Students Frequently Ask this Question: when did the major US parties switch places, and why? Which is to say, when and why did the Democrats, who had been the party of limited federal government, begin to favor expanding Washington’s power? When and why did the Republicans, who had favored so strong a central government in Washington that they would accept a civil war rather than see its power curbed, become the party rhetorically committed to curbing its power?
When is easier to answer than why, though there’s no single date. (It would be nicer, though, if in one presidential election, say, the two candidates had done a partial do-si-do and ended up in each other’s places.) But we can pretty easily bracket the era of change.
At the beginning, we can put the Civil War. During the 1860s, the Republicans favored an expansion of federal power and passed over Democratic opposition a set of laws sometimes called the Second American System, providing federal aid for the transcontinental railroad, for the state university system, for the settlement of the West by homesteaders; for a national currency and a protective tariff.
Taken together, this was a highly ambitious program for expanding federal power. It was mercantilist, but it also aimed to get small-time farmers and ordinary citizens to buy into it with the Homestead Act and the state universities. And, broadly speaking, Democrats opposed it.
The postwar era of Reconstruction saw this division grow clearer, as the Republicans supported an expansion of federal power to provide civil right for African Americans in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment and the creation of the Department of Justice—an expansion that, again, Democrats opposed.
So through the early 1870s, then, the lines are pretty clearly drawn. Let’s leave that era for a moment and flash forward to our closing bracket, which we might as well make the 1936 election. Here we have the Democratic incumbent Franklin Roosevelt winning reelection for the successes and promise of the New Deal, which expanded federal power to provide … well, an awfully long list of benefits including banking, securities, and currency regulation; relief for the unemployed and pensions for the elderly; wilderness conservation; improvements to roads and electric infrastructure; support for unionization; and much else. And he was opposed in this election by Republicans staunchly against this expansion of state power.
So the switch takes place sometime between, let’s say, 1872 and 1936. That may not sound very narrow, but it’s a start.
Now, we can go further by finding some landmark dates in there. One of them has to be the 1896 election, when the Democratic Party fused with the People’s Party, and the incumbent Grover Cleveland, a rather conservative Democrat, was displaced by the young and fiery William Jennings Bryan, whose rhetoric emphasized the importance of social justice in the priorities of the federal government. The next time the Democrats had a Congressional majority, with the start of Wilson’s presidency in 1913, they passed a raft of Bryanish legislation, including the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act. And the next Democratic president after that was FDR. So from Bryan onward, the Democratic Party looks much more like the modern Democratic Party than it does like the party of the 1870s.
Oddly though, during the first part of this period, i.e., the time of Bryan, the Republican Party does not immediately, in reaction, become the party of smaller government; there’s no do-si-do. Instead, for a couple of decades, both parties are promising an augmented federal government devoted in various ways to the cause of social justice. It’s not until the 1920s, and the era of Coolidge especially, that the Republican Party begins to sound like the modern Republican Party, rhetorically devoted to smaller government.1 And that rhetorical tendency doesn’t really set in firmly until the early 1930s and the era of Republican opposition to the New Deal.
So now we have a better idea of when this happens; we need now at least the beginning of an explanation why. And the short answer to that is, the West. Which is to say, had the US not expanded westward and taken in a swath of new states in the post-Civil War era, it’s plausible that the parties would have remained as they were, with the Democrats the party of the South and states’ rights and segregation, and the Republicans seeking electoral advantage by trying to enforce civil rights legislation. But the admission of new western states changed the political calculus. In the West were voters disillusioned with the Republican Party’s Second American System, which turned out awfully favorable to banks, railroads, and manufacturing interests, and less favorable to small-time farmers such as those who had gone West and gone bust.
Those western voters were up for grabs—Bryan got them in 1896, Roosevelt helped McKinley get them in 1900, and got them for himself in 1904—and the only way to get them was to promise that some of the federal largesse that had hitherto benefited the northeast. Which is why you have the period of both parties promising some augmentation of federal power in the decades around the turn of the century.
Now, what happens next is that the Republicans prove able to regain western electoral votes from 1920 without having to promise anything much like Bryanite policies. Why this happens is, to my mind, a bit murky. Possibly it’s because a lot of Bryanite policies have already been passed, and western voters are less rebellious. Possibly it’s because of reaction against the Democrats and the war. Possibly it’s to do with the reaction against immigration. Or all of the above plus something else.
Anyway, that’s the when plus a little of the why the parties switched places. Now, one can get cleverer and point out that although the rhetoric and to a degree the policies of the parties do switch places, their core supporters don’t—which is to say, the Republicans remain, throughout, the party of bigger businesses; it’s just that in the earlier era bigger businesses want bigger government and in the later era they don’t. But this post is already long enough.
1That is to say, rhetorically devoted to smaller government even while increasing government’s size and power to regulate behavior with, e.g. Prohibition—but that’s another wrinkle to this story.
24 comments
May 20, 2010 at 9:33 pm
MSR
That, though, leaves off the abandonment of Democrats by the South from about Al Smith in 1928 until really Gingrich in 1994, and that’s all about social issues, Prohibition, immigration, racism (against Irish Catholics and blacks), Civil Rights, and then Christian Coalition-type issues. The current electoral coalitions are the fairly recent culmination of much longer trends, not the result of movements that ended in 1936.
May 20, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Elliott
Man, it’s for posts like this that I read TEotAW. I’m glad you’re back to posting regularly.
May 21, 2010 at 1:55 am
erubin
Since your focus is usually on economics, I would put Keynes’ 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace right at the fulcrum. It’s a little funny of me to say that, since Keynes’ popularity soared during and after the Great Depression, well after the parties had completed their do-si-do. Nevertheless, Keynes’ advocacy of government intervention toward economic security and prosperity greatly influenced public policy for fifty years. If Keynes wasn’t responsible for the switch, I’d say he surely cemented it.
May 21, 2010 at 4:37 am
eric
MSR, the question isn’t about coalitions, it’s about ideology/rhetoric/policy mix.
May 21, 2010 at 4:40 am
Western Dave
I think what you start seeing in the West is backlash in state politics against the federal government which the Republicans recognize and take advantage of nationally. All those national parks and national forests and national monuments dislocate or otherwise disadvantage a whole lot of people who used those lands for subsistence or low-level market purposes. How is Joe Farmer gonna compete with Big Timber to log in the national forest when he just wants some firewood? The politics around fire suppression vs. “Indian” burning, the expansion of some reservations, citizenship for Native Americans, and western mining wars all bring those types of conflict to the fore and you start seeing a lot of complaining about “Washington” or “experts.” Combine that with the unusual economic prosperity for some and the unusually wet years in the 1920s where farmers were expanding production into places where experts told them they shouldn’t and you’re set up for “the man keeping you down” kind of stuff. Plus radio and movies scaring the crap out of a whole lot of rural Westerners so that the Republicans positions themselves as the “family values” party of their age against the Catholics/Jews/scary city people with their Jazz and their flappers and bootlegging and crime.
So, in short, in the 1920s you get Republican = for the little guy against big corporations/government, for morals, against change.
Democrats (nationally) for Catholics, drinking, big government telling you you can’t do stuff, big business as opposed to the little guy, and maybe unions.
State politics will vary by state but if NM is any indication it’s all about who gets to manipulate the state budget to spread the money to their buddies the fastest.
May 21, 2010 at 4:54 am
eric
Further to my comment above: admittedly, coalitions are not entirely separable from rhetoric. But the question is about a shift in positions on the question of who’s for a more activist federal government. This shift is pretty clearly complete by the New Deal. Which is why that’s when African Americans begin voting Democratic in large numbers, which in turn is why the Democratic Party becomes a party of African American civil rights, which is why the South becomes Republican.
May 21, 2010 at 5:05 am
Ben Alpers
A few thoughts….
1) As I was reading this excellent post, I kept thinking “isn’t one key the changing desires of big business?” And then Eric threw in his last paragraph. Well done!
2) There are substantial regional variations, especially in the Democratic Party through the Sixties (and, I increasingly think, beyond) on the issue of the size of government. So perhaps one ought to specify that one is discussing national political rhetoric.
3) The Progressive / frankly (i.e. rhetorically and well as really) big government strain in Republicanism doesn’t really die until Nelson Rockefeller breathes his last in the 1970s. Though it usually loses internal GOP battles in the ’40s and ’50s, and pretty much always loses them in the ’60s and ’70s, big government rhetoric in the GOP certainly doesn’t go away immediately after 1933. In many ways Nixon’s domestic policy (which was, as Rick Perlstein argues, largely about politics) drew on this strain within the GOP as much as it did on the rising movement conservatism that was all about small government rhetoric.
4) In general, these political do-si-dos take longer working themselves out than is sometimes suggested in thumbnail sketches of political history. For example, while it is broadly true that, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Democrats lost the South, this didn’t happen overnight. LBJ’s prediction that his party would lose the South for a generation was actually not quite right. For the next twenty years, the Democrats and Republicans fought over these voters (Mississippi’s electoral votes put Carter over the top on election night 1976); it was really only at the end of that generation, in the mid-1980s, that Republicans had secured a South nearly as solid as it had been for the Democrats through the 1940s (and, even then, there were cracks in 1992).
May 21, 2010 at 5:32 am
Erik Lund
I’d put my money on the 1932 gubernatorial election in California, with Sinclair’s run for the Democratic nomination. A big enough event that in itself sees the West-beyond-the-West put itself on the electoral map, it also have a huge cultural momentum. With Will Rogers, Steinbeck, Heinlein, Robert E. Howard (I’m reading “Hour of the Dragon” as an anti-EPIC allegory), not to mention the emergence of country music and the western. Much of the modern American dreamscape crystallised around that campaign.
I would also bring up squicky racialising discourses and the Okies (why is Conan a brunette?), but I don’t want Silbey jumping on my head when he gets back from the SMH.
May 21, 2010 at 5:43 am
arbitrista
I think one of the contributing factors is in whose interests federal power is expected to be used. When a constituency expects to be advantaged by assertions of federal power, they tend to favor it, and vice versa. The Jeffersonian strain in the Democratic Party had always seen national power as inevitably favoring interest of northeastern financiers and industrialists. When they came around to the idea that the federal government could be used as a counterweight to those interests, the two parties started to change places. For me the real question is why the sudden change in focus on the part of the more populist type of Democrat.
May 21, 2010 at 5:46 am
Anderson
As I was reading this excellent post, I kept thinking “isn’t one key the changing desires of big business?” And then Eric threw in his last paragraph.
Me too. I don’t have any real grasp of the period (where’s that volume of the Oxford History of the U.S.? I need it!), but my naive understanding was that, with slavery and the South no longer an issue after 1878, the Republican Party’s raison d’etre became Big Business, and that the Democrats gradually became the Not Quite So Much Big Business party by virtue of the two-party system.
May 21, 2010 at 6:05 am
Cheryl Rofer
Thanks for this history.
Let me add another factor. The Republican Party originated in the 1850s as the only party that would face up to the issue of slavery. Its ancestry was largely the Whigs, although it included Democrats as well. The admission of new Western states as slave or free was a major issue.
A bunch of things happened during Reconstruction, and the Republican Party’s history of having ended slavery played into that; it’s why the South remained Democratic until a century later.
So this is another do-si-do: the Republicans originated as anti-slavery and now represent those who feel that the Civil War was an injustice and that citizenship should be correlated to skin color or ancestry. And some of the concerns that you mention are used to mask these preferences, although they also can be considered separately.
May 21, 2010 at 8:36 am
scottg
As Western Dave notes, by the 20s you get “Republicans position(ing) themselves as the “family values” party of their age against the Catholics/Jews/scary city people”
To which I would have added Sinclair and Cali in ’32 which cemented some of the nascent party positions, but Lund has already done so, leaving me with only two additional points:
Hoover’s largely successful mobilization of state power against labor and the left in the Red Scare at the end of WWI, which hit hard in the Mountain and Far West;
Followed by the ascendancy of the Ku Klux Klan esp in NW politics, which as I understand it happened mostly under a Democratic label.
From which cauldron the Republicans emerged with the idea that they could win by being tougher on labor and ethnics than Democrats.
May 21, 2010 at 8:43 am
kevin
where’s that volume of the Oxford History of the U.S.?
Bruce Schulman is hard at work on it. Stay tuned.
May 21, 2010 at 9:58 am
AWC
This is incredibly useful. A truly western perspective, and one that spurs my thinking.
But let me suggest a complementary narrative, one giving immigration a greater role. The Republicans (like the Whigs and Federalists before them) were essentially a native Protestant party before the 1890s. This is why the “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” slur was so effective against Blaine in 1884; the subtext was the GOP’s longtime hostility to the Irish.
As Eric knows better than I, McKinley and Roosevelt made a strong and successful appeal for immigrant votes by advocating a more activist state. This severely damaging the Populist Dems’ attempts at perfecting their producing-class coalition. Likewise, candidates like Hughes had enormous support among urban immigrants.
Suffice to say, white ethnic support for the GOP collapsed in the twenties and thirties, due to a combination of Prohibition, Hoover’s attempts to woo Southern nativists in 1928, and the Depression. Indeed, this break was even more immediate and severe than the shift of African-Americans to the Democrats.
With this the Republicans were severely weakened in their Northeastern strongholds. And the GOP fell into the hands of its Western leaders, while dreaming of someday picking up votes in the South. Thus was born Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
May 21, 2010 at 10:05 am
Ben Alpers
Sinclair’s EPIC gubernatorial campaign was in ’34, not ’32. And I question how much it cemented the positions of the parties.
Sinclair hoped to elicit FDR’s support in his campaign; he more or less failed. FDR refused to enthusiastically back Sinclair, and many moderate California Democrats voted instead for third-party candidate Raymond L. Haight running on the Commonwealth-Progressive Party ticket. Frank Merriam, the Republican, won with 48% of the vote, Sinclair took 37%, and Haight got 13%.
Merriam was defeated four years later by Culbert Olson, who had been an EPIC supporter in ’34. But Olson lost in ’42 to Earl Warren, who was both centrist and popular enough to earn the nominations of the Democratic and Progressive Parties as well as his own Republican Party in 1946.
I’m not a California historian by any means, but it seems to me that, in California politics, it’s really not until the Cold War era that the old progressive wing of the Republican Party begins to be superseded. And even that takes time. When Ronald Reagan, running as an unabashed conservative, won the ’66 GOP nomination for Governor, people were surprised at the ease with which he beat the moderate SF mayor George Christopher in the primary.
May 21, 2010 at 10:16 am
Sir Charles
Isn’t there a sort of multi-step process to the Republicans becoming the ugly entity that they are today, with roughly this timeline:
1. The 1896 election where McKinley, through the efforts of Mark Hanna, taps heavily into Wall Street and big business money, at the same time that the Democrats move left with Bryan.
2. A move further to the right with Taft basically showing no desire to follow up on Roosevelt’s “trust busting” rhetoric.
3. The Harding-Coolidge-Hoover era — when Andrew Mellon was the only Secretary of the Treasury that three Presidents served under — solidifying the party as the proponents of laissez-faire capitalism (and opposed to rum, Romanism, and rebellion).
and finally,
4. The Southern-fried GOP from 1968 Nixon onward, playing up the racial resentments of white southerners and southerners at heart in the rest of the country.
Eric,
What do you think of Jackson Lears’ “Rebirth of a Nation” as a primer for people interested in the period 1877-1920?
May 21, 2010 at 10:22 am
eric
Sir Charles — yes, there is a multistep timeline in the Republicans becoming the party they are today, but again, that’s not the question I’m trying to answer; it’s more when did they start opposing a strong central government.
(I like your locution re Mellon and the presidents.)
May 21, 2010 at 10:22 am
chris
This is why the “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” slur was so effective against Blaine in 1884; the subtext was the GOP’s longtime hostility to the Irish.
Can you still call it a subtext when it makes up 1/3 of the text?
I’m not a California historian by any means, but it seems to me that, in California politics, it’s really not until the Cold War era that the old progressive wing of the Republican Party begins to be superseded. And even that takes time.
The *current* Republican governor of CA is one of the most prominent non-movement-conservative members of the party. I wouldn’t exactly call him progressive relative to the overall political landscape, but within the party, definitely.
May 21, 2010 at 10:34 am
scottg
@Ben: corrections taken. Thank you sir; may we have some more…
May 21, 2010 at 11:15 am
Raleigh
Do you see any importance in the rise of the Liberal Republican wing of the party during Reconstruction? It seems that much of the anti-reg/pro-business/paean to Middle America ideology of the 1920s Republican Party has its origins there, in the rejection of the radicals’ activism and interest in Civil Rights legislation. It was certainly strong enough to take over the general party by 1876 (and formally end Reconstruction) even if it went underground during the TR years. I see the early attempts by the farmers’ associations to grab union support in the 1880s as a partial recognition that the Republican Party, despite the support of N’Eastern urban centers, had gained that support more by its condemnation of the Dem/immigrant political machines than by its support for the unions…
May 21, 2010 at 11:51 am
AWC
O.k. Eric. I have to make an annoying point (one you know all too well). But I think it’ll help us to our goal of total consciousness.
As late as the 1930s, the GOP doesn’t oppose federal power. They still looooove the tariff. And they aren’t opposed to military might. Justice George Sutherland (from Utah) is a big supporter of both the trade restriction and executive power in foreign affairs.
So what do they oppose by 1933? The income tax, business regulation, the safety net, and unions.
The Dem-GOP split on income tax is pretty clear by the 1890s.
I’d say the Republicans are never comfortable with the other three, but they give up entirely during the 1920s (not coincidentally, after the death of TR).
May 21, 2010 at 12:03 pm
jim
A couple of tweaks:
1. Immigrant vs. nativist. The Republicans were, throughout the period (and still!), more anti-immigration than the Democrats (perhaps because of Democratic city machines). Recent immigrants tend to need more government help than established populations. So small government tendencies were encouraged by a nativist stance.
2. War vs. isolationist. Certainly between the two world wars, Republicans in general were isolationist. Small government is much less compatible with expansionism than big government is. (Since the late ’40s, of course, both parties have been war parties — Gary Wills blames it on the bomb — so Republican rhetoric has become the slightly oxymoronic “small government plus strong national defense.”)
May 21, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Anderson
when did they start opposing a strong central government
When government started becoming a threat to big business. That would be my hypo going into researching the monograph.
I don’t think “tariff” and “strong central gov’t” are really all that closely correlated (tho I’m happy to be refuted). And the military was useful in those Latin American markets ….
May 22, 2010 at 10:31 pm
andrew
I’m probably too late to this thread, but I have a question.
How do attitudes towards state government fit into this? For quite a while, believing in a weak central government was perfectly compatible with believing in strong state governments (state-level regulation, state-run or at least -legitimized monopolies, state subsidies, that sort of thing). But now attitudes towards “government” tend to line up; government is just government.
When did this shift occur, and how has it affected the party system (and been affected by it)?