Schwabe was elected as a Republican to the Seventy-eighth and the two succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1943 – January 3, 1949). He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection to the Eighty-first Congress in 1948. He also worked as the Missouri State director of the Farmers Home Administration in the United States Department of Agriculture from 1953 to 1961.
Schwabe died on July 31, 1983, and was interred in Columbia Cemetery.[citation needed]