In 1916 Governor Johnson, who was himself standing for the United States Senate, was prepared, on the smallest encouragement, to follow the example of his leader Mr. Roosevelt and support the Republican candidate. Unfortunately for the Republican candidate that encouragement was never given. When Mr. Hughes visited California he accepted the ill-conceived advice of a political agent, ignored Mr. Johnson, and took inordinate pains to make it clear that he was standing as a true-blue Republican, with no compromising strain of Progressivism in his political faith. That declaration lost him the thirteen California votes that would have made him President of the United States. Hiram Johnson and his friends were radicals and Republicans. They had a choice between supporting a radical and Democrat on the one hand and a conservative and Republican on the other. They preferred the the radical and Democrat. Governor Johnson himself beat his Democratic opponent out of the field for the Senatorship, but the State's Presidential vote went to Wilson. Few conclusive inferences can be drawn from an election so closely contested. It is clear that all the speculations on the effect of the women's vote and the hyphenated vote were superfluous. The women voted one way in one State and the opposite way in in another. The hyphenated electors did the same. The Progressives evidently voted Republican in the Eastern States, but in the West they must have given considerable support to Mr. Wilson. There is Oregon and South Dakota (five votes each), every State from the Pacific Ocean to the Missouri had lined up behind Mr. Wilson. The West had combined with the South to send him back to the White House in the face of the East. And incidentally the President had achieved the unexampled feat of winning against the adverse verdict of New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, which contribute between them no fewer than 112 votes. While no one State was actually more " pivotal than any other, it was a curious irony that thrust on California the appearance of having turned the election. For California was the scene of a Republican faux pas that may justly be said to have cost Mr. Hughes the Presidency. The State was Republican by tradition. It had four times split its vote, but it had never since the Civil War gone solid for the Democrats. In 1912 it was Progressive, with a small split. In 1916 it should have been secure for the Republicans. But California was not prepared to discard its radicalism. It had cast up a political leader, Hiram Johnson, a strong Progressive, of whom more will be heard heard at Washington-certainly at the Capitol, it may even be at the White House-in no remote future. He had accepted nomination to the Governorship unwillingly, fought and beaten the party machine, broken the power of the railroad that dominated State politics, and then proceeded to to purge California as Woodrow Wilson in his time had purged New Jersey. In 1916 Governor Johnson, who was himself standing for the United States Senate, was prepared, on the smallest encouragement, to follow the example of his leader Mr. Roosevelt and support the Republican candidate. Unfortunately for the Republican candidate that encouragement was never given. When Mr. Hughes visited California he accepted the ill-conceived advice of a political agent, ignored Mr. Johnson, and took inordinate pains to make it clear that he was standing as a true-blue Republican, with no compromising strain of Progressivism in his political faith. That declaration lost him the thirteen California votes that would have made him President of the United States. Hiram Johnson and and his friends were radicals and Republicans. They had a choice between supporting a radical and Democrat on the one hand and a conservative and Republican on the other. They preferred the the radical radical and Democrat. Governor Johnson himself beat his Democratic opponent out of the field for the Senatorship, but the State's Presidential vote went to Wilson. Few conclusive inferences can be drawn from an election so closely contested. It is clear that all the speculations on the effect of the women's vote and the hyphenated vote were superfluous. The women voted one way in one State and the opposite way in another. The hyphenated electors did the same. The Progressives evidently voted Republican in the Eastern States, but in the West they must have given considerable support to Mr. Wilson. There is some evidence of a transference of votes, as compared with 1912, from the Socialist to the Democratic candidate. The one broad moral to be drawn is that while America would have been quite content to see Mr. Hughes at the White House, she preferred on the whole that Mr. Wilson should remain in possession. His conduct of affairs might be open to criticism at different points, but at any rate he had steered the country through perilous seas without the shipwreck of either its honour or its prosperity. Was it certain that Mr. Hughes could do as much? The West, at least, was disinclined to take risks on that. The crisis, moreover, was still at its height, and the old 1864 dictum about swapping horses in the middle of a stream was peculiarly applicable to 1916. And to that was added the reflection, probably much more widespread than appeared on the surface, that if war had to come it was well that America should go into it under a leader who hated war and could be relied on to take up arms only under irresistible compulsion. If the secrets of individual votes could be revealed, it is not unlikely that Mr. Wilson would be found to owe his election to Republicans who shrank at the eleventh hour from the responsibility of committing the destinies of America at so critical a moment to untried hands. It should be added that the elections reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate from 16 to 12, and left the balance in the House in the hands of half a dozen Progressives, Independents, |