(Given the current state of angst over the direction of the Democratic Party, I think it's great that John is doing this series to give us some historical perspective, and the chance to reason together over what it all means. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
(Over the last many months I've been studying the history of the Democrats and the American Party system, and will be publishing the results piece by piece here. I am not coordinating these pieces with the news of the day, and you shouldn't jump too quickly to conclusions about what my point really is. My source today is Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Democracy of the Middle West, 1865--1896, Washington, 1953.)
Between the end of the Civil War and the New Deal the two parties were, by our standards, about equally conservative; on racial questions the Democrats were the more conservative. Between the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, many Democrats were still very conservative -- not only on race, and not only Southern Democrats. (The Democrats' 1928 Presidential candidate, Al Smith of New York, supported the Republican candidate in 1936.) The conservative Democrats have always been there, and while the two parties are more polarized today than they have been in a long time, if ever, that's mostly because the Republicans have driven out all of their liberals and moderates (and many of their sane conservatives) -- not because the Democratic Party as a whole (as opposed to some of its members) is more liberal.
Merrill's book tells the story of the Midwestern branch of the "Bourbon Democrats", the dominant Democratic faction during the three decades following the Civil War. "Bourbon Democrats" may sound like fun, but they were nothing but a coterie of wealthy, corrupt wheeler-dealers whose only interests were feathering their own nests and keeping small farmers and labor out of power. The Bourbons did not need to win, and seldom did; they only needed to keep control of the party.
Grover Cleveland, the only Democratic President in the 47 years between Appomattox and the election of Woodrow Wilson (and one of the most anti-labor Presidents of all), was a model Bourbon on policy questions, though he differed from the rest in being less corrupt and was nominated for that reason.
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