Gerald Burton Winrod and the Republican senatorial primary of 1938.

Abstract

The Republican senatorial primary of 1938 was important to the future and respectability of the Republican Party in Kansas. Four candidates ran for the right to meet the Democratic incumbent, George McGill, in the general election of 1938. Of these four, Jesse C. Fisher and Dallas Knapp had slim chances of being victorious. The two candidates that made the primary unusually significant and controversial were Clyde M. Reed and Gerald B. Winrod. Reed was a progressive Republican that had incurred many enemies, as a result of his liberal dealings and his support of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the presidential elections of 1932 and 1936. Reed was controversial, but not to the extent that Winrod was. Winrod led the Fundamentalist movement in the 1920s. In the 1930s he gained the reputation of being a supporter of Adolf Hitler and fascism, which compelled the conservative and liberal Republicans to cooperate to insure his defeat.