A Response to The LBJ Vantage Point's Brief History of the Democratic Party's Nomination System
and the perils of generalism
Yesterday, twitter micro-celebrity @lyndonbajohnson released a piece on the history of the Democratic Party. While he certainly makes some good points there and I agree with his overall thoughts about how the Democratic nominating process has gotten more democratic over time, he also falls victim to a number of inaccuracies and misunderstandings of events he is covering, specifically pre-WW2 events. In this essay, I will be going through them one at a time, while hopefully making a broader point about the perils of historical generalism. Since I don’t want to refer to @lyndonbajohnson as LBJ, I will be referring to him as The Texas Regular (TTR), his alias on his website. If you haven’t read his work yet, here is a link to it: https://lbjvantagepoint.com/the-white-house-tapes/f/a-brief-history-of-the-democratic-partys-nomination-system.
“Unsurprisingly, the first parties emerged from the bickering factions of Washington's second term, divided primarily over the core issues of Alexander Hamilton's economic plan: the Bank, the tariff, and publicly financed "internal improvements." Hamilton's supporters created the Federalist Party and claimed George Washington as their progenitor. Jefferson and Madison's "anti-Administration" faction planted the seeds of what became the Democratic-Republican Party.”
This paragraph strongly implies that Federalists supported the Bank, tariffs, and internal improvements, while the Democratic-Republicans opposed those policies. This is not really true. It was Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson’s administration that instituted the protectionist Embargo of 1807. On the Federalist side, the most prominent Federalist in the country (at the time), Rufus King, opposed the Tariff of 1816 (though he voted for it in the end as a necessary evil). Daniel Webster also cut his teeth as a Federalist battling tariffs.
“The innerworkings of Congress, and of most of the individual state houses, had by the 1870s come to be as dependent upon two-party organization as executive elections, and the parties had also gobbled-up the ever-growing pool of civil service jobs into their war chests of patronage and spoils. Splinter parties could no longer compete, either financially or logistically. In fact the single most successful splinter party formed since the Civil War, the People's Party, organized in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1892, lasted as an independent party for only two elections (1892 and 1894) before it fused with the Democrats to gain access to the cash and organizing expertise it desperately lacked.”
I think the point being made here is for the most part okay, but I do have two issues with it. One is the lack of mention of the Liberal Republican Party. While it’s less successful than the People’s Party in longevity, the Liberal Republicans did manage to become the official opposition for 1872. My second issue is that TTR doesn’t really mention why the People’s Party merged with the Democrats in the end; it was because the Democrats had nominated William Jennings Bryan, a candidate very sympathetic to the goals the People’s Party was trying to achieve. The same was true for the Liberal Republicans, by the way. They were unable to get an effort off the ground in 1876, because the major party candidates were Tilden and Hayes, two politicians who really focused on appealing to the Liberal Republican base.
“Also, from the outset, the U.S. has usually only had two major parties. Like the parties themselves, the two party system is not written anywhere into U.S. organic or statutory law, but is rather an ingrained feature of our election systems and their central flaw: many states, many election systems, one federal executive who must win a majority of the myriad. Only two parties, because you must win 51% of the electors. Our system is not parliamentary, you cannot form a government with a head of government from a coalition. The head of government must be chosen by a majority of the electors from the many states. In fact, the U.S. has never stably supported more than two major parties at a time, and those moments where there were briefly more exclusively came in periods of significant realignment where one or both of the major parties collapsed. The collapse of the Federalists after the War of 1812 caused the Democratic-Republicans to splinter into numerous parties before the system coalesced into the Democrats and their Whig opposition. The collapse of the Whigs and schism of the Democrats into their "Barnburner" and "Hunker" factions over the issues of expansion into Mexico and the extension of slavery briefly spawned numerous parties before the system collapsed back to Democrats versus Republicans.
…The short of the long -- we have two viable parties, and as long as we have this constitution, and these election systems, we will probably only have these two viable parties. So get used to it. ”
Here I’ve combined two sections making essentially the same point together. TTR is definitely correct that for most of American history, there was a two party system. He is definitely correct that the American political system somewhat trends towards a two party system. However, I firmly disagree with the historical determinist point that a two party system is somehow inevitable or the only way the American political system could function. There is absolutely room for different regional parties competing against one another. For example, maybe the Republicans would be a national party, running against southern, western, and northern regional parties. If in a presidential election, the regional candidates gain a majority of EVs, then they agree that whichever of them has won the biggest PV gets to be president. There is nothing inherently unstable about such a party system and something like this could very well happen in the future or have happened in the past if events unfolded just a little differently.
“The pre-Civil War Democratic Party was really a patchwork of at least three parties, that had to come together to be nationally relevant. There were the workingman's parties and locofocos of the Northern cities, mostly wage laborers, shopkeepers, and urban craftsman. Then there were the Free Soilers, and anti-slavery "Fannie Wrights," who were predominantly Northern intellectuals and elites. Finally there were the Southern slavers and aspiring slavers. What united the party was their common opposition to the tariff, the Bank, and "soft money."”
First of all, I think I somewhat disagree with this characterization of the splits in the Democratic Party, (it doesn’t really distinguish between westerners and southern conservatives, for example) but that’s not really my main critique here. My main critique is the final sentence. The Democrats only kind of had a common opposition to the Bank, and definitely didn’t have a common opposition to the tariff and “soft money”.
TTR is closest to being correct about the National Bank; the Democrats really did eventually establish consensus against it. But in the beginning there was a non-insignificant sliver of Democrats in states like Pennsylvania which supported the National Bank and opposed the Bank War.
Pennsylvania also dissented on tariffs. Both factions of the Pennsylvanian Democracy, the Family faction led by George M. Dallas and William Wilkins, and the Amalgamators led by James Buchanan, supported high tariffs (or “compromise” on the issue when supporting high tariffs was inconvenient). Unlike Pennsylvania’s support for the Bank, its support for high tariffs lasted all the way through the Second Party system. In 1844, Polk only won the state because he wrote a letter where he claimed to support both “protection” and “discrimination” (Pennsylvanian Democrats were very happy and claimed that Polk was a better protectionist than Clay). George M. Dallas’ tie-breaking-vote in favor of the reductions of the Walker Tariff killed his popularity in the state. The Walker Tariff would also be the main reason for the Democratic loss of Pennsylvania in the next presidential election. These protectionist impulses were also present in other northern Democratic Parties, but I chose to focus on Pennsylvania because it was the epicenter of these ideas.
Finally, the Democratic Party was also not uniformly supportive of hard-money policies. In fact, Lewis Cass, one of the major candidates in 1844 and 1848 nominee, was considered a soft-money man. Additionally, prominent figures like Richard M. Johnson, William C. Rives, and William L. Marcy all joined the soft-money block.
“The two-thirds rule effectively coalesced as a Southern veto on the prospects of a Free Soil or, even worse, "Fannie Wright" Democratic nominee, and was justified by the rough calculation that two-thirds of the party was at most agnostic on the issue of slavery (which was probably true). The earliest and most notable employment of the two-thirds rule came at the convention of 1844, where it denied the nomination to Martin Van Buren, the anti-Texas annexation and free-soil-sympathetic nominee who'd entered the convention with a delegate majority, but not a two-thirds majority. The rule awarded the nomination instead to pro-Texas and pro-slavery candidate James K. Polk.”
It is indeed true that Martin Van Buren did enter the convention with a delegate majority, but what TTR doesn’t mention is that not all of those delegates agreed with him on the issues of Texas annexation and sympathy to Free Soil. Here we must once again discuss William Wilkins and George M. Dallas. Neither were particularly anti-slavery; Dallas supported popular sovereignty and Wilkins was so supportive of slavery that he sympathized with the Confederacy. Dallas wanted to annex all of Mexico. Yet the Dallas-Wilkins clan backed Van Buren because he had a preestablished base in the state and they wanted to support the strongest possible candidate to stop their rival James Buchanan from outmaneuvering them and taking control of the Pennsylvania delegation. Thus, it is correct that Van Buren came into the convention with a majority, but it was a majority in many ways built on top of political opportunists who disagreed with his platform.
“The plantation master elite of the Old South had actually been predominantly Whiggish rather than Democratic prior to the Whigs' collapse in 1852. That Whig elite fused with the Fire Eaters on the issue of slavery, and actually became a significant-if-not-the-dominant influence over the Confederate constitutional convention and the Confederate government.”
I actually don’t disagree that there were a lot of Whigs in the Old South plantation master elite, but I think TTR overstates that case. South Carolina, the state where the planter elite was most entrenched, never really had Whig Representatives or Senators. It is clear that its planter elite was 99% Democratic. Alabama too had overwhelmingly Democratic Representatives, Senators, and Governors. Really in the Deep South, the Whigs only had a good level of success in Georgia and Mississippi.
“Most often, the two-thirds rule steered the Democratic Nomination to a worthless New York Bourbon who possessed the racial views of a White Mississippi dirt farmer, like Horatio Seymour or Samuel Tilden. Most of these worthless New Yorkers were losers. The only one who wasn't, Grover Cleveland, a nonconsecutive winner and loser, managed to have the worst racial views and record of them all. Cleveland finds himself in the exclusively evil club of presidents who signed a repeal of existing civil rights laws. So exclusive, that piece of shit is the only member of the club.”
Let’s look at Seymour and Tilden’s records to see whether Grover Cleveland actually had the worst racial views and record of the three. Horatio Seymour was a Hunker aligned with William L. Marcy who opposed Free Soil movement in the 1840s and then worked against the abolition of slavery in the 1860s. Then in 1868, he ran one of the most explicitly racist presidential campaigns in US history, where he called black people an “ignorant and degraded race”. His running mate Francis P. Blair Jr. was even worse, warning of a rule of "a semi-barbarous race of blacks who are worshipers of fetishes and poligamists" and wanted to "subject the white women to their unbridled lust."
Samuel J. Tilden was better than Seymour on racism, but not that much. He was a Van Buren protege and a Barnburner in 1848, though he rejoined Democratic ranks later. In the 1860s, Tilden promoted the conspiracy that northern radicals were promoting the rights of black people to take control of the south. Additionally, Tilden had a… unique proposal of deporting all freedmen to Brazil.
Grover Cleveland obviously was pretty bad on civil rights, but to say his views or record was worse than Seymour and Tilden’s is a huge stretch.
“Tammany Hall of New York was of course largest, most famous, and most powerful of these machines, and though its roots extended all the way back to the first party system, as an anti-Clinton and anti-Federalist organization, it came into its own under the "Tweed Regime," from 1858 until William Tweed's arrest in 1872, and the stewardship of subsequent "Sachems" like "Honest" John Kelly and Charles Francis Murphy. In fact, Murphy was most responsible for building the apex of Tammany's power, fostering the careers of Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, gearing the machine toward the cause of reform and mafioso-style welfare offered in a landscape of minimal public services.”
Here I’m actually going to give credit to TTR. Not many people talk about how Murphy built Tammany into a legitimate organization. Good job!
“In 1924, the DNC was brought back to New York for the first time since 1868, and mainly just put forth an argument to never hold another convention there again. This time the convention sputtered for a staggering 102 ballots, as it got stuck in a circular argument about whether or not to continue support for prohibition.”
Oh boy. Here the extremely-wrong paragraph on the 1924 Convention begins. The convention didn’t go 102 ballots because of Prohibition, it went for 102 ballots because of fundamental disagreements within the Democratic Party. The party disagreed on Prohibition, but it also disagreed on ruralism vs. urbanism, the role of Catholics and immigrants within the party, and how the party should respond to the Ku Klux Klan. Saying that it was just about temperance is incredibly reductionist and stupid.
“That argument was elongated by the dithering of one of the leading candidates, William Gibbs McAdoo of California, who put on a display of cognitive impairment at the convention that makes Joe Biden's debate performance last Thursday look downright sharp by comparison. McAdoo twice forgot whether he was "wet" or "dry" and ended up arguing both. He also forgot he was implicated in the Teapot Dome Scandal. ”
TTR is getting this from somewhere, so this probably did happen, but I don’t think these gaffes are mentioned in Robert K. Murray’s book on the 1924 Convention, so they didn’t actually have an effect on McAdoo’s chances. Additionally, saying that they did is obscuring the actual problems with McAdoo’s campaign. McAdoo had three huge problems which did actually really impact his prospects.
Firstly, he refused to condemn the KKK, thus really polarizing the party into pro-KKK and anti-KKK factions. He probably needed the KKK’s support to win the nomination (that’s just the sort of party the Democratic Party was in 1924), but if he issued some mild condemnation, the Klan would have stuck by him.
Second, McAdoo’s overall campaign strategy was bad. Instead of cultivating good relations with favorite sons and trying to get them to drop out, McAdoo damaged his relationship with favorite sons by challenging them in primaries. Then, during the convention, he focused his energy on doing damage to Smith’s campaign instead of getting the support of favorite sons.
Finally, McAdoo throughout the course of the convention, McAdoo was given multiple opportunities to drop out alongside Al Smith and effectively determine who the compromise candidate is going to be. But, he refused them all, presumably because he still thought he could win. Eventually, the delegates were so angry at him for extending the convention that they forced him into dropping out and effectively voted for whomever they wanted. McAdoo’s had wasted his chance to kingmake.
“The fever only broke after the 100th ballot, when it appeared that Catholic New York Reformer, the "Happy Warrior," Al Smith, might break through. The convention quickly settled on the most conservative shithead they could all agree upon to stop Smith — John W. Davis of West Virginia, nominated on ballot 103.”
This didn’t happen. Throughout most of the convention, both Al Smith and his manager Franklin D. Roosevelt knew they weren’t going to win. In fact, FDR’s goal for a large chunk of the second half of the convention was getting a convention veto – one third of the delegates, which, because of the two thirds rule, would give Smith the ability to deny McAdoo the nomination without outside help.
So no; delegates didn’t jump to Davis to stop reformer Smith from winning the nomination. Instead, it started with the actions of 1920 nominee James M. Cox. Cox, Ohio’s favorite son, was listening to the convention on the radio, before finally arriving in New York on Monday, July 7th, determined to finally force a compromise candidate on the convention. It was Cox who persuaded the Ohio delegation to throw their support behind West Virginia favorite son John W. Davis, reasoning that he might attract both Smith and McAdoo delegates and just wanting someone to be nominated. Soon after the Ohio delegation’s decision, a trend developed. Favorite sons like Jonathan M. Davis of Kansas and Albert Ritchie of Maryland withdrew from the race and put their delegates on the John W. Davis bandwagon.
Meanwhile, Smith’s campaign was planning to push Alabama’s Oscar Underwood. Underwood was definitely a conservative. He opposed the big government policies of the later Wilson years, pushed against women’s suffrage, and was worried by a powerful chief executive. He garnered Smith’s support because both of them were wets, focused on business issues over farm issues, and stood in staunch opposition to the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, McAdoo men had to make a choice between Davis and Underwood. Many disliked Davis for his connections to wall street, but states’ rights conservative Underwood was an anathema for progressive McAdoo delegates. So, many of them switched to Davis as the lesser of two evils. And it is with this (plus some Smith men who didn’t like Underwood) that Davis won the Democratic nomination after 103 ballots.
So, in summary, John W. Davis won the Democratic nomination because McAdoo was unwilling to drop out earlier, and so couldn’t kingmake, favorite sons agreed with him on many issues and just wanted the convention to end, and McAdoo delegates were strongarmed into voting for him because Underwood was the alternative. TTR’s narrative that people just didn’t like Smith because he was too progressive is just wrong.
Also, it’s inconsistent with Smith’s record. The truth is that Smith was a conservative in the Democratic Party. His opposition to the New Deal in the 1930s was not him becoming bitter at FDR betraying him; it was a position consistent with his ideology up to that time. People like to tout Smith’s gubernatorial record as some great precursor to the New Deal, but the truth is that Smith’s reformism was a type of “business progressivism” that, though it did entail building schools, roads, etc., also involved a focus on business efficiency. As governor, Smith frequently repeated warnings of “irresponsible and wanton attacks on business”, used state intervention as a last resort, and when he did intervene, he viewed his changes as a temporary measure. There’s a reason why McAdoo was unwilling to campaign for conservative Davis in 1924, but Smith was on fairly good terms with him.
As Smith’s closest political ally Robert Moses said, “Smith and Roosevelt were essentially very different people. Smith was an urban democrat with basic sympathy for the masses, but in economics he was a congenital conservative. Roosevelt was a country-squire liberal. They really had little in common but membership in the same party. Smith thought about economics in many ways like a Southern conservative Democrat. So did Jim Farley. Roosevelt showed after 1932 that he wanted no part of Smith, and Smith no doubt was resentful, but the cleavage is not to be explained on theories of the headshrinkers of the American Historical Association.”
If you actually examine their ideologies, it is clear that McAdoo was the progressive in 1924, while Smith was just another conservative like Underwood and Davis. A different type of conservative, but a conservative nevertheless.
“After Murphy died in 1924, his successor George Olvany, used the muscle Murphy had amassed to engineer the greatest of Tammany's DNC feats on the floor of the 1928 Convention in Houston, TX. Olvany brokered with the Southern bloc, through convention chairman Jesse Jones, for the necessary delegates to push Tammany's favorite son, Al Smith, beyond the two-thirds threshold and into the Democratic Nomination. Al Smith was the first Catholic nominee, and the first nominee of either party to truly and wholly be an animal of the grinding transactional world of urban politics.
…After the fiascos of 1920 and 1924, the strong convention surrendered, and died a self-imposed death in 1928 and 1932. In 1928, Jesse Jones, one of the strongest of the Texas newspaper moguls, brought the DNC to Houston, and carved out for himself powers that made him one of the last strong convention chairmen to preside. Jones was convinced the party desperately needed a new path and new blood in the leadership. He was inclined toward the nomination of Al Smith, who'd emerged from 1924 as a serious consideration, and so Jones forced through rules that gave him immense power to bully the bosses, and even cow the leadership from his home state of Texas. The Texas delegation, led by Gov. Dan Moody, was the most dead-set against Smith, but Jones gaveled in their disputes, and even allowed delegates to "shift their votes" (a trick that would be used by several other powerful chairman thereafter) after Smith fell just short of two-thirds on the first ballot, without calling for a new ballot.”
All of this is true, but what TTR isn’t mentioning is the role of Democratic apathy to Smith securing the nomination. Much of the Democratic Party, including prominent leaders like FDR and Cordell Hull didn’t think the Democrats had a chance that year as long as the current prosperity continues. So, instead, many Democrats were willing to allow Smith to be nominated because of considerations related to the long term health of the party. One of these considerations was the continued loyalty of the northern urban workers; the south was remaining Democratic no matter what, but the nomination of Smith was important because if a southerner was nominated, there is a good chance the northern urban workingmen ditch the Democratic Party and become Republicans. Another consideration pushing the Democrats towards Smith was the religious issue; if Smith was denied the nomination, the perception would be that it would be because of his Catholicism, thus alienating millions of northern Catholics. Finally, many progressives wanted Smith to be nominated in a year where the Democrats have no chance because that would clear the way for an actual progressive in 1932.
So while what TTR wrote here is true, it is very misleading to parade Olvany and Jones’ nomination of Smith in 1928 as some huge win when it was really them getting Smith the nomination when most of the Democratic Party were expecting the Democratic nominee to get the nomination and lose in a landslide.
“The strong convention fully surrendered itself to the man who'd finally kill it in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We call it a surrender, because Southern obstinance would have actually defeated FDR. Roosevelt came into the convention with a broad base of support and confidence he'd clear two-thirds on a single ballot. That confidence rapidly evaporated when it became clear that Hearst had denied Roosevelt the support of his own home turf in the Northeast. He then turned his efforts toward the two-thirds rule itself, imploring the convention to suspend or end the rule, but backed off when it threatened his small contingent of Deep Southern support lead by Huey Long. After a third ballot, Roosevelt remained 87 votes short, and feared he'd topped out. In desperation, he turned to John Nance Garner of Texas, the leading Southern candidate for the nomination, and offered Garner the Vice Presidency for the votes of his delegates on a 4th ballot. Had Garner rejected the offer, FDR would've likely faded and given way to a compromise candidate as Hearst and Garner had effectively deadlocked the convention. But Garner threw up the white flag, and the convention would never be so powerful again.”
This interpretation of the 1932 Democratic Convention is also really bad – I don’t know why TTR misunderstands all of the conventions in this era. FDR was indeed 87 votes short, but he didn’t win the nomination by talking to Garner; he won the nomination because McAdoo endorsed him, bringing California’s 44 delegates to FDR’s column. Why did McAdoo do this? Because, though it took long for him to admit, FDR was his ideological heir and significantly more in line with the Californian’s ideology than the coalition of conservatives – Al Smith, William R. Hearst, Newton D. Baker, John J. Raskob, John Nance Garner, Albert Ritchie, Harry F. Byrd – who were trying to stop him. The future only confirms this; of these men, only McAdoo supported the New Deal. The others opposed it.
The anti-FDR coalition ultimately failed because of two reasons. First, they just couldn’t agree on a candidate. Al Smith was still around, but the south and west hated him for ideological reasons and Hearst hated him for personal reasons. Businessman Owen D. Young was a promising candidate, but he eventually dropped out because of his sick wife. Ritchie was too strong of a wet to be a plausible compromise candidate, and Byrd was too southern, yet both remained favorite sons, hoping that the conservative coalition would choose them after FDR is defeated. Ultimately, Newton D. Baker was the closest to a compromise choice, but even he was opposed by Hearst for being too internationalist.
Second, Al Smith not dropping between the crucial third and fourth ballots was a large blow to the coalition. A lot of the south and west remained under FDR’s thumb because they still hated Smith and feared that Smith would win the nomination if FDR was stopped. As William Allen White wrote, “So long as Smith remained in the race, Roosevelt was fairly safe.”
Now that we enter into post-WW2 history, I will end this response, because I just don’t know that much about that time period. But, before I end this post, I’d like to discuss why TTR might be making these mistakes and what we can learn from this. Personally, I think the problem is historical generalism. Whenever I’ve seen TTR recommend books on his twitter, they’re broad books analyzing a time period of 10+ years. I’ve seen him recommend books like Leuchtenberg’s The Perils of Prosperity, Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform, and Woodward’s The Origins of the New South. I think all of these are probably great books (I’ve read excerpts from the first two), but they’re still huge summaries instead of works focusing on one event or person. However, I think in this article, TTR is making for which you would need specific knowledge for. A big summary isn’t going to tell you who between Tilden, Seymour, and Cleveland is the most racist. A big summary probably isn’t going to tell you what Al Smith’s specific political views were or how exactly John W. Davis was chosen. So, I would encourage TTR to either step away from these specific claims or read more specific and focused works. Though I’m also not saying that he doesn’t read specific works at all. He’s probably read a lot of books on LBJ that I don’t even know of. He just hasn’t read specific works on the time periods I’ve covered here.
Lastly, many of you are probably wondering why I’ve decided to spend so much time nitpicking and debunking the work of a twitter microcelebrity. Well, one reason is that small mistakes can help sell large mistakes/misconceptions. If you think that conservative John W. Davis was nominated to stop Al Smith, then it’s much easier to buy the idea that Al Smith was some progressive champion who only didn’t support the New Deal because he was a progressive asshole. So, it is worth going after even the minor mistakes. Another reason is that I think I’m the only one with the knowledge to do this sort of thing. A lot of the people in TTR’s side of twitter are also staunch liberals who wouldn’t challenge a work like this because they also focus on the 1960s and agree with most of the narratives that TTR is presenting here. And the conservatives on that side of twitter don’t seem to be super interested in American politics. So, it is up to us, the lowly American history nerds with less than 100 followers, to debunk the mistakes here. And my third and final reason for doing this is that it’s fun!
I don’t bear ill will towards TTR, but I’d want him to issue a correction and do better in the future. If anyone needs sources for the assertions I made here, I can provide them for most of this.