New Deal coalition

The New Deal coalition was the alignment of interest groups and voting blocs in the United States that supported the New Deal and voted for Democratic candidates from 1932 until the late 1960s. It made the Democratic Party the majority party nationally during that period. Democrats lost control of the White House only to Dwight D. Eisenhower, a pro-New Deal Republican and war hero, in 1952 and 1956; they also controlled both Houses of Congress for most of the period. Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a coalition that included the Democratic state party organizations, city machines, labor unions, blue collar workers, minorities (including Jews, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and African-Americans), farmers, white Southerners, people on relief, and intellectuals.[1] This coalition provided Roosevelt with popular support for the many large-scale government programs that were enacted during the New Deal. The coalition began to fall apart with the bitter factionalism during the 1968 election, but it remains the model that party activists seek to replicate.[2]

History

Formation

The 1932 presidential election and 1934 Senate and House of Representatives elections brought about long-term shifts in voting behavior, and causing an enduring realignment. Roosevelt set up his New Deal in 1933 and forged a coalition of labor unions, communists, socialists[3], liberals, religious, ethnic and racial minorities (Catholics, Jews and Blacks), Southern whites, poor people and those on relief. The organizational heft was provided by big-city machines, which gained access to millions of relief jobs and billions of dollars in spending projects. These voting blocs together formed a majority of voters and handed the Democratic Party seven victories out of nine presidential elections (1932–1948, 1960, 1964), as well as control of both houses of Congress during all but four years between the years 1932–1980 (Republicans won small majorities in 1946 and 1952). Starting in the 1930s, the term "liberal" was used in US politics to indicate supporters of the coalition, "conservative" its opponents. The coalition was never formally organized, and the constituent members often disagreed. The coalition usually was often divided on foreign policy and racial issues but was more united to support liberal proposals in other domestic policy.

Political scientists called the new coalition the "Fifth Party System" in contrast to the Fourth Party System of the 1896–1932 era that it replaced.[4] Journalist Sidney Lubell found in his survey of voters after the 1948 presidential election that Democrat Harry Truman, not Republican Thomas E. Dewey, seemed the safer, more conservative candidate to the "new middle class" that had developed over the previous 20 years. He wrote that, "to an appreciable part of the electorate, the Democrats had replaced the Republicans as the party of prosperity" and quoted a man who, when asked why he did not vote Republican after moving to the suburbs, answered "I own a nice home, have a new car and am much better off than my parents were. I've been a Democrat all my life. Why should I change?"[5]

Administrations

Roosevelt had a magnetic appeal to city dwellers, especially the poorer minorities, 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.[6]

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 Wendell Willkie by 52%. It was just enough to provide the critical electoral college margin.[6]

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.

Decline and fall

The coalition fell apart largely due to the declining influence of labor unions and a backlash to racial integration, urban crime, and the counterculture of the 1960s. Meanwhile, Republicans made major gains by promising lower taxes and control of crime. During the 1960s, 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. In addition, the coalition lacked a leader of the stature of Roosevelt. The closest was perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson, who deliberately tried to reinvigorate the old coalition but in fact drove its constituents apart.

Beginning in the late 1960s, labor unions began to lose their influence. With the economy becoming more service-oriented, the number of manufacturing jobs leveled off. Companies began relocating such jobs to Sun Belt states free of union influences, and many Americans followed. As a result, a growing number of Americans became unaffiliated with unions; this, combined with generally rising incomes reduced their incentive to vote Democrat. Labor unions were subsequently painted as corrupt, ineffective, and outdated by the Republican Party.

While most Americans supported the original civil rights movement, many conservative blue collar voters, including many assimilated descendants of immigrants, disliked the goal of racial integration and became fearful of rising urban crime. The Republicans, first under Richard Nixon, then later under Reagan, were able to corral these voters with promises to be tough on law and order. In addition, urban Democrat politicians would later gain a reputation as sleazy and corrupt. The votes of blue-collar workers contributed heavily to the Republican landslides of 1972 and 1984, and to a lesser extent 1980 and 1988.[7]

In Southern States, which were long Democratic strongholds, it was the civil rights movement that ultimately heralded the change to Republican dominance. Once the primary civil rights laws—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965—were enacted, the argument among opponents of those laws that Democrats were needed in office to block civil rights laws collapsed. That opened the way for the same social forces operating elsewhere to reshape voter loyalties. Democrats had traditionally solid support in Southern states (which led the region to be dubbed the Solid South), but this electoral dominance began eroding in 1964, when Barry Goldwater achieved unprecedented GOP support in the Deep South; all of the states he won in the Electoral College, bar his home state Arizona, had voted for Democrat John F. Kennedy in 1960. In the 1968 election, the South once again abandoned its traditional Democratic support by supporting Republican Richard Nixon and third-party candidate George C. Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama at the time. The only Southern state to give its 1968 electoral votes to Democrat Hubert Humphrey was Texas (and even then only narrowly); Humphrey benefited from Texas being the home state of President Lyndon Johnson. Beginning in the 1980s, Southern seats in Congress began rapidly changing from Democrat to Republican, largely due to incumbent retirements and shifting social values.

Since the collapse of the New Deal coalition in the South, the region has generally voted for Republicans in presidential elections. Exceptions came in the elections of 1976, when every former Confederate state except Virginia voted for Georgia native Jimmy Carter, and 1992 and 1996, when the Democratic ticket of southerners Bill Clinton (Arkansas) and Al Gore (Tennessee) achieved a split of the region's electoral votes due the presence of third-party candidate Ross Perot.[8] Barack Obama in 2008 carried Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. However, Democrats continued to dominate state politics in Southern states until the 1990s and 2000s.

Legacy

The big-city machines faded away in the 1940s with a few exceptions, especially Albany 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.[9]

Labor unions crested in size and power in the 1950s but then went into steady decline. They continue to be major backers of the Democrats, but with so few members, they have lost much of their influence.[10] From the 1960s into the 1990s, many jobs moved to the Sunbelt free of union influences, and the Republican Party frequently painted unions as corrupt and ineffective.

Intellectuals gave increasing support to Democrats since 1932. The Vietnam War, however, caused a serious split, with the New Left reluctant to support most of the Democratic presidential candidates.[11] Since the 1990s, the growing number of Americans with a post-graduate degree have supported Democrats.

White Southerners abandoned cotton and tobacco farming, and moved to the cities where the New Deal programs had much less impact. Beginning in the 1960s, the southern cities and suburbs started voting Republican. The white Southerners believed the support that northern Democrats gave to the Civil Rights Movement to be a direct political assault on their interests, which 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 new Republican coalition.[12] Since the 2010s, young, white, and non-Evangelical Southerners with a college degree have been trending towards the Democratic Party, particularly in states like North Carolina and Texas, although a big part of this shift may be due to an influx of Northern transplants.

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 ethnic minorities saw the Democratic party as a working class party, and preferred the GOP as the middle class party. In addition, while many supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they were generally opposed to racial integration, and also supported the Republican stance against rising urban crime. However, the Jewish community has continued to vote largely Democratic: 74% voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, 78% in 2008, and 69% in 2012.[13] In recent years, European-Americans with a college degree have tended to support the Democratic Party, especially among younger voters, while non-college graduates are more likely to support the Republican Party.

African Americans grew stronger in their Democratic loyalties and in their numbers. From the 1930s into the 1960s, black voters in the North began trending Democrat, while those in the South were largely disenfranchised. Following the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, black voters became a much more important part of the Democrat voter base. Their Democratic loyalties have cut across all income and geographic lines to form the single most unified bloc of voters in the country, with over 90% of black voters voting for the Democratic presidential candidate since 2008.[14]

Voting percentage: 1948–1964

Percentage of 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	71	77	61	68	94
College educated	22	34	31	39	52
High School educated	51	45	42	52	62
Grade School educated	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)

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References

James Ciment, Encyclopedia of the Great Depression and the New Deal (2001) Vol. 1 p. 6
See for example, Larry M. Bartels, "What's Wrong with Short-Term Thinking?" Boston Review 29#3 online Archived 2008-05-13 at the Wayback Machine
Martin Lipset, Seymour; Marks, Gary (2001). "How FDR Saved Capitalism". Hoover Institution.
Robert C. Benedict, Matthew J. Burbank and Ronald J. Hrebenar, Political Parties, Interest Groups and Political Campaigns. Westview Press. 1999. Page 11.
Lubell, Samuel (1956). The Future of American Politics (2nd ed.). Anchor Press. pp. 62–63. OL 6193934M.
Jensen 1981
Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of Republicans (2003)
Thomas F. Schaller, Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (2006)
Steven P. Erie, Rainbow's End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840—1985 (1988).
Stanley Aronowitz, From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future (1998) ch 7
Tevi Troy, Intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians? (2003)
Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South, 1987.
by William B. Prendergast, The Catholic Voter in American Politics: The Passing of the Democratic Monolith, (1999).
Hanes Walton, African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable (1997)

New Deal
Causes and legacy	Great Depression New Deal Coalition Brain Trust American Liberty League Criticism
New Deal	Emergency Banking Act Economy Act Agricultural Adjustment Act Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Civil Works Administration Communications Act Executive Order 6102 Homeowners Refinancing Act Farm Credit Administration Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Federal Emergency Relief Administration Frazier–Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act Glass–Steagall Act National Industrial Recovery Act National Housing Act National Recovery Administration National Youth Administration Public Works Administration (PWA) Public Works of Art Project Reciprocal Tariff Act Railroad Retirement Act Securities Act Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
Second New Deal	Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Project Number One Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Farm Security Administration Judicial Procedures Reform Act National Bituminous Coal Conservation Act National Labor Relations Board (Act) Rural Electrification Act Rural Electrification Administration Social Security United States Housing Authority
Individuals	Franklin D. Roosevelt Harold L. Ickes Frances Perkins Harry Hopkins Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Huey Long Herbert Hoover Francis Townsend Robert F. Wagner
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