The Prospects for a New Political Alignment

1931 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 906-914
Author(s):  
Paul H. Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The People ◽  
Capitol Hill ◽  
Middle West ◽  
Political Alignment

Although a naïve economist, I am quite conscious of the way in which the forces of inertia, self-interest, and sentiment combine to give persistent vitality to those two old parties which, so far as ideas are concerned, are so perfect an example of the embalmer's art. Not only do these parties have the network of precinct and local organization upon which effective political work must rest, but they also furnish to ambitious men and women the sole avenues to immediate political power. Perhaps most important of all is the fact that their trade-marks and totemistic deities tap large wellsprings of genuine, if benighted, sentiment in the hearts of millions of humble and undistinguished men and women. To the farmers of the Middle West, the Republican party is still a glorious fellowship of the consecrated Knights of the Grail, who, in times past, prevented slavery from creeping up the Mississippi Valley, gave homesteads to the people, fought the Civil War, and bequeathed Abraham Lincoln to the ages. Similarly, nostalgic Southerners regard the Democratic party as an integral part in that vista of the glorious days before the Civil War when cotton was king and their statesmen dominated Capitol Hill, and also as the corporate representative of that chivalrous group of men in white armor who finally overthrew carpet-bag government and negro domination, and who by their efforts finally made Southern Caucasian civilization free at last.Such being the assets of the old parties as going concerns, it is not surprising that progressively minded leaders like Senators Norris and Borah should wish to stay inside the party breastworks and utilize the accumulated resources of organization and sentiment for their own purposes, rather than to surrender the good-will value of the party label to their opponents.

Democracy in Spain

2018 ◽  
pp. 53-76
Author(s):  
Javier Fernández-Sebastián ◽  
Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Revolution

Spanish traditions of mixed monarchy were revived in the face of Napoleonic occupation, and later championed by opponents of restored autocracy. Discussions of ‘democracy’ as an option for modern Spain were both encouraged and constrained by this setting. Popular support for the absolutist claimant in the civil war of the 1830s set the scene for endorsements of Doctrinaire liberalism, entailing vesting power in the propertied and educated, for the benefit of the people. But sharp differences over how inclusive such a governing class should be encouraged some to argue for something more radically inclusive. A ‘democratic party’ first emerged among left-liberals in the 1840s, persisting as a force in Spanish politics thereafter. During the 1850s and 60s, there were many calls for democracy, variously interpreted. Democracy provided a leitmotif of politics after the revolution of 1868, leading subsequent historians to describe it as having inaugurated a ‘democratic sexennio’.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
William L. Barney
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Political Force ◽  
National Convention ◽  
Secession Crisis ◽  
Do So ◽  
Abolition Movement

Sectional tensions over slavery persisted since the writing of the Constitution and exploded into secession and the Civil War in 1860–61. The resistance to slavery of African Americans, both enslaved and free, prodded the consciences of enough Northern whites to produce the abolition movement and emerge as a political force in its own right. Southerners recognized that the morality of slavery was at the heart of the issue and sought in vain to make Northerners acknowledge slavery as a morally just institution and allow it to grow and expand. The Northern refusal to do so fueled the rise of the Republican Party and split the Democratic Party at its national convention in the spring of 1860, setting the stage for the election of Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the secession crisis.

Arguing until Doomsday

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Woods
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Charles Sumner ◽  
Civil War Era

As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois's Stephen Douglas and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis and Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis's factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party's internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan W. Keating
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Popular Vote ◽  
The North ◽  
The People ◽  
Commander In Chief ◽  
Precarious Situation

In April 1861, newly elected president Abraham Lincoln found himself in a precarious situation. Although he had won the presidency in the November elections, his victory was by no means a mandate from the people for the Republican Party platform. The nation was perilously divided. Winning less than half the popular vote in 1860, the tall, gaunt lawyer from Illinois looked on as his nation teetered on the brink of civil war. To keep the nation together, the new commander in chief drew support from a rather tenuous alliance of political rivals openly divided in their opinions about the actions of their southern brethren. The attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, however, galvanized public opinion throughout the north and fostered, at least momentarily, a powerful wartime alliance between Republicans and Democrats that allowed Lincoln to carry out a war to preserve the Union. As Federal troops lowered the Stars and Stripes in surrender from the ramparts of the bastion in Charleston Harbor, banners were hoisted in towns and cities across the North as men of all ages, ethnicities, classes, and backgrounds rushed to the defense of their flag and their nation....

Polarization and Politics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
White Backlash ◽  
The Right

Chapter 6 explains how the three long-standing trends described in earlier chapters fed into rising political polarization, especially in Washington. First, the rise of neoliberalism pushed both Republicans and Democrats to the right, with Republicans moving farther than Democrats. Second, as stagflation and globalization unfolded, organized labor grew weaker and its support for the Democratic Party diminished. Big corporations’ support for the Democratic Party eroded too. But while economic issues were pushing both parties to the right, they also polarized them by driving wedges between generations and between men and women on important policy issues. Third, politics became polarized racially. White working-class voters switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party, which insinuated that Democratic policies were threatening white privileges. This sparked a white backlash against the Democrats. Immigration and then the 9/11 terrorist attacks racialized political divisions further.

Bleeding Kansas

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Kristen T. Oertel
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Free State ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
The People ◽  
Fundamental Cause ◽  
Kansas Territory ◽  
Bleeding Kansas

Many historians identify Bleeding Kansas as a fundamental cause of the Civil War, and this chapter demonstrates how violence in Kansas Territory not only inflamed sectional tensions but also represents the origins of military conflict between Northerners and Southerners. Antislavery or “free-state” settlers and pro-slavery settlers formed military companies in the late 1850s and fought each other in ways that would set the stage for the larger war. Average men and women answered their communities’ call to arms and actuated their political ideals with bullets, defending not only their homes but also their views about slavery and abolition. The words and gunfire exchanged by the people residing on the Kansas-Missouri border galvanized the nation and brought it to the brink of war in 1861, but settlers on the border had already been at war for years.

Organizing into Blocs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine N. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
State Politics ◽  
Third Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Contentious Issue

This chapter examines the politicization of Minnesota's temperance movement between the end of the Civil War and the passage of a High License Law in 1887. It shows how Minnesota's temperance activists pushed the temperance cause into the political arena, giving rise to a temperance politics that moved the temperance issue at the center of party, electoral, and state politics. It explains how the popularity of the temperance cause forced both Republicans and Democrats to engage with the arguments of both temperance reformers and opponents involving Irish and German Americans while also carefully negotiating their position within the legal battles about alcohol. It also considers how personal liberty emerged as a contentious issue in the High License debates. These debates led to an equilibrium between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and even provoked the founding of a third party solely geared toward the extinction of the liquor traffic, the Temperance Party of Minnesota. The chapter concludes with a discussion ofd the rise of a women's temperance movement during the period.

Long Shadows

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Lause
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
The West ◽  
Christopher Lasch ◽  
Social Empathy ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Free Democratic Party

This epilogue considers the legacies left by spiritualism of the Civil War era. It begins with a discussion of the spiritualist movement's early links to the Free Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and Abraham Lincoln and what happened after the war to some of the prominent spiritualists such as Isabelle Laurie Miller, the Fox sisters, and Nettie Colburn. It then examines the spiritualists' involvement in Reconstruction; how spiritualism and its legacy found their fit in what Christopher Lasch later called “the culture of narcissism” on the West Coast; and how the experience of the antislavery movement and the war imbued spiritualism with a radical new kind of social empathy. It also cites some of the reasons why spiritualism declined after the war, when the issues of secession and Union receded, and looks at three of the organizations established by the spiritualists after the war.

A History of the Ozarks, Volume 1

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooks Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North American ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Upland South ◽  
States History

A History of the Ozarks, Vol. I: The Old Ozarks is the first book-length account of life in the Ozark region of Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma in the era before the Civil War. Placing the region’s story within the context of North American and United States history, The Old Ozarks follows the human story in the Middle American highlands from prehistoric times until the eve of the Civil War. Along the way it chronicles the rise and fall of the powerful Osages, the settlement of the French in the Mississippi Valley and the flood of Anglo-Americans on the frontier, the resettlement of immigrant Indians from the East, and the development of antebellum society in the diverse terrain of the Ozark uplift. Above all The Old Ozarks follows a narrative approach that focuses on the people whose activities and ambitions brought life to the region, from the Shawnee Quatawapea to Moses Austin, and in turn brings life to many long-forgotten individuals and the lifeways that they brought with them from Tennessee, Kentucky, and other parts of the Upland South. The storyline that flows throughout The Old Ozarks underscores not a region of isolated backwoodsmen but a regional variation of the American story.

ABCs of the Revolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-291
Author(s):  
Egor A. Yesyunin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Development History ◽  
The People ◽  
Red Army ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Revolution

The article is devoted to the satirical agitation ABCs that appeared during the Civil War, which have never previously been identified by researchers as a separate type of agitation art. The ABCs, which used to have the narrow purpose of teaching children to read and write before, became a form of agitation art in the hands of artists and writers. This was facilitated by the fact that ABCs, in contrast to primers, are less loaded with educational material and, accordingly, they have more space for illustrations. The article presents the development history of the agitation ABCs, focusing in detail on four of them: V.V. Mayakovsky’s “Soviet ABC”, D.S. Moor’s “Red Army Soldier’s ABC”, A.I. Strakhov’s “ABC of the Revolution”, and M.M. Cheremnykh’s “Anti-Religious ABC”. There is also briefly considered “Our ABC”: the “TASS Posters” created by various artists during the Second World War. The article highlights the special significance of V.V. Mayakovsky’s first agitation ABC, which later became a reference point for many artists. The authors of the first satirical ABCs of the Civil War period consciously used the traditional form of popular prints, as well as ditties and sayings, in order to create images close to the people. The article focuses on the iconographic connections between the ABCs and posters in the works of D.S. Moor and M.M. Cheremnykh, who transferred their solutions from the posters to the ABCs.

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