On this day in 1935, New Mexico Republican Sen. Bronson Cutting died when a Transcontinental & Western Air DC-2, nearly out of fuel and groping through a dense fog for a safe landing place, crashed at the edge of a field near Atlanta, Missouri.

Cutting had boarded the twin-engine plane in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a flight back to Washington, where the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections was weighing a challenge to his seating brought by Rep. Dennis Chávez (D-N.M.). Cutting had flown to New Mexico to gather evidence to defend himself against Chávez’s charge that he had conspired to rig the 1934 senatorial election — one that Cutting , the incumbent, carried by 1,261 votes despite a nationwide Democratic tide.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Cutting and Chávez ran on similar platforms, calling for more government aid to farmers and small-business owners. Cutting’s death shattered the GOP in New Mexico; the party didn’t get another Republican to the Senate until 1972.

Within a week, New Mexico’s Democratic governor named Chávez to fill the vacant seat. Chávez went on to win a special election in 1936 with 55 percent of the vote and was subsequently reelected four times, serving until his death in 1962.

Educated at Harvard, Cutting had moved to New Mexico in 1910 at the age of 22 to be treated for tuberculosis. He was a classmate and friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt; his newspaper endorsed FDR’s presidential bid in 1932 and backed his New Deal policies. In the months before his death, he had been touted as a possible contender for the 1936 Republican presidential nomination.

In contrast to the wealthy Cutting, Chávez spent his early years struggling against the barriers of poverty and prejudice among the state’s political elite against his Hispanic roots.

Bronson M Cutting