Political Parties in the United States

V

Revived Two-Party System

The second two-party system developed gradually as Democratic-Republicans began quarreling over several issues. The followers of Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, who asserted that the federal government should actively promote economic development, became known as National Republicans. Their opponents, who eventually united behind the presidential candidacy of Andrew Jackson, took the Democratic-Republican name. By 1828 the Democratic-Republicans were known as the Democratic Party.

During Jackson’s tenure as president, his controversial policies and contentious personality prevented any reconciliation with the National Republicans. By the middle of Jackson’s second term, his opponents began to call themselves the Whig Party. Leaders of the Whig Party included Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.

During the 1830s a radical splinter group of the Democratic Party in New York City, the Locofocos, opposed monopolies and private bankers. The name was derived from a popular brand of matches used by the group to continue a crucial meeting in 1835, at which probank opponents turned off the gas. Later known as the Equal Rights Party, the Locofocos were conciliated and reabsorbed into the Democratic Party in 1838 with the election of Martin Van Buren.

The Democrats controlled the national government for most of the years from 1828 to 1860, although they lost two presidential elections to Whig military heroes. After 1840 the Democratic Party increasingly came under the control of Southern slaveholders. Northern Democratic leaders were often called “doughfaces,” or Northern men with Southern principles, by their opponents. Opposed to the Democrats were the Whigs and a variety of minor parties, such as the Liberty Party, the political arm of the abolitionists, and the Free-Soil Party.

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In 1854 the party system dominated by Whigs and Democrats collapsed due to the controversy sparked by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which made it possible to establish slavery in Western territories, where it had previously been banned. This act outraged Northerners and convinced many Democrats and Whigs in that region to abandon their parties. Many of these voters initially joined the Know-Nothing Party, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant organization whose antislavery reputation in the North helped it attract more than 1 million members (see Know-Nothings).

The creation of a new Republican Party was the most important result of the Kansas controversy. Organized in some places as early as July 1854, the party promised not only to prevent the admission of new slave states to the Union, but also to diminish slaveholders’ influence in the federal government. The appeal of this platform quickly enabled the Republican Party to overpower the Know-Nothings. Although the Republicans lost their first campaign for the presidency in 1856, they triumphed in 1860 with former congressman Abraham Lincoln. The Republican victory resulted in part from the division of the Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions, each of which ran its own presidential candidate, and in part from their success at attracting Whigs and Know-Nothings who had opposed the Republicans in 1856. During the Civil War (1861-1865), the Republicans temporarily called themselves the Union Party in an attempt to win the votes of prowar Democrats.

VI

Post-Civil War Period

After the Civil War, as U.S. industrialization proceeded at great speed, the Republican Party became the champion of the nation’s manufacturing interests, railroad builders, speculators, and financiers, and to a lesser extent, of the workers of the North and West. The Democratic Party was revived after the war as a party of opposition; its strength lay primarily in the South, where it was seen as the champion of the lost Confederate cause. Support also came from immigrants and those who opposed the Republicans’ Reconstruction policies.

In 1872 Republicans dissatisfied with the reelection of President Ulysses S. Grant formed the short-lived Liberal Republican Party and nominated as their candidate the journalist Horace Greeley. Although the Democrats also endorsed him, Greeley was defeated, and his new party collapsed.

The chief political tactic of both parties during the postwar period was “waving the bloody shirt,” by which Republicans in the North and Democrats in the South charged that a vote for the opposition was unpatriotic. Serious policy issues also separated the two parties. The most significant points of disagreement included the advocacy of high tariffs by the Republicans and low customs duties by the Democrats, and the emphasis laid by the Democrats on the rights of states in contrast to Republican nationalism.

A number of minor parties emerged during the postwar period. In the long years of agricultural depression, from the conclusion of the Civil War to the end of the 19th century, discontent among farmers, particularly in the Western plains but also in the South, constituted a fertile source of political activity, giving rise to the Granger and Populist movements (see Granger Movement; Populism). From these movements evolved a considerable number of organizations, constituted for the most part on a regional and state basis (see Farmers’ Alliances; Greenback Party; Greenback Labor Party; People’s Party).

In industrialized regions, a large class of wage workers developed whose protest against poor working conditions, low pay, and discriminatory and abusive treatment induced the formation of other parties independent of and opposed to the dominant Republican and Democratic parties. One of the first was the Socialist Labor Party, founded in 1877 but unimportant until it came under the leadership of Daniel De Leon. Of far more significance was the Socialist Party of America (SPA), founded in 1901 by socialists unable to accept the autocratic De Leon (see Socialist Party). The greatest leader of the SPA was Eugene V. Debs. In 1919 a split in the SPA led to the formation of the Communist Party (CP), which had close ties with the Soviet Union. Although small, the CP had considerable influence at times, especially in the labor movement during the 1930s. These parties of agrarian and working-class protest frequently raised issues that were taken up in subsequent years by leaders of the major parties. Their own successes in elections, however, were mostly local and minor.

VII

Progressivism

The various movements to improve industrial working conditions and curtail the power of big business, known by the early 20th century as Progressivism, caused divisions within both parties between progressives and conservatives. The most serious split occurred in the Republican ranks, where the renomination of President William Howard Taft in 1912 caused progressives to bolt and form the Progressive Party, which nominated former president Theodore Roosevelt. Although he lost the election, Roosevelt polled the highest percentage of the vote ever attained by a third-party candidate. The Republican split in that contest helped Woodrow Wilson become only the second Democrat to win the presidency since the Civil War. The Progressives made another strong bid for the presidency in 1924, when their candidate was Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr., of Wisconsin, a veteran of the 1912 campaign, who won about 16 percent of the votes.

VIII

The New Deal and After

Soon after Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hoover won the 1928 presidential election, the nation’s economy collapsed. The Great Depression, which produced unprecedented economic hardship, stemmed from a variety of causes, but from the perspective of millions of Americans the Republican Party, also known by this time as the Grand Old Party (GOP), had not done enough to promote economic recovery. In 1932 Americans elected Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, known as FDR, and a solidly Democratic Congress. FDR developed a program for economic recovery he dubbed the New Deal. Under the auspices of the New Deal, the size and reach of America’s national government was substantially increased. The federal government took responsibility for economic management and social welfare to an extent that was unprecedented in U.S. history. Roosevelt designed many of his programs specifically to expand the political base of the Democratic Party. He rebuilt the party around a nucleus of unionized workers, upper middle class intellectuals and professionals, Southern farmers, Jews, Catholics, and African Americans that made the Democrats the nation’s majority party.

This so-called New Deal coalition made the Democrats the nation’s majority party in Congress for most of the next 62 years. With the exception of 1946 and 1952, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress from 1932 until 1980, when they lost the Senate. At the peak of its influence in 1936, the Democratic Party held 75 of 96 seats in the Senate and 333 of 435 seats in the House. Republicans groped for a response to the New Deal and often wound up supporting popular New Deal programs, such as Social Security, in what was sometimes derided as “me too” Republicanism.

When Roosevelt died in 1945, he was succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman. Democratic unity appeared to unravel, however, when two dissident groups opposed him in the 1948 election—the anti-Cold War Progressives under Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s vice president during his third term, and the anti-civil rights Dixiecrats under Strom Thurmond. However, Truman won despite them, and the Democrats remained in control of the White House until 1952.

The Republicans were returned to power that year, carried to victory by their popular candidate, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. During Eisenhower’s two terms, his moderate supporters came into conflict with the more conservative old guard Republicans. From 1955 until the 1980s the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and their leaders often cooperated with moderate Republicans.

IX

The Turbulent 1960s

The New Deal coalition was severely strained during the 1960s and early 1970s by conflicts over civil rights and the Vietnam War (1959-1975). The struggle over civil rights initially divided Northern Democrats, who supported the civil rights cause, from white Southern Democrats, who defended the system of racial segregation. Subsequently, as the civil rights movement launched a Northern campaign aimed at securing access to jobs, education, and housing, Northern Democrats also split, often along income lines. The struggle over the Vietnam War further divided the Democrats, with upper-income liberal Democrats strongly opposing the decision by the administration of Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson to continue sending U.S. forces to fight in Southeast Asia. These schisms within the Democratic Party provided an opportunity for the Republican Party, which returned to power in 1968 under the leadership of Richard Nixon.

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