Democratic Party

Democratic Party. No certain date marks the beginning of the Democratic party, but its intellectual heritage can be traced to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both of whom shunned parties even as they shaped the policies and sensibility of the so‐called Democratic‐Republican political movement during the 1790s. Opposing the centralizing programs of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who urged a revenue system based on tariffs, excise taxes, a federal bank, and funding of the national debt, Jefferson and Madison established enduring party themes. Champions of the common people, especially small farmers, they spoke for small and frugal government, of states' rights, and the people's sovereignty. In their presidential administrations from 1801 until 1817, the two Virginians sought to retire the national debt, remove the government from the nation's economic life, and rely on state militias rather than a federal army.

While the Democrats had leaders, a program, and an ideology, they had no organization or loyal following until after 1828 when Andrew Jackson was elected president. The Democrats, who now embraced the name their enemies had employed to tarnish them as radicals, held national presidential nominating conventions beginning in 1832, making this the world's oldest continuing political party. Coalescing around the popular Jackson, they started campaign newspapers, organized local and state committees, and built support through barbecues and partisan clubs.

Jackson, in turn, using presidential patronage to solidify support, defined national issues—especially in his opposition to a national bank and to federally funded internal improvements. These positions linked Democrats throughout the country to an organization with a national identity distinct from the Whig party (and later the Know‐Nothing and Republican parties) in a competitive two‐party system. By 1836 when master party‐builder Martin Van Buren won the presidency, nearly 80 percent of white males were voting in national elections, with the Democrats the majority party controlling Congress and many state legislatures.

From 1840 to 1860, the Democrats displayed considerable resiliency. While they elected presidents James Knox Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan in this period, they faced a bitter sectional crisis. Recruiting urban German and Irish immigrants into their ranks, they achieved a nationwide constituency, only to see it shattered in the 1850s by congressional divisions over slavery in the territories and the emergence of a powerful Republican party in the North. On the eve of the Civil War, as party realignments shuffled the support of all political parties, the Democrats' power and programs tilted toward the South.

From 1860, when a divided Democratic party offered the electorate two sectional candidates— Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Kentucky's John Breckinridge (1821–1875)—until the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the Democrats were a minority party. During the Civil War many leaders and supporters joined the Confederacy, and the majority Republicans tarred northern Democrats as disloyal copperheads. Still, even as Democrats opposed Emancipation and such popular Republican legislation as the Homestead Act and support for higher education, they continued to hold a third of the voters as well as a few northern governorships and legislatures.

After the war, Democrats came to embody white racism as they opposed the Reconstruction amendments granting freedmen citizenship and voting rights. White southerners' disproportionate power in the party was perpetuated by a party rule that presidential nominations must be approved by two‐thirds, not just a majority, of convention delegates. Using voting‐precinct surveys and door‐to‐door leafletting (a campaign strategy developed by New York's Samuel Tilden), Democrats captured the House of Representatives in 1874, stunningly demonstrating their durability. As Reconstruction collapsed and the South returned to white domination, the party's future was assured, albeit with a dependence on the South and the increasingly Democratic border states that lasted until after World War II. Urban ethnic voters and white southerners formed the party's core constituencies. Although failing to win the presidency apart from Grover Cleveland's two victories in 1884 and 1892, the late nineteenth‐century Democratic party elected significant numbers of congressmen and senators who, given seniority rules, dominated important committees.

From 1896 to 1932, Republicans overwhelmingly controlled the federal government. Even William Jennings Bryan, who sounded like a Jacksonian with his agrarian appeals and complaints about monopolies, could not win the presidency in 1896, 1900, or 1908. But Bryan marked a watershed in party thinking when he championed an activist government. The 1908 Democratic platform espoused regulation of trusts and railroads, a federal income tax, and a national health bureau. In keeping with the party themes of equal rights and opportunities for all, liberal Democrats came to accept government intervention as a necessity for the well‐being of citizens in an industrial society.

Woodrow Wilson, in his successful presidential campaign of 1912, picked up on these themes with his New Freedom concept grounded in individual freedom achieved with the aid of the national government. Although Wilson won in 1912 primarily owing to a split in Republican ranks, he pursued a popular legislative agenda that included child‐labor reform, aid to agriculture, federal income taxes, corporate regulations, and banking reform. In his second term (until incapacitated by a stroke in 1919) he identified the Democratic party with an internationalist perspective sustained by party leaders throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.

The Democrats' long electoral drought in the 1920s ended in 1932 with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As the Republicans failed to meet the challenges of the Great Depression, the Democrats, led by the masterful coalition‐builder Roosevelt, used the government to alleviate economic and social problems. For the first time, the party became popular among African Americans, historically attached to the party of Lincoln. The New Deal coalition of urban ethnic voters, blacks, farmers, union members, and (increasingly restive) white southerners enabled Roosevelt's successor Harry S. Truman to win election in his own right in 1948, sustained Democratic strength in Congress in the 1950s even as the Republicans regained the presidency, and undergirded the 1960s administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

On foreign affairs, Democrats had historically differed widely, from Polk's expansionism to Bryan's pacifism and anti‐imperialism to Wilson's internationalism. From the late 1930s through the Cold War, the party firmly espoused internationalism, military strength, and America's mission to resist totalitarianism of the right or left. Roosevelt stiffened the nation's resolve to battle fascism, and the Truman administration embraced America's postwar global role in the struggle against communism in Europe, Korea, and elsewhere. By the 1960s, the party's Cold War liberalism focused on Asia, as President Johnson, while championing social welfare and civil rights at home, also plunged the nation into full‐scale war in Vietnam.

The late 1960s and 1970s brought a broad‐based reaction against the Democrats, not only because of the Vietnam War's bitter legacy, but also because of the party's identification with welfare spending, school busing, racial preferences, and a series of volatile social issues from abortion to gay rights unpopular with conservatives. The party struggled to represent the interests of various minority constituencies while simultaneously of fering a national vision, but Republican Richard M. Nixon defeated the liberal stalwart Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential race and crushed the 1972 Democratic candidate, liberal senator George McGovern (1922–) of South Dakota. The southern Democrat Jimmy Carter narrowly won in 1976, in the aftermath of Watergate, but by the 1980s, as many white middle‐class and working‐class voters concluded that the party had abandoned “mainstream” values, millions of Roosevelt Democrats became Reagan Democrats.

As the twentieth century ended, Democratic and Republican leaders alike struggled to adapt in an era of diminished party loyalty, voter fractiousness, personalized over‐organized politics, and the dominance of television. Divided government became the pattern: Democrats in the 1980s generally controlled Congress, the Republicans the presidency; in the 1990s, the situation was reversed.

Amid growing voter cynicism and apathy, Democratic neoliberals in Congress, organized as the Democratic Leadership Council, sought to erase the party's identification with big government and deficit spending. Adopting a centrist approach, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton proved a charismatic campaigner, returning the Democrats to the White House in 1992. Embracing deficit reduction and welfare reform, and aided by a buoyant economy, Clinton won reelection in 1996—only to endure the ignominy of an impeachment trial on charges arising from his efforts to conceal an affair with a White House intern. In the Cold War's aftermath, Clinton continued the tradition of Democratic internationalism, focusing now on regional peacekeeping, combating threats from rogue states, and promoting world trade.

Al Gore's narrow loss to George W. Bush after winning the popular vote in the disputed 2000 presidential election outraged and energized Democrats. But the party's 2004 presidential candidate, Massachusetts senator John Kerry, faced a challenge as he sought to uphold the party's liberal tradition, dating to the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, without alienating an increasingly conservative electorate hostile to big government, tax increases, and expansive social‐welfare programs. As the Democratic Party continued to evolve 170 years after its founding, the question of what it fundamentally stood for still remained unresolved.
See also Affirmative Action; Antitrust Legislation; Bank of the United States, First and Second; Compromise of 1877; Depressions, Economic; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: House of Representatives; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate. Foreign Relations; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; German Americans; Irish Americans; Liberalism; New Deal Era, The; Political Parties; Populist Era; Populist Party; Progressive Era; Progressive Party of 1912–1924; Progressive Party of 1948; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

David Cohn , The Fabulous Democrats, 1956.
Ralph Goldman , The Democratic Party in American Politics, 1966.
Richard Wade , The Democratic Party, 1960–1972, in History of U.S. Political Parties, ed. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 1973, pp. 2827–68.
Dewey Grantham , The Life and Death of the Solid South, 1979.
Robert Rutland , The Democrats: From Jefferson to Carter, 1979.
Alan Ware , The Breakdown of the Democratic Party Organization, 1985.
Murray Fisher, ed., Of the People: The 200‐Year History of the Democratic Party, 1992.
Peter Kovler, ed., Democrats and the American Idea, 1992.

Jean Harvey Baker

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer