Elections

The political culture of the late 19th century gave a central place to the ritual of election campaigns. Torchlight parades and party picnics were the occasion for fiery partisan oratory, and elections took on the aura of great battles between the Grand Old Party (Republicans) and the Dinner Pail Brigade (Democrats). By 1920, however, politics had been transformed. A critical realignment in 1896 made the Republican Party the majority party in both the White House and Congress, and the competitiveness that characterized elections evaporated. High levels of voter participation declined, as the old battleground states of Ohio, Indiana, New York, Connecticut, and, to a lesser extent, New Jersey and Pennsylvania became rock-solid Republican. As the minority, the Democratic Party relied on its strength in the South and the rural Midwest.

There were other changes as well. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) for woman suffrage gave the vote to women. In many respects, however, voting and electoral politics were of declining significance. The initiative for legislation came increasingly from lobbying and interest groups, and the center of political gravity shifted from local party politics to mass democracy. At the same time, elections—at least national presidential elections—remained the central drama of American political life.

After 1900, several political reforms—new voting regulations, early registration, residency requirements, and stricter enforcement of voting laws—changed who was defined as a citizen and a voter. More independent voters and declining party loyalty increased such practices as split-ticket voting (where individuals voted for candidates of more than one party) and the use of pasters (stickers with independent candidates’ names). Initiative, referendum, and recall and the direct primary changed how politicians and party officials did business, as did the increasing levels of campaign funding required by improvements in communication and in how party campaigns were conducted. Fear of the power of immigrant political machines encouraged an urban reform movement, which worked to shift power away from ward organizations to central government. The introduction of citywide elections and the shift toward city commissions undermined ward-level politics. By the 1920s, the spate of laws restricting immigration also diminished the importance of the immigrant and ethnic vote.

The expansion of the right to vote to women ironically helped to lower voter participation rates. In 1920, for example, the rate had fallen to 53 percent. Following declines in party identification, fewer voters voted. What was more, newly enfranchised women were not voting in the same proportion as men. Women did not vote as a bloc as many opponents of suffrage had feared. Rather, women seemed to have as many political opinions and as varied political interests as men. Their presence as voters—and later as candidates for political office—was deemed negligible. The changing composition of the American electorate, from the new women voters to the naturalized citizens and second-generation ethnic children, eventually caused a realignment in the two major political parties that brought about Democratic dominance of the federal government in the 1930s.

Before 1930, however, the mainstream political parties had little to distinguish them in terms of issues. For the Republicans, monetary policy, especially establishing the Gold Standard for the dollar and support for high protective tariffs, dominated their platform. Democrats stood against the enhancement of federal power and for a greater voice for the people in politics. Both parties endorsed the sanctity of property rights and the virtues of democracy.

The sameness in their platforms sparked dissent in the creation of third-party candidacies. Throughout the period from 1900 to 1930, third-party activity on the local and state levels allowed the election of socialist and farmer-labor aldermen, mayors, state representatives, and members of Congress. In successive elections of 1912, 1916, and 1920, socialist Eugene Victor Debs received increasing support from voters disenchanted with the business-oriented politics of the Republican and Democratic Parties. The Progressive Republicans’ revolt against the “Old Guard” gave rise to the Progressive Party campaigns of 1912 and 1924. Throughout the period, the Prohibition Party also ran national campaigns dedicated to building a consensus for state control of alcohol and eventual passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which instituted national Prohibition.

In 1900, the election of William McKinley to a second term in office was a confirmation of fundamental shifts in party loyalty in the late 19th century. The previous election had been a critical one, in which party support shifted and the Republicans became the majority party in Congress and the White House. The Democratic Party, which was divided between a solid South and uneven support in the rural Midwest, lost critical ground by nominating Bryan again. His support for Free Silver (inflation through monetary policy) alienated urban voters from both the working class and the middle class. The Republicans had for their platform a consistent emphasis on the Gold Standard for money and a high protective tariff. Besting for a second time Democrat William Jennings Bryan, McKinley benefited from a large campaign fund and a well-orchestrated political campaign under Republican businessman Mark Hanna. McKinley won the election by a margin of 7,218,491 to Bryan’s 6,356,734.

With the assassination of McKinley in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt assumed office. When he campaigned for office in his own right in 1904, his popularity among voters buoyed him against his opponent, the Democratic

Theodore Roosevelt at the first Progressive Party convention in Chicago, Illinois, 1912 (Library of Congress)

Candidate, corporate lawyer Alton B. Parker. Not only was Roosevelt better known and liked, but also he was the incumbent. His boisterous campaign to regulate trusts and his support for healthy government-business relations gave him an edge with both sides of the class divide. Roosevelt won the election 7,628,461 votes to Parker’s 5,084,223. The electoral vote was even more decisive, with Roosevelt winning 336 to Parker’s 140.

Custom prevented Roosevelt from running for his second full term, since he had already served nearly eight years in the White House. The Republican Party still controlled crucial states, and it continued to have majority strength, so eventually Roosevelt gave the go-ahead to William Howard Taft, his handpicked successor, to run for the presidency on the Republican Party ticket. In that campaign year, 1908, Bryan once again stood as Democratic candidate for the White House. His conservative populism played well in the rural South and Midwest, but it did not convince the majority of voters. Taft, running a low-key and conservative campaign, won the election handily, 7,675,320 votes to Bryan’s 6,412,294. Socialist Debs, on this third campaign for the presidency, won more than 420,000 votes.

In 1912, tensions within the Republican Party, and the renewed ambition of former president Theodore Roosevelt, helped spark the creation of the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party. By this time, there were clear divisions among Republicans. Opposition to Taft and to the Old Guard in Congress under JosEPH Gurney Cannon prompted the creation of a National Progressive Republican League under Robert La Follette. In the election campaign, there was a strong contrast between reform politics aimed at bolstering the federal government power, idealized under the rubric of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, and the more competition-centered, small business language of the New Freedom under Woodrow Wilson. Running as the incumbent, Taft spent most of his attention and fire on the Progressive Party. While Roosevelt continued to have a grasp on the public’s loyalty and imagination and outpolled Taft, Woodrow Wilson won the election. The split between Progressive voters and Republican stalwarts opened the door for the Democrats to take the White House for the first time since the election of 1892.

Woodrow Wilson’s presidency confirmed that a Democratic Congress had overcome the obstacles to reform. In the first four years of his presidency, Wilson used Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to pass several important pieces of legislation, including the child labor Keating-Owen Act, the Adamson Act, the Federal Reserve Act, and the Underwood-Simmons Tariff, which finally lowered the high protective tariff rates of Republican administrations. In 1916, running against Wilson, Republican Charles Evans Hughes tried to mobilize the discontent with the reforms from both Republicans and Democrats. As incumbent, however, Wilson held the edge, and the Republican Party still suffered from its earlier split. Wilson narrowly defeated Hughes, riding on his pledge to keep the country out of World War I. With a margin of 9,127,695 votes to Hughes’ 8,533,507, Wilson was reelected.

Changes in the electorate were not at first noticed during the Republican ascendancy of the 1920s. Republican politicians followed the call of their presidential candidate, Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio, for a “politics of normalcy.” As the “best available man,” he became the party’s candidate in preference to other reforming politicians. His opponent, Ohio politician James Cox, similarly won the Democratic Party nomination by defeating the politics of reform within the party. Such Wilson administration stalwarts as Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and William McAdoo, the president’s son-in-law, lost out in the struggle to find a consensus candidate. Winning the election by a nearly two to one margin in popular votes (16,143,407 votes to 9,130,328), Harding became president not so much because voters rejected reform in general as because they refused to endorse the particular reforms that had dominated American politics since Wilson’s election in 1912.

Harding’s death and the subsequent presidency of Calvin Coolidge distanced the Republican Party from charges of corruption and graft, and in 1924, he ran for president in his own right against an opposition split between a new farmer-labor alliance and a Democratic Party with a divided constituency. Ever since the election of 1896, the Democrats had kept a balance between urban immigrant voters and their larger national base among rural and southern voters. By 1924, the strain of trying to keep together the party was beginning to show. Democratic voters and politicians were divided over the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition, and foreign policy. The Klan, which had become powerful in local and state governments across the nation, was the object of an anti-Klan resolution in the party convention. For every state, which, like New York and Minnesota, had passed anti-Klan laws, however, there were other states where Klan members held major political offices. The chief contestants for the Democratic nomination were on opposite sides of the issue. William McAdoo, a politician with strong rural and southern ties, an advocate of Prohibition and supporter of the Klan, ran for the nomination against Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York, allied with Tammany Hall, and an opponent of both the Klan and Prohibition. More than 100 ballots were needed to decide the Democratic candidate for president—John W. Davis, a conservative Wall Street lawyer. Davis had neither strong ties to the Wilson administration nor did he represent the urban/rural divide within the party.

Discontent over politics as usual helped spark a third-party political campaign in 1924. A coalition of socialists, trade unionists, farm advocates, and progressives created a Progressive Party ticket. Robert La Follette, whose achievements as a reforming senator gave him national fame, agreed to be the party’s presidential candidate. Burton Wheeler, who had gained notoriety as the chief investigator of the Harding administration, became the vice presidential candidate. The controversial role of the Communist League in the party and divisions among progressive voters weakened the party’s chances in the election. Calvin Coolidge was elected president, winning 15.7 million votes to 8.4 million for Democrat John Davis. Third-party candidate La Follette received 4.8 million votes.

The elections of Harding, Coolidge, and later Herbert Hoover were in many ways emblematic of a political system at a standstill. Republican Party politics went no further than arguing for, in Harding’s words, “Less government in business and more business in government.” The positive legacy of the Harding administration was a reorganized and streamlined federal bureaucracy. Coolidge, Harding’s successor, had a similar eye toward the limited scope of government. Unaddressed problems of race, poverty, and the relation between government and the economy lay beneath the surface of the politics of normalcy.

By 1928, the strains of the political system began to show. Coolidge, who had support for a second term, withdrew from the race early, leaving the Republicans to nominate stalwart Herbert Hoover for the presidency. Hoover had served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, but most notably as secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge. A former engineer, Hoover was committed to the same principles of rational and efficient government. Like many Republicans, however, he believed that the country should rely on the market to stabilize the economy and address inequality.

For urban voters, an increasingly important segment of the voting population, the candidacy of Herbert Hoover, a staid midwesterner associated with business interests, was just more of the same. Instead, they found their interests represented in the candidacy of Democrat Alfred E. Smith. A Catholic, urban politician, and a “wet” (antiProhibitionist) to boot, Smith garnered the votes of urban working-class and white voters. A realignment of northern cities away from the Republican and into the Democratic Party column was a sign of a different politics in the making. But during an election year characterized by anti-Catholicism and a strong Prohibitionist vote, Smith could not make headway against Hoover. Hoover won the election by a landslide of 21 million votes to Smith’s 15 million (444 electoral votes to Smith’s 87). The election of Hoover was the last stand for the politics of normalcy. The onset of the Great Depression brought with it realignment in party politics and a permanent shift in how elections would be conducted in the future.

Further reading: David Burner, The Politics of Provin-cialis-m: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918-1932 (New York: Knopf, 1968); John D. Hicks, The Republican Ascendancy, 1921-1933 (New York: Harper and Row, 1960); John Reynolds, Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Progressive Reform in New Jersey, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).