National Affairs: New Jersey Jolt

Studded with good middle-class suburbs are Morris and Union counties in New Jersey. Together they compose the State's 5th Congressional district, hold 10% of its population. Elizabeth is an industrial entity unto itself but in Morristown, Mendham, Madison, Summit. Plainfield et al. live countless families whose heads have 9:30-to-4:30 o'clock jobs in the city, who are not quite so socially smart as the residents of Somerset County (Far Hills, Bernardsville, Peapack) with 10-to-4 o'clock jobs, but who do hold a higher head than the 9-to-5 commuters of Essex County (Montclair and the Oranges). They own comfortable homes, drive two cars, belong to country clubs, invest in stocks & bonds, vote the Republican ticket straight. Last week these conservative and substantial citizens of New Jersey's 5th Congressional district staged a major political revolt which augured ill for the G. O. P. and President Hoover.

Not since 1912 has the 5th district gone Democratic in a Congressional election. Last October Ernest R. Ackerman, its Republican Congressman for the past twelve years, died. To succeed him the Republicans nominated Donald H. McLean, local lawyer; the Democrats named Percy Hamilton Stewart. Nominee Stewart, a commuting Manhattan attorney, was once Mayor of Plainfield. His wife is the granddaughter of the late Alexander Smith, carpet tycoon. Since both men were Wet, the Stewart-McLean campaign, brief and bitter, turned only on national issues. Republican McLean asked for a vote of confidence in the Hoover Administration, eulogized the President's attempts to combat Depression. Democrat Stewart flayed President Hoover for "refusing to face the facts," for ducking and dodging economic responsibility. The Republican National Committee sent two second-string speakers into the district to help Nominee McLean whereas Jouett Shouse, Democratic executive chairman, and the two New York Senators stumped Morris and Union Counties for Nominee Stewart.

On election day most of the district's 9:30-4:30 Republican commuters—typical of the backbone of their party throughout the land—either went to Manhattan without voting or resentfully cast their ballots for Democrat Stewart. He was elected by 1,900 votes. The late Congressman Ackerman used to carry his district by about 33,000 votes and in 1928 Herbert Hoover rolled up a 49,000-vote majority there. Far & wide the Stewart victory was interpreted as a rebuke to President Hoover, a revolt of worthy middle-class G. O. Partisans against their party because of hard times. The arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune called it "the severest jolt the party has yet sustained." The Democrats, to whom it gave a House majority of two, trumpeted it as a bright omen for 1932.