Travails of the Democratic Party

Travails of the Democratic Party 

The Democratic Party, formed in the Jacksonian revolution of the 1830s, combined an explosive democratic impulse among white working and middle classes with the most egregious racism embodied in this nation’s history. This tension remained a pervasive feature of the Party’s political culture through the mid-20^th century.

 This racist impetus intensified with the heating up of the sectional conflict with such Democratic stalwarts like Mississippi Senator, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, Governor of Georgia, serving as President and Vice-President of the breakaway Confederacy. Fighting Radical Reconstruction, after the Civil War, tooth and nail, the Democratic Party in the South sought to destroy any vestige of an interracial democracy, which the Radical Reconstructionist Congress and its abolitionist allies sought to perpetuate. Led by the likes of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner and the preeminent Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, these advocates of radical reconstruction sought to instill the fruits of a fundamental political and social revolution in the former Confederate South.

 Instead, the myth of a “Lost Cause” prevailed, seeking to reconstruct Southern culture along the idealized vision of plantation life supported by benevolent masters and contented slaves. It is this idyllic that the intrusion of the Radical Reconstruction Congress sought to deconstruct by instilling an interracial socio-political structure that contradicted the “natural” aristocratic values that Southern traditionalists sought to reinstate in a post-slavery context. Through a variety of political, judicial, extra-legal, and socio-cultural strategies, including outright violence, an 80-year reign of Jim Crow segregation (i.e., apartheid) was imposed on the entire region designed to eviscerate what was accomplished through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the passage of the 13^th, 14, and 15^th amendments, and a host civil rights legislation that the Supreme Court ultimately deemed unconstitutional. This retrograde movement was perpetuated through the auspices of the Democratic Party.

 Except for the two-term presidency of Grover Cleveland, no Democrat served as president from 1861 to 1913. An advocate of civil service reform, Cleveland sought to clean up government against unfettered lobbying interests. He also signed the Interstate Commerce Act that provided the federal government with the legal basis to regulate the railroad industry. Cleveland embraced a non-virulent segregationist stance on race, shared throughout the nation in the late 19^th century. This included refusal to use the federal authority of the 15^th Amendment to enforce voting rights for African American males. Sympathizing with the South, he viewed Reconstruction as a failed experiment.

Rooted in the progressive movement of the early 1900s, the reform impetus took a dynamic turn in response to the increased complexity and expansion of urbanized life, the proliferation of an explosive diversly ethnic immigrant population, and the increasing impact of industrialization and the mass-produced manufacturing system on the nature of work and its effect on the life, health, and safety of largely non-unionized factory workers. President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) sought to master these societal changes by expanding the power of the presidency through effective administrative. He also supported workers’ compensation for federal employees, sought to create laws to regulate child labor, obtained an eight-hour workday for railroad workers, and championed the Adamson Act that resulted in a shortening of the workday for industrial workers. Notwithstanding his northern background as President of Princeton University and Governor of New Jersey, Wilson, Virginia born and Southern raised, was a staunch critic of Reconstruction. As President, he segregated federal governmental departments and sponsored the screening of D. W. Griffith’s super-charged racist film, Birth of a Nation, in the White House. In brief, Wilson embodied the enduring sectional tensions of racism and reform that characterized the prevailing ethos of the Democratic Party.

 The Party had always been composed of a southern and northern wing. But as the 20^th century burst forth in all its complexity and diversity, an increasingly progressive, multi-ethnic, reform-oriented wing, rooted in Northern urban culture, came increasingly into prominence, personified by the highly colorful figures of New York Governor, Al Smith, New York City Mayor, Fiorella La Guardia, and the iconic, larger than life, presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

 Ira Katznelson’s important study, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Times, documents the built-in limitations faced by the Roosevelt administration in enacting any far-edged reformist vison, given the inescapable political need to compromise with the Party’s Southern “Dixiecrats” in Congress. Katznelson’s core argument is that the New Deal legislation advocated by FDR would only pass if the Dixiecrats had veto power over any legislation that might upset the South’s peculiar social arrangements rooted in segregation and the economic subjugation of the Black poor and working class to the informal and overt social hierarchy of the region’s social elite.

 We shift the focus, all too quickly, to the challenges President Lyndon Johnson confronted in the mid-1960s in enacting major civil rights legislation. This included his apprehension that the Democratic Party would lose the South for a generation if he succeeded in getting passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson was more than prescient in analyzing the long-term political impact on the Party that ensued stemming from his full-throated support of the major platforms of the Civil Rights agenda.

 Whether “Scranton” Joe can bring these voters back to the Democratic Party in highlighting his working-class bone fides while expanding its more progressive multi-cultural base remains to be seen. To maintain its effective viability as a governing body, the Party has the difficult challenge of increasing its base in the South and Mid-West while enlarging its support in the cities and exurbs. Without such political expansion, Democrats will not be able to enact their long-range agenda of effectively meeting the substantial domestic and international challenges the nation and the world will invariably face in the next two decades. Currently, there is no other political entity capable of rising to the occasion.