Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,056

This is the grave of Carl Hatch.

Born in 1889 in Kirwin, Kansas, Hatch attended the local public schools, did well, and had enough money to attend college, which happened at the Cumberland School of Law, which is today part of Samford University in Alabama. Not sure what led a Kansas kid to go to college in Alabama. This was also the era when one could get a bachelor of law degree. It was the short cut to a quick admission to the bar in a less specialized era and Hatch was admitted in 1912. He started a practice in El Dorado, Oklahoma that year. In 1916, he moved his practice to Clovis, New Mexico, where he worked until 1929.

But Hatch wasn’t just some small town lawyer. He was a politically ambitious young Democrat who found New Mexico a good place for him to rise. It was a new state still after all and there were opportunities for young men who thought Clovis (of all damn places) was a good place to make a life. So having just arrived in the state, he became assistant attorney general in 1917 and did that for a couple of years. He then became collector of internal revenue for the state from 1919 to 1922. He was named a Judge of the New Mexico District Court for the Ninth Judicial District in 1923 and did that until 1929.

In 1932, Hatch was a presidential elector for New Mexico, happy to cast his vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was really just a Democratic insider, not someone who had ever run for office before. But in 1933, FDR named New Mexico senator Sam Bratton to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Bratton accepted that position. The governor then named Hatch to his position. Hatch had to run for himself in 1934. He won and would be a prominent senator for the next fifteen years.

Generally, Hatch was the kind of standard western senator that still defines both parties today–lots of committee work on western issues such as agriculture and forests that stay out of the headlines and the committees that interest political junkies. He would become Chairman of the Committee on Public Lands and Surveys for six years, for example.

But everyone who pays any attention at all to politics has at least heard Hatch’s name because he is the sponsor of the Hatch Act. The origins of this law aren’t great. Hatch represented a bunch of conservative Democrats and Republicans who were furious that New Deal liberals in government were actively engaged in politics. That was particularly true of Harry Hopkins and the Works Progress Administration. This was all during FDR’s attempted purge of conservatives in the 1938 elections, which largely failed because Roosevelt didn’t really understand state level politics in most of these places. So this was a right-wing move in a liberal age to undermine progressive politics. Passed in 1939, it came after news stories suggested that WPA workers in a few states were promising employment and patronage in return for contributions to liberal candidates. I imagine there was at least some truth to this, though I’ve never seen any exploration of the issue.

In any case, Hatch took the lead in writing the law that would supposedly depoliticize government workers. The law is often misunderstood. In fact, today people talk about it all the time but it is the most violated law in the entire nation. Can you imagine anyone in the Trump administration being prosecuted for violating the Hatch Act? But then sometimes you see some low-level government employee–I’m talking someone way below anyone’s radar screen–email or tell someone they can’t talk about politics because they work for the government, which is very much not what this law does either. Specifically, it makes illegal any government employee from using their power to influence elections while on the job, such as through bribery, intimidation, promises of employment, things like that. Of course it was also anti-communist and prohibited government workers from being members of the Communist Party, as well as fascist organizations, which of course was relevant in 1939. It doesn’t do anything when the fascists get elected to lead the government, unfortunately.

The law’s 1940 extension added some levels of restrictions to state and local employees funded by the government, such as state employees who are administering government programs like Social Security or FICA or Medicare. There have been changes over the years since as well. But the law is neither as overwhelming nor restrictive as it is sometimes made out to be. In a properly run nation, it’s probably not a bad law. This is, however, not a properly run nation. And in truth, it wasn’t even effective in stopping massive political donations, as there were plenty of ways for political figures to give money.

Roosevelt very much wanted to veto the Hatch Act. He was disgusted by the right-wing of his party and didn’t want to give them any power. But this was the kind of story where they had the political tailwinds behind them and it was going to be quite politically damaging to not sign it. So he just lied through his teeth and embraced it. He was a good politician, no doubt about that.

Unsurprisingly, Hatch was a toad on most of things. It wasn’t only restricting the power New Dealers that he was with southern Democrats on. He thought any kind of fair employment bill was unconstitutional and routinely sided with the racists on that, opposing his fellow New Mexico Democrat Dennis Chavez, who represented a very different kind of New Mexican. Most of the time though, outside of the famous law named for him, he was more or less a non-entity. He barely comes up in the scholarly literature on any issue of the time except for that one, which is pretty interesting to me given the overwhelming amount of books and articles on mid-twentieth century politics. Again, some of this is that much of his focus was on the ag issues of the west that don’t get a lot of attention but a lot of it is that he was mostly a zero.

In 1949, Harry Truman offered Hatch a judgeship on the District Court for New Mexico. It wasn’t even an appeals court position. I think Hatch mostly wanted to retire and go home and just be active there. The Senate easily confirmed him. He stayed on the court for almost the rest of his life, going into retired status just before his death, in 1963. He died at the age of 73.

Carl Hatch is buried in Fairview Park Cemetery, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in 1934, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frances Maloney is in Meriden, Connecticut and Park Trammell is in Lakeland, Florida. Now those are some memorable guys! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.