At this point in our quadrennial election cycle, thoughts turn to party platforms. In doing my research on a 1937 federal death penalty case in Michigan (the only case I have found before 2002 in which the federal government succeeded in securing a death sentence for a crime committed in a State that did not authorize the death penalty for the same offense), I wanted to look at the Democratic Party platforms over time, to see how much emphasis was paid to “states rights” at various times. Fortunately, I found a great website (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/platforms.php) that catalogs the platforms of the major parties going back to 1840.
I found that inclusion of a federalism plank in the Democratic Platform in the early part of the twentieth century was erratic. In 1900 and 1904, there was none. Then, in 1908, the sixth plank, entitled “The Rights of the States,” proclaimed:
Believing, with Jefferson, in “the support of the State governments in all their rights as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies,” and in “the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad,” we are opposed to the centralization implied in the suggestion, now frequently made, that the powers of the General Government should be extended by judicial construction.
A similar plank was included four years later as the platform’s fourth. In 1916 and 1920, there was no federalism plank in the Democratic Party platform. Such a plank reappeared in 1924, but it was buried near the middle – the 26th of forty-four planks. Then, amazingly, “The Rights of the States” appeared as the very first plank in the 1928 platform. It read:
We demand that the constitutional rights and powers of the states shall be preserved in their full vigor and virtue. These constitute a bulwark against centralization and the destructive tendencies of the Republican Party.
We oppose bureaucracy and the multiplication of offices and officeholders.
We demand a revival of the spirit of local self-government, without which free institutions cannot be preserved.
In 1932, the federalism plank disappeared from the Democratic Party platform, for pretty obvious reasons.
Most of my historical research has been on the founding period. Now, I have some general knowledge of the fact that there was a strong states’ rights faction in the Democratic Party prior to 1932, when the election of FDR marked the birth of the modern Democratic Party as the party of big federal government. I also know that this faction lingered on until the Republican Party’s “southern strategy” began the process of eliminating virtually all vestiges of that faction by transforming southern Democrats into Republicans. But I wonder if someone with more knowledge than I can chime in and help explain in more detail what was going on from 1900-32. Specifically, why was there such a dramatic push in 1928 to put federalism front and center when the party was only four years away from nominating FDR?
Posted by Michael J.Z. Mannheimer on August 1, 2016 at 02:31 PM
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FDR did not run on a social democratic platform. The Democratic platform in 1932 called for cuts in federal spending and throw-the-rascals-out. FDR at times criticized Hoover for excess activity.
The “Southern Strategy” is an abiding meme for partisan Democrats (who evidently fancy that Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern did not want Southerers’ votes or perhaps fancy that white Southerners were honor bound not to cast ballots), but there’s little to it. Joe McGinness interviewed Kevin Phillips and knocked about Nixon headquarters in 1968 and heard Phillips’ pollsters’ assessment of changing regional voting patterns and how they expected to benefit from them and which groups have responses to advertising appeals which are out of sync (Phillips contending, for example, that you could not craft advertising campaigns in New York that appeal simultaneously to Jews and Catholics. You can appeal to the one or the other).
It’s perfectly unremarkable that white Southern voters abandoned the Democratic Party. When segregation and the protection of segregation ceased to be an option in federal politics, other issues came to the fore, and these cut against the Democratic Party. The attenuation of cultural habits did as well. This particular electoral shift took place over a period of more than four decades (1952-94) and commenced in portions of the South where racial questions were the least neuralgic. If segregationists were expecting to get jack out of either the Nixon or Reagan administrations, they were disappointed. The Reagan administration was antagonistic to racial preference schemes in various realms, a position anathema to black politicians, but there’s nothing indefensible about the position the Administration took.
Samples of Mr. Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 TV advertisements are here.
http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/
Not particularly trenchant, any of them, though one, mistaken at the time for a segment of Laugh-In, jabs Humphrey. It’s not a comprehensive sample. It does not include the ones with Roy Acuff singing a country & western Nixon jingle, but that one’s also not contention (“This Time This Time with Leadership from Richard M Nixon”).
Posted by: Art Deco | Aug 1, 2016 4:42:47 PM