ABSTRACT
The losses in 1932 and 1936 could be explained as the party’s penalty for the Great Depression, while in 1940 and 1944 everybody knew that the war and the enormous personal popularity of FDR had kept Democrats in control. When the GOP acquired a majority in Congress in 1946, the inevitable return of Republican domination seemed at hand. Republicans reverted to their minority status as the Democrats regained the House by winning an additional seventy-five seats and getting nine more in the Senate. The election of 1948 was, in some ways, the greatest shock of all to the Republican party. In Illinois, Paul Douglas, a professional economist, defeated Old Guard Republican Senator C. Wayland Brooks, and Adlai E. Stevenson, whose grandfather had been Vice President under Grover Cleveland, won the governorship with a margin of over half a million votes. A Republican casualty in his first attempt at political office, even before November, had been General Douglas MacArthur.
