Showing posts with label JFK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JFK. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

A not-terribly-short history of the Lodges and the Kennedys


I’ve read my fair share (and other people’s fair shares, as well) of John Grisham novels. When I was in middle school/high school I wanted to be a writer…of some sort. Novels, sports, non-fiction. I have 500 pages of notes on a book about Andrew Jackson’s 1833 tour of New England that at some point I’ll get around to writing. But one novel I read that stood out to me was The Pelican Brief. It was a book about a young legal assistant who wrote a theory about who was behind the assassination of two Supreme Court justices and ended up being right and getting targeted by killers. Denzel came to help her. The book is way better than the movie, as most John Grisham novels and most books, to be honest, are.

What follows is a simple theory based on some reading I did for my AP US History class on JFK’s assassination and the Conspiracy Day we had last week in which my students were presented with six different theories as to who killed JFK. They had to evaluate the evidence presented for what supported the theory, and what undermined it. It was great fun. There was one theory that was not presented in the evidence, which I would like to present now. Again (are you listening, CIA?) this is simply a thought exercise and please don’t kill me.
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We need to start in 1919.

When Democratic president Woodrow Wilson went to Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, the Pause button between The War To End All Wars and World War II, he did not take anyone with him. This was a slap in the face to his own party and to the Republican Party, who expected a bone to be thrown their way in a matter of such worldwide importance.

Chief among those upset was Henry Cabot Lodge, the heir to a shipping fortune, descendant of two Boston institutions: the Cabots and the Lodges.

Wait. When I say “institutions,” we need to back up. Way up. There’s context, I promise.

The Cabots were a Massachusetts institution and, as such, were an American institution. Joseph Cabot was born in Salem in 1720 and ran opium, rum, and slaves, becoming exceedingly wealthy through shipping, as most prominent Massachusetts families did. His son, George (born in 1752), attended Harvard for two years before dropping out to go to sea. George was the captain of his own ship by age 21. The Cabots soon became synonymous with American politics. George, the Harvard dropout, was a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1775 at Age 23. Two years later he was a delegate to the state constitutional convention. In 1787 he was a delegate to the state convention that ratified the Constitution. He was a senator from Massachusetts from 1791 to 1796, supported Alexander Hamilton and became a director of Hamilton’s 1st Bank of the United States.

In a rare political misstep, Cabot – an opponent of the Democratic-Republican Jefferson and Madison administrations – was the president of the Hartford Convention, an 1814 meeting of Federalists that didn’t like how the War of 1812 was going and openly discussed reforming the Constitution but stopped just short of suggesting that New England secede from the Union. During the convention Andrew Jackson led a group of rednecks, slaves, and Native Americans into a stunning upset of Great Britain at New Orleans. England pursued peace and the Hartford Convention looked like a bunch of traitors. It essentially ended the Federalist Party.

The Lodges were a Boston Brahmin family, a first family of Boston: Harvard-educated with a Beacon Hill address. According to Boston Brahmin code, you should only be mentioned in the newspaper when you’re born, married, and dead. To qualify as a First Family, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, you needed “four or more generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of his Majesty’s Council for the Provinces, a Governor or so, one of two Doctors of Divinity, or a member of Congress not later than the time of long boots with tassels.” Both the Cabots and the Lodges fit the criteria.

At a 1910 alumni dinner at Holy Cross, a toast was given:

Here’s to dear old Boston/
The home of the bean and the cod/
Where Lowells speak only to Cabots/
And Cabots speak only to God

Here comes Henry Cabot Lodge, the son of John Ellerton Lodge and Anna Cabot and 1871 graduate of Harvard – the same year he married Anna Cabot Mills Davis, 14 years his junior and a union of two of Boston’s most illustrious families. He earned Harvard’s first Ph.D. degree in political science in 1876, edited the North American Review with Henry Adams, and joined the faculty at Harvard. Lodge served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1880-1881 and the United States House of Representatives from 1887-1893. In 1893 Lodge won the election to become one of Massachusetts’ senators, a position he would hold until his death in 1924.

As WGBH described him, Lodge was a hardcore Republican who supported “the gold standard, high protective tariffs, an aggressive approach to global politics, and a Navy large enough to back it up.”
Lodge didn’t like immigrants, especially the Irish. The Immigration Restriction League was founded by Brahmins in 1894 at the height of the Nativism trend in the United States. Lodge sponsored a bill in Congress that would require immigrants to pass a literacy test before gaining entry to the United States. Lodge showed his hand when (bear with me) thanks to a storm that bought the colonists enough time to reinforce their positions, the British voluntarily evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776. Of course this is the day St. Patrick died and many Bostonians didn’t see this as a coincidence. Lodge – not exactly anxious to honor an Irishman – helped rebrand March 17 as Evacuation Day.

Theodore Roosevelt’s best friend and chief political adviser was Henry Cabot Lodge. They had met Harvard’s Porcellian Club – the oldest, founded in 1791, and most prestigious “final club.” That the Porcellian Club refused admission to Franklin Delano Roosevelt caused FDR to later declare the rejection as “the greatest disappointment” of his life. A former member said of the Porcellian Club, “If you don’t make your first million by 30, they give it to you.” Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss – the Facebook twins – were members. Lodge, who had won a Massachusetts Senate seat in 1891, worked to get Teddy Roosevelt a job in the government after William McKinley won the election of 1896. Lodge got Teddy a post as assistant secretary of the navy in 1897. They were both imperialists, agitating for intervention in Cuba prior to the Spanish-American War.

Henry Cabot Lodge was appointed an overseer of Harvard University from 1911 until his death in 1924. His son-in-law Augustus Peabody Gardner was the nephew of Jack Gardner II and Isabella Stewart Gardner, founder of the world-renowned museum that bears her name.

Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 presidential election, mainly thanks to Lodge’s BFF Roosevelt running as a (very successful) third-party candidate, representing the Bull Moose party – a reference to an “incident” in Milwaukee when John Flammang Schrank shot Roosevelt in the chest before a campaign speech. Roosevelt explained that he had just been shot, begged his supporters’ pardon, pulled the bloody manuscript of his speech out of his pocket, said “it takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” gave an hour-long speech and then went to the hospital. Roosevelt split the Republican vote with incumbent William Howard Taft. Wilson dominated the 1912 electoral vote 435 to 88, but was actually outgained in the popular vote by Roosevelt and Taft.

In 1916 Wilson was re-elected in 1916 under the slogan “He kept us out of war,” maintaining U.S. isolationism in the early stages of World War I. That same election season saw a major threat to the Lodge dynasty. John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald made a serious legitimate run at Lodge’s seat.
Honey Fitz was born to poor Irish immigrants in the North End of Boston in 1863, the middle of the Civil War. But he rose to attend Harvard Medical School for a year until his father died in 1885. Honey Fitz worked his way to the House of Representatives in 1894 and sponsored legislation that funded the T and the Cape Cod Canal, and also tried to overcome the predominant anti-immigrant stance. He convinced President Grover Cleveland to veto an anti-immigration bill introduced by Henry Cabot Lodge. Honey Fitz threw out the inaugural first pitch at the new Fenway Park. According to Gerard O’Neill’s “Rogues and Redeemers: When Politics was King in Irish Boston,” 


Lodge (to Honey Fitz): You are an impudent young man. Do you think the Jews and Italians have any right in this country?

Honey Fitz (to Lodge): As much as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships.

Honey Fitz – it’s just such a wonderful nickname – took on Henry Cabot Lodge’s Senate seat in 1916. Honey Fitz won just one county: Suffolk County, whose seat is Boston. Lodge won the popular vote by about 33,000 votes, 51-45.

John F. Fitzgerald married his second cousin Mary Josephine Hannon. Their oldest child, Rose, would marry Joseph P. Kennedy. Honey Fitz was upset that their firstborn son, Joe Kennedy, Jr., wasn’t named after him. Yet, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Honey Fitz told the press that his grandson would become the first Irish-Catholic president of the United States. Fitzgerald won a tight 1918 election for the House of Representatives but an investigation uncovered voter fraud – a Kennedy tradition – by Honey Fitz’s allies and overturned the election.

Wilson’s isolationism didn’t last. Wilson asked for, and received, a congressional declaration of war in 1917. In 1918 he went before Congress and gave the famous Fourteen Points speech, the last of which would establish “a general association of nations…affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” The League of Nations was proposed, and it won Wilson the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Arguably already famous, Lodge is taught in US History/AP US History courses as the guy who defeated the League of Nations. Lodge – a war hawk – wanted Germany crushed by the Treaty of Versailles (as did France and Great Britain). There were three camps who reacted to the Treaty of Versailles: those who were all in favor, those who were 100% opposed, known as the Irreconcilables; and then there were the Reservationists, led by Lodge, who were opposed unless certain reservations they had were addressed. Lodge felt like the U.S. would give up too much power under the League of Nations, so Lodge wrote fourteen reservations to match Wilson’s fourteen points.

While Wilson was campaigning across the country to win approval for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, he had a severe stroke. It paralyzed his left side and “caused significant brain damage.” He refused to resign and it “likely contributed to Wilson’s uncharacteristic failure to reach a compromise” with the Reservationists and Irreconcilables.

Peace treaties have to be approved by the Senate with a two-thirds majority. In 1919 this meant 56 of 84 senators had to be in favor. Lodge was not only the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was the Senate Majority Leader. Wilson needed Lodge. The first version of the Treaty upon which the Senate voted included the 14 Lodge reservations. Wilson ordered his supporters to vote against it. Of course the Irreconcilables voted against it, too, and it failed by one vote. A second vote without Lodge’s reservations fell short by three votes because the “Cabot Republicans” and the Irreconcilables voted against it. A third version was voted upon in 1920 and included some of the Lodge Reservations. It, too, failed. That was it.

The Treaty of Versailles was not ratified by the United States and it took the Knox-Porter Resolution in 1921 to formally end World War I. Mississippi Representative Ross Collins said that “with the exception of the United States of America, all the nations that were at war with the Central Powers are now at peace with them. This country alone remains in a state of war…the people in all parts of our Nation are hungry for actual peace.”

Wilson died in Washington, D.C. in February 1924. Henry Cabot Lodge died of a stroke – the same culprit that got Wilson –  in Cambridge, Massachusetts nine months later.

Which brings us, finally, to the subject of the theory. Ten and a half months after the end of the Spanish-American War, Henry Cabot Lodge II was born to George Cabot – Henry Cabot Lodge’s son – and Mathilda Elizabeth Frelinghuysen (granddaughter of Senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen).

Where Henry Cabot Lodge was a member of the Porcellian Club at Harvard, Lodge II – or “Cabot” or “Cab,” to distinguish himself from his titan grandfather - was a member of the Hasty Pudding and the Fox Club. Cab’s father George died of heart failure at 35 years old, when Cab was seven years old. George also served in the Spanish-American War and was also close to Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote a nice little introduction to George’s posthumous collection Poems and Dramas of George Cabot Lodge, published in 1911. That year Henry Adams – who worked with Henry Cabot Lodge on the North American Reviewpublished George’s biography. Cab’s grandfather, The Henry Cabot Lodge, raised him and oversaw Cab’s education. Cab graduated in just three years Cum Laude from Harvard in 1924.

Having written for the Boston Transcript and the New York Herald Tribune for the previous seven years, Cab published “The Cult of Weakness” in 1932, a collection of essays that echoed the tenets of Social Darwinism and called for “a return of government principles which will recognize the rights and welfare of the strong against the weak.” He was opposed to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and, despite this, won Massachusetts’ Senate seat over the extremely popular Democratic governor James M. Curley. He was the only Republican in the United States to steal a Democratic seat in 1936. The new junior senator was escorted down the aisle to take the oath of office by the senior senator, David I. Walsh, “the most successful Irish Catholic politician” in Massachusetts, who hated Curley. Cab was the seventh Lodge to serve in the Senate.

Re-elected in 1942, Cab became the first senator to resign his seat in order to go on active duty in the military since the Civil War after Eisenhower told Congress to choose between Congress and the war. He served in the Mediterranean and Europe, eventually becoming a Lieutenant Colonel before regaining his Senate seat over Walsh, whose “appeal had been diminished” when he was named as the senator who had frequented a male brothel in New York City which also happened to be a meeting-spot for German spies.” Cab won the election to become the junior senator from Massachusetts, since he had resigned his seat during World War II.

That was cool and all, but Cab gained national attention for the first time when he helped convince Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for the Republican nomination in 1952. Eisenhower would be tough on communism, having been the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and having overseen the D-Day invasion. Eisenhower muscled out Robert A. Taft, eldest son of William Howard Taft (former rival of family friend Teddy Roosevelt), for the Republican nomination. Cab neglected his own re-election campaign to focus on Eisenhower’s presidential bid.

His opponent in the 1952 Massachusetts Senate race? John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father, “loaned” the Boston Post, a prominent Republican-leaning newspaper, $500,000 during the campaign. The newspaper endorsed JFK though publisher John Fox said the endorsement came before the loan. “[Fitzgerald] was very much concerned about young John being a candidate for public office,” said John F. Cahill, chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, in a 1967 interview.
Lodge was Massachusetts through and through, a personality that was described as cold and aloof. Lodge’s campaign aide in 1952, James Sullivan, said of Lodge, “He had a gracious manner, a certain remoteness…He wouldn’t put his arm around you and say, ‘Let’s go out for a beer,’ or something like that. No way.” Kennedy, however, “had that marvelous quality of making you feel that you were his special friend.”

Fletcher Knebel observed, “The Kennedys might be of Boston society; The Lodges were Boston society.”

There was at least one instance in which the campaign got personal, and it revolved around future Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill. The way O’Neill told it in his book (and excerpted in the Chicago Tribune), the Kennedys had asked O’Neill – then running for national office for the first time himself – to deliver a speech that the Kennedy campaign had written. The speech showed up so late that Cab offered to switch places and speak first, then stayed to hear O’Neill. The speech “kicked the living hell out of Henry Cabot Lodge. I didn’t have time to edit it or make any changes…I was humiliated.” Lodge left halfway through the speech and told O’Neill’s wife, “You know, the Kennedys would never give a speech like that for him. And I would never say the things about Jack Kennedy that he’s saying about me.”

When the election results came in, JFK had won by less than 71,000 votes out of over 2.3 million cast.

Suddenly out of a job, Eisenhower appointed Cab as the head of his transition team and then as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, securing Cab a spot in Eisenhower’s cabinet. While Ambassador to the U.N., Cab maintained a high profile. He worked behind (and in front of) the scenes during the Suez Canal crisis, and the revolt in Hungary in 1956. Lodge was Nikita Khruschev’s escort during his 1959 tour of the United States.

In March 1960, eight months before the presidential election, the U.S. government made a formal decision (in secret) to overthrow Castro. Preparations were underway for an invasion of Cuba at Castro’s favorite fishing spot – the Bay of Pigs. Castro had appealed to the United Nations for help, providing detailed evidence to the U.N. Security Council of pilots. Ambassador Lodge assured Castro and the Security Council “the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba.”

Eisenhower’s national security policy focused on building the American economy to support the Cold War, relying on nuclear weapons to deter communist aggression (supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ “Brinksmanship” policy of showing that you’re just wheels-off enough to take your nukes out for a spin in an effort to get the other side to back down), and carrying out secret/covert operations against governments who made eyes at the Soviet Union. Lodge would have been privy to all of this and, given his relationship with Eisenhower, tacitly approved.

Nixon chose Cab as his vice presidential candidate for a few reasons: His foreign policy experience in working under Eisenhower would be well-received, and that Nixon thought the Lodge name could check Kennedy’s popularity in New England. Cab made a Republican misstep, telling a Harlem crowd that a Nixon Presidency would name an African-American to its Cabinet. Plot twist: he walked it back. It probably lost Nixon the South. The Nixon/Lodge ticket lost the popular vote to the Kennedy/Johnson ticket by 113,000 votes out of 68 million cast. There were likely Shenanigans.
President Kennedy needed bipartisan support. As a liberal Northern Democrat, Kennedy had to face not only the Republicans but the Southern Democrats, who didn’t like anybody, and certainly didn’t support Kennedy’s progressive agenda which built on Eisenhower’s actions and the Warren Court of the mid-1950s.

Lodge’s promise that the United States had no aggressive purpose against Cuba, as the disaster of the Bay of Pigs “invasion” – three months after JFK’s inauguration – showed. And, hold on a second, JFK was seeking to normalize relations with Cuba and Castro? Reporter Jean Daniel was in Cuba with Fidel Castro when JFK was assassinated. Castro had told reporter Daniel, regarding Kennedy, that he (Castro) was not afraid of getting assassinated, and that assassination at the hands of the United States would only raise his own standing in Latin America. But Castro understood that Kennedy was in a unique position to make everything okay in the Western Hemisphere. As he told Jean Daniel on November 19, 1963, three days before Kennedy’s assassination:

Kennedy could still be this man. He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leaders who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with.

Well, that would have flown in the face of everything Lodge stood for, politically.  

A quick aside: JFK had resigned his Senate seat to run for president in 1960. His brother, Ted, wanted the Senate seat to match the accomplishments of his brothers (Robert was John’s Attorney General), but he wouldn’t be the required 30 years old until 1962. JFK asked Massachusetts Governor Foster Furcolo to name Ben Smith – a friend of the Kennedy family – as the interim senator to serve out JFK’s term, keeping the Senate seat open for Ted. He faced George Cabot Lodge, Cab’s son, in the 1962 election. Ted Kennedy beat George Cabot Lodge by just under 300,000 votes. It was the third time the Lodges and Kennedys had squared off in an election. Kennedys were up 2-1.

Kennedy asked Cab to become the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. He accepted, and arrived in August 1963, ostensibly to corral Ngo Dinh Diem, who was living The Life thanks to American money, and squashing opposition. Notably, Diem had authorized raids on Buddhist pagodas where upwards of hundreds of Buddhists were killed by Diem’s forces, orchestrated by Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. Cable 243 authorized Cab to pressure Diem to remove Nhu. If he didn’t, the United States would look for other leadership in South Vietnam. Lodge interpreted it as an opportunity to send the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to remove Diem if he didn’t take his brother out. Diem was assassinated, along with his brother, on November 2, 1963, the day after Diem’s government was overthrown by the South Vietnamese military. Kennedy, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger, “accepted the coup but did not order or contemplate the assassination of Diem.” Cable 243 is seen as a turning point in the Vietnam War, as the U.S. became more heavily involved in Vietnam in an effort to stabilize the country. Kennedy blamed himself for not handling Lodge more appropriately. Less than three weeks later, Kennedy was dead.

By now it’s generally accepted that JFK was planning on withdrawing troops from Vietnam. One thousand troops were slated to return to the United States by the end of 1963. Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a memo on October 4, 1963 explaining that JFK had already approved recommendations for a full withdrawal of “special assistance units and personnel by the end of 1965.” This decision was decidedly not the stance of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr, who ardently believed in the Domino Theory that if Vietnam fell to communism, other Southeast Asian countries would soon follow. Feel free to draw your own psychological conclusions that Cab was such a strident internationalist given the hardline isolationist stance taken by his grandfather, the man who raised him.

Roger Stone, who is problematic in a variety of ways, wrote a best-selling book called “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ,” in which he recalls a 1979 conversation with Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge – Cab’s brother:

I knew that JFK had planned to fire ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge upon his return from Texas on November 24, 1963. I also know that Lodge knew why he had been summoned to see the President. I couldn’t resist asking John Lodge about his brother.

“Did you ever ask your brother who really killed Kennedy?”

His lips spread into a tight grin. “Cabot said it was the Agency boys, some Mafiosi.” He looked me in the eye. “And Lyndon.”

“Did your brother know in advance?” I asked.

Lodge took a sip of his Manhattan. “He knew Kennedy wouldn’t be around to fire him. LBJ kept him at his post so he could serve his country.”

In James Douglass’ book “JFK and the Unspeakable,” Robert Kennedy is on record:

“The individual who forced out position at the time of Vietnam was Henry Cabot Lodge. In fact, Henry Cabot Lodge was being brought back – and the President discussed with me in detail how he could be fired – because he wouldn’t communicate in any way with us…The President would send out messages, and he would never really answer them…[Lodge] wouldn’t communicate….We were trying to figure out how to get rid of Henry Cabot Lodge.”

There’s an excerpt in Phillip F. Nelson’s book “LBJ: Mastermind of the JFK Assassination” referencing an article from the Honolulu Star Bulletin:

“In Hawaii on November 21, 1963…shortly after lunch Honolulu time, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge made a long distance call from the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel…This distinguished diplomat had access to phones in privacy from his room or the military circuits at no cost…yet he was seen, according to the Star Bulletin, with a stack of quarters in his hand putting coin after coin into a pay phone…Lodge as the only person of the seven member policy-making body to stay at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel…the others stayed in the military quarters.”

JFK wouldn’t hold that meeting with Lodge on November 24. LBJ would.

In the wake of JFK’s assassination, Republicans were assessing their chances of defeating LBJ in the 1964 election. Eisenhower called Cab to see if he would return from Vietnam to run for the Republican nomination. Cab declined.

Cab and Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ’s Secretary of Defense, went on a tour of South Vietnam. McNamara recommended to LBJ to “furnish assistance and support to South Vietnam for as long as it takes to bring the insurgency under control.” The next day National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, on LBJ’s behalf, enacted McNamara’s recommendations in NSA Memorandum 288. The Vietnam War was escalating.

President Lyndon B. Johnson re-appointed Cab as the Ambassador to South Vietnam, a post he held from 1965-1967 – the years following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which was LBJ’s excuse to escalate military involvement in Vietnam. In the July 29, 1967 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, Cab wrote a letter explaining that the U.S. was winning in Vietnam. Six months later the Tet Offensive began.

Two Boston political families: the Kennedys – who were of Boston society, and the Lodges – who were Boston society. Two political dynasties intersecting as they each fell and rose, respectively. Anti-immigrant (and, thus, anti-Catholic) Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., who almost single-handedly kept the United States out of the League of Nations, a titan of American politics, kept the Lodge dynasty alive, besting a Kennedy in the process. The Kennedys seemingly derailed the Lodge political dynasty with the 1952 election, but was kept alive by Eisenhower and later by JFK himself. If JFK was undermining Lodge’s foreign policy goals, and embarrassing him in the process, of what could Lodge be capable?  

Friday, February 23, 2018

When did the political parties shift platforms?

If you spend too long on the cursed website Facebook.com I'm sure you will find someone who gently, and with no ill-motive for sure, reminds The World that the Democrats once supported slavery and ran the KKK. Or maybe your Man-Bun Liberal slides into your DMs and whispers "Oh hey did you know that Republicans were once the party of a large central government that would happily go to war to protect the size and power of the federal government?" Well, gentle reader, you know what? They're absolutely correct. Both are 100% true. Here are the key moments in the history of each side eating the other side's political platform.

Prior to 1854: American politics was fractured, and the once-strong two-party system that George Washington advised against in his Farewell Address was starting to bubble up:
In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection. 

Washington had seen first-hand the rise of the two-party system and tried to combat it by inviting Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist, as his Secretary of the Treasury and Thomas Jefferson, an Anti-Federalist (a term that is oppositional by its very definition), as his Secretary of State. It, uh, didn't work. 

Anyhow, as you well know, tribalism is very real in politics and it didn't take long for political observers to join in with like-minded people about how the country should be run. The War of 1812 saw the end of the Federalist party and the rise of the Democratic-Republicans. James Monroe ran as the incumbent in 1820 and won 231 of 232 electoral votes, losing one vote to John Quincy Adams, who ran as an Independent. Four different Democratic-Republicans received electoral votes in the Corrupt Bargain election of 1824. From 1828-1856 the following political parties were represented by candidates who earned electoral votes (parties in bold were the winning party in that election):

1828: Democratic, National Republican
1832: Democratic, National Republican, Independent, Anti-Masonic
1836: Democratic, Whig, Independent
1840: Whig, Democrat
1844: Democratic, Whig
1848: Whig, Democratic
1852: Democratic, Whig
1856: Democratic, Republican, American (aka Know-Nothings, who simply opposed immigration).

The National Republicans gave way to the Whigs, who went back and forth in winning from 1836-1852. The Whigs promoted federal funding of internal improvements (railroads, canals, bridges, and other infrastructure), which chafed the Democrats. Andrew Jackson shaped this era of the Democrats' policy: the supreme power of the president who can check Congress and body up the Supreme Court; Oh, and if Ohio wants a canal built, Ohio can pay for it, not the federal government. The Whig platform appealed to the growing western population who needed to be connected to the larger markets back east. Abraham Lincoln got into politics as a Whig, and was a Whig longer than he was a Republican.

The Whigs fell apart thanks to the internal debate over what to do about the westward expansion of slavery and the rise of the Free Soil Party, whose sole political platform was the banning of slavery in western territories. The Free Soil Party (slogan: Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, Free Men) never won an electoral vote but were enough of a third-party presence to shift the conversation about slavery). The 1852 election was the last for the Whigs, who tried to thread the needle of internal improvements while also embracing slavery in an effort to get more votes.

Democrats, for their part, were deeply divided in the 1852 election. The four main Democratic hopefuls faced strong opposition from another faction of the party, and a consensus could not be reached during the nominating convention. A nominee needed 2/3 of the delegates to secure the nomination. After 34 attempts, it was clear the Democrats needed to start over. But whoever emerged had to satisfy both the pro-slavery Southern Democrats and the anti-Slavery Northern Democrats. Franklin Pierce secured the nomination and won the election of 1852 running the "most ludicrous, ridiculous, and uninteresting campaign" ever. Pierce was low-drama, and won.

Out of the ashes of the Whig Party came the Republican Party for the 1854 mid-term elections, who absorbed some Whigs, Free Soilers, and anti-slavery Democrats angered by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Months prior to the 1854 election, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which - in another attempt to avoid civil war - told the people to decide if they wanted slavery in their states (rather than Congress, you know, taking a stand on something). Violence between abolitionists and the pro-slavery crowd arguing for their side brought some foreshadowing to what would go down between 1861-1865.

The early Republican Party focused on stopping the expansion of slavery (not the abolition of slavery where it already existed). The Whigs they absorbed also brought into the party an unhealthy distrust of Irish Catholic immigrants, but at least everyone could agree (in one party, anyway) that the spread of slavery needed to stop. John C. Fremont - the first Republican nominee for president - kept it close. James Buchanan won the electoral vote 174-114, but the popular vote edge was only 500,000 out of about four million votes cast. Millard Fillmore's anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party got almost 900,000 votes

Then came 1860. Because the Democratic Party was fractured between Northern and Southern Democrats, they each nominated their own candidate, splitting their vote. While the two Democratic candidates (John C. Breckinridge and Stephen Douglas) received enough votes to out-gain Lincoln, the Republicans rallied around Lincoln and he won the election despite not winning a single Southern state. South Carolina would secede from the Union soon after and then this fair country would spend the next four years trying to kill each other.

Meanwhile the Homestead Act of 1862 (for populating and developing the West) and the Morrill Land-Grant Act (establishing universities on the frontier) were supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats. After the Civil War's end the Radical Republicans, whose aims were to empower African-Americans via the 14th Amendment and a proposed Civil Rights Bill (both opposed by Democrats), oversaw the Reconstruction of the South following the Civil War until 1877. Those efforts came to an end with the Election of 1876. How? 

Democrat Samuel Tilden got about 250,000 more votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. But the Electoral College was much closer. It was an election rife with corruption. Tilden led in the electoral vote 184-165, a nineteen-vote difference. Democrats and Republicans in each of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina reported that their guy won each state and heylookathat, combined they totaled 20 electoral votes. After a prolonged legal battle that involved a special commission of 15 Congressmen and Supreme Court justices, Hayes was awarded all 20 votes (in an 8-7 decision along party lines), giving him a 185-184 edge. Historians generally agree that a deal was made: Give Republican Hayes the victory in the election and the Republicans will pull out of the South, thus ending Reconstruction.

With the Compromise of 1877, Republicans sold out the newly-freed African-American population for the next 90 years in exchange for four years of the presidency. The next major turning point in this gradual platform change came with American politics' version of the Buffalo Bills: William Jennings Bryan. 

Over the course of the 1870s-1880s a populist movement had grown. It started with The Patrons of Husbandry aka The Grange - farmers who organized into a political force - in 1867. They gained in strength after the Panic of 1873 that saw the railroads squeeze the farmers over shipping rates, the Republican-controlled Congress reducing the supply of paper money in favor of the Gold/Silver Standard (negatively impacting farmers and westerners who relied on paper money to go about their everyday lives).

The Populist Party was officially organized on the 116th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Omaha Platform - their call to arms - challenged the two-party system for failing the people who fed America. They called on the unlimited coinage of silver, direct election of senators (who - to that point - were chosen by state legislatures), public ownership of railroads, more power to voters - they wanted power to shift from the elite to the people. And William Jennings Bryan was their showman.

Bryan ("The Boy Orator of the Platte") won election to Congress as a 30-year old Democrat in 1890, mainly by challenging his opponent to a series of debates, which he won handily. He ran for Senate in 1894 but the Panic of 1893 led to a backlash against Democrats, and the Nebraska State Legislature chose the Republican candidate (something about which the Populists weren't thrilled). Bryan took to the (rail)roads to spread his message. As Bryan leaned more towards the Populists, the Democrats just assumed Bryan's platform into their own for the 1896 Democratic National Convention. It was there that Bryan gave his now-famous (and required reading, if you're one of my AP students) Cross of Gold speech, called "the most famous speech in American political history." Check the closing:

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. 

The speech made Bryan a star in the Democratic party. At 36, he was the youngest presidential nominee in history. The Democrats had two factions: the Bourbon Democrats (New England and Midwestern pro-business) and Bryan's Democrats (Southern and Western pro-farmer). The Republicans rallied around the gold standard and industrial growth, and outspent the Democrats 5-to-1. Republican William McKinley carried New England and the Midwest while Bryan won the South and West. McKinley took the election 271-176, though the popular vote gave McKinley just a 600,000 vote edge. In the rematch in 1900, McKinley again beat Bryan thanks to the success of the Spanish-American War and the economy's recovery from the Panic of 1893.

Republicans held the presidency until 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt ran as an independent (Bull Moose) because he was mad at Taft. Having to choose between the incumbent Taft and old favorite Teddy, the Republican vote was split, giving the presidency to Woodrow Wilson, who had only received the Democratic Party's nomination after a contentious 46 ballots, securing it after receiving William Jennings Bryan's blessing.

Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" promoted social insurance, an eight-hour workday, and strong federal oversight of the economy. Taft could see the writing on the wall and didn't campaign all that hard on "progressive conservatism." Wilson's - a Democrat, remember - "New Freedom" platform was a nod to William Jennings Bryan (whose support got him the nomination in the first place) based on limited government but also tariff reform, banking reform, and a new anti-trust law. Things got weird when, a month before the election, an assassin shot Roosevelt at close range outside a Milwaukee hotel. Roosevelt insisted on giving his 90-minute speech and opened with a sense of drama:

Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.

He finished the speech. Like a BAWSE.

Wilson won handily (435 Electoral Votes to Roosevelt's 88) and the electoral map showed a shifting nation. It was the first time since 1852 that Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Rhode Island voted for a Democrat. Wilson carried Massachusetts, a state in which a Democrat had never won on the national level.

Wilson realized he needed to appeal to Progressives. Under Wilson's presidency the Democratic Party ushered in reforms first proposed by The Grange and the Populists: A graduated income tax, the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the passage of the 17th Amendment which allowed the people to directly elect their senators. The Democratic Party, with a big assist from William Jennings Bryan, was starting to shift. The Republican Party kept on keepin' on. So both parties over the rest of the 1910s and 1920s were virtually indistinguishable in what the role of government should be.

Before we pat Wilson on the back too heavily, let's also note that the Democrat didn't call for an end to lynchings across the South until 1918 and segregated federal buildings,

Then came the Great Depression. Republicans won the election of 1920 largely on the unpopularity of Wilson's League of Nations idea and the race riots which erupted in 1919. The economy was in its typical post-war recession and Wilson had suffered a stroke, leaving him out of the public eye for the better part of a year. Republicans like Warren G. Harding, Calvin "The business of America is business" Coolidge (nicknamed Silent Cal for his allowance of the rapid scaling of the American economy which would precipitate the stock market crash of 1929), and Herbert Hoover fully embraced the laissez-faire maxim of Just Let The Economy Sort Itself Out.

When Hoover received the Republican nomination for president in 1928, he proudly proclaimed:
We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. 

Well that wasn't a very prescient prediction. Eight months after he took office the stock market crashed, but Hoover promoted his "Rugged Individualism" and "self-reliance" stances - the idea that people in trouble will get themselves out. In a 1931 address to the Gridiron Club, Hoover said:

If, by the grace of God, we have passed the worst of this storm, the future months will be easy. If we shall be called upon to endure more of this period, we must gird ourselves for even greater effort...The question is whether that history shall be written in terms of individual responsibility, and the capacity of the Nation for voluntary cooperative action, or whether it shall be written in terms of futile attempt to cure poverty by the enactment of law. 

Hoover did try to fix the economy once he realized that the stock market crash wasn't just another "passing recession", but the beginning of a 12-year economic disaster brought about by the Republicans' economic policies of the 1920s. But it was too little, too late. Hoover founded government agencies to try to reverse the economy, but still called upon the charity of the private sector to help those in need. Hoover ignored calls from the public - and from Democrats - to fully involve the government in the relief efforts out of fear that forcing fixed prices, hiring unemployed workers, increasing government spending, etc. were irreversible steps towards socialism. Republicans were anti-bailout in this instance.

His opponent in the 1932 election was Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt who campaigned on the platform of "Relief, Recovery, Reform." Hoover got whooped, winning only a handful of New England states and losing in the Electoral College 472 to 59. FDR installed the New Deal, and the Democratic tradition of embracing large government was complete. The New Deal created strict regulation on business as well as an alphabet soup of numerous federal agencies (CCC, AAA, TVA, WPA, etc.) designed to put people to work. Of course the size of the federal government, and the federal deficit itself, exploded in an effort developed by British economist John Maynard Keynes to spend their way out of the Great Depression and the side circus of the Dust Bowl. Democrats were okay with this. Also, it was FDR and the Democrats who pushed for the repeal of Prohibition though Republicans quit trying to defend it. The switch was almost complete.

FDR would get re-elected in 1936, 1940, and 1944. After he died in April 1945, Republicans began working on the 22nd Amendment, limiting the number of terms a president could serve to two.

No area of the country highlights the musical-chairing of the major political parties quite like the South. In the same way that the Democrats absorbed the changing demographic of Western voters, Republicans capitalized on social issues to welcome Southerners into the fold. But it took a branch of the Democratic Party to initiate the shift: the Dixiecrats. New York Governor Thomas Dewey was the Republican nominee for president in the 1944 and 1948 elections. He supported - along with Northern Republicans and Democrats alike - sweeping civil rights legislation with which the Southern Democrats wholeheartedly disagreed. When Truman issued Executive Order 9981 in July 1948 (a few months before the presidential election) desegregating the military, dudes like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and James Eastland of Mississippi led the charge to break away from the Democratic Party and form their own branch known as the States' Rights Democratic Party (because nothing rings those alarm bells like invoking "States Rights" 83 years after Appomattox. Platform points 4-6 were as follows:

We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates...We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights. 

We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiat, regulations of private employment practices, voting, and local law enforcement.

We affirm that the effective enforcement of such a program would be utterly destructive of the social, economic and political life of the Southern people, and of other localities in which there may be differences in race, creed or national origin in appreciable numbers.

Strom Thurmond was their chosen nominee in 1948. In the election, Democrat Harry Truman won his own term, defeating Dewey 303-189 with about a two million vote edge. Thurmond won 39 electoral votes and 1.17 million votes, winning South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and one elector from Tennessee - all states won by FDR in 1944.

Democrat Adlai Stevenson's only Electoral College wins were in the Deep South in 1952, with WW2 hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower taking the election in a landslide thanks to concerns over the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union, and who better to face a potential conflict with the Soviet Union than the guy who commanded the entire American force against the Nazis? Two years later Brown v. Board of Education desegregated schools. Eisenhower won re-election in 1956, flipping Louisiana to the Republican Party for the first time since the aforementioned 1876 election, when their electoral votes were given to Rutherford B. Hayes. The South was starting to break with the Democratic Party.

The rematch in 1956 saw the Republican Eisenhower easily win re-election. Southern states were shifting their allegiance to the Republican party, though Eisenhower would send in the 101st Airborne to Little Rock Central High School and force its compliance with Brown. That said, here is the net gain by the Republican Party among Southern states from the 1952 to 1956 presidential elections:

Alabama: +4
Arkansas: +3
Florida: +2
Georgia: +3
Louisiana: +6
Mississippi: -15
North Carolina: +3
South Carolina: +22
Tennessee: -0.8

Kennedy's civil rights bill was based on a similar 1875 attempt at civil rights legislation. Democrat Howard Smith, a Virginia segregationist, killed it in committee. When noted political bully Lyndon B. Johnson first addressed a joint session of Congress - five days after Kennedy's assassination - he said:

No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.

LBJ pushed the bill through as quickly as he could. Problem is that it was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by James Eastland...who (if you're still awake) was one of the key Dixiecrat figures of 1948. Democrats finessed it so that it went directly to the Senate floor for debate. Upon its arrival, the Southern Democrats were joined by Republican senator Richard Russell filibustered the bill's debate. Russell:

We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states.

There it is. The Republicans managed to filibuster for 54 days. Strom Thurmond lost his racist mind about it:

This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise, and extend beyond the realm of reason. This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is reminiscent of the Reconstruction proposals and actions of the radical Republican Congress.

It was part of LBJ's Great Society plan. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2. It didn't hurt that 1964 was an election year. Here's the net Republican gain in the presidential election from 1952 to 1964, when Republican Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson:

Alabama: +34
Arkansas: Same
Florida: -7
Georgia: +24
Louisiana: +10
Mississippi: +48
North Carolina: +10
South Carolina: +55
Tennessee: -5

Why did Arizona senator and Republican nominee Barry Goldwater make such massive gains among Southern states in 1964? Look to Goldwater's 1960 book The Conscience of a ConservativeIn it, Goldwater wrote against the "radical, or Liberal, approach" to politics.

(Interestingly enough, Goldwater and John F. Kennedy - opposite ends of the political spectrum - were very good friends and proposed a joint campaign: both sides making the same campaign stops at the same time and debating issues from a Conservative and Liberal standpoint. The CIACubansRussiansMafia, Lee Harvey Oswald ended that wonderful idea for a political experiment.)

Since 1964 there have been 13 presidential elections. The number of times the non-Democratic candidate ('sup, 1968 George Wallace) has won the Deep South, from 1968-2016:

Alabama: 11
Arkansas: 10
Florida: 9
Georgia: 9
Louisiana: 10
Mississippi: 12
North Carolina: 11
South Carolina: 12
Tennessee: 10

It took about 90 years from the 1870s-1960s, but racial tensions of post-Reconstruction America combined with the role of government in the financial sector in the 1920s-1930s, and then back to racial tensions of the mid-20th Century completed the do-si-do of the Democratic and Republican parties. I'll let you interpret the party differences of the 21st Century.