Changing Patterns

Dwight Eisenhower seemed fated to be the first winning presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson (1916) unable to sweep his party into control of the House of Representatives. But while Ike and the Republicans did not seem likely to dent the solid majority of 230 seats which the Democratic Party had in the 84th Congress, they did succeed in changing the voting patterns that have dominated U.S. congressional elections for a century. In 1956 the Republican Party was picking up Congressmen in the cities, losing them in the country.

Ike's coattails were broadest in the most heavily urban area of the U.S.--the Northeast. In Connecticut, Republican Edwin H. May Jr. solidly carried the industrial First District. Democratic Senatorial Candidate Thomas Dodd's old stamping ground, and thereby snatched away from the Democrats the only one of Connecticut's six House seats that remained in Democratic hands after 1954. (In the heavily Italian Third District, which centers on New Haven, Democrat Robert Giaimo waited only 47 minutes after the polls had closed before conceding that Republican Albert Cretella had won a third term.)

In New Jersey's populous Sixth District (Union County), handsome, bustling Assemblywoman Florence Dwyer, fiftyish, took away from personable, 36-year-old Democrat Harrison Williams Jr. the seat he has held since 1953. Even more startling were the results in traditionally Democratic Hudson County, whose two House seats the Democrats had considered money in the bank. In the 14th District, bumptious Democrat T. (for Thomas) James Tumulty, whose boast it was that he carried more weight (330 Ibs.) than any man in Congress, ran well behind 49-year-old Auditor Vincent J. null In the 13th District, 45-year-old Major Alfred Sieminski, a Princeton-educated laundry operator who was elected to the House in 1950 while serving in Korea, apparently lost (by 200 votes) to Republican Norman Roth, assistant counsel to the county board of education.

In the South, the Republicans fought a holding operation with incumbent Republican Congressmen increasing their margins, and in the industrial areas of the Midwest the Republicans actually gained two seats. In much of the Midwest-primarily the areas in which the farm vote was critical--the Republicans were losers rather than gainers from the new voting patterns. "The old man of the Ozarks," 58-year-old Dewey Short, seemed likely to be the most resounding Republican casualty of all. In his attempt to win a 13th term in the House, he was trailing 36-year-old Charles Harrison Brown, a polio victim who campaigned with a hillbilly quartet. In the Far West, the gains were made by the Democrats. Montana's 38-year-old Republican Congressman Orvin B. Fjare lost the Second District to State Senator LeRoy Anderson in a campaign that centered around Fjare's opposition to paying the Crow Indians $5,000,000 for the proposed site of the Yellowtail Dam on the Big Horn River.

With the exception of Dewey Short, few familiar faces will be missing from the next Congress. Republican Katharine St. George easily staved off the challenge of World War II Cartoonist William ("Willie and Joe") Mauldin in New York's 28th District, and Incumbent Frederic Coudert Jr. surmounted a dangerous bid by Democrat Anthony Akers, World War II PT-boat skipper. It was a bad year for basketball players too. In Kentucky, Wallace ("Wah Wah" Jones, one of the two "clean" players on the bribe-prone 1948-49 Kentucky basketball team, was smothered by Democratic Incumbent John Watts, and Minnesota's 6 ft. 10 in. basketball All-America George Mikan of De Paul College failed to unseat the Third District's Democratic incumbent, 68-year-old Roy Wier.

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