple victory from here, these six counties only tallied 8,543 votes for Nicholls, plus another 2,264 for Washington Cook and 722 for William Weeks; technically enough to have beaten Lodge if all other votes held (not a given, of course), but a narrow margin to stake a campaign on. The Prohibition Party nominee for governor received 2,455 votes in these counties, which might be taken as committed prohibitionist votes and not simply liberals embracing a nominee who agreed with them on the issues. Furthermore, counties such as Franklin were heavily Republican, and votes that abstained from Lodge might not have shifted to any sort of Democrat.

Nevertheless, though Walker may not have endorsed a Democrat the way he endorsed Nicholls, Whipple would likely have staunched the liberal, pro-League bleeding, and presumably would have therefore clawed back some of the voters who went to Nicholls with “Wilson Democrats” such as Charles W. Elliot and Moorefield Storey. If he brought in even a tenth of the votes that went to Nicholls, Cook, and Weeks, then he would have only needed Curley and Lomasney to scare up less than 3,600 new voters, which is fewer than the number of votes than Gaston ran behind Lodge in Suffolk County alone. Nicholls’ voters were largely disaffected old-stock Republicans who were opposed to Lodge based on Prohibition and the League: some of them presumably would have voted for a major party pro-League candidate. With just a bit more than a fifth of them, Whipple would have been golden.[xxii]

It might seem that the Democrats had everything to gain and nothing to lose by nominating Whipple instead of Gaston. Election history, however, is fickle. As noted, Gaston and Fitzgerald didn’t even have the same voters as ticket-mates; there may be voters who voted for Gaston over Lodge, but would have voted for Lodge over Whipple. Furthermore, part of the reason that Gaston defeated Whipple in the primary was that he had a superior organization. One journalist wrote that some expected Whipple to win the primary, but they “did not count upon the high-grade organization” of Gaston, who “organized in every precinct in the State and it became apparent to observers as much as two weeks ago that he would run strong, if he did not put Whipple out of the game.”[xxiii] It is possible that, even as Curley and Lomasney hypothetically worked harder to turn out votes in their fiefdoms, a less robust Whipple operation would have lost ground elsewhere. Overall, though, there are many reason to think that a very narrow loss by a candidate who was widely criticized as uninspiring and who saw considerable defections on an ideological basis would have been turned into a (likely also very narrow) win by a more inspiring candidate who would have seen fewer defections.

Henry Cabot Lodge died late in 1924; the final years of the last term that he won were noteworthy mostly for his snub by Calvin Coolidge’s forces at the 1924 Republican National Convention. His seat, however, was won by David I. Walsh in a special election. Serving as senator from 1919 to 1925, Walsh was narrowly defeated in the Coolidge landslide; but his comeback in the special Lodge’s seat allowed him to dominate the Massachusetts Democracy for almost two more decades, and serve as a leading isolationist voice during the Roosevelt Administration. Depriving him of this opportunity, at least until Whipple’s death in 1930, would have changed at minimum the course of Massachusetts political history, perhaps allowing Curley to come into full flower earlier than he did in the mid-‘30s; and could have brought about an entirely different configuration of officeholders for the next several decades, changing the men who gave Massachusetts input on federal policy.

The other Sherman Whipple counterfactual comes from when Wilson passed him over as nominee for Attorney General in favor of A. Mitchell Palmer, a major figure in the first Red Scare, but that is another story entirely…

[i] Huthmacher, J.J. Massachusetts People and Politics (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 57.

[ii] Garraty, John A., Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 412.

[iii] “Lodge Expected to Have Easy Victory in Fall,” New York Tribune, September 14, 1922.

[iv] Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 50-51.

[v] Ibid., 51-52; Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge, 410-11. All election results are from Public Document 43, 1922.

[vi]Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 52.

[vii] Cutler, John Henry, Honey Fitz: Three Steps to the White House (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 235-36.

[viii] “Gaston for Senator, Fitzgerald Governor,” Boston Globe, April 9, 1922.

[ix] “Curley and Whipple Will Confer Today,” Boston Globe, May 19, 1922; “Curley to Take the Stump for Whipple,” Boston Globe, July 28, 1922; “‘Strategy’ by Lomasney,” Boston Globe, September 11, 1922. Curley even boosted Whipple for the next presidential nomination, saying that “It’s about time we had a Democratic President from this side of the Mason-Dixon Line. Mr. Whipple, in my humble opinion, out to be that man. He has a splendid professional record of accomplishment, and has the brains and the heart to meet and promote a settlement of a good many of the ticklish problems that now beset us, nationally. I think he’s a natural leader.”

[x] “Whipple Says Lodge Thinks as a Banker,” Boston Globe, September 11, 1922.

[xi] Ranson, The American Mid-Term Elections of 1922 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), 117; Hennessy, Four Decades of Massachusetts Politics 1890-1935 (Norwood, MA: Norwood Press, 1935), 305; Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge, 412.

[xii] “Failure to Get Sizable Vote in Boston Defeated Whipple,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 14, 1922.

[xiii] Hutmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics,54-57.

[xiv] Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge, 413. Information on other candidates from respective Wikipedia pages. My thanks to the hardworking Wikipedia biographers.

[xv] “Lodge Expected to Win by at Least 40,000,” New York Tribune, October 16, 1922; Merrill, John D., “Politics and Politicians,” Boston Globe, November 5, 1922.

[xvi] Cutler, Honey Fitz, 237-38.

[xvii] Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge¸413.

[xviii] Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics¸76.

[xix] Brown, George Rothwell, “Lodge’s Ranks Grow,” Washington Post, October 19, 1922. This article is a great source of analysis from the campaign trail for anyone looking to dive deeper into this election.

[xx] Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 74-75.

[xxi] The counties where Lodge underperformed Cox by the greatest extent were Franklin (57.2% to Cox’s 70%), Hampshire (51.3% to 61.9%), Hampden (43.7% to 54.1%), Dukes (75% to 85.2%), Barnstable (68.5% to 77.1%), and Berkshire (44.1% to 52.5%). Nicholls’ best counties, meanwhile, were Dukes (8.3%), Franklin (8%), Hampshire (7%), Barnstable (5.8%), Hampden (4.2%), Plymouth (4.1%), and Berkshire (3.9%).

[xxii] Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 294n26.

[xxiii] Essary, J.F., “Primary Results Gave No Surprises,” Baltimore Sun, September 14, 1922.