Third Party System

Timeline of Development of Political Parties in the United States

As with the preceding Second Party System era, the Third was characterized by intense voter interest, routinely high voter turnout, unflinching party loyalty, dependence on nominating conventions, hierarchical party organizations, and the systematic use of government jobs as patronage for party workers, known as the spoils system. Cities of 50,000 or more developed ward and citywide "bosses" who could depend on the votes of clients, especially recent immigrants. Newspapers continued to be the primary communication system, with the great majority closely linked to one party or the other.[3]

Both parties consisted of broad-based voting coalitions. Throughout the North, businessmen, shop owners, skilled craftsmen, clerks and professionals favored the Republicans, as did more modern, commercially oriented farmers. In the South, the Republicans won strong support from the freedmen (newly enfranchised African Americans), but the party was usually controlled by local whites ("scalawags") and opportunistic Yankees ("carpetbaggers"). The race issue pulled the great majority of white southerners into the Democratic Party as Redeemers.

The Democratic Party was dominated by conservative, pro-business Bourbon Democrats, who usually controlled the national convention from 1868 until their great defeat by William Jennings Bryan in 1896. The Democratic coalition was composed of traditional Democrats in the North (many of them former Copperheads). They were joined by the Redeemers in the South and by Catholic immigrants, especially Irish-Americans and German-Americans. In addition, the party attracted unskilled laborers and hard-scrabble old-stock farmers in remote areas of New England and along the Ohio River valley.[4]

Religious lines were sharply drawn.[5] Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Scandinavian Lutherans and other pietists in the North were tightly linked to the Republicans. In sharp contrast, liturgical groups, especially the Catholics, Episcopalians, and German Lutherans, looked to the Democratic Party for protection from pietistic moralism, especially prohibition. While both parties cut across economic class structures, the Democrats were supported more heavily by its lower tiers.[6]

Cultural issues, especially prohibition and foreign language schools, became important because of the sharp religious divisions in the electorate. In the North, about 50% of the voters were pietistic Protestants who believed the government should be used to reduce social sins, such as drinking. Liturgical churches constituted over a quarter of the vote and wanted the government to stay out of personal morality issues. Prohibition debates and referendums heated up politics in most states over a period of decades, and national prohibition was finally passed in 1918 (repealed in 1932), serving as a major issue between the largely wet Democrats and the largely dry Republicans - although there was a pro-Prohibition faction within the Democratic Party and an anti-Prohibition faction within the Republican Party.[5]

Source: Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System 1853–1892 (1979) p. 182

The Republican Party emerged from the great political realignment of the mid-1850s. William Gienapp argues that the great realignment of the 1850s began before the Whig party collapse, and was caused not by politicians but by voters at the local level. The central forces were ethno-cultural, involving tensions between pietistic Protestants versus liturgical Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians regarding Catholicism, prohibition, and nativism. Various prohibitionist and nativist movements emerged, especially the American Party, based originally on the secret Know Nothing lodges. It was a moralistic party that appealed to the middle-class fear of corruption—identifying that danger with Catholics, especially the recent Irish immigrants who seemed to bring crime, corruption, poverty and bossism as soon as they arrived. Anti-slavery did play a role but it was less important at first. The Know-Nothing party embodied the social forces at work, but its weak leadership was unable to solidify its organization, and the Republicans picked it apart. Nativism was so powerful that the Republicans could not avoid it, but they did minimize it and turn voter wrath against the threat that slave owners would buy up the good farm lands wherever slavery was allowed. The realignment was so powerful because it forced voters to switch parties, as typified by the rise and fall of the Know-Nothings, the rise of the Republican Party, and the splits in the Democratic Party. The Republican Party was more driven, in terms of ideology and talent; it surpassed the hapless American Party in 1856. By 1858 the Republicans controlled majorities in every Northern state, and hence controlled the electoral votes for president in 1860.[7][8][9]

The ideological force driving the new party was modernization, and opposition to slavery, that anti-modern threat. By 1856 the Republicans were crusading for "Free Soil, Free Labor, Frémont and Victory." The main argument was that a 'Slave Power' had seized control of the federal government and would try to make slavery legal in the territories, and perhaps even in the northern states. That would give rich slave owners the chance to go anywhere and buy up the best land, thus undercutting the wages of free labor and destroying the foundations of civil society. The Democratic response was to countercrusade in 1856, warning that the election of Republican candidate John C. Frémont would produce civil war. The outstanding leader of the Democrats was Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas; he believed that the democratic process in each state or territory should settle the slavery question. When President James Buchanan tried to rig politics in Kansas Territory to approve slavery, Douglas broke with him, presaging the split that ruined the party in 1860. That year, northern Democrats nominated Douglas as the candidate of democracy, while the southern wing put up John Breckinridge as the upholder of the rights of property and of states' rights, which in this context meant slavery. In the South, ex-Whigs organized an ad hoc "Constitutional Union" Party, pledging to keep the nation united on the basis of the Constitution, regardless of democracy, states' rights, property or liberty. The Republicans played it safe in 1860, passing over better-known radicals in favor of a moderate border-state politician known to be an articulate advocate of liberty. Abraham Lincoln made no speeches, letting the party apparatus march the armies to the polls. Even if all three of Lincoln's opponents had formed a common ticket–quite impossible in view of their ideological differences–his 40 percent of the vote was enough to carry the North and thus win the electoral college.[10]

It was the measure of genius of President Lincoln not only that he won his war but that he did so by drawing upon and synthesizing the strengths of anti-slavery, free soil, democracy, and nationalism.[11] The Confederacy abandoned all party activity, and thereby forfeited the advantages of a nationwide organization committed to support of the administration. In the Union, the Republican Party unanimously supported the war effort, finding officers, enlisted men, enlistment bonuses, aid to wives and widows, war supplies, bond purchases, and the enthusiasm that was critical to victory. The Democrats at first supported a war for Union, and in 1861 many Democratic politicians became colonels and generals. Announced by Lincoln in September 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation was designed primarily to destroy the economic base of the 'Slave Power'. It initially alienated many northern Democrats and even moderate Republicans. They were reluctant to support a war for the benefit of what they considered an inferior race. The Democrats made significant gains in the 1862 midterm elections, but the Republicans remained in control with the support of the Unionist Party. Success on the battlefield (especially the fall of Atlanta) significantly bolstered the Republicans in the election of 1864. The Democrats attempted to capitalize on negative reactions to the Emancipation, but by 1864 these had faded somewhat due to its success in undermining the South. Additionally, the Republicans made charges of treason against 'Copperheads' a successful campaign issue. Increasingly the Union Army became Republican in its makeup; probably a majority of Democrats who enlisted marched home Republican, including such key leaders as John Logan and Ben Butler.[12]

The Civil War and Reconstruction issues polarized the parties until the Compromise of 1877 finally ended the political warfare. War issues resonated for a quarter century, as Republicans waved the "bloody shirt" (of dead union soldiers), and Democrats warned against Black supremacy in the South and plutocracy in the North. The modernizing Republicans who had founded the party in 1854 looked askance at the undisguised corruption of Ulysses S. Grant and his war veterans, bolstered by the solid vote of freedmen. The dissenters formed a "Liberal Republican" Party in 1872, only to have it smashed by Grant's reelection. By the mid-1870s it was clear that Confederate nationalism was dead; all but the most ardent Republican 'Stalwarts' agreed that the southern Republican coalition of African-American freedmen, scalawags and carpetbaggers was helpless and hopeless. In 1874 the Democrats won big majorities in Congress, with economic depression a major issue. People asked how much longer the Republicans could use the Army to impose control in the South.[2]

An 1881 cartoon attacking the imperial splendor of Garfield's inauguration in contrast to Jefferson's republican simplicity (upper left)

Rutherford Hayes became President after a highly controversial electoral count, demonstrating that the corruption of Southern politics threatened the legitimacy of the presidency itself. After Hayes removed the last federal troops in 1877, the Republican Party in the South sank into oblivion, kept alive only by the crumbs of federal patronage. It would be forty years before a Republican would win a former Confederate state in a presidential election.[13]

New issues emerged in the late 1880s, as Grover Cleveland and the Bourbon Democrats made the low tariff "for revenue only" a rallying cry for Democrats in the 1888 election, and the Republican Congress in 1890 legislated high tariffs and high spending. At the state level moralistic pietists pushed hard for prohibition, and in some states for the elimination of foreign-language schools serving German immigrants. The Bennett Law in Wisconsin produced a bruising ethnocultural battle in that state in 1890, which the Democrats won. The millions of postwar immigrants divided politically along ethnic and religious lines, with enough Germans moving into the Democratic Party to give the Democrats a national majority in 1892. Party loyalties were starting to weaken, as evidenced by the movement back and forth of the German vote and the sudden rise of the Populists. Army-style campaigns of necessity had to be supplemented by "campaigns of education", which focused more on the swing voters.[14]

Democratic magazine ridicules Republican use of "bloody shirt" memories of war

Cleveland's second term was ruined by a major depression, the Panic of 1893, which also undercut the appeal of the loosely organized Populist coalitions in the south and west. A stunning Republican triumph in 1894 nearly wiped out the Democratic Party north of the Mason–Dixon line. In the 1896 election William Jennings Bryan and the radical silverites seized control of the Democratic Party, denounced their own president, and called for a return to Jeffersonian agrarianism (see Jeffersonian democracy). Bryan, in his Cross of Gold speech, talked about workers and farmers crucified by big business, evil bankers and the gold standard. With Bryan giving from five to 35 speeches a day throughout the Midwest, straw polls showed his crusade forging a lead in the critical Midwest. Republicans William McKinley and Mark Hanna then seized control of the situation; their countercrusade was a campaign of education making lavish use of new advertising techniques. McKinley warned that Bryan's bimetallism would wreck the economy and achieve equality by making everyone poor. McKinley promised prosperity through strong economic growth based on sound money and business confidence, and an abundance of high-paying industrial jobs. Farmers would benefit by selling to a rich home market. Every racial, ethnic and religious group would prosper, and the government would never be used by one group to attack another. In particular McKinley reassured the German-Americans, alarmed on the one hand by Bryan's inflation and on the other by prohibition. McKinley's overwhelming victory combined city and farm, Northeast and Midwest, businessmen and factory workers. He carried nearly every city of 50,000 population, while Bryan swept the rural South (which was off-limits to the Republicans) and Mountain states. McKinley's victory, ratified by an even more decisive reelection in 1900, thus solidified one of the central ideologies of twentieth-century American politics, pluralism.[14]

By campaigning tirelessly with over 500 speeches in 100 days, William Jennings Bryan seized control of the headlines in the 1896 election. It no longer mattered as much what the editorial page said—most newspapers opposed him—as long as his speeches made the front page. Financing likewise changed radically. Under the Second and Third Party Systems, parties financed their campaigns through patronage; now civil service reform was undercutting that revenue, and entirely new, outside sources of funding became critical. Mark Hanna systematically told nervous businessmen and financiers that he had a business plan to win the election, and then billed them for their share of the cost. Hanna spent $3.5 million in three months for speakers, pamphlets, posters, and rallies that all warned of doom and anarchy if Bryan should win, and offered prosperity and pluralism under William McKinley. Party loyalty itself weakened as voters were switching between parties much more often. It became respectable to declare oneself an 'independent'.[15]

Throughout the nineteenth century, third parties such as the Prohibition Party, Greenback Party and the Populist Party evolved from widespread antiparty sentiment and a belief that governance should attend to the public good rather than partisan agendas. Because this position was based more on social experiences than any political ideology, nonpartisan activity was generally most effective on the local level. As third-party candidates tried to assert themselves in mainstream politics, however, they were forced to betray the antiparty foundations of the movement by allying with major partisan leaders. These alliances and the factionalism they engendered discouraged nonpartisan supporters and undermined the third-party movement by the end of the nineteenth century. Many reformers and nonpartisans subsequently lent support to the Republican Party, which promised to attend to issues important to them, such as anti-slavery or prohibition.[16]

The overwhelming Republican victory, repeated in 1900, restored business confidence, began three decades of prosperity for which the Republicans took credit, and swept away the issues and personalities of the Third Party System.[17] The period 1896–1932 can be called the Fourth Party System. Most voting blocs continued unchanged, but others realigned themselves, giving a strong Republican dominance in the industrial Northeast, though the way was clear for the Progressive Era to impose a new way of thinking and a new agenda for politics.[18]

Alarmed at the new rules of the game for campaign funding, the Progressives launched investigations and exposures (by the 'muckraker' journalists) into corrupt links between party bosses and business. New laws and constitutional amendments weakened the party bosses by installing primaries and directly electing senators. Theodore Roosevelt shared the growing concern with business influence on government. When William Howard Taft appeared to be too cozy with pro-business conservatives in terms of tariff and conservation issues, Roosevelt broke with his old friend and his old party. After losing the 1912 Republican nomination to Taft, he founded a new "Bull Moose" Progressive Party and ran as a third candidate. Although he outpolled Taft (who won only two states) in both the popular vote and the electoral college, the Republican split elected Woodrow Wilson and made pro-business conservatives the dominant force in the Republican Party.[19]

• First Party System, 1788-1824
• Second Party System, 1824-1856
• Fourth Party System, 1896-1932
• Fifth Party System, 1932-1968
• Sixth Party System, 1968-present
• American election campaigns in the 19th century
• Gilded Age
• History of the Democratic Party (United States)
• History of the Republican Party (United States)
• Political parties in the United States

• Bensel, Richard Franklin. The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (2000)
• Calhoun, Charles W. From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age (2010) excerpt and text search
• Calhoun, Charles W. Minority Victory: Gilded Age Politics and the Front Porch Campaign of 1888 (2008) 243 pp.
• Campbell, James E. "Party Systems and Realignments in the United States, 1868–2004", Social Science History, Fall 2006, Vol. 30 Issue 3, pp. 359–386
• Cherny, Robert. American Politics in the Gilded Age 1868–1900 (1997)
• DeCanio, Samuel. "Religion and Nineteenth-Century Voting Behavior: A New Look at Some Old Data", Journal of Politics, 2007. 69: 339–350
• Dinkin, Robert J. Voting and Vote-Getting in American History (2016), expanded edition of Dinkin, Campaigning in America: A History of Election Practices. (Greenwood 1989) online 1989 edition
• Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1995). .
• Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988)
• Gienap, William E. The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (1987)
• Gienap, William E. "'Politics Seem to Enter into Everything': Political Culture in the North, 1840–1860", in Gienapp et al., eds. Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840-1860 (1982) online edition pp. 15–79
• Hansen, Stephen L. The Making of the Third Party System: Voters and Parties in Illinois, 1850–1876. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980. 280 pp.
• Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978).
• Holt, Michael F. "The Primacy of Party Reasserted." Journal of American History 1999 86(1): 151–157. in JSTOR
• James, Scott C. Presidents, Parties, and the State: A Party System Perspective on Democratic Regulatory Choice, 1884–1936. (2000). 307 pp.
• Jensen, Richard. The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888–1896 (1971)
• Jensen, Richard. "Democracy, Republicanism and Efficiency: The Values of American Politics, 1885–1930", in Byron Shafer and Anthony Badger, eds, Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775–2000 (University of Kansas Press, 2001) pp. 149–180; online version
• Josephson, Matthew. The Politicos: 1865–1896 (1938).
• Keller, Morton. Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (1977).
• Keller, Morton. America's Three Regimes: A New Political History (2007) 384 pp.
• Kleppner, Paul. The Third Electoral System 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (1979), the most important and detailed analysis of voting behavior. online edition
• Klinghard, Daniel. The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896 (2010) excerpt and text search, political science perspective
• Lynch, G. Patrick "U.S. Presidential Elections in the Nineteenth Century: Why Culture and the Economy Both Mattered." Polity 35#1 (2002) pp. 29+. online version, focus on 1884
• McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (2003)
• Miller, Worth Robert. "The Lost World of Gilded Age Politics", Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era vol 1, no. 1 (January 2002): 49–67, online edition
• Morgan, H. Wayne. From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896 (1969) online edition
• Ostrogorski, M. Democracy and the Party System in the United States (1910) classic analysis, emphasizing party operations and corruption; online edition
• Paludan, Phillip Shaw. The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.(1994) ISBN 0-7006-0745-5
• Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision (2007) excerpt and text search
• Potter, David. The Impending Crisis 1848–1861. (1976); Pulitzer Prize
• Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Roosevelt-Taft Administration (1920), 8 vols.: highly detailed narrative from 1850 to 1909 online edition
• Rothbard, Murray N. The Progressive Era (2017), pp. 109–98, emphasis on popular voting online excerpt
• Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., ed. History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–2008 (2011) 3 vol and 11 vol editions; detailed analysis of each election, with primary documents; online v. 1. 1789–1824; v. 2. 1824–1844; v. 3. 1848–1868; v. 4. 1872–1888; v. 5. 1892–1908; v. 6. 1912–1924; v. 7. 1928–1940; v. 8. 1944–1956; v. 9. 1960–1968; v. 10. 1972–1984; v. 11. 1988–2001
• Silbey, Joel. The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (1991). online edition
• Smith, Adam I. P. No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (2006)excerpt and text search
• Summers, Mark Wahlgren. The Era of Good Stealings (1993), covers corruption 1868–1877
• Summers, Mark Wahlgren. Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of a President, 1884 (2000) online version
• Summers, Mark Wahlgren. Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics (2003) excerpt and text search
• Summers, Mark Wahlgren.The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865–1878 (1994)
• Voss-Hubbard, Mark. "The 'Third Party Tradition' Reconsidered: Third Parties and American Public Life, 1830–1900." Journal of American History 1999 86(1): 121–150. in JSTOR

• Harper's Weekly 150 cartoons on elections 1860–1912; Reconstruction topics; Chinese exclusion; plus American Political Prints from the Library of Congress, 1766-1876
  • Elections 1860–1912 as covered by Harper's Weekly; news, editorials, cartoons (many by Thomas Nast)
  • Thomas Nast cartoons strongly pro-Republican, pro-Reconstruction, anti-South, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic
  • more Nast cartoons
  • still more Nast
• "Graphic Witness" caricatures in history
• Gilded Age & Progressive Era Cartoons, industry, labor, politics, prohibition from Ohio State
• Puck cartoons
• Keppler cartoons
• 1892 cartoons
• Photographs of prominent politicians, 1861–1922; these are pre-1923 and out of copyright