From 1929 to 1945, the Democratic Party went from a disorganized minority party to the majority party of the nation. As the decade of the 1920s neared its end, the prospects of the Democratic Party in national politics seemed dim. Only two Democrats had won the presidency since 1860; the Republican Party had been the normal majority party since the mid-1890s; and Republicans had dominated national politics throughout the 1920s. In the election of 1928, Herbert C. Hoover defeated the Democratic presidential nominee, Alfred E. Smith, by 58.2 to 40.9 percent of the popular vote. In the Congress elected that year, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 267-167 in the House of Representatives and by 56-39 in the Senate. The Republican Party’s organizational strength, longstanding majority status, and identification with the prosperity of the 1920s seemed to promise its continued dominance.
The Democratic Party did have some areas of significant strength. The South, where few African Americans could vote, had been solidly Democratic since the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Democrats controlled a number of cities outside the South because of strong organizations and support from Catholic immigrant groups (especially Irish Americans). But the party had severe weaknesses as well. It was more a collection of state and local machines than an organized national party. Its two major areas of strength, old-stock rural Protestants in the Midwest and South and ethnic urban Catholics in the North, were bitterly at odds on the polarizing social issues of the 1920s (Prohibition and immigration restriction, for example), and it had taken the divided Democrats 103 ballots to decide upon a compromise presidential nominee in 1924. Al Smith, the Irish-American Catholic governor of New York, won the party’s nomination in 1928; but while he rallied millions of new urban voters to the Democratic Party, he carried only six states in the deep South plus heavily Catholic Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In addition to its deep cultural and geographical divisions, the Democratic Party offered little real policy alternative to the Republicans and no common position on most big issues. “I don’t belong to an organized political party,” quipped the humorist Will Rogers. “I’m a Democrat.”
The Great Depression provided the Democrats the opportunity to regain national power. The two parties essentially broke even in the election of 1930, and when the new Congress met, Democrats had a narrow majority in the House and a coalition of Democrats and progressive Republicans were able to control the Senate when they wished. But the Democrats were unified only in their efforts to blame the collapse of the economy on Hoover and the Republicans. A number of leading congressional Democrats from the South, including Speaker of the House John Nance Garner of Texas, were traditional small-government conservatives, as unwilling as Hoover to support expensive or expansive new federal programs. Others in the party wanted more government action, but progressive southern and western rural Democrats typically emphasized assistance to agriculture, while liberal urban Democrats focused on help for workers and the cities.
As the Democrats prepared for the election of 1932, many supported the popular and progressive governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt had ties to both rural and urban Democrats, partly through his efforts in the 1920s to have the party establish an effective national organization, and he understood that Democrats had to stress the economic problems that might unite the party. Although opposed by leading Democratic conservatives, and by Al Smith, who wanted renomination, Roosevelt was the early front-runner. He won the necessary two-thirds of the convention delegates on the fourth ballot, when John Nance Garner, subsequently nominated for vice president, helped deliver enough votes to ensure Roosevelt’s nomination.
The election of 1932 was in many ways a transitional one for the Democratic Party. Roosevelt and the Democrats swept to landslide victory, with 57.4 percent of the presidential vote and with margins of 310-117 in the House and 60-35 in the Senate. But the election marked more a rejection of Hoover and the Republicans than an affirmation of Roosevelt and the Democrats, who waged a campaign that was inconsistent and unclear, criticizing Hoover for doing and spending too much as well as for doing too little to deal with the depression. The Democrats’ forthright opposition to Prohibition was perhaps the most obvious distinction between the two parties. Yet if Roosevelt did not clearly or consistently outline what would become the New Deal, his greater emphasis on providing action for the economy and RELIEE for the unemployed distinguished him from Hoover. And the election had transferred power to the Democrats and given them a chance to govern—and to build a new coalition of voters that would keep them in power.
Once in office, Roosevelt began to implement the New Deal and, helped by new national chairman James A. Farley, to build the organizational strength and voter support that made Democrats the majority party. Democrats gained strength in both houses of Congress in the election of 1934, a significant departure from the usual pattern of the incumbent president’s party losing substantial ground in off-year elections and a telling confirmation of public support for Roosevelt and the New Deal. The Democratic gains, moreover, came especially from northern and urban constituencies increasingly central to the party’s voter base and policy agenda. The social reform programs of 1935 came in significant measure from the greater strength of urban liberals in Congress, typified in many ways by Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York. The new directions of the party upset conservative Democrats, some of whom joined Al Smith in the anti-New Deal American Liberty League.
The election OE 1936 confirmed the Democratic Party’s new urban, liberal orientation and established it as the nation’s new majority party. At their national convention, the Democrats abolished their requirement of a two-thirds majority for nomination, which ended the veto power that southern Democrats had long enjoyed. Roosevelt tried to rally the working class and lower middle class behind him and his party with rhetoric castigating “economic royalists.” Democrats made particular efforts to turn out the vote among ethnic groups and labor, and unions in 1936 provided the party unprecedented financial and organizational support. Led by Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary W. Dewson of the Democratic National Committee, the party made special efforts to bring women to the polls. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was the first woman cabinet member ever, and the New Deal’s women’s network brought political dividends. Roosevelt’s appointments of Catholics and Jews to important government positions in unprecedented numbers helped solidify the support of those groups. Similarly, Roosevelt named many African Americans, such as Mary McLeod Bethune, to significant posts, and the resulting informal Black Cabinet as well as assistance from New Deal programs led black Americans to vote Democratic in unprecedented numbers. New Deal programs, relief especially, also helped Democratic urban politicians build or strengthen powerful organizations that brought voters to the polls.
In November, FDR won more than three-fifths of the presidential vote, losing (as Farley had predicted) only Maine and Vermont, and Democrats swept to even more top-heavy control of the Congress, with margins of nearly 4 to 1 in the House and 5 to 1 in the Senate. Unlike 1932, the electorate had voted not just against the Republicans, but for Roosevelt, the Democrats, and the New Deal. The Democratic Party’s new majority came from the Roosevelt Coalition of voters, based partly on the South but even more on overwhelming support in northern metropolitan areas from working-class and lower-income voters, Catholic and Jewish ethnic groups, and African Americans. And the realignment of the 1930s had not only made the Democratic Party the majority party at the national level but, in varying degrees, had also built substantial new Democratic strength in many states and cities.
Yet the Democratic Party’s new top-heavy majority status carried its own difficulties. A coalition so broad was hard to keep together, as subsequent years would show. Many voters in 1936 had supported Roosevelt but did not necessarily think of themselves as Democrats. Democratic politicians and officials at the state and local levels, particularly in the South, were often lukewarm at best toward New Deal policy and at odds with liberal Democrats in Washington. Rural Democrats thought too much attention and money were going to urban areas and industrial workers. Southerners feared also that too much power was going to the North and that New Deal programs were undermining traditional social, political, and even racial patterns in the South. Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina complained that the introduction of ANTILYNchING legislation meant that southerners had “been deserted by the Democrats of the North,” and by the end of the decade southern Democrats in Washington increasingly opposed social and economic reform. Conservative Democrats retained their small-government preferences and feared the growing size, power, and costs of the federal government. At times, Roosevelt seemed inclined to try to reorient the party system along clear liberal/conservative lines, but it was never a priority and was probably impossible given the exigencies of the era and the obstacles of the American political system.
Democratic factionalism flared in 1937 and 1938, when conservative, most southern and rural, Democrats in the Congress, began joining with Republicans to form a conservative coalition that would stymie much of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda for the remainder of his presidency. In addition to their concerns about the federal government doing and spending too much, congressional conservatives feared that the executive branch was aggrandizing power, diminishing states’ rights, and giving excessive attention to the agenda of urban liberals. The COURT-PACKiNG PLAN of 1937, sit-down strikes by CIO workers, and the RECESSION Of 1937-1938 fueled public criticism of Roosevelt and led conservative Democrats to ally with Republicans in defeating proposals to extend the New Deal. Angered, Roosevelt sought to “purge” anti-New Deal Democrats by opposing them in party primaries in 1938—but his efforts at punishing them and liberalizing the party were on balance an embarrassing failure that deepened party divisions. In the election of 1938, Republicans picked up substantial strength in the Congress.
For the remainder of the Roosevelt years, the Democratic Party remained divided along ideological and geographical lines, with the majority liberal wing unable to control Congress because of the strength of the conservative coalition. As the economy recovered during WORLD War II, New Deal programs aimed at the unemployed and impoverished were eliminated or cut back, and liberal proposals to extend the New Deal stood no chance. Though the heart of the New Deal regulatory welfare state remained intact, Democratic liberals were often distressed not just by the party’s conservatives, but even by Franklin Roosevelt, who many thought did not provide enough leadership for domestic programs in the war years. Yet liberals themselves typically altered their programmatic emphasis as LIBERALISM changed in the late 1930s and 1940s, emphasizing KEYNESIANISM to produce economic growth via fiscal policy rather than the regulation and redistribution of the early New Deal. As liberal northern Democrats also increasingly championed CIVIL RIGHTS, southern Democrats became all the more worried about the party’s direction; and although the South remained solidly Democratic in 1944, seeds were laid for the “Dixiecrat” revolt of 1948. In Congress, Southern Democrats in the House and Senate were clearly more conservative than Democrats from the North by the early 1940s, a geographical split in the party that would continue in the postwar years.
Despite their ongoing divisions and tensions, however, Democrats remained the majority party for the remainder of Roosevelt’s presidency, and for decades beyond. In the ELECTION Of 1940, Roosevelt decisively won an unprecedented third term, with the party division in Congress changing little. James Farley resigned as national chairman, upset by FDR’s decision to seek a third term as well as by the party’s liberal direction, but Edward J. Flynn proved an able successor. Republicans cut sharply into Democratic margins in Congress in the election of 1942; but in the ELECTION Of 1944, Roosevelt won another decisive victory and Democrats increased their control of Congress. Democrats thus retained their majority status in the new politics of prosperity and global war. The core of the Roosevelt Coalition, like the core of the New Deal regulatory-welfare state, emerged largely intact from World War II, as did the party issues and images of the realignment of the 1930s. POLITICS IN the Roosevelt era had not just transformed the Democratic Party but had profoundly changed the American political system.
Further reading: John M. Allswang, The New Deal and American Politics (New York: Wiley, 1978); David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918-1932 (New York: Knopf, 1968); Otis L. Graham, Jr., “The Democratic Party, 1932-1945,” in The History of U. S. Political Parties, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (New York: Chelsea House, 1973), 1,939-2,006; James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967); Sean J. Savage, Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932-1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991).
World History
