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The Direct Primary in New York State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

H. Feldman
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Extract

Governor Hughes first made the direct primary a state-wide issue in New York. It was in no gentle terms that his speeches and annual messages arraigned the nominating system then in vogue. His message to the legislature in 1909 gave wide publicity to the flagrant evils of the primaries and added a constructive plan of reform. Apart from his suggestions for important changes in the methods of administering the primaries, his plan included a system of direct nominations which combined responsibility in the party machine and initiative in the party membership. Designations were to be made by elected party representatives meeting as a party committee for this purpose; but if their designations proved unsatisfactory to the members of the party, ample opportunity was to be afforded the latter for nominating contesting designations by petition. The final choice of the party nominee was to be decided by a direct vote of the members of the party.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , August 1917 , pp. 494 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1917

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References

1 New York Evening Post, September 22, 1916.

2 These opinions on the direct primary were secured, in part, by Harold P. Stokes, Albany correspondent of the New York Evening Post, who aided the writer by supplying him with valuable material on this subject.

3 As illustrative of one of the curiosities of the direct primary system, the following quotation from a letter from ex-Congressman William S. Bennett is of interest: “In 1915 at the special election a man by the name of Webster, who has never really been a New Yorker, ran in the Republican, Progressive and Independence League primaries against me and got a considerable vote. He had run the preceding year for congressman-at-large in Illinois and ran in the preferential primary for president in Minnesota and for vice-president in Oregon. He had no opposition in Oregon and therefore secured the endorsement of the Republicans there.”

4 The following report of the main items of expense of the congressman who spent $1519 in a vain effort to get the nomination is characteristic of the type:

5 New York Times, January 19, 1916.

6 New York Times, September 28 and 29, 1916.

7 New York Tribune, December 19, 1916.

8 Ibid., January 14, 1917.

9 A very interesting direct primary bill was that sponsored by former State Senator J. Godfrey Saxe. His letter to the chairman of the senate judiciary committee reads in part as follows:

“My plan, briefly, is, first, to restore the Hughes' system which, you will recollect, consisted of two elements: (1) Designations by the certificates of small party committees elected the year before, i.e., an organization or machine designation, whereby the leaders lay their cards on the table; (2) A period of opportunity of, say, fifteen days, within which other party members who dissent from any designation made by the machine may file a contesting designation, by petition.

“To this, I add my own new feature: Whenever and wherever no contesting designation is filed, the committee's designation shall become, ipso facto, the party nominee for that office without a primary election.

“Individuals join parties because they are in sympathy with them, and nine out of ten, if not ninety-nine out of one hundred designations are not contested today and the primary election is a farce. My plan recognizes that party leaders are usually going to make the nomination anyway; and after providing for the fullest opportunity to the individual party member to make an intelligent contest, it then provides that where there is no such contest, the primary election shall be dispensed with altogether. Why have an ‘election’ with only one candidate? I earnestly contend that this plan would result in an enormous reduction of trouble and expense and that it presents no serious difficulty.”

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