Background of news –
Divided Democratic Party
By Bertram Benedict, editorial research reports
In the House vote last Thursday to override the veto of the revenue bill, about 80% of the Representatives who stuck by the President come from urban areas. With the President were all but two of the Democrats from New York City, a large proportion of those from the West, a considerable number from Oklahoma and Tennessee, but only five from the Solid South (two on pairs).
The Democratic Party is an uneasy amalgam of the South and the large cities of the North and West. About one-half of the Democrats in Congress are Southerners; about one-third urban Easterners and Westerners, about one-sixth non-urban Easterners and Westerners.
In 1924, the party delegates split 50-50 at the national convention in New York on condemning the Ku Klux Klan by name, with most of the Southerners against condemnation, most of the Easterners for it. The convention deadlocked for over 100 ballots between the candidacies of Alfred E. Smith, supported chiefly in the East and in Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and of William G. McAdoo, supported chiefly in the South and the rural West.
In the election of 1924, the Smith states gave little support of John W. Davis, the party’s compromise candidate. When the Smith camp demanded and got the nomination for their man in 1928, half of the Southern states voted for Hoover.
Alliance is nothing new
Today, the Northern and Western Democrats yearn to retain the labor vote and Negro vote, necessary to party success in many parts of the North and the West. Southern Democrats in Congress usually can expect reelection whatever the fate of the presidential ticket.
From its very beginning, the Democratic Party was a union of the South and large cities of the North.
Thomas Jefferson rode to power by dint of an alliance with certain urban political organizations of the North, notable Tammany Hall. The alliance ultimately came to grief, despite Jefferson’s attempt to hold the Northerners in line with patronage, and by the end of Jefferson’s administration, he had all but lost control over his party in Congress.
Even at the time of the Civil War, the Southern cotton planters were in close political alliance with Northern cotton manufacturers, and most of the considerable vote in the North against Lincoln for reelection in 1864 came from large cities and towns.
In Grover Cleveland’s second administration, he turned ultraconservative, according to the prevalent views in the South and West during the long depression of the ‘90s, and the South and West took control of the Democratic Party at the 1896 convention. Over Northern opposition, they put across a Free Silver plank and the nomination of Bryan, and the convention even rejected a proposal to commend the Cleveland administration.
Labor turns to GOP
With the Democratic Party in the hands of Southerners and Westerners, Eastern labor turned largely to the Republican Party, especially since the GOP “sold” labor, as we say today, on a protective tariff.
Woodrow Wilson managed to keep the Southerners in line for the pro-labor program of his administration, but in those days, industrialization had made few inroads into the South, where the trade union movement was still more of an abstraction than a reality.
Today, the South has come to know at first hand the attempt to organize both industrial and farm workers for higher wages and shorter hours, and the South is cold to pleas of the Northern and Western Democrats that they need the labor and Negro vote for political success.
The South, on its side, insists that the Northern and Western Democrats don’t appreciate the excesses in Reconstruction days, when voting restrictions in the South were largely relaxed.