page_title: 1959 Philadelphia municipal election
section_title: Mayor
hierarchical_section_title: 1959 Philadelphia municipal election / Mayor
caption_attribution_description: English: 1959 Philadelphia mayor election by ward
context_page_description: Philadelphia's municipal election of November 3, 1959 involved contests for mayor, all seventeen city council seats, and several other executive and judicial offices. Citywide, the Democrats took majorities of over 200,000 votes, continuing their success from the elections four years earlier. Richardson Dilworth, who had been elected mayor in 1955, was re-elected over Republican nominee Harold Stassen. The Democrats also took fifteen of seventeen city council seats, the most seats allowed to any one party under the 1951 city charter. They further kept control of the other citywide offices. The election represented a continued consolidation of control by the Democrats after their citywide victories of the previous eight years.
context_section_description: In the mayor's race, incumbent Democrat Richardson Dilworth ran for reelection against Republican Harold Stassen. After service in World War I and a law degree from Yale, Dilworth practiced law in Philadelphia. He and Joseph S. Clark, Jr., were allies in the anti-corruption reform effort that had swept the city eight years earlier in coalition with the Democratic political organization. Dilworth had run for mayor unsuccessfully in 1947, with Clark as his campaign manager. In 1949, he was elected City Treasurer. He resigned that post to run for governor in 1950, but was defeated by Republican John S. Fine. Democratic party leaders had intended Dilworth to be their candidate for mayor again in 1951, but when Clark announced his candidacy, Dilworth agreed to run for district attorney instead, and won. In 1955, Dilworth got his shot at the mayor's office when Clark instead ran for the Senate; he was elected with 59% of the vote. Four years later, he was renominated without opposition.
  The Republicans nominated Harold Stassen. In 1938, Stassen was elected Governor of Minnesota at the age of thirty-one. He became known as an efficient, honest, and moderately liberal governor, and was reelected in 1940 and 1942. Stassen resigned as governor shortly after his 1942 reelection to serve in World War II. He made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination for president in 1948; later that year, he was appointed president of the University of Pennsylvania. After four years, he left that position to work in the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration as  a special assistant for nuclear disarmament efforts. In 1958, he sought the nomination for Governor of Pennsylvania, but was unsuccessful.
  As the 1959 election approached, Republican City Committee leaders Wilbur H. Hamilton and Austin Meehan backed Stassen for their party's nomination. Triumphing over token opposition in the May primary, Stassen pledged to cut taxes and promised to run a "fusion campaign," inviting the support of Democrats dissatisfied with Dilworth's administration. Dilworth called for more spending, especially on streets, highways, and public housing, and admitted that increased taxation was likely the price of those improvements.
  As in 1955, the result was a landslide for Dilworth. Dilworth called the victory "greater than we had anticipated" and said the scale of the landslide "puts us on a spot. We really have to deliver during the next four years." Stassen said he would return to his law practice and promised to continue to build the Republican Party in Philadelphia. Dilworth secured nearly two-thirds of the vote and fifty-eight out of fifty-nine wards, continuing a trend of Democratic dominance in the city's politics.
caption: Ward-level results in the mayor's race, with Dilworth in blue and Stassen in red
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