Late 19th Century major shift in US political parties?

Factual Questions
1

I recall reading in college that there was a major political shit in ideology between republican and democratic parties, but I can remember what it was about at all.

I remember there was a line graph that went along with one line for each party, then, around 1860 or 1880, the two parties just flipped and switched places on the chart.

Can anyone shed any light on this topic? Can you direct me to a site that maybe talks about the shift, what it meant, and the causes?

I’ve searched but can’t find it online. Thanks!

2

The Republican party didn’t even exist until 1859-1860, so I don’t see how they could have flipped with the Democrats at that time. Now, the 1950s-1960s, when the Dixiecrats jumped ship and joined the Republicans, I can see being the flipping point.

3

I think it must have been around 1880 or 1890 then.

4

It was something along the lines of a shift in ideology… where the Republicans were the “liberals” then it became the Dems

5

Nothing like this happened in the 19th century. Somewhere along the time of Teddy Roosevelt (some argue that it started with McKinley, but I find that not as convincing), the Republican party began picking up ideas from the Populist and Progressive parties and brought them to the mainstream. These were still enough ahead of their time to qualify as liberal. The World War brought an end to the Republicans’ liberalism and they became quite conservative in the 1920s, eventually leading to the resurgence of the Democrats as the liberal party under Roosevelt.

But it’s much harder to find a spot for this in the 19th century. Because the Democratic were the party of the South during the War - and had supported the south prior to the Civil War as well - the war almost finished them as a national party. The Republicans held the presidency from 1860-1912 except for Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms, and he was hardly an ideological leader.

It’s true that Samuel Tilden probably should have won the 1876 election, but that was more a response to the corruption of some of those in Grant’s administration than an ideological shift. Most of the liberal issues on the national level - Civil Service reform most notably - were eventually co-opted by the Republicans.

A northern branch of the Democratic Party developed in large urban areas, as the political bosses exploited the massive number of needy immigrants by providing them with patronage jobs, food, social help and critically, a recognition of their values and value that the more upscale Republicans ignored. These politicians were the ultimate pragmatists, though, as corrupt as any group in our political history and vulnerable to the periodic uprising of Goo-Goos (Good Government ideological reformers) whose successes were short term…

And by the time of Williams Jenning Bryon, western farmers and miners, also groups ignored by Republicans. were being wooed by the Democrats. But their issues were ephemeral and economically unworkable, and the Republicans stole all the good ones.

So unless you’re confusing the formation of the Republican party, which took place before the 1856 election and drove the Whigs out of existence, with this ideological shift, I can’t quite figure out what you might be referring to. Power shifts and ideological shifts go hand in hand in American politics, but there was no real shift in power in the late 19th century.

6

Perhaps my memory is faulty, which may be why I can’t find a damn thing on it.

The course was a Political Science cousre called “Political Parties”. I recall questions being asked about why freed blacks voted for GOP, then switchd to Dems.

I also recall discussion of something like a handful of major political “party systems” in US History. Each party systme came and went with major shifts in political party thought. The first party system died with the Federalists. There were a few more major shifts, and now we have the “modern” party system.

Thank you.

7

There was a realignment of sorts in the 1890s, but I’m not sure I would call it one of the major party realignments of U.S. history.

During Reconstruction and immediately after, the Republican and Democratic parties were largely regional parties, but with a couple of ethnic twists. The Northeast and Midwest were generally Republican, but not solidly so on account of many urban “ethnic” whites voting Democrat. Southern whites voted overwhelmingly Democrat. Before the end of Reconstruction the South was not solidly Democrat because southern blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican until they were disenfranchised.

During Reconstruction, this secnario gave the Republicans safe majorities in both Houses of Congress. After Southern blacks were disenfranchised, the South became solidly Democratic. Along with significant numbers of Northern (especially urban) Congressmen, this gave control of the House to the Democrats for 16 out of 20 years between 1875 and 1895. The greater number of Republican states in the North, Midwest, and Far West meant that the Democrats held the Senate only four of those 20 years.

Between the late 1880s and mid-1890s, economic issues–especially coinage and the tariff–began to trump regional and ethnic ones. Republicans generally supported gold coinage and little or no silver coinage. This had the effect of minimizing inflation, and in some periods led to outright deflation. Bankers and other lenders loved the Republicans for it, but poor farmers and other debtors hated them. Silver miners also despised the policy. Democrats gained seats because of it in some states dominated by agricultural and silver-mining interests.

Republicans generally favored high tariff rates, which kept out cheap foreign goods. This turned off those who spent a lot on manufactured goods (importers, farmers again, and some merchants) but tended to attract those whose livelihoods depended on manufacturing (factory owners, factory workers, steel workers, etc).

In short, during the 1890s, the Republicans lost a fair amount of support in the mining-dominated Far West and farming-dominated parts of the Midwest, but gained a lot in the industrial cities and coal- and iron-mining towns of the Midwest the Northeast. Not all urban ethnic white factory workers switched parties by any means, but enough to make a difference. It helped that silver became more or less a non-issue after about 1895-1905 when new gold discoveries in various parts of the world led willy-nilly to inflation, the objective of most silver supporters.

The realignment seems to have benefited the Republicans more than the Democrats. The Republicans held control of both Houses of Congress continuously between 1895 and 1911.

For more information, see Critical Elections and Congressional Policy Making by David W. Brady (1988), which has a chapter or two on this period.

8

Short version: You can trace that to Reconstruction and its end (with the 1876 election already mentioned). The Republicans had been the party of abolition, executed the Civil War rather than permit Southern secession and the continuation of slavery, and then ran Reconstruction in the South so as to punish the whites and provide what amounted to affirmative action for the freedmen. The Democrats, even after their North-South schism in 1860, were still dominated by Southern white interests. It was obvious to any black which party best represented their interests.

The deal that settled the 1876 presidential election ended that, in one of the most shameful episodes in our history. In return for getting their man, Hayes, into office, the Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction, permit the establishment of Jim Crow laws to re-oppress the blacks, and even turn a blind eye toward lynchings. For several generations afterward, the blacks really had no party representing their interests, and mostly couldn’t have voted anyway.

Then, mainly in the early 20th century, came a mass migration of blacks out of the South to the industrial, labor-hungry cities in the North (I said this was the short version), facilitated by low-cost train and car transportation. The cities’ political machines and unions, which the black migrants had to deal with and which effectively provided their jobs and social protections, had traditionally been aligned with the Democrats, which in return gained the allegiance of the blacks.

There was another realignment in the 1960’s, when LBJ coerced the Southern Democrats, still racist, into accepting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which (short version again) ended Jim Crow, and of course alienated that faction from what had become the mainstream Democratic party. In 1968 and 1972, Nixon won the Presidency with the “Southern Strategy”, appealing to other conservative values overtly (and winking and using code words about the racial stuff), making them consider the Republicans their true party. There are some stragglers still, but for the most part Southern conservatives are solidly Republican when not long ago they were solidly Democratic. Although racial division has largely dried up by now, you can look at an electoral map even today and still see the effects of the Civil War.

9

Blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican from the end of the Civil War until FDR in 1932. That is, where they were allowed to vote. Few blacks were allowed to vote in the south through a combination of poll taxes, literacy tests, and sheer intimidation.

John M. Berry in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America makes an interesting argument for why the switchover occurred.

Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, was placed in charge of the recovery from the devastation caused by the floods in 1927, a disaster that affected a far larger area and almost as many people as Katrina. Poor blacks were immensely more affected than whites (at one point they were literally stacked on top of levees in lieu of sandbags!), and the relief efforts were blatantly discriminatory. Hoover purportedly made promises to black leaders who kept the anger from boiling over and then reneged on every one of them after he was elected president the next year on the strength of his public performance. It was this betrayal that drove blacks into the Democratic party, even if that meant voting with the hated racist Democrats who controlled the southern states.

Until that time, however, blacks were solidly Republican during the entire 1865-1932 period, and even had a measure of power in representation to the nominating conventions. The change, when it occurred, was far less an ideological one than a recognition of practical benefits. Roosevelt’s action did represent a change - Hoover quite forthrightly thought that Americanism precluded government handouts. “If we start appropriations of this character we [will] have not only impaired something infinitely valuable in the life of the American people but have struck at the roots of self-government,” he said. But if he had kept to his promises to help poor blacks, who were disproportionately suffering, they might likely have stayed Republican in large numbers.

10

Best typo of the year!

I’d be interested to know what was on the vertical axis on the graph.

I’ve always felt that an ideological shift did take place in the late Nineteenth Century, but I break it into two steps, with US Grant as the founder of the modern “conservative” Republican Party and William Jennings Bryan as the founder of the “liberal” Democrats. In between Grant and Bryan, both parties were conservative.

Of course one must be careful about extending these terms backward in time, since “liberal” meant the opposite in the 1800’s. But during the second Grant administration, the Republican Party largely abandoned the defense of African American rights in the South and came down firmly on the side of hard money and opposition to labor unions. By modern standards, they were “conservative”.

The Democrats generally agreed with these positions, and what we would today call “liberalism” was left to the Greenback and Populist Parties. During the 1890’s Bryan merged Populism into the Democratic Party and they’ve been the more “liberal” side ever since (except for 1904, when the centrist TR ran against conservative throwback Democrat Alton Parker).