Election Maps: Vermont Senate, 1934
This is the municipal-level election result map for the Vermont Senate race in 1934, as covered in “Vermont’s Traditional Republicanism vs. the New Deal” by George T. Mazuzan.
Mazuzan was the biographer of Senator Warren R. Austin, who was nearly denied a full term by Democratic nominee Fred C. Martin. This was a remarkable occurrence: the state did not elect a Democrat to statewide or federal office at any point between the Civil War and the late 1950s. In the last few years before their breakthrough (William H. Meyer was elected to Congress in 1958, and Phil Hoff was elected Governor in 1962), the Democrats came closer and closer to victory; but the 1934 election was one of just a few close calls decades before the one-party system came to an end. Another was for the state’s western Congressional seat in 1922 (as written about by me).
The Democrats ran a full ticket in 1934, but they focused on opposing Austin, a conservative critic of the New Deal. “Nationally,” Mazuzan writes, “the Democrats felt that 1934 was their year.”
Even in Vermont they believed they had a chance through an appeal for endorsement of the New Deal. Bolstered by a popular votegetter such as Frederick Martin, they became convinced it was worth the effort to try to turn the trick.
The platforms of the two candidates must also be taken into account. The issues were national in scope, and there could not have been a more clear-cut choice for the voter. Martin’s campaign solidly endorsed the New Deal while Austin opposed it in all its aspects.
Psychologically, Austin had an advantage. He stood on his record that always had favored rugged individualism, frugality and the independence of the Green Mountain State He emphasized these points at every opportunity. Austin proclaimed himself to be his own man, representing his own state against practically the rest of the nation. His campaign was based on a strong appeal to a Vermont tradition of conservatism not to be denied. At a time when change was taking place rapidly, Austin remained within the mold of the conservative Vermont political tradition.
In the face of all this, Austin’s near defeat demonstrated the impact the New Deal had on the voters of Vermont. Nearly half of those who voted were willing to abandon old ideas of frugality, independence and rugged individualism in favor of the experimentation offered by the New Deal.
If Mazuzan (naturally a bit more sympathetic to Austin, I’ll note) hadn’t written this paper, I’d have wanted to be the one.
This was one of several Senate near misses for the New Deal Democrats in northern New England, long the bastion of anti-Roosevelt Republicanism. In Maine, F. Harold Dubord came only 1,200 votes away from defeating Senator Frederick Hale in 1934, and Governor Louis Brann lost to Senator Wallace White by only 4,648 votes two years later. Also in 1936, Congressman William N. Rogers narrowly lost the Senate race to Governor Styles Bridges; Rogers went on to be a Wendell Willkie supporter, possibly because FRD didn’t give him a patronage job. Speaking of Styles Bridges: the Democrats also fumbled the 1934 gubernatorial election that also might have arrested the future McCarthy acolyte’s rise. The only success story was Fred H. Brown, former Governor of New Hampshire, who defeated famously mean Senator George H. Moses for Senate on FDR’s coattails in 1932. More on that, as they say, later.