Agrarian Democrats demanding
Free Silver overthrew the Bourbon Democrats in 1896 and nominated
William Jennings Bryan
for the presidency (a nomination repeated by Democrats in 1900 and
1908). Bryan waged a vigorous campaign attacking Eastern moneyed
interests, but he lost to the Republican
William McKinley. The Democrats took control of the House in 1910 and elected
Woodrow Wilson
as president in 1912 and 1916. Wilson effectively led Congress to put
to rest the issues of tariffs, money, and antitrust, which had dominated
politics for 40 years, with new progressive laws.
1930–1960
The
Great Depression in 1929 that occurred under Republican President
Herbert Hoover
and the Republican Congress set the stage for a more liberal
government; the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives nearly
uninterrupted from 1930 until 1994 and won most presidential elections
until 1968.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected to the presidency in 1932, came forth with government programs called the
New Deal.
New Deal liberalism meant the regulation of business (especially
finance and banking) and the promotion of labor unions, as well as
federal spending to aid to the unemployed, help distressed farmers, and
undertake large-scale public works projects. It marked the start of the
American welfare state.
[25]
The opponents, who stressed opposition to unions, support for business,
and low taxes, started calling themselves "conservatives".
[26]
Until the 1980s, the Democratic Party was a coalition of two parties
divided by the Mason–Dixon line: liberal Democrats in the North and
culturally conservative voters in the South, who though benefitting from
many of the New Deal public works projects, opposed increasing
Civil Rights
initiatives advocated by Northeastern liberals. The polarization grew
stronger after Roosevelt died. Southern Democrats formed a key part of
the bipartisan
conservative coalition in an alliance with most of the Midwestern Republicans. The economically activist philosophy of
Franklin D. Roosevelt, which has strongly influenced
American liberalism, shaped much of the party's economic agenda after 1932. From the 1930s to the mid-1960s, the liberal
New Deal coalition usually controlled the Presidency while the conservative coalition usually controlled Congress.
[27]
Issues facing parties and the United States after
World War II included the
Cold War and the
Civil Rights Movement. Republicans attracted conservatives and white Southerners from the Democratic coalition with their use of the
Southern strategy and resistance to New Deal and
Great Society liberalism. African Americans had traditionally supported the Republican Party because of the anti-slavery policies of
Abraham Lincoln and the civil rights policies of his successors, such as
Ulysses S. Grant.
But they began supporting Democrats following the ascent of the
Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, the New Deal, the integration of
the military and embrace of proposed civil rights legislation by
President Harry Truman in 1947–48, and the postwar Civil Rights
movement. The Democratic Party's main base of support shifted to the
Northeast, marking a dramatic reversal of history.
1960–1980
The election of President
John F. Kennedy
from Massachusetts in 1960 was a partial reflection of this shift. In
the campaign, Kennedy attracted a new generation of younger voters. In
his agenda dubbed the
New Frontier, Kennedy introduced a host of social programs and public works projects, along with enhanced support of the
space program, proposing a manned spacecraft
trip to the moon by the end of the decade. He pushed for civil rights initiatives and proposed the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, but with his
assassination in November 1963, was not able to see its passage.
Kennedy's successor
Lyndon B. Johnson
was able to persuade the largely conservative congress to pass civil
rights bill in 1964 and with a more progressive congress in 1965 passed
much of the
Great Society,
which consisted of an array of social programs designed to help the
poor. Kennedy and Johnson's advocacy of civil rights further solidified
black support for the Democrats, but had the effect of alienating
southern whites, who would eventually gravitate towards the Republican
party, particularly after the election of
Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. The United States' involvement in the
Vietnam War in the 1960s was another divisive issue that further fractured the fault lines of the Democrats' coalition. After
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, President Johnson committed a large contingency of combat troops to Vietnam, but the escalation failed to drive the
Viet Cong from south Vietnam, resulting in an increasing
quagmire,
which by 1968 had become the subject of widespread anti-war protests in
the United States and elsewhere. With increasing casualties and nightly
news reports bringing home troubling images from Vietnam, the costly
military engagement became increasingly unpopular, alienating many of
the kinds of young voters that the Democrats had attracted the early
1960s. The protests that year along with assassinations of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic presidential candidate Sen.
Robert F. Kennedy (younger brother of John F. Kennedy) climaxed in turbulence at the hotly contested
Democratic National Convention that summer in Chicago (which, amongst the ensuing turmoil inside and outside of the convention hall, nominated Vice President
Hubert Humphrey),
in a series of events that proved to mark a significant turning point
in the decline of the Democratic party's broad coalition.
Republican presidential nominee
Richard Nixon
was able to capitalize on the Democrat's confusion that year and won
the 1968 election to become the 37th president, and would win again in
1972 against Democratic nominee
George McGovern,
who like Robert Kennedy reached out to the younger anti-war and
counterculture voters, but unlike Kennedy, was not able to appeal to the
party's more traditional white working class constituencies. During
Nixon's second term, his presidency was rocked by the
Watergate scandal, which forced him to resign in 1974, being succeeded by vice president
Gerald Ford, who served a brief tenure. Watergate offered the Democrats an opportunity to recoup, and their nominee
Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election. With the initial support of
evangelical Christian voters in the South, Carter was temporarily able to re-unite the disparate factions within the party, but
inflation and the
Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979–1980 took their toll, resulting in a landside victory for Republican presidential nominee
Ronald Reagan in 1980, which shifted the tectonic plates of the political landscape in favor of the Republicans for years to come.
