Listener Calls

PETER: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And we’re talking today about the history of struggles within political parties. As we do with each of our shows, we’ve been soliciting your comments at backstoryradio.org and Facebook.

And we got one of those commenters on the phone with us now. Marianne, from Harvey, Louisiana. Hey, Marianne, welcome to the show.

MARIANNE: Thank you. I had a question based on looking on videos– because I grew up in Shreveport– looking at videos of the sheriff’s office as they rode a horse into what was my mother’s church to break up a civil rights meeting, which was also a church service.

And just the thought of the fact that we’re used to thinking now, especially in Louisiana, that the Republicans are on one side and the Democrats are on the other side. But in this particular case, these people were all probably Democrats. I also know something about Reconstruction. In Shreveport, the Lieutenant Governor right after Reconstruction was African American, and was probably a Republican. So I was wondering, when did blacks turn to the Democratic Party?

PETER: Yeah, great question.

BRIAN: Yeah, Marianne, to answer your question about when did African Americans begin voting Democratic, well. They start experimenting with it in the 1920s. But the real tidal wave comes during the Great Depression and during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. I think it’s 1936, is the first time that African Americans vote in a majority for the Democratic Party.

Now here’s the thing. A lot of southern, most southern, African Americans are not allowed to vote. They simply are not allowed even to register to vote. So when we say African Americans voting for the Democratic Party beginning in the New Deal, that’s largely northern African Americans. Because southern African Americans, especially in the deep South, are simply not allowed to vote.

MARIANNE: That address one of my other questions. Because I feel like the African American Democrats here had no real power in Louisiana. So what there something they got out of the fact of being Democratic?

PETER: It would be some of those New Deal programs, wouldn’t it Brian?

BRIAN: Yeah. So if you were an African American farmer, ultimately you would benefit from price supports for crops like tobacco, for instance, or in Louisiana, sugar. Now here’s the thing. African Americans always got the short end of the stick even within those programs. But they did get more than they had been getting from the federal government in the first place.

ED: And in the spirit of Marianne’s question, what they got were acts from the federal government, not a role in governance itself. The Democrats were not going to let black people have an actual say in the running of the party. So this is very much unlike Reconstruction.

This changes in the 1960s in the civil rights struggle, when they say, listen. The main thing we have to have, we recognize the Democrats are our better friends, but now we must have actual representation in the Democratic Party.

BRIAN: Marianne, which is why that sheriff was riding his horse into the civil rights demonstration, because the Democrats in the south didn’t go along with their national party.

MARIANNE: Right. That was one of the things that was never talked about when I was growing up. We were protected from all of it. The most I asked my mother what happened that day, did she go to church, did she see all of this? Because of course, the police were beating the crowd. They beat the minister nearly to death. And she says, well, I didn’t go to church that day. And that is the most I ever got out of her about what happened.

ED: Well you know, this helps explain something else that’s really important about all this. Why a church? It’s because when African Americans had no real voice in either political party, the African American church became a unit of mobilization.

That’s why the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the civil rights struggle comes out of the black church. It’s because they had been precluded from being even a faction of a political party. And so they generated their own political energy, which is why southern white Democrats would ride a horse into a church.

BRIAN: But the real answer to your question doesn’t come until that Voting Rights Act of 1965. It creates a voting revolution in the South. Given the opportunity to register and to vote, African Americans register in the millions. And they do vote. And they very quickly are part of the government. They elect people to local office, and eventually to Congress and to the US Senate.

ED: And Marianne, then the irony– and I think this was own memory– is that as soon as that happens, then white Southerners say, we’re out of this Democratic Party. And now we’re Republicans, right?

So what this shows is that every time an African Americans have tried to use the American political system to gain some control over their own political lives, parties break in some ways in the very threat of African Americans having some kind of political power.

PETER: Hey, Marianne, thanks for calling.

MARIANNE: Thank you.

BRIAN: Thank you so much.

PETER: Bye bye. We got another call, and it’s from Sarah in Indianapolis. Sarah, welcome to BackStory.

SARAH: Hi, thank you.

PETER: We’re talking about parties. Join us. Let’s party down, what’ve you got?

SARAH: Great. Well, I would love to hear your thoughts on the effects of party reforms in the ’70s that opened up party processes to more women, young people and minorities. And I’m thinking particularly here about the McGovern Commission recommendations in the Democratic Party.

I assume that there were similar reforms that happened in the Republican Party a bit later, but it just seems interesting to me, and a bit paradoxical that right at the moment that the Democratic Party itself is becoming more democratic– with a small D– the Democrats as a group are finding it harder to further their policy goals.

And I just wonder if a well-oiled party machine works more efficiently than a heterogeneous group of diverse folks. So I was just wondering what you guys think.

PETER: Well, Sarah, thanks for that question. And we do paradox on BackStory, and I’m going to start with Mr. 20th Century. What’ve you got?

BRIAN: Sarah’s referring to the McGovern-Fraser reforms that changed the way the Democratic Party chose its candidates for office, starting with the president. The old way of doing it was to leave things up, for the most part, to party bosses.

So after the debacle of the 1968 convention where all hell broke loose outside the convention hall, the Democratic Party said, we’re going to put together a commission that’s going to change the way we choose candidates. Because it really doesn’t reflect what our voters in the Democratic Party are thinking.

And from 1972, when these reforms started on, the number of primaries that were used to select the Democratic candidate increased pretty much steadily. And I think you’re absolutely on the mark here, Sarah. By reflecting a more diverse group of voters, it became a lot harder to take what we could only call the party line.

And the Democratic Party got what it wanted. It got a lot of different perspectives. It was a lot harder to make the trains run on time.

PETER: Hey, Brian, I’ve got a question for you. I’m thinking about representation. And the idea of the party being representative, it has to have the demographic look of its constituents. But when you open up a party, the way the Democrats did, and then, I think, the way the Republicans have too, you’re opening up the opportunity for the people who care the most, who have the biggest agenda to push.

So it’s not, at the end of the day, that, for instance, the Republican Party right now is truly representative of all people who vote Republican. It’s been dominated, taken over by highly motivated partisans or factious people.

ED: And Sarah, it seems that the paradox you’re pointing toward is this great democratization leads to defeat, that the Democrats shoot themselves in both feet, or ever how many feet there are now. And as a result, hand the election to Richard Nixon of all people. Yeah.

BRIAN: But you also, I think, put your finger on an even more fundamental point, Sarah. And that is, when decisions about candidates are handed over to what we know are very small percentage of voters who turn out for primaries, you don’t always get the most electable candidates in general elections.

SARAH: Right. I mean, thinking back to my original question with the McGovern commission and you see the type of candidate chosen by the people who have now increased participation in the party in George McGovern himself. And he’s incredibly unelectable, right? For a variety of reasons.

And yeah, if you can’t get the person you want elected and you can’t even do basic governing functions like pass a budget and work across the aisle with each other, then–

PETER: Right, right. You’d rather lose.

BRIAN: But I also think that this is the fundamental way in which parties change. A faction pushes a party to one extreme or another, perhaps. And it loses, the way the conservative faction that nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964 did. The way the anti-Vietnam, more aggressive civil rights movement faction in ’72 that supported McGovern did. And then the party reformulates around the middle. It’s part of the life cycle of parties.

And sometimes, these factions don’t always lose. The same faction that got clobbered in supporting Barry Goldwater reconstituted itself and took over the party under Ronald Reagan, and had a pretty good ride.

SARAH: Right. And I mean, if you talk about the position of women and liberals and minorities and young people in the Democratic Party, well, hello. Look at where the election of Barack Obama in 2008. So yeah, that’s a really great point. Thank you guys so much.

BRIAN: Thank you, Sarah. Bye bye. That’s going to do it for us today. Drop in at backstoryradio.org, and help Ed, Peter and me come up with names for our own party factions.

PETER: Just remember. Mugwumps, Softshells, and Locofocos, well. Those names are already taken. We’re also on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

ED: BackStory is produced by Tony Field, Jessie Engebretson, Nina Earnest, and Andrew Parsons. Emily Charnock is our research and web coordinator, and Jamal Millner is our engineer. BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

BRIAN: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, an anonymous donor, and the History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham, for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.