Formation of Political Parties

Origins

The development of what we know as today's two primary U.S. political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, appears to have gotten off to an ambiguous start. While the Republican Party can more precisely trace its roots back to the 1850's, the Democratic Party seems to have several sources over a number of years that contributed to its creation.

The Democratic Party's ancestry dates back to the early 1790's and has several factors that impacted its development, including Thomas Jefferson's influence, and the unrest created by the Federalist policies of Alexander Hamilton during George Washington's first administration. The downfall of Federalist policy and the shift to the Democratic Party began when Hamilton's proposal for a national bank was passed by Congress and signed by George Washington. This was done over the objections of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Representative James Madison, who then realized they would need to make a drastic change to influence government rule. Whereas the Federalists preferred a strong central government and flexible interpretation of the Constitution, Democrats believed government power belonged in the hands of the people and were in support of more rigid interpretation of the Bill of Rights. This can be seen in the definition of democrat, which comes from the Greek word democratia, and means "power of the people," or "the people rule," which is, even today, the philosophy that the Democratic Party stands behind.

Between 1790 and 1820, the Democratic Party went by several names, including the Jeffersonian Republicans, Democratic-Republicans and National Republicans. In the late 1820's, the dominant wing of a divided Democratic-Republican Party, led by President Andrew Jackson, deserted the Republican portion of their party, taking the name Democrat and making Jackson the first Democratic President to be elected to office in 1828.

In 1854, antislavery supporters dissatisfied with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed each territory to decide its own position on slavery, formed a new party and adopted the Republican name. They were joined by individuals who felt the U.S. government should grant land in the western states to settlers for free. The term republican derives from the Latin phrase res publica and means "public thing," or "public affair" and was adopted because it reminded Republicans of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party (GOP.com). It suggests a government in which citizens actively participate in decision-making by returning power to each of the states. Although the unstable slavery issue was the means for creating the party, the political void caused by the decline of the Whig Party and the failure of less known parties, such as the Know-Nothings and Free Soilers, led to a stable national following that grew with dramatic speed.

Thomas Nast, political cartoonist during the Gilded Age, created the symbols we know today that represent the two major political parties: the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. The image of the donkey dates back to the 1830's when Andrew Jackson was characterized as a jackass by his opponents, and it was during the 1870's when Nast used this image in a series of political cartoons that appeared in Harper's Weekly. The donkey symbolized the strong, rowdy, outrageous and durable Democrats. To portray the Republicans, Nast used an elephant, initially to represent the thoughtlessness of the Republican vote. Later, the image came to reflect the elephant's size and strength advantages over other smaller animals and was compared to the GOP's control of the post-Civil War political environment. The symbol came to represent attributes such as cleverness, majesty, and awkwardness. Given that literacy rates were much lower than today, and information regarding specific party candidates and their policies was difficult to come by, the party symbols came to provide prospective voters with an easy way to distinguish candidates of one party from those of another. For today's voters, these traditional symbols don't quite have the same impact or significance, but they have continued on as part of our popular culture and can still be seen in some media outlets. Source: Michael Nelson, ed., Guide to the Presidency, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2002), 790.

The two-party concept became even more popular due to an increase in societal diversity. Up until the 1950's, southern voters were primarily white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant agrarians and the majority lived in rural areas or small towns and shared similar economic characteristics. Once industrialization, unionization, urbanization, black suffrage, and the immigration or northerners took place, there was a greater need and desire to develop two competing parties to keep a hand in government control. This division within Southern society is what enabled the Republicans to gain their core support, and subsequent divisions have continued their growth: North vs. South, East vs. West, agricultural vs. financial and industrial interests, and rural vs. urban areas.

Belief Structures

The early philosophy of the Democratic Party stressed a belief in a strict interpretation of the Constitution, states' rights, and limited spending by the federal government. Although nationwide members of the party accepted these basic principles, there was no national agreement on the volatile slavery issue, which ultimately divided