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.
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 Conservative. In 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.
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.
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.
