The History of the Democratic Party E-Book

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 113

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

“I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.” – William Jennings Bryan

As the oldest political party in the United States, the Democratic Party has been one of the nation’s major political parties for over 150 years, and diverse men and ideas have fallen under its tent since the 19th century. Today the Democrats are generally viewed as proponents of a strong, centralized federal government, and yet the forerunner of the modern party was none other than Thomas Jefferson, the man most associated with states’ rights and limited government.

With its Jeffersonian background, the party championed farmers, and Andrew Jackson’s populist era made the Party home to urban workers and new immigrants. Eventually sectional splits weakened the Democrats, and when the fledgling Republican Party took power under Abraham Lincoln in 1861, it ushered in an era in which the Democrats only elected 2 presidents over a 70 year span. However, Reconstruction ensured that the Democrats maintained an almost unbreakable level of support in the old Confederate states, and they used the Solid South to wield power in Congress for decades.

150 years after the Civil War, the Democratic Party’s current voting bloc (strongly reliant on minorities) and their base of power (the Northeast and Midwest) are completely different than the 19th century’s incarnation. Its platform has also been completely revamped. Both of those reversals are byproducts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, which continue to be the pillars on which the Democrats’ current platform rests.

The History of the Democratic Party looks back at the historical narrative of the Democrats, including their key leaders, important changes and events, and the Party’s current political platform. Along with pictures, you will learn about the Democratic Party like you never have before, in no time at all.

Leseprobe

The History of the Democratic Party: A Political Primer

By Charles River Editors

About Charles River Editors

Charles River Editors was founded by Harvard and MIT alumni to provide superior editing and original writing services, with the expertise to create digital content for publishers across a vast range of subject matter. In addition to providing original digital content for third party publishers, Charles River Editors republishes civilization’s greatest literary works, bringing them to a new generation via ebooks.

Introduction

The Democratic Party

“I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.” – William Jennings Bryan

As the oldest political party in the United States, the Democratic Party has been one of the nation’s major political parties for over 150 years, and diverse men and ideas have fallen under its tent since the 19th century. Today the Democrats are generally viewed as proponents of a strong, centralized federal government, and yet the forerunner of the modern party was none other than Thomas Jefferson, the man most associated with states’ rights and limited government.

With its Jeffersonian background, the party championed farmers, and Andrew Jackson’s populist era made the Party home to urban workers and new immigrants. Eventually sectional splits weakened the Democrats, and when the fledgling Republican Party took power under Abraham Lincoln in 1861, it ushered in an era in which the Democrats only elected 2 presidents over a 70 year span. However, Reconstruction ensured that the Democrats maintained an almost unbreakable level of support in the old Confederate states, and they used the Solid South to wield power in Congress for decades.

150 years after the Civil War, the Democratic Party’s current voting bloc (strongly reliant on minorities) and their base of power (the Northeast and Midwest) are completely different than the 19th century’s incarnation. Its platform has also been completely revamped. Both of those reversals are byproducts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, which continue to be the pillars on which the Democrats’ current platform rests.

The History of the Democratic Party looks back at the historical narrative of the Democrats, including their key leaders, important changes and events, and the Party’s current political platform. Along with pictures, you will learn about the Democratic Party like you never have before, in no time at all.

The History of the Democratic Party: A Political Primer

About Charles River Editors

Introduction

Chapter 1: Before the Democratic Party

Chapter 2: The Democratic-Republicans

Chapter 3: Jacksonian Democrats

Chapter 4: 1850s Politics and the Election of 1860

Chapter 5: Out of Power

Chapter 6: The FDR Years

Chapter 7: Forging a New Path

Chapter 8: A New Frontier

Chapter 9: The Great Society

Chapter 10: The New Democrats

Chapter 11: The Democrats Today

Chapter 1: Before the Democratic Party

When he emerged from the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was stopped and asked what the men writing the new government had decided upon.

“A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.”

More than 200 years later, the Republic has indeed endured. Yet one of the most common complaints here today is that the Founders would be shocked at the partisan and gridlock that consume so much of American politics today. In fact, the founders might not be surprised at all. The system of government created in Philadelphia was in many ways designed to create such gridlock.

In the Federalist Papers that were written to encourage support for the new Constitution, James Madison wrote that the system of checks and balances created by the founders would pit “faction against faction.” Perhaps another word for this phenomenon is “gridlock.”

The Founding Fathers saw this as healthy and good for the young Republic. They feared mob rule and wanted to make government a thoughtful and slow process. Hence, the design of the government separated powers; and the legislative branch was divided into two parts so that legislation could not move easily.

As Hamilton wrote in Federalist #31, “A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care, and to the complete execution of the trusts for which it is responsible, free from every other control but a regard to the public good and to the sense of the people.” In essence, the founders wanted a government big enough to get things done, but not too big that it forgot it worked for the people.

As a result of this design, the creation of political parties was inevitable. Any time an issue is debated there are typically two opposing sides, and the “factions” that Madison wrote about would eventually organize formally and name themselves. For the people who today gather under the Democratic Party banner, the man to whom they trace their lineage is Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson

In the late 19th century, a debate raged in Europe and America about the goal of government. In the American Revolution, the colonists waged war for a specific reason: they were being taxed and yet had no say in Parliament. Despite what Thomas Paine wrote at the time, many of the American revolutionaries weren’t trying to make the world anew: they just wanted lower taxes and a vote in government. This has led some historians to label the American Revolution a “conservative” revolution.

A few years later in France, a very different kind of battle broke out. In the French Revolution, seemingly no limits existed to the goals of the revolutionaries. Instead, a war ensued that was designed to achieve “liberty, equality and fraternity,” a far cry from “taxation without representation.”

Ironically, Jefferson found himself in Paris as the Revolution began, and from the start, he found himself in complete sympathy with the French Revolution. When he returned to the United States to serve as President Washington’s Secretary of State, he brought with him a renewed disdain for monarchy and a rekindled fire for democracy. Meanwhile, he found himself serving in Washington’s cabinet alongside Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of Treasury. Hamilton was appalled by the excesses of the French Revolution and thought America could do worse than to copy the British policy of establishing a national debt and creating a national bank.

Since Washington frequently sided with Hamilton, Jefferson was concerned about Hamilton’s influence on the President, but he was not the only one. As early as 1791, Jefferson began consorting with James Madison of Virginia and Aaron Burr and DeWitt Clinton of New York to form an allied opposition to Hamilton's policies. Under Jefferson’s leadership, they organized a party that came to be called the Democratic-Republicans, which opposed Hamilton's understanding of a flexible constitution and his advocacy for a strong federal government. They were often simply referred to as Jeffersonians.

On almost every major issue of the Washington Presidency, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury had clashed. Jefferson often felt slighted by both the President and Hamilton, who tended to side with one another. This came up in both domestic and foreign policy. Hamilton's area of expertise was economics, so Jefferson could justify Washington's siding with Hamilton on taxes and banking. But on foreign policy – particularly on war between France and Great Britain in 1793 – Washington again sided with Hamilton, despite Jefferson being the Secretary of State. Jefferson and his allies supported France in the conflict while Hamilton supported Great Britain; Washington decided on neutrality.

In response to the mobilization of the Democratic-Republicans, Hamilton didn't sit idly by. He became the intellectual driving force of another party, the Federalists, and gained crucial allies like John Adams to join his cause in support of a strong central government. The two parties mobilized in often-vitriolic ways, lambasting their opponents in newspapers throughout the country.

Hamilton

Thus was formed the nation's first Party System. One party, the Federalists, was led by Alexander Hamilton and supported a strong federal government. Its supporters were primarily Northern and were frequently attached to business or capitalist interests. The other party was the Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, who supported more agrarian interests and preferred to reserve more power for the states. The Democratic-Republicans garnered most of their support from Southern farmers.

Hamilton and Jefferson would clash and compete for Washington's influence so frequently that Jefferson felt himself forced out of the cabinet and resigned in 1793, at the beginning of Washington's second term as President

Madison’s predication of “faction against faction” had first played out as Jefferson against Hamilton, and in this initial bit of gridlock, the outlines of the Democratic Party began to emerge.

Chapter 2: The Democratic-Republicans

In many ways, Jefferson seems a strange founder of a party that has long claimed to be devoted to the interests of the working class. The Sage of Monticello was anything but working class. Sophisticated and urbane, Jefferson spoke several languages, enjoyed wine from overseas and was not shy about using slave labor to build and rebuild his estate.

One of the benefits of a life of luxury was Jefferson had time to read, think and write, and with that his mind was an ocean that roared with waves of ideas and vision. To Jefferson, America had little in common with aristocratic England. Instead, he viewed America as a “natural aristocracy” where ordinary people could do extraordinary things; he wanted to create a nation of “yeoman farmers” where people ran their own farms and their own affairs.

Jefferson feared that this might not be possible if Hamilton’s economic program were adopted, especially with the formation of a national bank. Southerners thought it gave excessive powers to the federal government at the expense of the states. Jefferson had other reasons to oppose the bill; always a fan of agriculture, Jefferson saw the bank as no friend of farmers. He thought it was geared exclusively towards helping urban businessmen improve their fortunes. To some extent, Hamilton wouldn't disagree with this assessment; he thought the United States was destined not to be a Jeffersonian agrarian nation, but a large industrial one.

And so the Democratic-Republican Party, as it was then called, began as a limited government party. It traced its roots to classical liberalism and it acknowledged that every man is endowed with natural rights. Above all, Jefferson’s party would fight hard against big government and big money and stand firm for states’ rights. Meanwhile, Hamilton and John Adams belonged to the Federalist Party, which favored a strong national government, trade ties to England, and a centralized bank. America now had its first two organized political parties.

Jefferson soon got to try out his brand of politics as the third president of the United States, only to learn what all presidents eventually do. Sometimes a philosophy works much better in theory than in practice. When presented with the chance to execute the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson briefly overlooked his limited government principles and doubled the size of the young country.

Still, even today's American dialogue focuses heavily on the balance of power between state and federal government. In fact, the current size of the federal government has been the foremost political issue in the country’s most recent elections. Jefferson ensured that the strain that supported stronger states would live on strongly in rural America, because he intertwined the virtues of small, local governments and an agrarian life style, and the appeal of states rights still lives on in rural America today. At its base, Jefferson's political philosophy trusted the broad masses to govern themselves. Such trust is now a defining cornerstone of American democracy.

When Jefferson assumed the Presidency in 1800, he did so after 12 years of Federalist government, and it was not clear that the United States would prefer a course of government that trusted a broad democracy. Moments like the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts suggest that the United States might have limited the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Jefferson changed that, and in doing so undid the first 12 years of American political history, and ensured that a more limited, trusting and democratic view of government prevailed in the United States until the Civil War. After Jefferson left the office of President, both of his successors – who both served two terms – were devout Democratic-Republicans. Presidents Madison and Monroe further ensured that Jeffersonianism would dominate American political discourse.

Chapter 3: Jacksonian Democrats

Andrew Jackson

In the search for a successor to President James Monroe, the Democratic-Republican Party split. The group that was still devoted to Jeffersonian principles became known simply as “Democrats” and was led in the 1824 presidential election by Andrew Jackson.

The Election of 1824, however, proved to be a watershed in American political history, opening the doors to the present-day two party system. Jackson initially had trouble securing the nomination of the Democratic-Republicans, because the Congressional Caucus nominated William Crawford, the sitting Secretary of the Treasury. Jackson may have been a military hero who was popular with the country, but the nomination process did not involve citizens voting yet, and Jackson now faced an entrenched politician.

Luckily for Jackson, many within the party thought that that method of selection was undemocratic, and that Crawford's nomination was illegitimate. Other candidates thus jumped in the race, believing Crawford stood no chance of winning. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams threw his hat into the race, as did the “Great Compromiser”, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and, briefly, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who dropped out after deciding he wanted to be Vice President instead. And finally, Andrew Jackson also decided to run for the White House. Jackson was now running against several Cabinet members and one of the Lions of the Senate.