Originally (1792–98)  Republican Party  first opposition political party in the United States. Organized in 1792 as the Republican Party, its members held power nationally between 1801 and 1825. It was the direct antecedent of the present Democratic Party.

During the two administrations of President George Washington (1789–97), many former Anti-Federalists—who had resisted adoption of the new federal Constitution (1787)—began to unite in opposition to the fiscal program of Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury. After Hamilton and other proponents of a strong central government and a loose interpretation of the Constitution formed the Federalist Party in 1791, those who favoured states' rights and a strict interpretation of the Constitution rallied under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson, who had served as Washington's first secretary of state. Jefferson's supporters, deeply influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution (1789), first adopted the name Republican to emphasize their antimonarchical views. The Republicans contended that the Federalists harboured aristocratic attitudes and that their policies placed too much power in the central government and tended to benefit the affluent at the expense of the common man. Although the Federalists soon branded Jefferson's followers “Democratic-Republicans,” attempting to link them with the excesses of the French Revolution, the Republicans officially adopted the derisive label in 1798. The Republican coalition supported France in the European war that broke out in 1792, while the Federalists supported Britain (see French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars). The Republicans' opposition to Britain unified the faction through the 1790s and inspired them to fight against the Federalist-sponsored Jay Treaty (1794) and the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798).

Notwithstanding the party's antielitist foundations, the first three Democratic-Republican presidents—Jefferson (1801–09), James Madison (1809–17), and James Monroe (1817–25)—were all wealthy, aristocratic Southern planters, though all three shared the same liberal political philosophy. Jefferson narrowly defeated the Federalist John Adams in the election of 1800; his victory demonstrated that power could be transferred peacefully between parties under the Constitution. Once in office, the Democratic-Republicans attempted to scale back Federalist programs but actually overturned few of the institutions they had criticized (e.g., the Bank of the United States was retained until its charter expired in 1811). Nevertheless, Jefferson made a genuine effort to make his administration appear more democratic and egalitarian: he walked to the Capitol for his inauguration rather than ride in a coach-and-six, and he sent his annual message to Congress by messenger, rather than reading it personally. Federal excises were repealed, the national debt was retired, and the size of the armed forces was greatly reduced. However, the demands of foreign relations (such as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803) often forced Jefferson and his successors into a nationalistic stance reminiscent of the Federalists.

In the 20 years after 1808 the party existed less as a united political group than as a loose coalition of personal and sectional factions. The fissures in the party were fully exposed by the election of 1824, when the leaders of the two major factions, Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, were both nominated for president. Meanwhile, William H. Crawford was nominated by the party's congressional caucus, and Henry Clay, another Democratic-Republican, was nominated by the Kentucky and Tennessee legislatures. Jackson carried the popular vote and a plurality in the electoral college, but because no candidate received a majority of the electoral vote, the presidency was decided by the House of Representatives. Clay, the speaker of the House of Representatives, finished fourth and was thus ineligible for consideration; he subsequently threw his support to Adams, who was elected president and promptly appointed Clay secretary of state. Following the election, the Democratic-Republicans split into two groups: the National Republicans, who became the nucleus of the Whig Party in the 1830s, were led by Adams and Clay, while the Democratic-Republicans were organized by Martin Van Buren, the future eighth president (1837–41), and led by Jackson. The Democratic-Republicans comprised diverse elements that emphasized local and humanitarian concerns, states' rights, agrarian interests, and democratic procedures. During Jackson's presidency (1829–37) they dropped the Republican label and called themselves simply Democrats or Jacksonian Democrats. The name Democratic Party was formally adopted in 1844.

History

The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the United States and among the oldest political parties in the world. It traces its roots to 1792, when followers of Thomas Jefferson adopted the name Republican to emphasize their antimonarchical views. The Republican Party, also known as the Jeffersonian Republicans, advocated a decentralized government with limited powers. Another faction to emerge in the early years of the republic, the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, favoured a strong central government. Jefferson's faction developed from the group of Anti-Federalists who had agitated in favour of the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States. The Federalists called Jefferson's faction the Democratic-Republican Party in an attempt to identify it with the disorder spawned by the “radical democrats” of the French Revolution of 1789. After the Federalist John Adams was elected president in 1796, the Republican Party served as the country's first opposition party, and in 1798 the Republicans adopted the derisive Democratic-Republican label as their official name.

In 1800 Adams was defeated by Jefferson, whose victory ushered in a period of prolonged Democratic-Republican dominance. Jefferson won reelection easily in 1804, and Democratic-Republicans James Madison (1808 and 1812) and James Monroe (1816 and 1820) were also subsequently elected. By 1820 the Federalist Party had faded from national politics, leaving the Democratic-Republicans as the country's sole major party and allowing Monroe to run unopposed in that year's presidential election.

During the 1820s new states entered the union, voting laws were relaxed, and several states passed legislation that provided for the direct election of presidential electors by voters (electors had previously been appointed by state legislatures). These changes split the Democratic-Republicans into factions, each of which nominated its own candidate in the presidential election of 1824. The party's congressional caucus nominated William H. Crawford of Georgia, but Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, the leaders of the party's two largest factions, also sought the presidency; Henry Clay, the speaker of the House of Representatives, was nominated by the Kentucky and Tennessee legislatures. Jackson won the most popular and electoral votes, but no candidate received the necessary majority in the electoral college. When the election went to the House of Representatives (as stipulated in the Constitution), Clay—who had finished fourth and was thus eliminated from consideration—threw his support to Adams, who won the House vote and subsequently appointed Clay secretary of state (see table).

Andrew Jackson, oil on canvas by Asher B. Durand, 1800. Under Jackson, the Democratic Party held … Collection of the New-York Historical Society; photograph, Corbis-Bettmann

Despite Adams's victory, differences between the Adams and the Jackson factions persisted. Adams's supporters, representing Eastern interests, called themselves the National Republicans. Jackson, whose strength lay in the South and West, referred to his followers simply as Democrats (or as Jacksonian Democrats). Jackson defeated Adams in the 1828 presidential election. In 1832 in Baltimore, Maryland, at one of the country's first national political conventions (the first convention had been held the previous year by the Anti-Masonic Movement), the Democrats nominated Jackson for president, drafted a party platform, and established a rule that required party presidential and vice presidential nominees to receive the votes of at least two-thirds of the national convention delegates. This rule, which was not repealed until 1936, effectively ceded veto power in the selection process to minority factions, and it often required conventions to hold dozens of ballots to determine a presidential nominee. (The party's presidential candidate in 1924, John W. Davis, needed more than 100 ballots to secure the nomination.) Jackson easily won reelection in 1836, but his various opponents—who derisively referred to him as “King Andrew”—joined with former National Republicans to form the Whig Party, named for the English political faction that had opposed absolute monarchy in the 17th century (see Whig and Tory).

From 1828 to 1856 the Democrats won all but two presidential elections (1840 and 1848). During the 1840s and '50s, however, the Democratic Party, as it officially named itself in 1844, suffered serious internal strains over the issue of extending slavery to the Western territories. Southern Democrats, led by Jefferson Davis, wanted to allow slavery in all the territories, while Northern Democrats, led by Stephen A. Douglas, proposed that each territory should decide the question for itself through referendum. The issue split the Democrats at their 1860 presidential convention, where Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge and Northern Democrats nominated Douglas. The 1860 election also included John Bell, the nominee of the Constitutional Union Party, and Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the newly established (1854) antislavery Republican Party (which was unrelated to Jefferson's Republican Party of decades earlier). With the Democrats hopelessly split, Lincoln was elected president with only about 40 percent of the national vote; in contrast, Douglas and Breckinridge won 29 percent and 18 percent of the vote, respectively.

The election of 1860 is regarded by most political observers as the first of the country's three “critical” elections—contests that produced sharp yet enduring changes in party loyalties across the country. (Some scholars also identify the 1824 election as a critical election.) It established the Democratic and Republican parties as the major parties in what was ostensibly a two-party system. In federal elections from the 1870s to the 1890s, the parties were in rough balance—except in the South, where the Democrats dominated because most whites blamed the Republican Party for both the American Civil War (1861–65) and the Reconstruction (1865–77) that followed; the two parties controlled Congress for almost equal periods through the rest of the 19th century, though the Democratic Party held the presidency only during the two terms of Grover Cleveland (1885–89 and 1893–97). Repressive legislation and physical intimidation designed to prevent newly enfranchised African Americans from voting—despite passage of the Fifteenth Amendment—ensured that the South would remain staunchly Democratic for nearly a century (see black code). During Cleveland's second term, however, the United States sank into an economic depression. The party at this time was basically conservative and agrarian-oriented, opposing the interests of big business (especially protective tariffs) and favouring cheap-money policies, which were aimed at maintaining low interest rates.

William Jennings Bryan's “Cross of Gold” speech, given at the Democratic National …

In the country's second critical election, in 1896, the Democrats split disastrously over the free-silver and Populist program of their presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan lost by a wide margin to Republican William McKinley, a conservative who supported high tariffs and money based only on gold. From 1896 to 1932 the Democrats held the presidency only during the two terms of Woodrow Wilson (1913–21), and even Wilson's presidency was considered somewhat of a fluke. Wilson won in 1912 because the Republican vote was divided between President William Howard Taft (the official party nominee) and former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, the candidate of the new Bull Moose Party. Wilson championed various progressive economic reforms, including the breaking up of business monopolies and broader federal regulation of banking and industry. Although he led the United States into World War I to make the world “safe for democracy,” Wilson's brand of idealism and internationalism proved less attractive to voters during the spectacular prosperity of the 1920s than the Republicans' frank embrace of big business. The Democrats lost decisively the presidential elections of 1920, 1924, and 1928.

Button for a Franklin D. Roosevelt campaign for U.S. president; date unknown. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. U.S. President Harry S. Truman accepts the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency on July … Bettmann/Corbis

The country's third critical election, in 1932, took place in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and in the midst of the Great Depression. Led by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats not only regained the presidency but also replaced the Republicans as the majority party throughout the country—in the North as well as the South. Through his political skills and his sweeping New Deal social programs, such as social security and the statutory minimum wage, Roosevelt forged a broad coalition—including small farmers, Northern city dwellers, organized labour, European immigrants, liberals, intellectuals, and reformers—that enabled the Democratic Party to retain the presidency until 1952 and to control both houses of Congress for most of the period from the 1930s to the mid-1990s. Roosevelt was reelected in 1936, 1940, and 1944; he was the only president to be elected to more than two terms. Upon his death in 1945 he was succeeded by his vice president, Harry S. Truman, who was narrowly elected in 1948.

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy debates Republican Richard M. Nixon in September … © Bettmann/Corbis Button from John F. Kennedy's 1960 U.S. presidential campaign. Americana/Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander during World War II, won overwhelming victories against Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. The Democrats regained the White House in the election of 1960, when John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Eisenhower's vice president, Richard M. Nixon. The Democrats' championing of civil rights and racial desegregation under Truman, Kennedy, and especially Lyndon B. Johnson—who secured passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—cost the party the traditional allegiance of many of its Southern supporters. Although Johnson defeated Republican Barry M. Goldwater by a landslide in 1964, his national support waned because of bitter opposition to the Vietnam War, and he chose not to run for reelection. Following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, the party nominated Johnson's vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, at a fractious convention in Chicago that was marred by violence outside the hall between police and protesters. Meanwhile, many Southern Democrats supported the candidacy of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, an opponent of federally mandated racial integration. In the 1968 election Humphrey was soundly defeated by Nixon in the electoral college (among Southern states Humphrey carried only Texas), though he lost the popular vote by only a narrow margin.

Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale on the platform at the Democratic National Convention, July … © Bettmann/Corbis

From 1972 to 1988 the Democrats lost four of five presidential elections. In 1972 the party nominated antiwar candidate George S. McGovern, who lost to Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. electoral history. Two years later the Watergate scandal forced Nixon's resignation, enabling Jimmy Carter, then the Democratic governor of Georgia, to defeat Gerald R. Ford, Nixon's successor, in 1976. Although Carter orchestrated the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, his presidency was plagued by a sluggish economy and by the crisis over the kidnapping and prolonged captivity of U.S. diplomats in Iran following the Islamic revolution there in 1979. Carter was defeated in 1980 by conservative Republican Ronald W. Reagan, who was easily reelected in 1984 against Carter's vice president, Walter F. Mondale. Mondale's running mate, Geraldine A. Ferraro, was the first female candidate on a major-party ticket. Reagan's vice president, George Bush, defeated Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. Despite its losses in the presidential elections of the 1970s and '80s, the Democratic Party continued to control both houses of Congress for most of the period (although the Republicans controlled the Senate from 1981 to 1987).

Pin from Bill Clinton's 1996 presidential campaign. Americana/Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In 1992 Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton recaptured the White House for the Democrats by defeating Bush and third-party candidate Ross Perot. Clinton's support of international trade agreements (e.g., the North American Free Trade Agreement) and his willingness to cut spending on social programs to reduce budget deficits alienated the left wing of his party and many traditional supporters in organized labour. In 1994 the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress, in part because of public disenchantment with Clinton's health-care plan. During Clinton's second term the country experienced a period of prosperity not seen since the 1920s, but a scandal involving Clinton's relationship with a White House intern led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1998; he was acquitted by the Senate in 1999. Al Gore, Clinton's vice president, easily won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000. In the general election, Gore won 500,000 more popular votes than Republican George W. Bush but narrowly lost in the electoral college after the Supreme Court of the United States ordered a halt to the manual recounting of disputed ballots in Florida. The party's nominee in 2004, John Kerry, was narrowly defeated by Bush in the popular and electoral vote.

 

Additional Reading

The origins and history of the Democratic Party are traced in Robert Allen Rutland, The Democrats: From Jefferson to Clinton (1995). The party's values and ideology are examined in John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (1998, reissued 2001); and William G. Mayer, The Divided Democrats: Ideological Unity, Party Reform, and Presidential Elections (1996). William J. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats: Reforming the Party Structure (1978), analyzes the events leading to the disruption of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the subsequent reforms of the process for nominating presidential candidates. Marjorie Randon Hershey and Paul Allen Back, Party Politics in America, 10th ed. (2003), provides a comprehensive survey of the Democratic Party, including its organization, campaign activities, role in national and state government, and electoral performance.

 

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