DEMOCRATIC PARTY

DEMOCRATIC PARTY, the oldest mass-based political party in the world. The party traces its ancestry to the collaboration between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison of Virginia and Aaron Burr and George Clinton of New York. The four founders of the party may first have gathered in upstate New York in 1791 when Jefferson and Madison were allegedly on a botanical expedition to observe the vegetation and wildlife of the region. The fateful alliance between Virginia and New York, between the planters and small farmers of the South with the small farmers of the West and urban workers of the East, began a durable coalition of American politics that endured into the middle of the twentieth century.

Jeffersonian Origins

Jefferson, Madison, Burr, and Clinton began their party as an organized opposition to the politics of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton and his supporters favored a strong central government, debt, credit, banking, and trade policies to further commercial and manufacturing interests, an expanded military and naval budget, and a conciliatory policy toward Great Britain. The Jeffersonian "Republicans" as they were then known, favored minimalist government, retirement of the national debt, no favoritism for banks or for manufacturing enterprises, and discriminatory trade policies that would favor France over Britain. The Jeffersonians conceived that they could make America's agricultural exports into a potent instrument of diplomacy. Jefferson, Madison, and Albert Gallatin, the ablest political economist among them, disdained military and naval expenditure as inherently wasteful and corrupting in peacetime.

The Jeffersonians gained power in both the executive and legislative branches in 1801 and they retained political power for a quarter century, the era known as the "VIRGINIA DYNASTY": Jefferson's two terms as president were followed by two terms each for his fellow Virginians James Madison and James Monroe.

Jefferson as president was not the minimalist that Jefferson the opposition leader had been. Although he reduced government expenditures, particularly the war and navy budget, his refusal to pay a "tribute" to the dey of Algiers resulted in the Tripolitan War, and a buildup of American naval forces that extended to the WAR OF 1812. Most importantly, Jefferson the "strict constructionist" of the Constitution dramatically expanded presidential power by negotiating the LOUISIANA PURCHASE, which he initiated and concluded without a specific constitutional warrant.

Jefferson's second term and Madison's first term marked a less successful period for the party that now called itself the "Democratic Republicans." The Jeffersonians tried to achieve their diplomatic ends peacefully, and this meant attempting to force diplomatic success through trade policy. Jefferson's Embargo Act and Madison's Non-Intercourse Act marked efforts to secure French and British recognition of America's neutral rights in the midst of their all-out struggle in the Napoleonic Wars.

In the upheaval of the war with Britain in 1812, the Jeffersonians found themselves severely hampered in their defense efforts, in part because of the cutbacks in naval and military budgets they had initiated a decade earlier. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, Madison and Monroe altered their approach to economic policy. Madison endorsed a protective tariff in 1816 and supported a new charter for a Bank of the United States. Madison even cautiously approved of federally initiated internal improvements, such as canals, roads, and river and harbor improvements. By the end of Madison's presidency and throughout Monroe's two terms, known as the "ERA OF GOOD FEELING," the Democratic Republican Party largely abandoned its minimalism and supported tariff, banking, and improvements policies originally supported by its Federalist opponents.

The Jacksonians

After the retirement of James Monroe, the newly renamed "Democratic" Party came to rally around the candidacy of Andrew Jackson. Jackson steered the party back toward its minimalist origins. Jackson vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States and expressed his hostility to federally funded internal improvements with a veto of the Maysville Road Bill. While Jackson favored tariff reduction in his first term, he would not countenance the efforts of states' rights extremists in South Carolina, under the leadership of John C. Calhoun, to nullify the existing tariff. Jackson reduced the tariff and used the threat of a Force Bill to compel South Carolina to retreat from its dangerous course. Jackson favored aggressive western expansion into Native American lands and he initiated the removal of the remaining Indian tribes in the Southeast—the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles—to much less hospitable lands more than 1,000 miles farther west in what today is the state of Oklahoma.

Jackson and his successor Martin Van Buren of New York favored the radical "HARD MONEY" policies advocated by labor reformers and some small farmers. Jackson initiated the Specie Circular, which required that all land transactions be conducted using coin rather than bank notes. In the aftermath of a severe downturn in the economy in 1837, Van Buren blamed "overspeculation" and called for a complete separation of bank and state. Hereafter all federal deposits would repose in an independent Subtreasury, immune from banking interference but also unavailable for investment to reflate the economy.

While the Specie Circular did not have its intended effect of reducing the power of banks and speculators, neither did it cause the panic of 1837, as many of the Democrats' Whig opponents charged. Nevertheless, the panic of 1837 and the economic discontent that lasted into the 1840s ended the Democratic dominance of the government after a dozen years. The Whig opposition to the Democrats succeeded in 1840 by imitating many of the aspects of Jacksonian Democracy that the voters found most appealing: in the "Log Cabin" campaign of that year they nominated a war hero and alleged log cabin dweller William Henry Harrison, known as "Old Tippecanoe" to supplant "Old Hickory" and his successor "Old Kinder-hook." Van Buren may not have made much impression on the voters in 1840, but he left a lasting impression on American language: His nickname "O.K." came to stand for anything that had popular approval.

The Democrats came back into power in 1845 with the accession to the presidency of another Tennessean, "Young Hickory," James K. Polk. Polk, like Jackson, was an ardent expansionist, and he campaigned for the presidency with promises to annex the republic of Texas to the Union and to extend Oregon Territory to the border of Russian Alaska: "FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT!" In the latter affair, Polk accepted reality and abandoned northern expansion in favor of an equitable split of Oregon Territory between the United States and British North America. In the matter of Texas, Polk proved far more willing to resort to war. The successful conclusion of that war and the forced cession by Mexico of California, New Mexico, and the rest of its northern territory proved very popular. Polk's free trade policy, negotiated at a time when Great Britain was also abandoning protectionism, helped to generate significant economic expansion. Polk was sufficiently popular that he could easily have run for reelection. He had promised to serve only a single term, however. A Whig, the MEXICAN-AMERICAN WAR hero General Zachary Taylor, followed in office.

Polk's term as president marks the maturity of the Democratic Party in the antebellum era. The Democrats had succeeded in becoming the dominant party of the era by appealing to most planters in the South, small farmers in the West, and urban workers and immigrants in the Northeast. The Democrats were the party of minimal government and libertarianism on the domestic front. The party was consistently hostile to the causes of social reform, such as temperance, education reform, women's rights, and, most unequivocally, abolitionism. The party supported western expansion and after Polk's term this expansion was linked to extending territory for the expansion of slavery. Jefferson's notion that expansion into the West would extend the "empire of liberty" had given way to an idea condemned by antislavery reformers that further expansion would only further the "empire of slavery."

The Democratic Party in the Sectional Crisis and Civil War

By the mid-1850s the Democratic Party was the only significant national institution that united adherents both North and South. The Democrats accomplished this feat at a time when churches, professional associations, and fraternal organizations, to say nothing of the Whigs, had split over the issue of slavery. The party had achieved this unity by papering over its differences on the issue of slavery and, as a result, antislavery Democrats like David Wilmot, Charles Sumner, and even Martin Van Buren abandoned the party. Beneath the veneer of unity, there lurked a deep division between the wings of the Democratic Party. Northern Democrats like Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois favored popular sovereignty as a solution to the problem of slavery in the territories. Southern Democrats like John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky argued that slave-holders were entitled to full protection of their "property" wherever they should go in the federal territories, a view endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision.

By 1860 the Democrats could no longer paper over their differences. In a four-way presidential contest with Republican Abraham Lincoln and Constitutional Unionist John Bell, both wings of the Democratic Party were resoundingly defeated. With the secession of the Confederate states, the Democratic Party lost its base and became a rump party, deeply divided between WAR DEMOCRATS like Montgomery Blair of Maryland, who served in Lincoln's cabinet, and Peace Democrats like Mayor Fernando Wood of New York, who were openly friendly to the aims of the Confederacy. With the Union victories of 1863 and 1864, General George McClellan, a War Democrat campaigning on a Peace platform, could not win the presidency away from Abraham Lincoln.

The Gilded Age

In the aftermath of the CIVIL WAR the Democrats drifted for nearly a decade, unsure of their identity, from the pro-southern urban politics of New York governor Horatio Seymour to the reformist zeal of Horace Greeley, once anathema to every organization Democrat North or South. Although the Democrats under Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote and in all likelihood the electoral vote in the disputed election of 1876, the Republican Party emerged victorious in a compromise settlement. The Democrats gained by this Faustian bargain, however. With the withdrawal of federal troops from the southern states in 1877, the South became solidly Democratic and succeeded in disenfranchising African Americans almost completely within a decade.

The Democrats' fortunes revived in 1884 thanks to the reformism of New York governor Grover Cleveland. Dedicated to free trade and civil service reform and opposed to expansionism into the Caribbean and Hawaii, the Democrats attracted a significant coterie of reformminded Republicans known as the "MUGWUMPS." These deserters left their party to support Cleveland and remained in the Democratic Party as the forerunners of the Democratic Progressives.

Populism and Progressivism

In the 1890s, however, the urban and agrarian components of the Democratic coalition drifted apart on the issue of an expansionist money supply. Cleveland and other eastern Democrats, known as "GOLD BUGS," favored remaining on the gold standard, a policy that benefited both Wall Street financiers and urban workers. Agrarian Democrats in the West and South, however, suffering severely from credit reduction after the depression of 1893, found a new eloquent champion for an expansionist money policy in the silver-tongued oratory of William Jennings Bryan.

Bryan's oratory left his southern and western listeners spellbound. His hostility to banks and to eastern financial interests had deep roots in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ideology. Bryan's expansionist money policy engendered hostility, however, among the other key component of the Democratic coalition: urban workers in the East. His money policy and his endorsement of free trade in the depressed economy of the 1890s left wageworkers seeking prosperity under the protectionist policies of William McKinley and the Republicans. Bryan's religious fundamentalism gave his oratory tremendous moral power among those for whom biblical imagery was an appropriate metaphor for all problems of life. His famous peroration delivered at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1896 electrified his supporters, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Others found Bryan's speech more alarming than thrilling. Among liturgical Christians, particularly Catholics and Lutherans, Bryan's use of the crucifixion as political metaphor sounded blasphemous. To Jews, the fixation on Christian crucifixion and on the avarice for gold held unpleasant echoes of European anti-Semitism. The result was the alienation of non-evangelical Democrats from Bryan and from the party. The Republican Party thereafter dominated all sections of the United States except the South until the Great Depression.

The Democrats spent the following sixteen years as a political minority, identified with a kind of retrogressive agrarianism in the South and ethnocentric tribalism in the North. The election of Woodrow Wilson transformed the Democrats in 1912. He led the party away from its agrarian roots and toward an energetic form of progressivism. Wilson's progressivism was more concerned with promoting economic competition than with regulating monopolies. Wilson essentially abandoned the traditional minimalism of previous Democrats from Jefferson and Jackson through Cleveland. Only in one respect did Wilson retain a traditional Democratic approach: Wilson was a strict segregationist who re-segregated the civil service in Washington.

During WORLD WAR I, Wilson took an antitrust approach in foreign affairs. Like Jefferson and Madison one hundred years earlier, Wilson found it impossible to generate respect for American neutral rights when Europe was once again engaged in an all-out struggle. With America's entry into the war, the Wilsonians' agenda became ever more interventionist. The WAR INDUSTRIES BOARD regulated wages and prices in key defense industries, including steel, petroleum, and railroads.

The aftermath of World War I brought the Democrats new problems. Wilson sponsored the FOURTEEN POINTS as principles by which the victorious Allies might lay the foundations of a lasting peace at Versailles. These were hailed abroad and widely admired at home. Wilson's devastating stroke, his consequent lack of judgment, and his failure to cooperate with the Republican-controlled Congress doomed the Versailles Treaty's passage in the Senate, and the failure of the United States to participate in Wilson's cherished LEAGUE OF NATIONS. The war's aftermath brought other problems on the home front. The passage of the ESPIONAGE and SEDITION ACTS and the "PALMER RAIDS" led by Wilson's attorney general against domestic radicals tarnished the Democrats' record as the defender of civil liberties. It also harmed the party's image among those ethnic minorities, such as Italians and Jews, singled out for persecution.

The 1920s were a period of eclipse for the Democrats. The party was bitterly divided over ethnocultural issues, including Prohibition, immigration restriction, and whether or not to recognize the KU KLUX KLAN. The Democratic Party was deeply divided between Drys and Wets, Protestants and Catholics, Klansmen and their antagonists. Even among what Wilson called "hyphenated Americans," there were deep divisions between northern and southern Europeans, old and new immigrants, Catholics and Jews. With Al Smith's nomination for president in 1928, the latter divisions between non-Protestant immigrants disappeared and the urban Progressive Smith led a new generation of Italian and Jewish Americans into the Democratic fold, where they would later support Franklin D. Roosevelt and the NEW DEAL. Smith, however, proved too much of an urban stereotype for Protestant Democrats in the South and West. His accent, his Catholicism, and his antagonism to PROHIBITION alienated many Democrats in the South and West into voting Republican for the first time in their lives. In 1928 Smith carried only two heavily Catholic states outside the Deep South: Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The Solid South was no longer solid in the face of a Catholic running for president. Smith lost the Upper South, where fear of Catholicism triumphed over hatred of Republicans. Only in the Deep South (including heavily Catholic Louisiana) did the loathing of Republicans prove stronger than fear of a Catholic in the White House.

The New Deal and the Fair Deal

In 1932, in the worst days of the GREAT DEPRESSION, the Democrats nominated another New Yorker for president: this time however, he had an impeccable old-line Protestant background and he hailed from a rural area in the Hudson River valley. Franklin D. Roosevelt united the Wets, Catholics, Jews, and urban Progressive reformers of the East and Midwest with the small farmers and miners of the West and the lily-white Democratic Party of the South. Roosevelt synthesized the trust-busting economic policy of the Wilsonians with the interventionist regulatory approach of his distant cousin Theodore.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Roosevelt launched the "alphabet soup" of government agencies instituted to help the American economy get going again. In agriculture, labor reform, securities trading, child labor restrictions, social security, unemployment relief, rural electrification, banking, and currency regulation, Roosevelt stamped the Democrats' vision of government as inherently interventionist.

WORLD WAR II drew the United States once again into an all-out European conflict, and Roosevelt sought an unprecedented third term because the nation required an experienced chief executive in the midst of such a grave worldwide crisis. In the midst of the war, the Democrats sponsored active intervention in the economy. As in World War I, government, industry, and labor found themselves in a sometimes-uneasy partnership directing a planned war economy. Wartime exigencies forced Roosevelt to break with another Democratic tradition: in the midst of the war, by executive order, Roosevelt prohibited racial discrimination in the hiring policy of federal contractors. African Americans reciprocated by giving their support to the Democrats, beginning in 1932 and accelerating in the 1940s. For the first time in American history, by the 1940s the majority of African American votes were cast for the Democrats.

With Roosevelt's death and the defeat of the Axis, the Democrats looked to Harry Truman to orchestrate the postwar strategic and economic order. The devastation of Western Europe and growing tensions with Joseph Stalin over the political complexion of Eastern Europe produced conflict with the Soviet Union in the early stages of formulating a postwar world order. The Soviet blockade of West Berlin and a Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia produced a siege mentality among Americans now in the early stages of the COLD WAR with the Soviet Union.

Truman and the Democrats supported interventionism and new mechanisms to promote international stability. The MARSHALL PLAN, the WORLD BANK, and the INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND produced economic aid and lent stability to the war-torn Western European economies. The TRUMAN DOCTRINE in the eastern Mediterranean produced "containment" of Communism in Greece and Turkey. American sponsorship of decolonization in India and the Middle East gave Americans greater leverage in those newly emerging states. The United States' recognition of Israel cemented a lasting relationship in the Middle East, despite the antagonism of European allies and the emerging Arab states.

East Asia proved more difficult for Truman and the Democratic Party. The successful Communist Revolution in China prompted Truman's Republican opponents to ask, "Who lost China?" American inability to halt the KOREAN WAR before it degenerated into a long, inconclusive stalemate also proved unpopular with the voters. When the Republicans nominated war hero Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, campaigning against "Korea, Communism, and Corruption," they made inroads into hitherto solid Democratic constituencies, including Southerners and Catholics.

In 1954 the Democrats regained their control of both houses of Congress after their losses in the 1952 Eisenhower landslide. The Democratic leadership was able to work with Eisenhower to promote a bipartisan approach to such issues as nuclear energy, federal aid to education, interstate highways, and limited civil rights legislation. The Democrats in Congress and the Eisenhower administration proved unwilling, or incapable, however, of opposing Senator Joseph McCarthy, until his own ruthless excesses destroyed him.

The New Frontier and the Great Society

In 1960 the Democrats broke with tradition and nominated a young, Harvard-educated Catholic, John F. Kennedy, for the presidency. Kennedy inspired a generation of young Americans with his idealistic rhetoric promoting sacrifice. Kennedy sponsored sweeping civil rights legislation, a tax cut to stimulate the economy, and a doctrine of "limited war" that would engage Communism in peripheral struggle without risking nuclear holocaust.

After Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson inherited Kennedy's civil rights and limited war initiatives. In the hands of Johnson, widely considered the most effective majority leader of the Senate, sweeping civil rights legislation passed Congress for the first time since Reconstruction. The Democrats, once the party supporting white supremacy, inaugurated an era of Second Reconstruction with the CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964, the VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965, and the Fair Housing Bill of 1966. These measures and Johnson's sponsorship of a WAR ON POVERTY brought to life the full promise of inclusion for African Americans. That this was achieved by a southerner, thanks to his extraordinary legislative abilities, was an irony lost neither on blacks nor on his fellow white southerners. The VIETNAM WAR, however, proved to be Johnson's worst nightmare. He would not withdraw and he could not escalate the war without risking a nuclear war with the Soviet Union and with China. Johnson was left in a war he could not win, and he refused to run for re-election in a year in which the Democrats seemed bent on self-destruction.

The candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene Mc-Carthy in 1968, and the candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, fired the idealism of the youthful antiwar wing of the Democratic Party. The labor unions, the lower middle class, Catholics, and white southerners expressed their alienation from these new politics by staying away from the polls or defecting to the Republicans or to George Wallace.

The Post-Watergate Democrats

In the aftermath of WATERGATE, widespread disillusion with the Republicans produced dramatic gains for the Democrats in Congress and in the statehouses in 1974. Despite a four-year hiatus in which white southerner Jimmy Carter temporarily won the South back for the Democrats, the party once again seemed on the verge of convulsion in 1980. With the advent of Ronald Reagan's presidency in that year, the Republicans gained control of the Senate as well as the White House, while the Democrats—bitterly divided once again between the liberal wing supporting Edward Kennedy and the moderate wing supporting Carter—went down to a landslide defeat. The Democrats recovered their control of the Senate in 1986 but continued to govern largely in response to Republican initiatives in the Reagan years and in the PERSIAN GULF WAR of President George H. W. Bush.

The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 seemed to argue a return to more of the activist policies of the Democrats in earlier eras, but after the failure of his health care initiative and the ignominious defeat of the Democrats in both houses of Congress the party lost whatever initiative it had in leading the government. Although President Clinton easily won a second term in 1996 and Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, after that time the Democratic Party exhibited the deep divisions between its diverse constituencies that marked its earlier errands in the political wilderness.