Democrats have prevailed in Washington County politics since the New Deal, but demographics change
Clerk of Courts Barbara Gibbs keeps an old Franklin Roosevelt campaign sign under glass on her desk in Washington County Courthouse.
In March 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a law levying a federal tax on all alcoholic beverages containing 3.2 percent alcohol. This law was known as the Beer and Wine Revenue Act. Its purpose was to raise revenue for the federal government and it allowed for the regulation of sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages in individual states.
In the 1980s, the Washington County Courthouse was undergoing major renovation, spurred by the completion of the Courthouse Square office building that allowed many elected officials and their staffs – the commissioners, sheriff, controller, treasurer and coroner, for example – to exit the crammed space at Main and Beau.
When workers toiled 30-some years ago in the clerk of courts office, they found copies of a political sign exhorting President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to “Carry On. Washington County is With You.”
It’s a little wider than a bumper sticker but printed on thin, glossy paper that lacks adhesive. The discovery of the sign prompted Clerk of Courts Barbara Gibbs, who plans to retire at the end of the year after serving eight four-year terms, to do some checking. She learned that homeowners or apartment dwellers used to post this type of sign in their windows.
The sign is undated, but the exhortation to “carry on” makes it unlikely to have been produced in 1932, the first time FDR was elected president. And because Roosevelt, unlike any other United States president, was elected four times, it makes the year even harder to pin down. Was the sign from the campaign in 1936, 1940 or 1944?
It was momentous when Roosevelt decided to seek a third term, and Washington & Jefferson College political science department chairman Joseph DiSarro called the reasons behind it “very complicated.”
“Look at Roosevelt’s background,” he said. “Here’s a patrician. He sees himself as better prepared for leadership than others. You’ve heard of noblesse oblige? He feels he has this duty to the nation and to the world.”
Domestically and internationally, Roosevelt in 1940 could see turmoil. At home, the Great Depression fostered extremism on both the right and left wings. Isolationists clashed with internationalists.
World War II had begun in 1939, and Nazi Germany had control of vast territory in Europe. Along with the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain, there was militarism in Japan and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, DiSarro noted.
“Strong leadership to save us as well as the world was necessary,” the professor, a Republican, said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. “You still have to step back and wonder whether the U.S. and its Constitution could’ve survived without Roosevelt. Democracies are fragile, like governments, and they can fall apart.
“Perhaps the Constitution was strong enough to deal with that and perhaps not. Without FDR, I fear the worst.”
Roosevelt’s motives in seeking a fourth term in 1944 were similar, DiSarro opined. With the entry of the United States into World War II in 1941, FDR likely felt he was the person to deal with world leaders and hold together the coalition with Stalin and Britain’s Winston Churchill.
Roosevelt did not live to see much of his fourth term. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage 70 years ago today. The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, constitutionally limits a president’s tenure to two elected terms.
DiSarro considers himself a supporter of the 22nd Amendment, but he also calls himself an admirer of Roosevelt. “I consider him one of the great presidents,” the professor said. “I think it’s really important for a democratic system to have leaders that rotate. You can see what’s happening to the Congress, and, to an extent, the Senate. They just keep getting elected and elected.”
Peg Wilson, 85, a Democratic committeewoman from Washington, recalled Roosevelt’s death.
“Part of my family was Democrat and my father was a Republican, but my dad was always an admirer of Roosevelt,” said Wilson, then 15-year-old Peg White. As a teenager, she could remember no one but Roosevelt as president of the United States, and she compared the outpouring of grief in 1945 with the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“For the funeral, we had the day off from school,” Wilson recalled.
Father of the New Deal he hoped would lift the nation out of the mire of an unprecedented economic disaster, Roosevelt represented a change in the politics of Washington County, which had been emphatically Republican. Democrats became the majority party, and although the Dems continue to hold an edge in voter registration, the margin is much slimmer today than in the 1980s when workers came across the Roosevelt sign. Unions had many members in the coal and steel industries who voted reliably Democratic, and the Route 19 corridor was home to farms rather than suburban subdivisions.
Voter registration for the May primary remains open through April 20, but as of Wednesday, Washington County had 67,730 Democrats, 46,430 Republicans, 10,273 people who checked “no affiliation,” 1,771 independents and a smattering of other party members. Since the eve of the 2008 presidential election, Democratic ranks in Washington County decreased by approximately 20,000, while the number of Republican registrations shrunk by about 1,800. The number of independents stayed about the same.
The 2008 presidential election year was the first time a Republican candidate – Sen. John McCain – carried Washington County since Richard Nixon’s landslide over George McGovern in 1972.
This is a local election year, and whether Democrats, who predominate in Washington County row offices, can continue to flex political muscle won’t be known until the outcome of the Nov. 3 municipal election.
“Washington County has voted Republican in all the recent major elections, and we intend to keep the conservative momentum building,” wrote Bob Woeber, chairman of the Republican Party of Peters Township, in response to an email.
In the midst of the Great Depression, Roosevelt carried all but six of the then 48 states. Pennsylvania was one of the six that gave its Electoral College votes to incumbent Republican President Herbert Hoover, but Roosevelt, then-governor of New York, carried Washington County, among others in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Radio and newspapers were primary sources for those seeking election returns as a landslide of Democratic votes swept the nation.
The morning Washington Observer headlines read, “County records are broken by Democratic vote; Roosevelt’s lead here over 7,000. Other candidates have corresponding margins – result due to revolt of Republican voters against conditions.” Roosevelt was only the second Democrat elected president up to that point in the 20th century.
Unofficial local returns in the Nov. 10 edition of the Observer show Roosevelt with 28,732 votes to Hoover’s 21,406. Two minor-party candidates were also in the race. In some parts of the state, turnout pushed 90 percent. It’s surprising to look back and see how comparatively small was Washington County’s number of voters, certainly a reflection of a largely rural area. In the 2012 presidential race, for example, Barack Obama had 40,345 votes, and 53,230 people cast ballots for Mitt Romney, a larger number than Roosevelt’s and Hoover’s Nov. 8, 1932, Washington County totals combined.
Ron Sicchitano, 69, of Scenery Hill, Washington County Democratic Party chairman, called Roosevelt “my hero. He was amazing.”
This year also marks the 80th anniversary of the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y., calls “the most important piece of labor legislation in American history. Given the current debate about such issues as the minimum wage and the adoption of right-to-work laws, as well as the ongoing effort to reduce the nation’s unemployment in the wake of the Great Recession, the question of how best to incorporate the rights of workers in a rapidly changing economy seems as relevant today as it was during the New Deal.”
“Unionism did bring the middle class out of the doldrums,” said Sicchitano.
Banking reform, formation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock market, jobs programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration, and the Social Security Act all sprung from FDR’s New Deal. Their effects are still being debated 80 years later.
“Economics and politics are tied together,” Sicchitano said. “It seems like we’re very cyclical. Politics change with the times due to economic conditions. Republicans tended to support more affluent people. Society has become more materialistic and affluent. We haven’t experienced the neediness of the conditions when Democrats came into power” in the 1930s.
Sicchitano sees Democrats’ objective as “keep the middle class strong and still have a conscience. We have to work at it. We can no longer rely on our plurality.”
Seventy years after Roosevelt’s death, controversy over his agenda remains.
Woeber, who was elected last November to a two-year term as Republican chairman, weighed in.
“While some see FDR’s actions as beneficial, there is significant economic evidence to the contrary. The New Deal unnecessarily protracted the Great Depression, and its legacy redistribution programs such as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the failed policies of the current administration have cost taxpayers trillions of dollars and stifled the growth that would of resulted from proven successful conservative policies that encourage free-market capitalism.”