AMERICAN HISTORY IS REPLETE with names of famous men that schoolchildren will learn about for decades to come. Alton Brooks Parker is not one of them. Not many people know Parker. Even among the club of failed Presidential candidates of the past, which is a club of some pretty obscure people, names like Wendell Wilkie, William Jennings Bryan, Adali Stevenson or, OK, just to be cute we'll say Mike Dukakis, Parker doesn't ring a bell.
This could be because he ran so long ago, or that he was a person of little significance before or after 1904. But it also could be because Parker was stuck with the challenging job of running against Theodore Roosevelt, one of the nation's most popular Presidents, in 1904 -- at what was the peak of his popularity--three years after he had taken the oath of office after William McKinley's assasination.
Alton B. Parker was a odd choice for a Presidential candidate,
....he was the Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, not exactly a training ground for Presidential candidates. He was especially an odd choice as he was a conservative Democrat what was called a Bourbon Democrat, at a time when under the Silver Tounge of Williams Jenning Bryan, the Democratic Party had become more progressive and liberal. Parker was no Bryan. He favored a gold standard for money at a time when the majority of the party was very much wild for inflationist silver politics. He supported business in a way that any corporate titan could be comfortable with.
Alton's 15 Minutes
But the Democratic Party that met in St. Louis in 1904 in a depressed and divided convention hall had little choice. Their issues -- the issues of Bryan -- had been stolen. Young Theodore Roosevelt was an activist President, using the Presidential bully pulpit to advocate against the unchecked accumulation of capital, for regulation of monopolies, to settle strikes in a way that acknowledged unions, all issues normally in the terrain of Democrats at this time. While Roosevelt didn't do anything radical like call for silver-backed money, he stole enough of the populist Democratic rhetoric to severly anger the big businesses that had been the mainstay of the Republican Party. Up until the election year, it was still possible that young TR could be taken out. Nearly every day of his first term Roosevelt had been dogged by hints of a well-funded challenge in the primaries from the conservative Ohio Senator Mark Hanna. But Hanna died before he could start a campaign, and no one else was up to the challenge.
Since we the country already had an ostensibly progressive President in the White House, the progressive Democrats had nothing to talk about in 1904. William Jennings Bryan decided not to run, having lost the last two elections, and so the party decided to explore their right wing, hoping to convert some conservatives and business backers that they had lost during the firey Bryan's two runs for the White House. For Vice President, The 1904 Democrats also picked railroad contractor Henry Davis. The 80 year old was the oldest person nominated for vice president by a major party in history. There was a simple reason he was nominated for the gig. Davis was rich. And Democrats hoped would fund the campaign out of his pocket. Which, sadly for Parker, he did not do.
Democrats also hoped big business angry with Roosevelt would switch sides and rush to Parker's side, that their loyalty would be to ideology and not party and Judge Parker's solid conservative credentials. This didn't really work either. A few did, including George Baer, a powerful Pennsylvania mining baron who was angered by Roosevelts' support for a union striking against him -- and the newspaper publisher Willam Randolph Hearst. But for the most part, despite their disagreements with Roosevelts rhetoric, big business stayed with the GOP. As the influential and conservative New York Sun wrote, "We will choose the impulsive candidate of the conservative party rather than the conservative candidate of the impulsive party."
As a candidate, Parker, to use 21st century parlance, sucked big time. Nominated in July, it took Parker a few months to even leave his home in New York State and begin a few campaign speeches. National Democratic Party officials were dismayed by his lacklusterness. Finally in September, he set out to do some speeches. Parker's one opportunity came when The New York World revealed a scandal in Roosevelt's Bureau of Corporations. The Judge saw his chance. He fired off a letter printed in major newspapers in which he went for the jugular -- he all but called Roosevelt corrupt. The quiet judge had become a lion. It seemed, for a week at least, that there could actually be a presidential election going on here. But when Roosevelt quickly dispatched a letter of his own, defending the charges and whiplashing Parker for going out on a limb on a flimsy charge without evidence, it was clear the amateur Parker had overstepped. Most voters backed the popular President rather than the unknown judge making the charges in the dispute. In the end, these two letters were the campaign of '04. Alton Parker carried only the Southern states -- those Southern States that Democrats always won from the Civil War to the Sixties, and Parker disappeared into obscurity.
The conservative Democrat's run in 1904 turned out to be a blip in a long progressive tradition of the Democratic party in the 20th century. There was always a conservative Dark Side to the Democratic Party of the 20th century, be it in the minority leader John Nance Garner who would conspire with conservative Republican Speaker Nick Longworth to emasculate the Progressive Republican wing of his party, or the Southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond that would filibuster civil rights bills. But not so much in national politics. It would be over seven decades before moderate southern Democrat Jimmy Carter was nominated, and even he was not as conservative as Parker was for his party at the time. But Parker's fifteen minutes, as they certianly would not have called it in 1904, is illustrative of how American parties can change thier ideology -- if only for a short time -- in a quest for all-important votes.
Parties do change over time, especially when there is opportunity to reach new voters and cling to the old. In period following the Civil War the 1800's the Democratic Party had been the conservative party, it was the party of the status quo -- certainly involving civil rights, a party that wanted state power to be supreme over Federal jurisdiction. The Republicans, in today's term, were progressives. If Progressivism is using the
government to cure the ills of society, if a progressive calls for a strong federal government, the Republicans of the 19th century were far more progressive than Democrats.
But does this mean the Democratic and Republican party's simply names, that can change ideology to fit each election? Are there any basic tenets of these parties? This question has relevant as Republicans seem to have executed another change -- a bit of a shift from small government Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to the Bush administration and the creation of the Homeland Security department in 2002 entering a what seems to man to be a new phase of Republican Federalism, not so much in rhetoric but in practice.
Changing party ideology is not new. It's been said that if Lincoln and Jefferson were alive today and could respectively see their Republican and Democratic parties today, Lincoln would secede and Jefferson would start a revolution.
And there's some truth to that joke. States rights Jefferson would seem to prefer today's Republican party positon, while strong government Lincoln would today feel more comfortable with Democratic support for a strong Federal government.
Republicans of Lincoln's era were the big government thinkers. They were the successors of Alexander Hamilton, Washington and John Adams. Not only was slavery at is essence a big government issue because Federal action was needed to end slavery. An absolute belief in states rights would have prevented interference with slavery where states didn't choose to end it. But Republicans also wanted high tarrifs - taxes on imports, and with that increasing revenue to federal government to use for roads and railroads.
Democrats of Jefferson's era who were known as 'Republicans' at the time but have no link to Lincoln's or today's Republicnas -- actually the line that can be drawn is to the Democratic party of today, were not exactly like Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid in philosophy. They were for small Federal government, strong state governments and weak federal government. They feared the powers of the Presidency, decried the Federalists for creating a govenrment that bore resemblence to the England they revolted against. They wanted state rather than Federal banks. However, they weren't purists. Jefferson used Federal power to make the largest Federal land purchase in history, and Jacksonian Democrats created a subtreasury system that gave some federal reinforcement to banking. A distrust of Federal power would be a Democratic Party trademark in the 19th century.
By 1932, the situation was completely reversed. Republican Herbert Hoover decried the proposed New Deal programs of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt vehemently, calling them un-American and near-socialist. Although Hoover had taken a few measures to jump start the economy, mostly by freeing up secondary sources of credit, he thought the enlarging of the Federal Government to relieve economic distress or provide jobs to people was close to criminal. He thought that programs like unemployment and social security would be a disincentive to work or save. Democrats had become the successors to Washington, Hamilton and Adams, advocating a Federal Government, while Hoover came off like a true Jeffersonian at this point in history.
And it didn't start with Hoover. Republicans before Hoover were even more conservative. Harding and Coolidge were private-sector Presidents. After the Reconstruction which was one of the largest Federal government programs, Republicans started to move away from Federal solutions to problems. Conservatives became the powerful force in the party. At the turn of the century when the progressive movement became popular, railing against powerful business barons and advocating that government had a role in leveling the playing field for average people. Theodore Roosevelt, with his inclination for action and his eye on the Progressive voting strength, did pick up that mantle, and many Republicans followed him. But the party still had a conservative streak - Teddy was threatened by conservatives in his party and his Speaker of the House Joe Cannon was a conservative who blocked some his programs.
In 1896, in the midst of an economic recession, Democrats abandoned their gold-standard conservative president Grover Cleaveland and nominated a thrity six year old, Williams Jennings Bryan a Nebraska congressman, to replace him in an attempt to refresh the party's image and claim populist and progressive votes. Bryan lost and then ran again in 1900. After the failed attempt to conservatize the party in 1904, Bryan ran again in '08. At this point the Democrats and Republicans would throughout that period start to out-do each other as to who was more progressive. By the time of the 1912 election, progressivism reached zenith. Each of the three candidates, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, claimed in some part to be a progressive. Though Taft enjoyed the conservative support. Taft's adminstration had sued the US Steel trust, a step farther than Roosevelt wanted to go. Roosevelt called for regulation (though not break up) of trusts, and Wilson offered his New Freedom, a multi point progressive agenda.
The Little Talked About 1914 Election
But the progressive spell would not last forever. Republicans and Roosevelt's splinter Bull Moose party lost the 1912 election, which soured Republicans on progressive ideas. The decisive election for change, the election that really gave each party its marching orders for most of the last century, was not 1912 but 1914. In 1914, Republicans gained many House seats and governorships running as conservatives. A new senator, Warren Harding was elected in Ohio as a conservative. However Woodrow Wilson's Democrats also had some good news in the election...Democrats picked up a Senate seat, a few governorships and kept all their House seats in the California and the Western States, ensuring that Wilson and the Democrats would hold on to the House. In the 1914 election, both parties saw their future. The lines were drawn. Republicans were the conservative and Democrats the Progressive party. And those lines would generally speaking, last from 1914 on to well, one might say 1996.....
In his 1996 State of the Union Bill Clinton, two years after the defeat of an ambitious healthcare program, Clinton declared 'the era of big government is over' Scandalous words for a democrat they seemed, and they made the Republicans in the Congressional chamber stand up and applaud. Although it sealed the re-election for Bill Clinton, establishing him as a centrists, Many thought it was a real moment for the consevative era. Only Nixon could go to China, the meaning that only the anti-communist advocate could reach out to a communist country and sruvive politically. Only Nixon could go to China, and only Clinton could cut down the Federal government.
Yet Clinton represented no sea change, partially because the words represented more political reality than Clinton's real philosphy and interests, and mostly because his Republican successor has not shared his expressed goal regarding the Federal government. Far from reducing government, George W. Bush increased government spending as a percentage of GNP from 18% under Clinton to over 20% in 2006. Of course Bush and the congressional GOP former majority did not in rhetoric adovocate bigger Federal government, they most often protested it, but all the while they increased it.
Dominate the World or Shun the World?
Another area where parties have bobed and weaved is on foreign policy. America has from its creation been torn as to how mch we should be involved in the world outside. Washington eschewed foreign entanglements outside of commerce in his farewell address, and his words were heeded up until a hundred years later. As America lurched towards imperialism under William McKinley's Republicans at the turn of the century. Democrats, this time with Bryan as their candidate, took an isolationist stance, fighting 'imperialism' but American voters were ready for some imperialsim, as they re-elected McKinley.
But 15 years later, when Bryan was Secretary of State under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, he resigned wihen he saw tat Wilson was edging towards American involvement in the Great War that would become World War I. Major Republicans urged involvement in that war. But By 1919, Roosevelt was dead and the Republicans led by Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and Tom Borah showed an isolationist streak, opposed American involvement in a League of nations, the Republican party was now fighting internationalism. Leaders like Thomas Borah and Henry Cabot Lodge opposed Wilson's League of Nations. There's was a minority position among Americans, who generally wanted a league, but a minority in the Senate where Wilson's plan failed. In 1920 the Republican ticket of Harding-Coolidge and the Democratic ticket of Cox-Roosevelt represented polar opposite choices, with the Repbulcian ticket adovcating less involvement in world affairs.
With the 1920 election as a referendum on world involement having been decided in the negative, throughout the 20's conservative isolationist Republican party prevailed. In the 30's, FDR paved a path of internationalism for the Democrats, and in the 1940 election, the GOP was forced to accept internationalism in order to be taken seriously in a dangerous era with the world at war. American politics was far more internationalist after World War II. Both Democrats and Republicans advocated a strong involvement in international affairs, as we had prospered from our involvmeent in World War II and defeated two enemies German and Japan that might have threatened our own freedom had they survived. During the cold war there were few isolantionists. After all with an enemy such the Soviet Union active around the world, for America to retreat to its shores seemed unthinkable.
It was only after 1994 when Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House that isolationsim re-appeared (one might say McGovern's 1972 campaign reflected some isolationism but this was only in terms of Vietnam and did not reflect a general philosphy) with Republicans not eager to operate as part of the United Nations. And while Demcorat Bill Clinton committed American ground troops to Bosnia and took the country on an air war with Serbia, candidate George W. Bush said he was against nation-building. That rhetoric however, did not turn out to match events in his Presidency.
Blobs of JELLO, or Big Tents?
Given this reversals of Party Positions on Federal Power and Internationalism, it seems that the parties have no principles, they change to meet opportunity. This is only partially true. Many of these changes like the focus on internationalism after World War II simply represent realities of the world. If we look broader, we can find basic tenets. The basic tenets that seem to be evident in the Democratic Party is that of democracy - majorty rule. Most often the Democratic Party adovates issues that are the most popular - they are pro-choice, they are for national health insurance, they support Social Security and
want more money for education just as polls show americans do. A direct line can be drawn from this to the party of Jefferson which serviced the popular multitude of then farmers and against the power of bankers, supporting France when it was popular in America to do so.
Republicans generally adovacate for business, reasoning that its better to take care of business to create jobs and eventually help people that way. Support for big business has been a pretty consistent tenent of the Republican party, which was in many ways started as a railroad party - the biggest and fastest growing mega-business of the 1850's when the party was founded. While Teddy Roosevelt represented a seeming departure from this, it is true that Roosevelt did not attack big busienss in practice so much as in his rhetoric, TR's progressivism may have meant no more than trimming down the most grotesque consolidations of money and power but leaving much in place. He was in fact agnered when his scuccessor Howard Traft actually sued US Steel.
On the important issue of the size and powers of the Federal government and on the issue of involvement in world affairs or uninvolvement, you cannot trace a line through history and fine that the Democrat and Republican parties have had a consistent majority position on these issues. You will end up with a jagged chart, showing the party here or there. But this is not to say that American parties are made of JELLO, and they can be molded to any shape you want. Blips like Parker's are rare. Usually, the evolution of American party positions has taken time. Parties are big, flexible tents, able to stretch a bit to envelope around a vote-rich issue, all the while trying to hold as much of their base in as they can.