The 2nd Three-quarter Century: the 3rd and 4th party paradigms, an overview with the editors

As noted (

The 1st Three-quarter Century: the 1st and 2nd party paradigms

), with the ending of the Civil War, the third party paradigm of the American two-party system began with this new party called the Republicans now being the party of the establishment, and that meant in the North (which to some lesser extent might have been considered to include the West too)—certainly not in the South, other than, during Reconstruction, of those former slaves who’d been freed by the 1865 13th Amendment and guaranteed the right to vote by the 1868 14th and 1870 15th Amendments.

It cloaked itself in the mantle of having rescued the Union from those backwards, barbarous, seditious Rebel Southerners, of having abolished the horror of human slavery, and of having enfranchised the freed slaves. They portrayed themselves in this role not only as greatly virtuous crusading humanitarians but additionally, as they had done even long before the Civil War, as the defenders against the menacing economic threat that slavery had always posed (not just throughout all the rest of the country but always of course also in the South itself) both to working people, with the unfair disadvantage of having to compete against the nearly free labor that slaveholders could employ, as well as to business people facing the same disadvantage of having to pay their own workforce when their slaveowning competitors didn’t.

Their basic ideology of nationwide modernization essentially dated back to the Federalists at the beginning of the country, which had been carried on by the National Republicans and other anti-Jacksonians and on through to the Whigs. They would point to programs of theirs such as railroads, homesteads, social spending (like more funding for Civil War veteran pensions), aid to land grant colleges, high tariffs, and national banks. Typical constituencies that this appealed to across the North included professionals, skilled craftsmen, white-collar workers, shop owners, and businessmen.

The Democrats had long been the party defending slavery and male-white supremacy. Their big goal now was to get Reconstruction ended, so that they could stop being forced to allow freed blacks to vote and hold public office. As can be seen in the graph [

*15] [

*17], they built up enough political power in the House by the 1876 presidential election, which was extremely tight, that they were able to threaten to block the Republican candidate from being elected. In exchange for their acquiescence to his win, the Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction, and all Union troops occupying Southern states were withdrawn.

The male-white supremacists were able to reassert their subjugation of blacks, with intimidation tactics such as burning down houses, churches, and villages, lynchings, and other public torturing and mass murders. They passed Jim Crow laws, such as a common one that exploited a loophole in the 13th Amendment by deprivatizing slavery: they would arrest blacks and demand proof on the spot of visible means of support, which would be construed to mean proof of having a job working for a white man. These presumed vagrants were then sentenced to jail time, sometimes for decades, and these inmates could be hired out to white individuals and businesses, who would pay the local government for the work instead of the black inmates. This of course also provided the male-white supremacist government with the added advantage of an additional source of revenue.

The right of blacks to vote in the South was ended, and so the Republican Party effectively disappeared there. In the rest of the country, constituencies the Democratic Party attracted included blue-collar laborers and poor farmers. And the party was mostly controlled by Bourbon Democrats, which meant that they were supporters of big-business conservatives.

The Democrats maintained their political power in the House, and they even got a majority in the Senate in one term. In 1884, their candidate won the presidency. He lost his run for reelection, but then came back four years later and defeated the Republican whom he’d lost to.

Just as his second term was starting, a grand depression began. It was called the Panic of ’93; in those days, “depression” wasn’t a term often used for an economic collapse, and “panic” was one of the more commonly used ways to describe one.

The Democrats were always assured of their political base in the South, which had long earlier secured its main goal of ending Reconstruction, and with Republicans and the rest of the country having abandoned the blacks there, that was also not in question. In essence, the Democratic Party’s fundamental issue had become a nonissue, whereby it had lost its key political reason for being, and the Democratic president was now showing himself and his party’s policies to be totally incompetent in addressing this economic crisis. So America’s two-party system started searching for a new party paradigm.

Not only had the Democratic candidate been elected president, but the Democrats had also taken control of the Senate and now maintained an overwhelming advantage in the House. In the very next midterm election though, this all flipped; the Republicans took over control in the Senate and grabbed a walloping majority in the House. This depression was a deflationary spiral, and with the president and his cohort being repudiated, a new faction took over control from the Bourbon Democrats. They and the Republicans campaigned against each other in the 1896 presidential election over issues such as the money supply and what metal or metals it should be backed by; the Republican candidate won.

And a movement, which rose up as a reaction to problems—like environmental pollution, huge monopolistic corporations, and widespread political corruption—that industrialization and modernization had for a long time been bringing on, began expressing itself in another political ideology. It was called progressivism, and this timeframe is referred to as the start of the Progressive Era.

A prominent figure in this movement was a young writer who had previously been a reform leader in the New York state legislature and who, after gaining renown commanding troops in what was called the Spanish-American War, was recruited by Republican party bosses to run for governor. He won and took office in 1899. Some of the main party bosses in New York found that, even as young as he was, he was too independent and couldn’t be manipulated, and they looked for a way to be rid of him. They saw an opportunity to do so by tryna get him into what they saw as a powerless and largely ceremonial role when the vice president died who had been serving under the Republican who’d unseated the Democrat in that previous presidential election. Their efforts worked, and he became the running mate in the president’s reelection campaign, which they won.

Their idea of burying him in this pointless, ceremonial position seemed to have worked; the only official duty of a vice president was to conduct sessions of the Senate, and in the first half a year, he only did that for four days. But after that half a year, the president was assassinated. And he, Teddy Roosevelt, became—and still to this day is—the youngest person ever to be president of the United States, with almost a full term left to serve.

Within just a few months, it was clear that he was gonna be leading in the implementation of significant parts of the movement’s goals, and the US two-party system’s fourth party paradigm, with progressivist principles prominently on the agenda, was in place.

When coal miners went on strike in those first few months, Roosevelt stepped in and became the first US president to help settle a labor dispute; he saw to it that corrupt political office holders and other government officials were prosecuted for criminal misconduct; he undertook trust busting and regulation; he put in place regulation of excessive fees in the railroad industry; he took action to ensure food and drugs were safe; he made progress in the conservation of natural resources and the environment. And he gave the definitive description of the basic progressivist principle: “a square deal for every man, big or small, rich or poor”, repeatedly using the term, making it a standard political catchphrase.

He won a second term, and he groomed one of his cabinet members to be his successor. His handpicked candidate did win the next election. But Roosevelt came to feel that this president had become too tied to big-business conservativism and was not upholding the progressivist ideals as expected. Roosevelt ended up running against him for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912. When he was beaten for the nomination by his handpicked successor, he joined with other supporters of his to found the Progressive Party (which got the nickname of the Bull Moose Party), and he ran on that ticket in the general election for president.

This Republican and this former Republican ran against Woodrow Wilson, a professor and university president, who campaigned against them as a progressivist Democrat. Roosevelt beat the incumbent president, getting more than 10 times the number of electoral votes. Combined they got more than half of all popular votes, but they had fractured the Republican constituency, and Wilson won in an enormous Electoral College landslide. He was only the second Democrat to be elected president in the half a century since the outbreak of the Civil War and the first Southerner elected in well over 60 years.

Wilson did get progressivist policies implemented in many areas—strengthening antitrust laws and creating the FTC (Federal Trade Commission); establishing an eight-hour workday in the railroad industry; reducing tariffs; providing subsidies, low-interest loans, and road building in rural areas; creating a central banking system, the Federal Reserve—and particularly in foreign affairs. But, as previously noted (

The Foreign Wars in US History: One Win out of Seven

), he was unable to carry those foreign policies out successfully at the end of World War I. Also, he had grown up in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction and was a racial segregationist and white supremacist, so he condoned changes in policy from previous Republican administrations in numerous departments, and there was increased discrimination against many black federal employees and blacks in the military.

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After Wilson’s second term, Republicans maintained majorities in both houses of Congress, mostly espousing the principles of big-business conservativism, and their candidates won the following three presidential elections. Less than eight months after that third one took office, as previously noted (

He Dealt with Crisis—Whither the Trajectory He Left Us on?: a diamond jubilee remembrance of FDR’s passing

), the global economy crumbled when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange completely collapsed. The First Great Depression had begun, and that new Republican president was completely inept at dealing with it. So the two-party system in America desperately began tryna find a different party paradigm.

In the midterm election before Teddy Roosevelt ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, a distant cousin of his named Franklin (who had become Roosevelt’s nephew-in-law five years earlier when he married Uncle Teddy’s niece) followed him in getting elected to the New York state legislature—just not as a member of the Republican Party but as a Democrat. And 30 years after his uncle-in-law was elected governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt also was. He had already run on the Democratic ticket as the candidate for vice president in 1920, and three years after the onset of Great Depression I, he got the nomination for president.

In his acceptance speech, with a twist on Teddy Roosevelt’s well-known catchphrase of the “square deal”, FDR pledged himself “to a new deal for the American people”, which was to include government-funded public works, securities regulation, farm relief, and other programs to tackle Great Depression I. He got the endorsements of many prominent progressivist Republicans. As the Democratic candidate, he could count on what had long been called the Solid South, which comprised the “Yellow Dog Democrats”—those male-white supremacists and segregationists in the South who would (as the decades-old saying went) “vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican”. And he built what is called the New Deal coalition, which also included big-city political machines, labor unions, small farmers, oppressed religious minorities such as Roman Catholics and Jews, blacks (other than those in the South, who still weren’t allowed to vote), intellectuals, and liberals.

He beat the hapless Republican incumbent with almost 90 percent of the electoral vote; this was the first time in 80 years that a member of the Democratic Party won both a majority in the Electoral College and a majority of the popular vote. And the Democrats won huge majorities in the House and Senate, which increased even more in the next midterms. His programs were successful enough that in the following presidential election, he got 98 and a half percent of the electoral vote, and the Democratic majorities in each house of Congress grew to over three quarters.

In December 1937, a US senator from North Carolina released a position paper that would become known as the Conservative Manifesto. It contained a familiar litany of proposals that it contended would guarantee a happy and prosperous America, such as upholding states’ rights, balancing the federal budget, ending coercion by labor unions, and reducing taxes. This provided a framework in Congress for bringing together the conservative Republicans (which constituted the majority of those in that party) and the conservative Democratics (who were mostly Southern Democrats) into what is called the conservative coalition. One of their first focuses was opposing FDR’s economic programs.

Roosevelt and a number of his analysts and advisors concluded that the huge expenditures they had made in agencies that they’d created to dig out of Great Depression I early in his first term, like the PWA (Public Works Administration) and the WPA (Works Progress Administration), had just been too limited and not nearly enormous enough. He had been tryna keep the budget balanced or at least close to it, and they became convinced that this had been a disastrous mistake.

On the 14th day of April 1938, he made an evening radio address [

*2] [

*9] (one of what were called fireside chats—a new media innovation of his) to the American public summarizing a message he’d given to Congress about a massive new spending program he had just sent them, explaining “that all the energies of government and business must be directed to increasing the national income, to putting more people into private jobs, to giving security and a feeling of security to all people in all walks of life.” He told them, “I came to the conclusion that the present-day problem calls for action both by the government and by the people, that we suffer primarily from a failure of consumer demand because of lack of buying power. Therefore it is up to us to create an economic upturn.”

He went on to say, “It is following tradition as well as necessity, if government strives to put idle money and idle men to work—to increase our public wealth and to build up the health and strength of the people, to help our system of private enterprise to function again—it is going to cost something to get out of this recession this way, but the profit of getting out of it will pay for the cost several times over. Lost working time is lost money. Every day that a workman is unemployed, or a machine is unused, or a business organization is marking time, it is a loss to the nation.”

He managed to get Congress to enact the program, and this approach worked. It could be seen by even the traditional fiscal and monetary officials that warding off deflation and keeping the money supply in circulation at an adequate level were absolute requirements to sustain a healthy economy; the progressivist principle of a square deal for everyone—enabling all to work toward creating, and to contribute to, the nation’s prosperity—was necessary, as had FDR stated in that fireside chat, “because I know that the people themselves have a deep conviction that secure prosperity of that kind cannot be a lasting one except on a basis of fair business dealing and a basis where all from the top to the bottom share in the prosperity.” By 1939, these steps he’d taken as president with, for the most part, support by the New Deal coalition and opposition by the conservative coalition, had put this progressivist model in action, and the fifth party paradigm of the two-party system in the US had taken hold.