Meanwhile, in Non-Gump Election News

"Keeping to the Main Highway" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 9, 1922

I hope you enjoyed our recounting the past two Saturdays of Andy Gump's election to Congress and the recount that took his victory away. But it's time now to get serious and to catch up on what really happened in the off-year election of 1922.

Gustavo Bronstrup, with a nod to the initially victorious Mr. Gump, celebrates the Republican sweep in California that year. Friend Richardson was elected Governor and Hiram Johnson was reelected Senator, both by landslides. (Ironically, Richardson, supported by a Republican majority in the legislature, would proceed to undo several policies enacted when Johnson had been Governor.) 

The Proposition 19 straw man fallen off the back of the car represents a defeated constitutional amendment that would have granted the governor authority to create and fund a board to develop, distribute and fix rates for water and electrical energy.

"Nearly Everybody in the House Knew..." by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, Nov. 10, 1922

The California results ran counter to the national trend that year, however: Democrats gained 72 seats in House and a net gain of six seats in the Senate. 

"Shrinkage? It's a Washout" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 9, 1922

The Democrats' gain was not quite enough to regain the majority lost in the elections of 1918 and 1920, but was an impressive showing nonetheless, and set off a wave of prognostication as to where the Republican Party had gone wrong.

"Now We'll Hear the Specialists" by Edwin Marcus in New York Times, Nov. 12, 1922

One of Edwin Marcus's "specialists" is an "anti-prohibitionist" who doesn't look anything like the Mr. Dry used by every other cartoonist of the time (see John Cassel, below). That may well be because Mr. Dry looks more like an undertaker than a doctor; but it leaves me suspecting that Marcus had everything drawn before the election results were in but the labels and the elephant head.

"After the Downpour" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, Nov. 10, 1922

To the extent that Republicans were hurt by the "wet" vote, it was primarily because they happened to have more incumbents in office than the Democrats did in 1922. Prohibition sentiments pro and con crossed party lines; support for the 18th Amendment included both conservative Southern Democrats and northern progressive Republicans. Opponents included big-city Democrats and Republicans alike.

"Home Again" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, Nov. 13, 1922

One of my disappointments in covering the 1922 election is that I was not able to turn up any cartoons by John Knott of the Dallas News and Galveston Daily News having anything substantial to say about the Klan candidate Texas elected to the U.S. Senate that year. Instead, he chose to celebrate Tennessee returning its governor's chair to the Democrats — and I do apologize for that character carrying Miss Tennessee's bags.

"The Retreat of the Lame-Duck Brigade" by John Baer, reprinted in National Leader (Minneapolis), December, 1922

Former Congressman John Baer cites a few of the ailments diagnosed in Edwin Marcus's cartoon and adds a few more: a proposed sales tax (to replace the income tax), an anti-strike bill, and a subsidy for shipbuilders.

What I was expecting to see in the National Leader was a celebration of Minnesotans' election to the Senate of the Farmer-Labor candidate, Henrik Shipstead, ousting Republican Senator Frank B. Kellogg, seated in the wheelchair in Baer's cartoon. (The Democrats' candidate, Anna Dickie Olesen, came in a distant third). The Farmer-Labor Party was the offspring of the Leader's "Non-Partisan League," after all, and the Leader had emblazoned a heroic sketch of Shipstead all over the front page of its November issue.

Front page of National Leader, Minneapolis, MN, November, 1922

Other than that, however, the Leader seems not to have found much to say about his campaign or his election.

Shipstead, a former and future Republican, would serve in the Senate until losing a GOP primary in 1947. An isolationist, anti-Semite, and conspiracy monger (Protocols of the Elders of Zion and all that crap), a senator described by the British Foreign office as "bigoted and crotchety," he is not remembered fondly these days.

"A Case for Careful Diagnosis" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Nov. 13, 1922

But returning again to 1922: it must be noted that for all this talk of the Republican Party needing to find out where it had gone wrong, the 1920's would continue to be a solidly Republican decade in most of the United States.

"He Fits the Niche" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, Nov. 8, 1922

To wit: 1922 saw the election of one of the Democratic Party's enduring heroes, Alfred E. Smith, as Governor of New York. As the party's presidential nominee in 1928, he would lead the Democrats to their third consecutive landslide loss.

And lucky for him, too.