Political Parties

Political Parties. Influenced by the eighteenth century's classical republican intellectual tradition, America's founding fathers were hostile to political parties, believing them to be corrupt advocates of narrow factional interests. Political parties emerged, nevertheless, when Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, soon Federalists and Republicans, squared off to define the authority of the new federal government in the 1790s. Much was at stake as a multitude of social, economic, and regional interests bred unremitting conflict. As political leaders addressed these issues, they mobilized support across a large landscape in order to contest regular elections on behalf of different policy initiatives. The Federalists, their strength centered among the social and economic elite of the New England and Middle Atlantic states, advocated a vigorous national government that would guarantee the nation's security and develop its commercial and manufacturing resources. The Republicans, in contrast, were more socially pluralist, wary of federal power, and supportive of economic policies that sustained the nation's dominant agricultural economy.

Political Parties in Antebellum America.

With much at stake, the contests between the Federalist party and the Jeffersonian Republican party were intense. But party activities remained limited, intermittent, and ephemeral. Turnout at the polls was low. Few voters were deeply committed to either party, policy disagreements were largely confined to small groups of political leaders, and the antiparty tendencies of the political culture remained influential. Neither party developed extensive organizations to promote its interests, and whatever furor the parties provoked in Congress or state legislatures did not survive for long. As a result, the history of the first parties was brief. The Federalists faded after 1815, while Republicans splintered into factions. What conflict remained in this “era of good feelings” was fragmented and shallowly rooted.

Party politics reappeared in the 1820s with more intensity and staying power. The nation's rapid development reinvigorated battles over the authority of the central government, while the expansion of the electorate, which by 1840 encompassed most white males, increased the need to organize voters and draw them into the electoral process. Democrats and Whigs, the respective successors to the Republicans and Federalists, were, like their predecessors, coalitions of social and economic interests united by their commitments to distinct policy perspectives. The Democrats, having elected Andrew Jackson as president in 1828, pushed an agenda favoring limited government. The Whig party, arising in opposition to Jackson, tended to be more commercially oriented, favoring the use of national power to develop an integrated market economy. Socially, the parties differed on ethnic and religious lines. Historic tensions between Catholics and Protestants, different Protestant denominations, and people of different national background continued to shape political outlooks in the New World and to influence party choice. Party leaders articulated alternative policy agendas so starkly, and made the differences between them seem so wide, that party loyalists felt they had to participate in partisan warfare for fear of losing their birthright should the other side win. Election campaigns became raucous nationwide extravaganzas drawing thousands to rallies spiced by debates among candidates and rousing speeches by party heroes. Each party maintained a newspaper network to spread the partisan word. Each energetically brought out the faithful on Election Day. Politics was about parties. Voters loyally followed their party's direction and turned out at the polls in record numbers. Once in office, party representatives worked assiduously to implement their declared policies.

With these developments came a significant ideological shift. Parties were now accepted as necessary. Their authority was great. Still, aspects of the constitutional system, such as the need to amass an absolute majority in the Electoral College in order to win the presidency, limited the number of parties at the national level. Locally, the major parties used their power to restrict the number of candidates on the ballot. Minor parties never attracted a large vote, their hopes thwarted by most voters' strong partisan commitments. Nevertheless, given the close competition between the two major parties, minor parties were sometimes important in determining electoral outcomes and—in the case of the Liberty and Free Soil parties—in signaling the rise of sectional tensions.

Electoral realignments, sharp political shocks that jolted voters from their partisan moorings and affected the subsequent course of party warfare, occurred at regular intervals after the 1830s. The first of these came in the 1850s. Neither Whigs nor Democrats had spent time discussing sectional matters, but as new territories were acquired, as a campaign against the further spread of slavery took root, and as a bipartisan nativist backlash against Irish Catholic immigration beset the major parties, a new organization, the Republican party, arose. It brought together antislavery sectionalists and other northern dissenters from the old party system. The Republicans' victory as a sectional party in 1860 led to the South's secession and the Civil War, during which party conflict remained as vigorous as ever in the North. The Republicans won support as the pro‐Union party, while the Democratic party suffered because of its adherents' alleged treasonous sympathy for the South. In the Confederacy, party warfare subsided during the war but reappeared with renewed vigor thereafter.

From the Gilded Age through the New Deal Era.

Partisan warfare was unusually intense in the postwar decades. The two parties fought to a standstill in some of the closest, best organized, and most partisan elections in American history. Nevertheless, much was changing. With rapid industrialization, a new economic elite of investment bankers and manufacturers sought federal policy support for their efforts, and the Republican party best embodied the pro‐business position. The Democrats, in contrast, were strong in the agrarian South and among urban immigrant laborers put off by the Republicans' traditional hostility to ethnic outsiders. The latter supported the new urban political machines that pushed policy initiatives stressing government's responsibility to protect recent arrivals, the unemployed, and others in need.

Despite the Republicans' industrial tilt, the Democrats did not entirely win over the agricultural and labor sectors. Old party loyalties, Civil War memories, and ethnic antagonisms held thousands to their Republican loyalties. In the Gilded Age and Populist Era, economically marginalized workers and especially Western farmers challenged the existing order through third parties, notably the Greenback Labor and Populist parties. The Democrats behind William Jennings Bryan successfully attracted many of these have‐nots in the mid‐1890s but were soundly beaten by William McKinley and the Republicans in 1896 in another transforming electoral realignment that solidified Republican control of national politics for a generation.

In the Progressive Era, modernizing economic elites joined forces with the political reformers in a coalition that reinvigorated residual antiparty sentiment and presaged a massive change in American political culture. In the name of unselfish and uncorrupt politics, these antipartisans pushed legislation that weakened party control of the nominating and electoral process, significantly cut off the parties' major source of funds necessary to fight elections (the spoils system), and, in general, made the parties' operations more difficult. This attack had significant long‐range consequences. Parties remained influential, but a process of destabilization and decline was underway.

The first third of the twentieth century also brought a major ideological reshuffling of party positions. Within the Democratic party the rise of urban political groups seeking federal welfare legislation affected its traditional commitment to limited government. The Great Depression of the 1930s provoked a new electoral realignment that, this time, badly hurt the Republicans. Rallying behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, liberal Democrats vastly expanded the federal government's role to make it the guarantor of citizens' social and economic well‐being. They were constrained, however, by resistance from the party's southern wing. Southern Democratic opposition also prevented action on civil rights, even as African Americans shed their traditional Republican loyalties in gratitude for Democratic economic policies.

So popular were Democratic policy initiatives from the 1930s onward that some Republicans embraced them in the name of political survival. Although still verbally confrontational, the parties lost some of their polarizing edge as a result. Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, the Republicans briefly regained national power but with an agenda that accepted many of their rivals' initiatives. Back in power after 1960, the Democrats extended their social legislation, this time including civil rights, with the support of liberal Republicans.

The Declining Influence of Political Parties.

The conditions for a partisan realignment again seemed present in the 1960s. Some liberal Republicans did join the Democrats, and many southern whites became Republicans. But the effect of the Progressive Era assault on parties was now increasingly evident, aided by the decline of party‐reinforcing mechanisms, such as the fervent campaign rally, as well as by the rise of alternative means of political communication, especially television, which shaped election campaigns in nonpartisan, often antipartisan ways. Party identification weakened as voters grew more unsettled in their behavior, primarily reacting to dramatic crises and to the appeal of charismatic candidates, rather than expressing long‐standing party loyalty. Electoral stability declined. The elements necessary for a realignment no longer existed.

Accompanying this voter defection from the party system was a strong popular reaction against the excesses and abuse of federal power identified with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandals. The antigovernment mood benefited the Republicans in the 1980s behind the conservative Ronald Reagan. The Democrats, charged with policy excesses that produced inflation and violent confrontations over civil rights, fell apart at the polls. The Reagan revolution undid or weakened much of the Democratic policy agenda of the previous era and reinvigorated sharp ideological polarities between the parties. In 1994, the backlash against the Democrats brought in the first Republican‐controlled Congress in forty years. But Republican gains were limited, with Democrats winning successive presidential elections in the 1990s. These divided outcomes suggested that a stable, partisan electoral order no longer existed. Without effective partisan anchoring, unpredictable voter swings became the rule. Whatever role parties still played, their influence was increasingly problematic in what was turning into a postpartisan political environment as the twentieth century ended.
See also Civil Service Reform; Depressions, Economic; Federal Government; Municipal and County Governments; National Woman's Party; Nativist Movement; New Deal Era, The; Progressive Party of 1912–1924; Progressive Party of 1948; Race and Ethnicity; Socialist Party of America; State Governments; States' Rights Party; Suffrage.

Bibliography

Roy Nichols , The Invention of the American Political Parties, 1967.
William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems, 1975.
Paul Kleppner et al. , The Evolution of the American Electoral Systems, 1981.
Michael McGerr , The Decline of Popular Politics, the American North, 1865–1928, 1986.
Joel H. Silbey , The American Political Nation, 1838–1893, 1991.
Sidney Milkis , The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal, 1993.
L. Sandy Maisel and William Shade, eds., Parties and Politics in American History, 1994.
Martin Wattenberg , The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–1992, 1994.

Joel H. Silbey