The Emergence of a Two-Party System in Republican Philadelphia, 1924-1936

Abstract

THE national political realignment of the 1920s and 1930s transformed Philadelphia. In 1924 Coolidge swept the city with 78 percent of the vote, not an atypical margin given that Republican majorities often reached 80 percent proportions and hundreds of voting divisions returned near unanimous ballots. All city and county offices had been Republican since the turn of the century except where statute required otherwise. The Democratic party was a kept minority, a subservient auxiliary of the dominant Republican organization, existing for and subsisting on minority patronage.1 In 1936 Franklin D. Roosevelt won Philadelphia by a 60 percent landslide, inaugurating a sequence of Democratic presidential victories that has not been broken since. The Republicans prevailed in city and county politics, but their monopoly grip on city hall was broken in 1933. The existence of a revitalized and independent Democratic party organization made Philadelphia politics after 1933 two party and competitive. Within the dominant Republican organization, a coup d'etat in 1934 overthrew a leadership that had controlled the party since 1916.2 Much of the discussion of the New Deal realignment has centered on an attempt to classify some single election contest as the critical one, where long-term political cleavages first took shape. The most popular thesis has been that of Samuel Lubell who contends that the unique appeal of Al Smith and the ethnic arousal that resulted from his campaign set the arena for American politics for the next several decades, marked the appearance of