Curated by Eric Sands
Introduction
Political parties have a long and often convoluted history in American politics. Parties were initially anathema to the Founders and the system laid out in the Constitution was explicitly designed not to be reliant on political parties. To the Founders, parties were factions that threatened to divide the nation into competing groups that, at the worst, could turn to violence to advance their interests (See Federalist 10). The Founders also feared that parties would disrupt the separation of powers. This would be especially true in the case of unified government where loyalty to party might come to interfere with the system of checks and balances. Finally, the Founders worried that political parties might stand in the way of effective representation. Elected officials with party affiliations might be tempted to only represent those of their own political party and leave party opponents without a voice. Given these concerns, it is little wonder that the Founders did not want parties participating in American government.
Yet within ten years of ratification of the Constitution, political parties were alive and well in American politics. Clearly this was not party politics as it is now known, but there was a rough party system and partisanship was as pronounced as it was divisive. This leads to an interesting conundrum – how did the political system become partisan within such a short time after the formation of a government designed to avoid reliance on political parties? Probably the leading answer to this question is that parties were understood as being inevitable. More precisely, republican government does not work well without being buttressed by political parties. Parties have proven to be instruments through which voters can make choices about the policy direction of the country. Parties allow minorities to form coalitions to create majority rule, even if that rule is not always harmonious or stable. Parties help build support for officeholders and serve as conduits of communication to the masses and vice versa. Parties serve as schools of democracy where citizens learn to associate and become attached to governing institutions. Finally, parties mobilize voters and encourage voter participation at all levels of democratic politics.
Inevitable or not, the party system did not emerge all at once: it grew and developed through several distinct political eras. The first of these was the Federalist Era where, under the influence of Alexander Hamilton, the Federalists embarked on an ambitious set of projects to develop an industrial, commercial economy, strengthen the presidency and the courts, and set out broad terrain for the president to exercise vast powers in the realm of foreign affairs. These projects and others were soon opposed vigorously by Madison and Jefferson, with Jefferson eventually allowing himself to be placed as the head of the opposition party. Madison and Jefferson’s growing partisanship was easy for all to see (See “Parties”, “A Candid State of Parties”, and Letter to Philip Mazzei). To be sure, these were not the highly organized political parties of the later nineteenth century but tended to be united behind strong individuals and maintained a more informal organizational structure. The parties did make use of the press, but it was still in its infancy and only a few party newspapers published party writings and attacks on opponents.
This new party, ultimately called the Democratic-Republican Party, saw victory in the election of 1800, thus marking the beginning of the second party era. Under Jeffersonian and then Madisonian rule, the Federalists began to wither and die as an opposition party and the country was left under one-party rule. But without an opposition to unite them, the Jeffersonians soon found themselves internally divided on issues ranging from war to internal improvements. This led to a fissure in 1824 with several different candidates contending for the presidency. This led some individuals, such as Martin Van Buren, to begin to argue for a wholesale reorganization of the party system (See Letter to Thomas Ritchie and Autobiography).
The late 1820s began the third era of party development, the establishment of permanent two-party competition in America. Martin Van Buren played a major role in making this change possible. For Van Buren, the American electoral system was plagued with several major flaws that needed correcting. It was prone to factionalism with several candidates trying to win over different parts of the country to make the runoff election in the House. It encouraged perpetual campaigning with nothing to formally begin and end the campaign process. It fostered demagoguery with nothing to moderate the messages from the candidates. And it suffered from lack of legitimacy with elections to be decided by the House of Representatives instead of the Electoral College.[1] Van Buren’s solution to all these problems was permanent two-party competition for America, and he began carrying out his vision by recruiting Andrew Jackson to form a new political party to compete in American politics (See Letter to Thomas Ritchie and Autobiography). Thus was born the Democratic Party which has been a fixture in American politics ever since.
A few years later, the second part of Van Buren’s equation came into being with the birth of the Whig Party. Steadily increasing rates of voter turnout were one sign of the influence that the parties were having on American politics. This is not to say that voting was always well informed, but it was carried out by millions of Americans each election cycle. The parties at this time also developed the convention system for nominating candidates to office. Starting at the local level, conventions would meet to nominate delegates to the next convention level going all the way up to the national conventions. These conventions were highly participatory and helped reflect voter choices in the selection of national candidates.
The fourth era of American party development came with the demise of the Whig Party. The Whigs largely defined themselves as being opposed to Andrew Jackson. Once Jackson left office, the Whigs were left with a void in their policy stances. They did support internal improvements and tended to take hard stands on moral issues. The one moral issue they refused to address, however, was slavery. The Whigs joined in the various compromises on slavery that the parties negotiated to keep the sections at peace with one another, but they did not take a hard stand on the immorality of slavery or oppose its spread into the territories. As the abolitionist movement grew in scale and influence, pressure mounted on the Whigs to take a position. When they failed to do so, a new political party was formed that eventually replaced the Whigs – the Republicans. The election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, precipitated the Civil War, and Lincoln’s victory in that war gave Republicans ascendency in American politics for a long time to come (See Republican Party Platform 1860, (Northern) Democratic Party Platform 1860, and (Southern) Democratic Party Platform 1860). At the same time, the two parties that would define American politics for the future were now firmly in place and Van Buren’s vision of permanent two-party competition seemed to have come to fruition.
By the end of Reconstruction, the parties were once again on equal footing and they began trading election victories and control over the patronage, also known as the spoils of victory. For the winning party, this meant installing party loyalists into positions in the bureaucracy, exchanging jobs for vote support. This period of time represents the apex of party control and influence over the electorate. For some, participation in a political party took on an almost religious dimension, providing a sense of identity as well as purpose as they worked to further the party’s political agenda. This is the era when bosses, politically influential individuals who control votes and appointments, emerged to run the big city machines that featured widespread corruption but also provided useful social services to their constituents (See Plunkitt of Tammany Hall). These machines were party organizations, usually headed by a boss, that secured enough votes to maintain control of a city, county, or state.
Voter turnout was never as high as it was during this post-Reconstruction Era and parties did a superlative job mobilizing voters and getting their people to the polls. Corruption at the polls certainly took place, but it tended to be particularized to certain areas and was definitely not all encompassing given the sheer number of voters participating. This period might truly be called the Golden Age of parties, which were considered a natural and organic part of the political system. Third parties also continued to emerge during this era including the Prohibition Party, the Greenback Party and the Populist Party (See Populist Party Platform 1892), though all were overshadowed by the dominance of the two-party system. This shows that there were undercurrents of discontent among the American electorate, but for the time being the two major parties were able to manage it.
In the 1890s, the course of American party eras becomes a bit murky. It becomes difficult to define what constitutes an era and what marks the beginning and ending of eras in the permanent two-party landscape. For instance, someone could argue that the election of 1896 marks the beginning of an era of Republican dominance following McKinley’s triumph over William Jennings Bryan and the combined forces of the Democratic Party and the Populists (See “Cross of Gold” Speech). Republicans would control both houses of Congress and the presidency until the election of 1912. That being said, the gaps between the parties in Congress were quite narrow at times and the Democrats maintained enough support to influence congressional politics. Thus the characterization of this era remains somewhat uncertain.
The Progressive Era marks another period for which an argument can be made that party development did occur. The Progressives alternately tried to destroy or reform political parties and brought about major changes to party politics in the process (See “Party Government in the United States”):
- the introduction of civil service reform that weakened party control over patronage (the practice of awarding government jobs for political loyalty);
- the Australian ballot (also known as the secret ballot that allowed voters to select candidates without the parties knowing who they were voting for), which lessened party influence at the ballot box;
- the advent of primaries (having nominees elected by voters rather than chosen by convention), which diminished party control over the nomination process;
- proposals for the implementation of more direct types of voter participation in the democratic process through initiatives (allowing citizens to bypass their state legislatures placing proposed statutes on the ballot), referendums (a general vote by the electorate on a political question that has been referred to them), and recalls (a vote to remove an elected representative from office before then end of his or her term) (See “The New Nationalism”, Progressive Party Platform 1912, and Popular Government).