Political Party History

By: AJ Sholing &Meagan Crisostomo

Definition

• A political organization that typically seeks to attain and maintain political power within government

• Usually by participating in electoral campaigns, educational outreach or protest actions.

• Parties often support an expressed ideology or vision bolstered by a written platform with specific goals, forming a coalition among disparate interests.

How it Started

• Came out of practical necessity.

• 1787: Parties began to form as citizens debated over ratifying the U.S. Constitution

How it Started

• Secretary of State Jefferson and other officials, many of whom despised Hamilton and his aristocratic ways as much as they opposed the policies he favored

• They were uncertain about how to deal with these political differences

• Concerned about the success of the new government; personal loyalty to Washington was a close second.

How it Started

• Jefferson stayed in the cabinet, despite his opposition to administration policies, during most of Washinton’s first term.

• When Jefferson left the cabinet at the end of 1793, many who joined him in opposition to the administration’s economic policies remained in Congress

• This formed a group of legislators opposed to Federalist fiscal policies and eventually to Federalist foreign policy

• DIVIDED GOVERNMENT

What is Realignment?

• Realigning Elections (AKA Critical Elections)- turning points that define the agenda of politics and the alignment of voters within parties during periods of historic change in the economy and society.

• Characterized by intense voter involvement, disruptions of traditional voting patterns, changes in the relations of power within the community, and the formation of new and durable electoral groupings.

• These elections occur cyclically and tend to coincide with expansions of the suffrage or changes in the rate of voting.

1824: Andrew Jackson and the Democrats

• Democrat Andrew Jackson, failed to achieve the necessary majority of the electoral college

• Defeated by John Quincy Adams in the runoff election in the House of Representatives.

• Jackson, aided by Martin Van Buren, gathered a winning combination of regions, interest groups, and political doctrines to win the presidency in 1828.

• The Whigs succeeded the Federalists as the opposition party.

• 1837: The Democrats had become a large, nationwide movement with national and state leadership, a clear party doctrine and a grassroots organization.

• The Whigs were almost as strong: in 1840, they put their own man, General William Henry Harrison into the White House.

• Two-Party System was born!

1860: The Civil War and The Rise of The

Republicans• Out of the crisis over slavery evolved the second

Republican party, the first being the National Republican Party that existed for barely a decade in the 1820s.

• Second Republican party nicknamed “Grand Old Party”.

• Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 with the support not only of financiers, industrialists, and merchants but also of many workers and farmers.

• For 50 years after 1860, the Republican coalition won every presidential race except for Grover Cleveland’s victories in 1884 and 1892.

• The Democratic party survived with its durable white male base in the South.

1896: A Party In Transition

• Economic changed led to changes in the Republican party in the late 1800s.

• The crisis of industrialization squarely placed an agrarian-fundamentalist view of life against an industrial-progress view.

• The two parties also differed over whether U.S. currency should be tied to a silver or gold standard, with Republicans favoring gold and Democrats silver.

• William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic candidate for president in 1896, lost the race to William McKinley.

• The 1896 realignment differs from the others, however, in that the party in power did not change hands. In that sense it was a converting realignment because it reinforced the Republican majority status that had been in place since 1860.

• The Progressive Era, the first two decades of the twentieth century, was a period of political reform led by the Progressive wing of the Republican Party.

• With the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, U.S. senators came to be popularly elected. Women obtained the right to vote when the 19th amendment was ratified in 1920.

• The electorate changed.

• Democrats were unable to build a durable winning coalition during this time and remained the minority party until the early 1930s, when the Great Depression overwhelmed the Hoover administration.

1932: Franklin Roosevelt And The New Deal

Alignment• Turning point in American Politics

• Herbert Hoover and the Republican majority in Congress had responded to the Depression

• Stated that problems with the economy were largely self-correcting and that their long-standing policy of following laissez-faire economics, a hands-off approach in which the government did not attempt to interfere in the economy was appropriate.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats were swept into office in 1932 by a tide of anti-Hoover and anti-Republican sentiment.

• Promised that his response to the Depression would be a “New Deal for America.”

• Rejected laissez-faire economics and instead relied on Keynesian economics, which asserted that government could influence the direction of the economy through fiscal and monetary policy.

1932-Today

• After a century of sporadic government action, the New Dealers fundamentally altered the relationship between government and society by providing government jobs for the unemployed and by using government expenditures to stimulate economic growth.

• Central issue on which the Republicans and Democrats disagreed in the New Deal period was the role government should play in the economy.

• Roosevelt Democrats argued that the government had to act to pull the country out of the Depression, but Republicans objected to enlarging the scope of government and intruding it into the economy.

• During World War II, both parties embraced a bipartisan foreign policy.