DEMOCRATS — THE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE

By Edwin Cooney

No, it’s not a mere slogan. The Democratic Party of the United States of America draws its political strength from the social agenda of the majority of the people.

As Democrats gather in Denver today for their forty-fifth historic gathering, their history is rich in both triumph and disaster. Most of their triumphs have come through the personal appeal of their presidential nominees. Their disasters have largely been of their own creation.

When George Washington was elected and re-elected in 1789 and 1792, there were no political parties. In the early 1790s, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, looking ahead to the day when Washington would return to Mount Vernon, decided that they’d need to be organized to resist men such as John Adams, John Jay, and other potential “federalist” presidential candidates who believed in centralized government. Hence they began the Democratic - Republican Party dedicated to states’ rights and agrarianism.

Jefferson was its unsuccessful presidential nominee in 1796. In 1800 and 1804, he was elected and re-elected President as a Democratic-Republican. Between 1796 and 1812, the Federalist Party was strong enough to elect John Adams and to remain a threat to the Democratic-Republicans. Eventually, however, the Federalist Party weakened and died. The year 1824 found the aristocratic John Quincy Adams opposing the “plain old” Andrew Jackson for the presidency, although both were from the same party.

By the 1820s, there were two sources of party selection. One was the Democratic-Republican caucus in Congress and the other was the collection of state legislature caucuses. Some states went for Jackson, some went for Adams and some chose Kentucky’s Henry Clay. The result was that the House of Representatives had to decide the 1824 election. Even though Jackson had the most popular votes, the House chose John Quincy Adams much to the resentment of Jackson supporters.

In 1828, Adams and Jackson faced one another again as Democratic-Republican candidates. This time, Jackson won an overwhelming number of electoral votes so there was no need for the House to settle things.

By 1831, Jackson’s party was beginning to split over banking and economic issues. For the first time, political conventions were held. This enabled supporters -- whether they were politicians, farmers, businessmen or laborers -- to represent their states in choosing prospective presidential or vice presidential candidates at a national level.

When the Democrats gathered in a national convention for the first time (Monday, May 21st through Wednesday, May 23rd, 1832), their task was easy. Since all were more than happy to nominate President Andrew Jackson for his second term, nominating a Vice President was their greatest challenge. In 1832, the Democrats were the third of the three political parties to hold its convention in Baltimore at a meeting hall called the Athenaeum.

Their challenge was so easy in fact that they adopted two rules that would nearly paralyze the party for a hundred years. They decided that a presidential candidate must receive two-thirds of the ballots in order to be nominated. This rule favored the South and West against the more heavily populated North and East. The second rule they adopted was the “unit rule” which gave the majority in any state’s delegation the power to issue the state’s unanimous vote for their candidate. Hence, the party’s principle that the “least must have representation” planted the seeds for political conflict and a half century of losses.

However, 1832 was a triumph for the Party of the Common Man. His donkey or barn yard mule was the symbol of Andy Jackson’s party. President Jackson was easily nominated for a second term. His choice for Vice President, the dapper little Dutchman from Kinderhook, New York with the bald top and dense side-whiskers, Martin (Matty) Van Buren, was easily nominated.

The next twenty-eight years were, with the exception of 1840 and 1848, happy (if not always successful) years for Democrats. Then, suddenly, 1860 arrived.

The South had lost its patience with the ever-growing and expanding Northeast and West. The South’s fear was that the industrialist North and West would gang up on the South and perhaps even go so far as to “abolish” the institution of slavery. The ultimate threat was the election of a Republican president. However, the immediate and real problem was that the Democratic Party, which required a two-thirds majority to nominate a presidential candidate, was hopelessly split.

Its first convention was held in Charleston, South Carolina. Fifty-seven ballots were cast, but they failed to nominate a presidential candidate. Senator Steven Arnold Douglas, whose lasting fame is due to his 1858 Senate election debates with Abraham Lincoln, might have received the nomination and history could have been different. He only received 181 votes on the fifty-seventh ballot which was not the necessary two-thirds (202) needed for the nomination. Thus the party divided. Douglas was nominated as a “Northern Democrat” on June 23rd, 1860 and John C. Breckinridge, the then sitting Vice President, received two “Democratic” nominations. Independent and Southern Democrats would nominate the youthful Vice President for President at their separate conventions in Baltimore on June 23rd and 28th, 1860. Lincoln’s subsequent election brought about the bloody but temporary secession of the South.

The die was firmly cast for Democratic Party defeats, however. From 1860 to 1912, Democrats would elect only one President: Grover Cleveland. Even in his case his successful elections as President were nonconsecutive. He won in 1884, lost in 1888 (despite winning the popular vote), and won a second term in 1892.

A split GOP between the incumbent President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 enabled Woodrow Wilson to become only the second Democratic president to be elected in fifty-two years. Wilson, a southerner by birth and an academician by profession, appealed to the church-going farmers and the aristocratic constabulary of the South and West as well as to the intellectual progressives of the Northeast who couldn’t quite swallow Teddy Roosevelt’s brand of progressivism. Still, it took the party forty-four ballots to nominate Wilson even with all of his appeal.

The 1924 presidential election was a total loss for the Democrats. They cast 103 ballots before settling on a compromise candidate -- John W. Davis of West Virginia -- on the 104th ballot. Davis would be “slaughtered” by Calvin Coolidge that fall.

In 1932, it took Democrats four ballots to give New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt the votes he needed to win the nomination. In reality, they couldn’t possibly have lost the Depression-dominated election. It was in that year that the Democrats finally eliminated the two-thirds ballot rule for nominating presidential candidates. Since 1936, it takes only a mere majority to nominate the presidential and vice presidential candidates. (In fact, Democrats won only four presidential elections in the seventy-two years between 1860 and 1932.)

The mission of the Democratic Party, since the Depression, has been to watch over America’s social well-being. Its abiding guideline is democracy by majority vote. To that end, it has championed causes dear to segments of the population such as the rights of labor, women, gays and lesbians, as well as affirmative action for the education, employment, and general advancement of minorities.

Its champions have been Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton. Other non-presidential champions of minority, senior, and labor causes have included Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Robert and Ted Kennedy, Claude Pepper, Jesse Jackson and at least five other unsuccessful presidential nominees.

The challenge for Barack Obama will be to meld the hard-hitting personality of Harry Truman of 1948, the magic glamour of JFK in 1960, the “will do” of LBJ from 1964, the gentle confidence of Jimmy Carter from 1976, and the determined passion of Clinton from 1992 with his own gifts and vision in 2008 so that he can successfully lead America onto a broad plateau of peace, unity and prosperity. The philosophy of the modern Democratic Party, I believe, was best expressed in these words spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his radio address of February 23, 1936. He said:

“I like to think of our country as one home in which the interests of each member are bound up with the happiness of all. We ought to know, by now, that the welfare of your family or mine cannot be bought at the sacrifice of our neighbor’s family; that our well-being depends, in the long run, on the well-being of our neighbors.”

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY