Origin of the Species

The party's success attracted voters. But as more people backed the Democrats, the likelihood that they would all agree diminished. The Jeffersonian burst of lightly governed expansion changed the American agenda, and with it the balance of interests in the Democratic Party.

For example: When populist frontiersmen swept Jackson to power, and then came clomping into Washington in their muddy boots, demanding their spoils -- and when Old Hickory began leveraging his popular support to defy Congress and the Supreme Court -- many Democrats began to fear the rabble and their "King Andrew." They dropped out of the Democratic coalition and formed the Whig Party, named in honor of the anti-monarchists of England. Building their own coalition, they pieced together some remnants of Hamiltonian politics, promoting government programs to build railroads and canals, all funded by high protective tariffs.

More important, slavery became a divisive issue for the Democrats. In Jefferson's day, the small-government crowd could coexist (sometimes uneasily) with pro-South partisans by framing the slavery debate as a matter of states' rights. "This Union can exist forever divided into free and slave states, as our fathers made it," the Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas said, expressing this live-and-let-live, head-in-the-sand view. Westward expansion, however, split this uneasy coalition. Now the question shifted to whether slavery should be extended into the new territories. It was one thing for Northern Democrats to tolerate slavery where it had existed for generations and another for them to advocate more of it. Their reluctance just made their Southern partners dig in their heels.

The result: the 1860 vote. The Democrats split into Northern and Southern factions, each nominating its own presidential candidate. "The Democratic Party was broken in two," journalist Jules Witcover wrote recently in his history of the party, "at last succumbing to the reality that it was split between a Southern wing that clung to slavery and insisted on imposing it on the whole party, and a Northern wing that would no longer permit the South to do so."

This opened the White House door to Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. Once again, a big party had fallen apart -- just in the nick of time.

LINCOLN'S REPUBLICANS were just six years old, having formed in 1854 from the husk of the Whig Party. The Whigs, too, had been undone by the rising drama of human bondage. "As the slavery issue came to the fore," historian Lewis L. Gould explained in his book on the Republicans (a companion to the Witcover history of the Democrats), "the Whigs found themselves more and more divided between their northern and southern wings. Their platform labeled slavery a dangerous issue . . . but said little more."

The Republicans married Hamiltonism to abolitionism for a 100 percent big-government platform. They believed in the national union over states' rights. They believed in government programs to organize and develop the conquered frontier. Even as Lincoln waged war on the rebellious Confederacy, he signed some of the most important public works and infrastructure legislation in U.S. history, all passed by the Republican Congress -- laws authorizing the transcontinental railroad and granting the right of way; the Homestead Act to encourage settlement of the empty prairies; a program to educate those settlers at land-grant colleges; and so on.

This new party supported high taxes to pay for its ambitious agenda. The GOP passed the first federal income tax, a temporary levy to pay for the Civil War. And it supported high tariffs on imported goods. The agenda made sense in the context of Hamilton's vision of the United States as a great industrial and financial power. From the beginning, U.S. economic potential was awesome, but for its first century, that potential was still taking shape. U.S. businesses needed government aid and protection from the stronger economies of Britain and Europe. They needed a national banking system. They needed a transportation network. They needed protective tariffs to keep domestic markets from being flooded with low-cost, high-quality foreign goods.

At first, the Republican coalition produced success upon success. The Union was preserved, the slaves were freed, the oceans were linked by the iron rails of progress. The United States enjoyed a burst of economic activity unmatched anywhere in the world, personified not just by Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan, but also by Post and Kellogg, Borden and Hershey, Heinz and Campbell, Sears and Woolworth. The consumer economy was born.

But just as the Jeffersonian westward expansion sharpened the slave question, this Hamiltonian burst of government-sponsored development changed the American agenda, and with it the balance of interests in the Republican Party. For example, the bloody toll of the Civil War and the chaotic muddle of Reconstruction revived anti-government, states-rights sentiments in the North, thus strengthening the Democrats.

More important, U.S. business had become a colossus. In fact, it was so powerful that some of the same people who had supported government protection of American business now started to believe that the government should protect people from American business. One of them, Theodore Roosevelt, became president in 1901 upon the assassination of William McKinley, and over the next 11 years, Roosevelt split the Republican Party. He continued to see big government as a force for national progress, thus alienating those in the GOP coalition whose main commitment was to big business.

In 1908, after his trust-busting, canal-building, federal-land-conserving presidency, Roosevelt turned the White House over to his friend William H. Taft. But T.R. came to feel that Taft was returning the party to the plutocrats, and after four years of uneasy retirement, he returned to challenge Taft in 1912. Forced to choose between them, the Republicans took the more conservative path. They nominated Taft.

"In its essence, 1912 introduced a conflict between progressive idealism . . . and conservative values," wrote James Chace in his recent history of that election. "The broken friendship between Taft and Roosevelt inflicted wounds on the Republican Party that have never been healed."

This rift paved the way for Democrats to grab the mantle of progressivism. It was, after all, high time for the Democrats to reinvent themselves. The Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer was vanishing in the din and bustle of the urban and industrial future. So the party found a new future in the cities, among the working people.