voting. Only six Republicans cast their ballots against the measure, including Jacob

Javits and Kenneth Keating, both of New York and associates of Dewey. Virtually all

of the nays came from non-oil states such as Minnesota, Kentucky, and Missouri, with

only a few anti-oil Pennsylvania Democrats breaking that trend. The Senate, a more

liberal body, refused to take up the bill.83 Here again, the conservatives in the House

had differed from the more diverse Senate membership, leaving another issue

unresolved as the Congress drew to a close.

 The Republican National Committee had won the elections of 1946 using a

conservative, anti-communist agenda, but party legislators failed to show unity of

purpose on Capitol Hill. The party was obviously divided, but the ideological labels

of liberal and conservative did not fit any group. Senators sympathetic to the Dewey

wing of the party submitted numerous civil rights bills, but Taft and his Old Guard

colleagues would only support one, the anti-poll tax. Some liberals such as Wayne

Morse refused to support the Tidelands Oil bills, forcing a number of Republicans to

ally with Southern Democrats to find the votes necessary to enact their program. The

sole occasion of a cohesive party was the Taft-Hartley Act, and this occurred only

because Taft made it the centerpiece of the Republican program and negotiated with

dissident northeasterners who initially rejected a strong anti-labor bill. Although both

groups self-identified as "liberals" or "conservatives," their voting records show a

lack of ideological purity on either side.

 Of course, the definitions of a liberal and a conservative were not clear. Taft,

one of the most principled defenders of economic states' rights, flatly refused to

support a compulsory FEPC but authored federal housing and education legislation.


83 Congress Senate, 80th Cong. 2nd Sess. Congressional Record (30 April 1948), 5118-5156; Congress,
Senate, Hearings before a Subcommittee on the Committee on the Judiciary, 80th Cong., 2nd Sess. 4-5
May 1948; Congress, Senate, 80th Cong., 2nd Sess. Daily Digest (10 June 1948), 459.