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DEMOCRATIC PARTY

As the oldest existing political party in the world, the Democratic Party of the United States experienced its most significant expansion in voter registration and party organization, consistent electoral success in national elections, and fundamental changes in its coalition, policy agenda, and ideology during the Great Depression. Despite Democratic presidential nominee Alfred E. Smith's resounding defeat in the 1928 election, there was evidence of the potential for a future political realignment favoring the Democratic Party. Smith was the first Democratic presidential nominee in many years to win pluralities in the twelve largest American cities. He also carried the two most Catholic, urban states: Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The presidential election of 1928 also stimulated a sharp increase in voter registration and turnout among foreign-born citizens and the voting-age children of immigrants, especially women, who voted overwhelmingly for Smith.

After being nominated for president, Smith had designated John J. Raskob, a wealthy, Catholic, anti-prohibition or "wet," former Republican and General Motors executive, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Through his vigorous fund-raising among his business contacts, Raskob succeeded in liquidating the DNC's __BODY__.5 million campaign debt. He also created and financed a full-time publicity division for then DNC. Its director, Charles Michelson, researched and publicized the policy behavior and statements of Republican president Herbert Hoover, the RNC chairman, and Republicans in Congress so that Raskob and other Democrats could regularly and publicly criticize and oppose Republican policies, especially after the Great Depression began in late 1929.

Nonetheless, Raskob wanted to continue to focus the efforts of the Democratic Party in general and the DNC's apparatus in particular on repealing the national prohibition of alcohol. By concentrating on the prohibition issue, Raskob hoped that the Democratic Party would nominate Smith for president in 1932 and adopt a platform as conservative and pro-big business as the Republican platform on economic issues. Like other conservative Democrats, Raskob blamed the worsening economic conditions on excessive spending, bureaucratic bloat, and an unbalanced federal budget by the Hoover administration.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

The major obstacle to Raskob's strategy for the 1932 presidential election was Democratic governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. Roosevelt had served as assistant secretary of the navy during the Woodrow Wilson administration and as the Democratic vice presidential nominee of 1920. He had also made nominating speeches for Al Smith at the 1924 and 1928 Democratic national conventions, earning Roosevelt the respect of many Catholic Democrats. Reluctantly accepting Smith's request that he run for governor in 1928, Roosevelt won by a narrow margin as Smith decisively lost his home state to Hoover.

Frustrated by his failed efforts throughout the 1920s to change the national Democratic Party's organization, decision-making processes, ideology, and future economic platform, Roosevelt used his governorship and titular leadership of the New York Democratic Party as a role model for his future national party leadership as president. In order to attract the support of traditionally Republican, rural upstate New Yorkers, Roosevelt's policy agenda included property tax relief for farmers, the construction of farm-to-market roads, and the development of state-sponsored hydroelectric power for rural areas. With James A. Farley serving as secretary and later chairman of the New York Democratic state committee, Roosevelt directed Farley and Secretary of State Edward J. Flynn to secure the removal of local Democratic chairmen in heavily Republican areas who had been collaborating with Republican politicians in exchange for patronage. The governor also encouraged Farley and Flynn to recruit Democratic candidates for state and local offices in order to provide contested elections in Republican-dominated areas and increase Democratic representation in the Republican-controlled state legislature. Shrewdly attuned to the power of publicity through modern technology, Roosevelt had Farley arrange and finance monthly radio broadcasts and later, for his 1930 reelection campaign, talking movies.

Reelected governor in 1930 with 62 percent of the votes and a winning margin of more than 167,000 votes in upstate counties, Roosevelt used his second term to develop a successful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1932. He distinguished himself as the first governor to advocate unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Roosevelt also educated himself on policy issues that were of greater concern in the South and West, such as cotton prices, railroad rates, soil and forest conservation, flood control, and rural electrification. Meanwhile, James A. Farley and Roosevelt's aide Louis Howe traveled throughout the United States, but especially in the South and West, to lobby for delegate support for Roosevelt at the 1932 Democratic national convention. Roosevelt, Farley, and Howe assumed that most northern delegates controlled by Catholic Democratic politicians would probably vote for Smith at the convention. Consequently, their strategy was to gradually develop a consensus-building yet ideologically diverse coalition of southern conservatives and western progressives whose delegates would eventually provide Roosevelt with at least the two-thirds majority needed for the presidential nomination. But this strategy also required the pro-Roosevelt Democrats to discourage and minimize the number of favorite son and other minor presidential candidacies at the convention. After they persuaded Speaker of the House John N. Garner of Texas to end his presidential candidacy in exchange for the vice-presidential nomination, Roosevelt was nominated for president on the fourth ballot.

With approximately one third of the voters identified as Democrats in 1932, Roosevelt recognized the need to attract the votes of disaffected Republicans, independents, and minor party members so that he could win a decisive victory that would provide a mandate for major policy changes and for transforming the Democratic Party into the new majority party in the two-party system. Therefore, Roosevelt rarely used the word Republican in his post-convention campaign speeches. His policy proposals and the Democratic national platform were a dichotomous, contradictory mixture of promises to balance the federal budget, reduce bureaucratic centralization, and protect states' rights, but also to provide vigorous presidential leadership and more federal intervention to reduce unemployment, raise farm prices, and protect Americans against the economic abuses and mistakes of banks and big business.

Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican president Herbert Hoover with 59 percent of the popular votes and carried forty-two states in the electoral college. Although about 65 percent of black voters supported Hoover, Roosevelt's electoral support from white Republicans and independents was broadly distributed among income levels and various ethnic groups and between urban and rural areas. Only 25 percent of Roosevelt's plurality in 1932 was derived from the nation's twelve largest cities.

From 1932 until 1940, James A. Farley served as DNC chairman. Roosevelt agreed with Farley that the DNC apparatus and activities should be used to promote intra-party harmony at such events as Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners and through fundraising efforts. For example, the Colored Division, a special division of the DNC that concentrated on black voters, cultivated the realignment of non-southern blacks from the Republican to the Democratic Party, but ignored controversial racial issues like segregation and the disfranchisement of southern blacks. Other DNC special divisions, such as those for labor, agriculture, and foreign-language ethnic groups, were used to promote the expansion and diversification of the Democratic coalition during this era.

By far, though, the most innovative, effective, and regularly active special division of the DNC from 1932 to 1940 was the Women's Division. Mary "Molly" Dewson, director of and later adviser to this division, shrewdly realized that Democratic women could increase their status and influence in the party organization and the Roosevelt administration if they impressed the president, DNC chairman, and other male Democratic politicians with their ability to raise funds, distribute publicity, mobilize voters, and win elections. For example, in the 1936 election, the DNC Women's Division produced and distributed about 80 percent of all Democratic campaign literature. It also published the Democratic Digest, a monthly newsletter, and increased the number of female Democratic campaign workers from approximately 73,000 in 1936 to 109,000 in 1940. Dewson used these impressive campaign accomplishments and her long-time friendships with Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to lobby and persuade the president and Farley to increase DNC funding of the Women's Division, the representation of women on party committees and at national conventions, and the number and status of federal jobs given to women. By the time of the 1940 election, however, Edward J. Flynn replaced the disgruntled Farley as DNC chairman, Dewson had left the Women's Division, and the DNC's apparatus played a smaller role in campaign finances and services.

NEW DEAL

Roosevelt hoped that the New Deal's economic policies would not only unite and satisfy the voting blocs and interest groups that elected him in 1932 but would eventually persuade enough disaffected Republican and independent voters to become loyal Democrats so that the Democratic Party would become the new majority party in the two-party system for a long time. However, after the Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and similar New Deal policies that emphasized economic cooperation and planning, Roosevelt moved New Deal liberalism and the national Democratic Party in a more controversial, leftist, divisive programmatic and ideological direction that favored labor and northern urban policy interests and was more antagonistic toward big business and upper-income Americans. Roosevelt wanted this more liberal, social welfare character of his administration and party to co-opt growing grassroots support for various economic protest movements, such as those led by Huey Long and Francis Townsend, before the 1936 election. Enactment of the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Wealth Tax Act of 1935 served to satisfy much of this demand for a broader redistribution of income by the federal government.

WAGNER ACT OF 1935

Likewise, Roosevelt's support of the National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act of 1935 helped to prevent the possibility of labor unions creating their own party for the 1936 election and to attract the endorsement of John L. Lewis, a Republican and the most powerful labor leader in the nation. Despite growing complaints from southern Democrats in Congress that Roosevelt's policies and party leadership pandered to blacks, Roosevelt cultivated black voters by appointing a so-called black cabinet. This was an informal group of black federal officials who tried to reduce racial discrimination in the distribution of federal relief benefits and public works jobs. For the first time ever, a black minister delivered the opening prayer at a Democratic national convention in 1936.

No matter how controversial the New Deal and the Democratic Party under Roosevelt had become among conservatives and business interests, Roosevelt's landslide reelection in 1936 confirmed that a political realignment had occurred. Roosevelt defeated Alfred Landon, the Republican presidential nominee, with more than 60 percent of the popular votes and carried all but two states in the electoral college. Approximately 65 percent of black voters supported Hoover in 1932, but 76 percent of them voted for Roosevelt in 1936. In addition, 80 percent of Catholics, 90 percent of Jews, and 60 percent of low-income, non-southern white Protestants voted for Roosevelt in 1936.

REALIGNMENT

The fact that these voting statistics signaled a partisan realignment, rather than merely a personal following for Roosevelt, is evident in the increasing number and proportion of non-southern Democratic seats in Congress as a consequence of the 1930 to 1936 congressional elections. In 1920, 82 percent of the Democratic representatives and 70 percent of the Democratic senators were southerners. By 1936, only 35 percent of the Democrats in Congress were southerners, and only 23 percent of Roosevelt's electoral college votes in that election came from the South. Even more ominous for the decline of southern influence in the Democratic Party, the Democratic national convention of 1936 repealed the two-thirds rule. This requirement of at least a two-thirds majority of delegate votes for presidential nominations had, in effect, given the South as a region the power to reject any presidential candidate objectionable to it, especially on racial issues.

Determined to solidify the policy accomplishments of the New Deal and to further develop the national Democratic Party as a liberal party, Roosevelt became embroiled with southern Democrats in Congress on two especially divisive issues: the court reform bill of 1937 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Most southern Democrats in Congress opposed Roosevelt on both bills, claiming that his apparent attempt to "pack" the Supreme Court with liberal justices violated the spirit of the Constitution and that the minimum wage legislation would unfairly punish the South for its lower labor costs and threaten race relations by requiring southern employers to pay blacks and whites the same wages. Frustrated with the increasing intra-party opposition in Congress from southern Democrats, Roosevelt decided to dramatically enforce party discipline by attempting to "purge" several conservative southern Democratic senators by opposing their renomination in their states' 1938 Democratic primaries. Roosevelt and his preferred Democratic candidates failed to defeat any of these senators, and the Republicans made substantial gains in the 1938 congressional elections.

After the 1938 elections, southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress cooperated with each other more openly and regularly, especially within the committee system, by forming a bipartisan conservative coalition that could prevent, defeat, or weaken any new liberal legislation. But the ever growing intra-party influence of blacks, labor unions, big city mayors, and liberal activists on Roosevelt's presidency and the party leadership was evident in his creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) by an executive order in 1940. The FEPC was authorized to investigate and prohibit racial discrimination in hiring by defense contractors.

Despite the regional and ideological diversity of Democratic support in Congress for Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor foreign and defense policies, the Democratic national convention of 1940 proved to be unusually restless and rancorous because of the controversy over the anticipation of Roosevelt's nomination for an unprecedented third term. Former DNC chairman James A. Farley and Vice President John N. Garner both ran against Roosevelt for the presidential nomination. But Roosevelt was easily and overwhelmingly renominated on the first ballot after Chicago machine politicians organized a rousing pro-Roosevelt demonstration. By contrast, Roosevelt's new running mate, Henry A. Wallace, was nominated by a narrow margin because of his reputation among delegates as a politically inept former Republican who was outspoken in his liberalism on race and other matters.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was reelected president in 1940 with 55 percent of the popular votes and he carried thirty-eight states in the electoral college. American entry into and participation in World War II finally ended the lingering economic effects of the Great Depression and slowed the rising southern white rebellion against the increasingly liberal, northern-dominated national Democratic Party, especially on racial issues. Nonetheless, the immediate political and economic effects of the Great Depression stimulated a realignment that enabled the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt to transform itself into the new majority party with a broad, diverse coalition, a new ideology based on New Deal liberalism, and a policy agenda that appealed to a wide range of voting blocs and interest groups that dominated the presidency, Congress, policy making, and even the internal politics of the Republican Party until the 1970s.

See Also: DEWSON, MARY (MOLLY); ELECTION OF 1928; ELECTION OF 1930; ELECTION OF 1932; ELECTION OF 1934; ELECTION OF 1936; ELECTION OF 1938; ELECTION OF 1940; FARLEY, JAMES A.; POLITICAL REALIGNMENT; RASKOB, JOHN J.; ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D.; SMITH, ALFRED E.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. 1982.

Burner, David. The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918–1932. 1986.

Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. 1956.

Savage, Sean J. Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932–1945. 1991.

Sundquist, James. The Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States. 1973.

Weiss, Nancy J. Farwell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR. 1983.

SEAN J. SAVAGE