New Deal encyclopedia topics

Realignment

The 1932 election brought about a major shifts in voting behavior, and became a permanent realignment, though some scholars point to the off-year election of 1934 as even more decisive in stabilizing the coalition. Roosevelt set up his New Deal forged a coalition of Big City machines, labor unions, liberals, ethnic and racial minorities (especially Catholics, Jews and African Americans,) and Southern whites. These disparate voting blocs together formed a large majority of voters and handed the Democratic Party seven victories out of nine presidential elections (1932-48, 1960, 1964), as well as control of both houses of Congress during all but 4 years between the years 1932-1980 (Republicans won in 1946 and 1952). Starting in the 1930s, the term “liberal” was used in U.S. politics to indicate supporters of the coalition, while "conservative" denoted its opponents. The coalition was never formally organized, and the constituent members often disagreed.

Some Political scientists call the resulting new coalition the "Fifth Party System" in contrast to the Fourth Party System of the 1896-1932 era that it replaced.

Cities

Roosevelt had a magnetic appeal to city dwellers, especially the poorer minorities who got recognition, unions, and relief jobs. Taxpayers, small business and the middle class voted for Roosevelt in 1936, but turned sharply against him after the recession of 1937-38 seemed to belie his promises of recovery.

Roosevelt discovered an entirely new use for city machines in his reelection campaigns. Traditionally, local bosses minimized turnout so as to guarantee reliable control of their wards and legislative districts. To carry the electoral college, however, Roosevelt needed massive majorities in the largest cities to overcome the hostility of suburbs and towns. With Postmaster General James A. Farley and WPA administrator Harry Hopkins cutting deals with state and local Democratic officials, Roosevelt used federal discretionary spending, especially the Works Progress Administration (1935-1942) as a national political machine. Men on relief could get WPA jobs regardless of their politics, but hundreds of thousands of supervisory jobs were given to local Democratic machines. The 3.5 million voters on relief payrolls during the 1936 election cast 82% percent of their ballots for Roosevelt. The vibrant labor unions, heavily based in the cities, likewise did their utmost for their benefactor, voting 80% for him, as did Irish, Italian and Jewish voters. In all, the nation's 106 cities over 100,000 population voted 70% for FDR in 1936, compared to 59% elsewhere. Roosevelt won reelection in 1940 thanks to the cities. In the North, the cities over 100,000 gave Roosevelt 60% of their votes, while the rest of the North favored Willkie by 52%. It was just enough to provide the critical electoral college margin.

With the start of full-scale war mobilization in the summer of 1940, the cities revived. The war economy pumped massive investments into new factories and funded round-the-clock munitions production, guaranteeing a job to anyone who showed up at the factory gate.

End of New Deal coalition

The coalition fell apart in many ways. The first cause was lack of a leader of the stature of Roosevelt. The closest was perhaps Lyndon Johnson, who deliberately tried to reinvigorate the old coalition, but in fact drove its constituents apart. During the 1960, new issues such as civil rights, the Vietnam War, affirmative action, and large-scale urban riots tended to split the coalition and drive many members away. Meanwhile, the Republican party made major gains by promising lower taxes and control of crime.

The big-city machines faded away in the 1940s, with a few exceptions, especially Albany, New York and Chicago. Local Democrats in most cities were heavily dependent on the WPA for patronage; when it ended in 1943 there was full employment and no replacement job source was created. Furthermore, World War II brought such a surge of prosperity that the relief mechanism of the WPA, CCC, etc. was no longer needed.

Labor unions crested in size and power in the 1950s, then went into steady decline. They continue into the 21st century as major backers of the Democrats, but with so few members they have lost much of their influence.

Intellectuals gave increasing support to Democrats since 1932. The Vietnam War, however, caused a serious split, with the New Left reluctant to support most Democratic presidential candidates.

The European ethnic groups came of age after the 1960s. Ronald Reagan pulled many of the working class social conservatives into the Republican party as Reagan Democrats. Many middle class ethnics saw the Democratic party as a working class party and preferred the GOP as the upper-middle class party. However, the Jewish community still voted en masse for the Democratic party, and with the recent election 74% voted for Kerry.

African Americans grew stronger in their Democratic loyalties and in their numbers. By the 1960s, they were a much more important part of the coalition than in the 1930s. Their Democratic loyalties cut across all income and geographic lines to form the single most unified bloc of voters in the country.

Region: Realignment in South

White Southerners abandoned cotton and tobacco farming, and moved to the cities where the New Deal programs had much less impact. Beginning in the 1950s, the southern cities and suburbs started voting Republican. The white South saw the support northern Democrats gave to the Civil Rights Movement as a direct political assault on their interests and opened the way to protest votes for Barry Goldwater, who in 1964 was the first Republican to carry the deep south. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton lured many of the Southern whites back at the level of Presidential voting, but by 2000 white males in the South were 2-1 Republican and, indeed, formed a major part of the Republican coalition.

In many ways, it was the civil rights movement that ultimately heralded the demise of the coalition. Democrats had traditionally solid support in Southern states (the Solid South), but this electoral dominance began eroding in 1964, when Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South (and little else). In the 1968 election, the South once again abandoned its traditional support for the Democrats by supporting Nixon and segregationist third-party candidate George C. Wallace. This, coupled with Nixon's southern strategy aimed at attracting these voters, led to increased support for Republicans by Southern whites.

Since 1968, the South has generally voted for Republicans in presidential elections. Exceptions came in the elections of 1976, when the southern states voted for native southerner Jimmy Carter, and 1992 and 1996, when the Democratic ticket of southerners Bill Clinton and Al Gore achieved a split of the region's electoral votes.

In more recent years, support for the Democrats has become the strongest in the northeast and on the west coast, with Republicans showing more strength in the south and southwest. The Midwest has become a partisan political battleground. The division between the two parties is virtually even in both houses of Congress, as of 2006, and no party has established the kind of dominance that the Democrats were able to exert during the period of the New Deal coalition.

New Deal Coalition: voting % 1948-1964

% Democratic vote in major groups, presidency 1948-1964
	1948	1952	1956	1960	1964
all voters	50	45	42	50	61
White	50	43	41	49	59
Black	50	79	61	68	94
College	22	34	31	39	52
High School	51	45	42	52	62
Grade School	64	52	50	55	66
Professional & Business	19	36	32	42	54
White Collar	47	40	37	48	57
Manual worker	66	55	50	60	71
Farmer	60	33	46	48	53
Union member	76		51	62	77
Not union	42		35	44	56
Protestant	43	37	37	38	55
Catholic	62	56	51	78	76
Republican		8	4	5	20
Independent		35	30	43	56
Democrat		77	85	84	87
East	48	45	40	53	68
Midwest	50	42	41	48	61
West	49	42	43	49	60
South	53	51	49	51	52

Source: Gallup Polls in Gallup (1972)

References

Allswang, John M. New Deal and American Politics (1978)
Andersen, Kristi. The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-1936 (1979)
Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956)
Cantril, Hadley and Mildred Strunk, eds. Public Opinion, 1935-1946 (1951), massive compilation of many public opinion polls from US, UK, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.
Gallup, George. The Gallup Poll: Public opinion, 1935-1971 (3 vol 1972)
James, Scott C. Presidents, Parties, and the State: A Party System Perspective on Democratic Regulatory Choice, 1884-1936 (2000)
Jensen, Richard. "The Last Party System, 1932-1980," in Paul Kleppner, ed. Evolution of American Electoral Systems (1981)
Ladd Jr., Everett Carll with Charles D. Hadley. Transformations of the American Party System: Political Coalitions from the New Deal to the 1970s 2nd ed. (1978).
Leuchtenburg, William E. In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to George W. Bush (2001)
Leuchtenburg, William E. The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon Johnson (2005)

by William Edward Leuchtenburg