Maine History Online

Maine Responds to the New Deal

On the eve of the Depression the Republican grip on the Maine electorate was loosened by growing concern over rural electrification, rising power rates, and ties between Walter Wyman's expansive Maine Central Power Company and other Maine industries.

Since the mid 1920s the Republican Party had been identified with the Wyman empire and its attempt to overturn Maine's Fernald Law, which prohibited the export of power from Maine. When Ralph O. Brewster became governor in 1925 and supported the Fernald Law, high-ranking Republican leaders attempted to abolish the direct primary system to ensure more control over nominations.

The assault on the primary law weakened the party, which also suffered a series of financial scandals and a split between Old Guard and younger factions.

The conservative wing found a candidate in William Tudor Gardiner, who was swept into office in 1928. But in that year a popular referendum upheld the Fernald law despite heavy party lobbying, further dampening Republican spirits. Gardiner was re-elected in 1930, before the Depression became a viable issue for Maine, but party divisions were deepening.

Over the next two years Republicans focused on perennial issues like prohibition and fiscal economy, avoiding the Depression for the most part. The administration rejected federal aid for roads to preserve state and local control, but the increase in automobiles and trucks in the 1920s made state construction costs a thorny issue. In 1929 Gardiner demanded resignations from the entire highway commission amid charges of poor construction and corruption.

Newspaper reports on bootleggers and heavy drinking at the Republican State Convention tarnished the party's long-standing prohibition plank.

Sensing fractures in the Republican edifice, State Democratic Chair and gubernatorial candidate Edward C. Moran of Rockland began reorganizing his disillusioned and frustrated party. The task was formidable; Democrats had been out of power effectively since the Civil War, and without hope of electoral success or patronage positions, the party attracted few good leaders.

Maine held its state elections in September, two months before the nation at large, and the old saw "as goes Maine goes, so goes the nation" brought funds and campaigners from the national Republican party in the hopes of generating a self-fulfilling prophesy. Nevertheless, in the 1930 off-year election the Republican majority was slimmer than in 1928.

In 1932 Democrats backed Louis Jefferson Brann, a popular Lewiston lawyer and former mayor. Brann ran an ambitious statewide grass roots campaign, and local committees appeared in areas Democrats had failed to organize for nearly a century.

With funding from the Democratic National Committee and the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, Democrats won the governor's seat, while Moran and former Bangor mayor John Utterback won seats in Congress in the Second and Third districts.

Despite the state victory for Democrats, Maine endorsed Herbert Hoover in November, joining only four other states to vote Republican in the presidential election.

Brann was reelected in 1934, but two years later Democrats were swept out of office at the height of the national party's political prospects. The brevity of this Democratic surge was in part a reflection of weaknesses in the state organization.

The party attracted French-Canadian votes in mill towns like Lewiston, Biddeford, and Waterville, but it also harbored an older faction made up of rural Jacksonian Democrats; while the former embraced the New Deal, the latter clung to pre-Civil War agrarian principles like states' rights and anti-federalism. The party's fortunes reflected this ambivalence.

Maine people were not satisfied with the New Deal. Roosevelt's 1933 General Reciprocity Treaty with Canada lowered tariffs on potatoes, apples, and wood products – three of Maine's most important commodities.

The federal Agricultural Adjustment Administration, established in 1938 to pay farmers for land left fallow, was restricted to commodities deemed "basic" to the American economy, and because no Maine crops fell under these guidelines the state was one of only two in the nation to retire no acres under the AAA production quotas. Maine Farmers benefited from the Farm Credit Administration and the Farm Security Administration, but the impact was uneven.

Maine's greatest disappointment with the New Deal was the Passamaquoddy Tidal Project, brainchild of engineer Dexter Cooper who, during the 1920s proposed dams across the deep channels of Passamaquoddy Bay to harness its 27-foot tides for hydroelectric power.

Under pressure from Roosevelt, Congress appropriated $10 million to launch the project. While most Maine people rallied behind the effort, conservative Republicans and Maine's private utility officials considered it socialistic or the opening wedge for a government dictatorship over utility rates. Nor were fishermen around the bay enthusiastic. As costs and opposition rose, a narrow Senate vote killed the project in 1936.

Maine's experience with tariffs, the AAA, and the Quoddy Project only partly explain its reaction to the New Deal. An experiment in federal counter-cyclical spending, the New Deal deliberately used the deficit to pump money into the economy and boost consumer power. This Maine people considered a political sacrilege. Newspaper editorials throughout the period expressed optimism that conditions were improving and insisted that New Deal spending was unnecessary.

The idea that balancing the budget was government's highest responsibility was rooted in generations of New England thrift. In addition, many Maine people found the relief programs distasteful, even in Depression circumstances.

The view that government help was morally improper was difficult to surmount, particularly in rural Maine where local administrators passed out relief funds reluctantly. Maine's insular location and rural, small-town culture left the state ill prepared for Washington's active role in state affairs, and finally, those who employed pulp-cutters, clam-diggers, potato pickers, fish-canners, quarry workers and the like complained that workers refused to give up their WPA jobs when offered seasonal work, even though federal eligibility required enrollees to take private-sector jobs when they were offered.

Aware of these reservations, Brann used federal funds to build support but kept the New Deal at arms length. However, disagreements continued to split the Democrats, leading to defeat at the polls.

In the 1936 presidential elections Maine once again rejected the New Deal by a margin of 57 to 43 percent, joining only one other state – Vermont – in endorsing Alfred Landon. Roosevelt, enjoying one of the greatest landslide victories in American history, quipped, "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont."

When Lewis O. Barrows defeated incumbent Brann in the 1938 gubernatorial election, the Democrats lost their last chance to ride the nationwide Democratic wave to victory in Maine. The New Deal programs presented an opportunity for rebuilding the party by appointing WPA supervisors and foremen throughout the state, but instead of exploiting this, Democrats plunged into a downward spiral that lasted until the election of Edmund S. Muskie in 1954.