Gains & Losses

Last week President Hoover made an announcement which, could he have made it before he was elected, would have given him 451 electoral votes instead of his recorded 444. By it the big Wet cities gained voting power over Dry rural communities. By it, wide cuts were made in the Congressional representation of farm States. Many a State had to be redistricted.

The announcement was official promulgation of the Census Bureau's figures for Congressional reapportionment based on the 1930 population count (total: 122,775,046). The Constitution provides that the House shall be altered to fit the population every ten years. Rural members of Congress, eyeing jealously the people's concentration in big cities, blocked the 1920 reapportionment and only authorized the 1930 change after a bitter struggle last year (TIME, Dec. 31, 1928 et seq.). It was voted to change the number of people whom one Congressman shall represent, not the number of Representatives (435) in Congress. The 1930 census revealed that this change must be from 211,000 persons per Congressman to 280,000. Unless the reapportionment struggle is reopened in the December-March session, the losses & gains in State representation will become law on March 4, 1931.

Losses of Representatives are:

Missouri 3 Mississippi 1

Georgia 2 Nebraska 1

Iowa 2 North Dakota 1

Kentucky 2 Rhode Island 1

Pennsylvania 2 South Carolina 1

Alabama 1 South Dakota 1

Indiana 1 Tennessee 1

Kansas 1 Vermont 1

Maine 1 Virginia 1

Massachusetts 1 Wisconsin 1

Minnesota 1

Gains of Representatives:

California 9 Connecticut 1

Michigan 4 Florida 1

Texas 3 North Carolina 1

New Jersey 2 Oklahoma 1

New York 2 Washington 1

Ohio 2

No sooner had the President proclaimed the law than Representatives John Elliott Rankin of Mississippi and Lester Jess Dickinson (Senator-elect) of Iowa flayed it. Dickinson said he would propose increasing the House by at least 27 members, so that no State should lose Representatives. Rankin returned to his old criticism of the Constitution which decrees that representation shall be calculated according to the number of "persons" residing in a locality. He cried: "Is it right to give the alien rum runners and racketeers representation in Congress and take it away from Indiana, Tennessee, the Dakotas, Kentucky and Missouri?"

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