As this year’s U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania has unfolded with Katie McGinty as the Democratic nominee, many residents have been surprised to learn that, if she wins, she will be the first woman elected to the Senate from this state. That’s right, starting with William Maclay and Robert Morris in 1788, there have been 58 senators from Pennsylvania, and every single one has been a man.
There was one race, however, when we came oh-so-close to having a woman in the Senate. In 1964, a Harrisburg resident named Genevieve Blatt came within 1 percentage point of making history.
Blatt was actually a native of Clarion County, but spent much of her adult life living on North Street in Harrisburg. And she was very much part of the community here. As an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I would always see her sitting in the front pew for 6:45 a.m. Mass.
She was a woman way ahead of her time. She was the first woman to ever gain statewide office when she was elected secretary of Internal Affairs in 1954 by a 52 to 48 percent margin. (The closeness of her races became such a constant in her career that she was given the sardonic nickname “Landslide Blatt”). Later in her career, she became the first woman to serve on the Commonwealth Court.
And she was one of the first Pennsylvania politicians to grasp the growing importance of television. For years, she hosted a Saturday morning TV show called “Coffee with Genevieve,” in which she interviewed Pennsylvanians famous and not so famous about aspects of life here. (She once had my brother and his friend, Jerome O’Leary, both grade-schoolers at the time, on the show to talk about the various rocks to be found in the state).
And so, in 1964, she set out to break another glass ceiling by running for the Senate. To put the endeavor in context, remember that women had not been granted the right to vote until 1920, and no woman was elected to the Senate until Margaret Chase Smith won a seat in Maine in 1948.
But, feeling herself more than qualified, Blatt announced her candidacy—and was completely ignored by her own state party. The Democrats had their own man, a flamboyant Supreme Court justice named Michael Musmanno. He quickly received the party endorsement.
Musmanno was an entertaining figure who was proud of his Italian heritage and was the author of many books, including one called “Columbus Was First,” which he wrote to refute claims that other Europeans preceded Christopher Columbus to America. (A sought-after speaker, Musmanno agreed to speak to my father’s Knights of Columbus council if they agreed to buy copies of the book to be re-sold to council members. Boxes of the books sat unopened in our attic for years afterwards.) A fervent anti-Communist, Musmanno once demanded that the Cincinnati Reds change their nickname.
The lack of the party endorsement did not dissuade Blatt, and she ran anyway. In one of the many similarities to this year’s race, there were three candidates for the Democratic nomination that year. The third, performing the role that John Fetterman played this year, was a massive man from Allegheny County named Dave Roberts. Roberts would have a key role in the race by taking votes from Musmanno.
Musmanno had the support of virtually every Democratic power broker except Blatt’s patron, U.S. Sen. Joe Clark.
The race was perilously close, even by Blatt’s standards. On election night, she emerged with a 491-vote edge over Musmannno. Sort of.
Musmanno challenged 5,600 votes in Philadelphia because of faulty ballots. In a precursor of the Bush-Gore fight over Florida, the court challenges dragged on for months until the state Supreme Court finally ruled in Blatt’s favor on Aug. 21, and her general election race could finally begin.
The late start would have been a challenge under any circumstances, but Blatt’s Republican opponent was an entrenched incumbent named Hugh Scott. Not only had Scott served six years in the Senate, but he had been in the House for 16 years before that. And, while Blatt was badly underfunded, Scott had access to resources from around the country.
But Scott had a problem, too. The Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, was considered too extreme for Pennsylvania, and Scott was doing his best to avoid any association with him. The best he could do was to say that he supported Republicans “at all levels,” a response that satisfied nobody.
In the end, Scott won by a little more than 1 percent, despite the Lyndon Johnson rout at the top of the ticket. His greater resources were too much to overcome. As an example, one night, the Blatt campaign staff received a frantic phone call from the candidate who was stuck in an airport because she did not have enough money to buy a plane ticket. Clark was called off the floor of the Senate, and he wired her the money.
There are only a few political veterans who remember that race. I am one of them because it was my first political campaign. I was 15, and my brother dragged me along some nights to the Blatt headquarters to stuff envelopes. It was only in retrospect that I realized how close we had come to making history.
According to her friends, Blatt never dwelled on what might have been. She went on to a distinguished career as a jurist. In perhaps her most famous case, she wrote the opinion demanding that the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association provide gender equality in high school sports. For that and her numerous accomplishments, she is honored by a historical marker in Riverfront Park at Liberty Street, close to building she called home for much of her life.
Sadly, though, but for a difference of 1 percent of the votes cast, Genevieve Blatt would have had another accomplishment on the marker—first woman U.S. senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Joseph Powers is a native of Harrisburg and an adjunct professor at Saint Joseph’s University.
