Ideologies in the making

During the wartime summer of 1944, just four years after a convention uprising awarded him the Republican presidential nomination, Wendell Willkie, a dedicated internationalist, dispatched a secret emissary to Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss party realignment. Willkie’s notion of segregating the mossbacks and the isolationists in one party intrigued the Democratic president. As FDR said at the time, “We ought to have two real parties -- one liberal and the other conservative. As it is now, each party is split with dissenters.”

Nothing came of this secret mission, primarily because Roosevelt and Willkie both died within a year. But in late 1945, Harry S. Truman’s thinking ran along similar lines. FDR’s successor expressed the hope that “there might be organized a liberal party in the country so that the Southern Democrats could go where they belonged into the conservative Republican Party.”

Now nearly 60 years later, America’s two political parties finally boast the ideological cohesion that they lacked during their first century of electoral jousting. The architects of this logical realignment were named Nixon and Reagan rather than Roosevelt and Truman. And it was the politics of race -- the same explosive force that created the Republican Party in 1854 from the wreckage of the Whigs -- that finally drove white Southern Democrats into the enveloping arms of the GOP.

American voters are so steeped in the two-party tradition that little time is spent mulling over the historical forces that have created the ideological rigidity of contemporary politics. The Democrats and the Republicans have been at each other’s throats for so long that their enmities seem ingrained in the fabric of democracy. That is why, as the Bush-Kerry race prematurely enters its thermonuclear phase, political junkies of both the left and the right should hail the decision by Random House to commission companion volumes that chronicle the tangled histories of the two parties.

The varying perspectives of “Party of the People: A History of the Democrats” by Jules Witcover and “Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans” by Lewis L. Gould reflect more than the partisan divide. By cleverly pairing a longtime campaign reporter (Witcover) with an esteemed University of Texas historian (Gould), this project has highlighted two differing approaches to the craft of forging a coherent political narrative.

Not surprisingly, both books play to the analytical strengths of their authors. Witcover’s sprawling history, which is filled with fascinating curiosities such as the Roosevelt and Truman quotes on party realignment, lacks an overarching conceptual framework and only truly comes alive with the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon contest, the first race covered by the veteran newspaperman, now a Baltimore Sun columnist. Gould, who has written frequently about the period from Grover Cleveland to Woodrow Wilson, is most at home illuminating bygone battles over seemingly arcane issues like the protective tariff and free silver.

The immersion course in political history provided by Witcover and Gould should dissuade anyone from believing that there was ever a time when American elections were high-minded contests of rival ideas uncontaminated by cynical gamesmanship. Name a nefarious political gambit, and you can be pretty certain that it was attempted several times in the 19th century.

Back in 1800, as Witcover recounts, the Democrats (OK, they were called Republicans in those early days) under Aaron Burr swept the elections for the New York Legislature, which had the responsibility for choosing the state’s presidential electors. To prevent the Legislature from handing New York’s votes to Thomas Jefferson for president, Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton concocted a scheme to change the rules in the midst of the campaign to give the state’s voters the power to directly pick the electors. Hamilton failed, but long-suffering Democrats may see a similarity to Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s recently successful efforts to jettison tradition and re-redistrict Texas in the middle of the decade to give the GOP more seats in Congress.

Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s overly celebrated political guru, claims that his role model is Mark Hanna, the Ohio industrialist who pulled the financial strings to elect William McKinley in 1896. But as Gould points out, presumably much to Rove’s disappointment, “McKinley, not Hanna, was the dominant figure in the relationship between the two men. Hanna provided access to the business community and money for the McKinley campaign, but he neither made the key decisions nor set the overall strategy.” If there is an inspiration for the current Bush money-mad campaign, as the president is well on his way to raising $200 million for his reelection bid, it came earlier, in the 1888 election, when department store titan John Wanamaker developed the strategy of shaking down fellow business leaders to prime the pump for Republican Benjamin Harrison. Wanamaker’s technique became known as “frying the fat” out of corporations.

But the historical evolution of the Republicans as the conservative voice of the self-satisfied business community took a major detour by the name of Theodore Roosevelt. Gould’s account of the first “celebrity” president covers familiar ground. At a time when 21st century Republicans champion the permanent abolition of the so-called death tax, it is still bracing to read what TR had to say about inheritance levies. He supported this federal tax “to put it out of the power of the owner of one of those enormous fortunes to hand more than a certain amount to any one individual.” If a Democrat delivered a speech like that today, a Republican chorus would denounce him for waging “class warfare.”

Ultimately, Roosevelt proved to be a historical outrider, a thundering Bull Moose who produced Woodrow Wilson rather than a reform-minded Republican Party. In fact, as Gould adroitly shows, the GOP adopted its modern right-of-center plumage with the triumph of the party regulars who backed William Howard Taft over Roosevelt in 1912. While the Democrats until mid-century continued to be a two-headed beast, depending on Northern ethnics and Southern troglodytes, the Republicans were the first party to achieve something close to philosophical consistency. After Roosevelt, the Republicans were defined by, as Gould puts it, “a conservative posture on the regulation of business, the role of taxation, and the size of government that remained in place for the rest of the twentieth century.”

If there is a flaw in both books, it lies in the authors’ failure to fully draw the connections between social history and the cleavages in American politics. This omission may partly stem from Gould’s self-identification with old-fashioned historical analysis and Witcover’s journalistic fascination with the game as it was directly played out in the electoral arena. The result is that cultural issues (aside from race) emerge out of nowhere, take a brief turn on the stage and then disappear back whence they came. Gould’s story line points out, but all too briefly discusses, 19th century Republican moralism embodied in the battles for Sunday blue laws in the Midwest, English-only instruction in the public schools (sound familiar?) and temperance.

Not until emblematic Democrat Al Smith wins the 1922 New York gubernatorial election does Witcover ever mention the 18th Amendment and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet to appreciate the Democrats’ fractious nomination fights during the 1920s, especially the comically self-destructive 1924 convention that lasted 103 ballots, it is necessary to understand the social tensions prompted by the Klan and Prohibition.

Gould’s Republican saga loses its virtue of historical perspective as the chronology moves into only-yesterday territory. Discussing Ronald Reagan, who is probably the dominant 20th century Republican president, Gould expresses uncharacteristic exasperation as he writes, “The GOP by the 1980s had detached itself from most of its own history.... It was as if the Republican Party had sprung from the forehead of Ronald Reagan without a past to burden its affairs.”

Witcover, in contrast, revels in contemporary history. His vivid imagery and treasure trove of anecdotes serve as a reminder that not even the most laborious archival research can conjure up a scene like a reporter who was there. Writing about the 1960 West Virginia primary, when John F. Kennedy paved the way to the nomination by defeating Hubert H. Humphrey in an overwhelmingly Protestant state, Witcover memorably describes JFK, wearing an expensive suit, trying to make conversation with grimy coal miners who “stood nervously back, as if not to sully him with their soot, hesitantly taking his proffered handshake.”

Armed with the sweep of history provided by these two volumes, a reader can easily argue that never before have the two parties been so polarized and so devoid of internal ideological contradictions. The centrists, aside from a few stubborn mavericks like John McCain, have been driven from the halls of Congress. Finally, as Kerry and Bush battle over taxes and terrorism, it seems American politics is pivoting on a clear left-right axis.

But wait, didn’t a Republican president and a GOP Congress, over bitter Democratic objections, just create a controversial Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the most far-reaching expansion of social insurance in nearly 40 years? Maybe for all the partisan posturing in Washington, we are witnessing just another phase in the eternal malleability of the two political parties. *