6th Term
In 1938, as the New Deal drew to a close, the Republicans made a strong comeback from near-oblivion, gaining eighty seats in the House and six in the Senate. The Republicans recaptured the governorship of Pennsylvania and locally, Wolfenden gained a sixth term with 68% of the vote over C. Ferno Hoffman, his Democratic challenger. Continuing the previous trend, however, Wolfenden fell 1,800 votes below the average vote for the Republican candidates for governor and U.S. senator, while Hoffman was 1,100 votes higher than his running mates.
Attention was now shifting toward ominous developments overseas, with both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan committing acts of aggression against their neighbors. As the international crisis worsened, with a full-scale war in Europe in September 1939, President Roosevelt asked Congress to strengthen the military in order to deter aggression.
Like most of his Republican colleagues, Wolfenden voted the isolationist line, against the Naval Expansion Act of 1938, the Lend-Lease Act, and the extension of the Selective Service in 1941. Even though the public was divided on most of the defense measures and many were hoping that the U.S. could miraculously avoid war, if these and other military defensive measures had not been adopted, the results could have been catastrophic.
Read more about this topic: James Wolfenden
Famous quotes containing the word term:
“Frankly, I do not like the idea of conversations to define the term “unconditional surrender.” ... The German people can have dinned into their ears what I said in my Christmas Eve speech—in effect, that we have no thought of destroying the German people and that we want them to live through the generations like other European peoples on condition, of course, that they get rid of their present philosophy of conquest.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)