The GOP Rebounds.

Although the Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress, the Republican Party was considered by many to be the big winner in the congressional elections of 1914. Having placed third in the presidential election of 1912, the GOP's successes in 1914 reaffirmed its broad-based electoral support. Republicans charged the Democrats with fiscal mismanagement, while the Democrats ran on the legislative successes of the first two years of the Wilson administration. In the aftermath of the 1914 elections the Progressive Party was on the brink of collapse. Theodore Roosevelt commented that in the East, "there is not a state in which the Progressive party remains in condition even to affect the balance of power between the two old parties." Republicans picked up sixty-nine seats in the House, where they held 196 seats to the Democrats' 230. In the Senate the Democrats fared better, increasing the...