Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I am dubious that the U.S. would have seen a powerful socialist or "labor" party emerge in this alternate reality. Disregarding the probable repercussions of a Confederate victory on the Second Industrial Revolution and Westward expansion (the latter having significant implications for the Grange movement and the Populists), the American labor movement was fractured and politically isolated throughout the late nineteenth century. (We tend to forget that most Americans viewed labor organizers as dangerous insurrectionists during this period.) Without the Solid South propping them up or holding them back, the Democrats would need to look elsewhere for support against a powerful and conservative Whig successor party: so I tend to think we'd see the Democrats evolve leftward, albeit differently from IOTL.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I'm skeptical of the idea that the Republicans were always the more conservative party than the Democrats, even if they were less open on issues like immigration and trade. How can we have a topic about the period from 1876-1932 without mentioning the single most important ideological movement of that era, progressivism? Just read the Bull Moose party platform from 1912, which translates well to modern liberalism in many ways. Even though there were progressives in both major parties, it's no coincidence that a great many of them were Western and Midwestern Republicans like Bob La Follette, William Borah, George Norris, and Hiram Johnson.

Oh, I would be very hesitant to suggest a one-to-one relationship between progressivism and liberalism in the late nineteenth century. In many cases, they were directly opposed to each other. The "Bull Moose" platform aligns with twenty-first century liberal orthodoxy to a degree, but was also in many ways an aberration, and considerably more radical than anything Teddy or Taft pursued in office.

Beyond that, describing the fifty-odd years from 1876-1932 as a homogenous period is problematic for a variety of reasons, and progressivism as a meaningful identity only existed for perhaps half that time.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I am dubious that the U.S. would have seen a powerful socialist or "labor" party emerge in this alternate reality. Disregarding the probable repercussions of a Confederate victory on the Second Industrial Revolution and Westward expansion (the latter having significant implications for the Grange movement and the Populists), the American labor movement was fractured and politically isolated throughout the late nineteenth century. (We tend to forget that most Americans viewed labor organizers as dangerous insurrectionists during this period.) Without the Solid South propping them up or holding them back, the Democrats would need to look elsewhere for support against a powerful and conservative Whig successor party: so I tend to think we'd see the Democrats evolve leftward, albeit differently from IOTL.

I'm curious as to what you think the available room to maneuver leftward is, sans a labor + agrarian populist movement. That leads us away from both industrial proletarian "socialism" and more traditional Jeffersonian "small farmer" foci... into what? I can see one credible alternative being a coalition centered on anti-imperialism, as that would probably still end up being an issue even with more restricted access to the Caribbean, and it could assemble a geographically-diverse constituency. This might align well with an increased emphasis on rights for both immigrants and freedmen.

I hadn't considered that, but it's an intriguing possibility. We can imagine such a coalition reabsorbing the "Radical Democracy" that split to fuse with the Republicans after Kansas–Nebraska in the 1850s. To the labor question, it's important to remember that you had really two labor movements that developed in parallel and to a large degree in conflict with each other during the 1870s and 80s. If the left forgoes a direct foray into socialism, I can see the Democrats aligning themselves with "respectable" unions like the KoL —who wanted their traditional privileges restored but weren't so keen on the more radical proposals of the IWW. Considering late nineteenth century American liberalism IOTL was in many ways characterized by a desire to return to pre-Industrial economic relationships, this seems it could be a natural fit.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

If your idea of a late 19th century liberal is Grover Cleveland, then yeah. His belief in laissez-faire economics couldn't be more opposed to progressivism, I agree. But by the 1910s I think this distinction no longer really existed, considering that Wilson was described as both a liberal and a progressive in equally strong terms.

To a degree. But Wilsonian progressivism is sufficiently distinct from the "mainstream" Republican progressives that I would consider it a mistake to conflate the two entirely. (La Follette is more difficult to characterize, and frankly I know less about him —though one could say he is in a class of his own, and certainly he was more favorable to Wilson than Roosevelt, Hughes, or Lodge.) Progressive conservatism both predates and predisposes liberal progressivism; the latter arising in response to the former, and though drawing significant influence from it, having a very different pedigree from its Republican cousin. The term isn't of much use after Wilson, having lost a large degree of its potency from circulation. (1924 is often cited as the "high water mark" of American conservatism, but all three major candidates for president that year had described themselves as progressives at some point in their careers, illustrative of just how widespread the term had become.)

I think part of the problem is that I started with 1876. You're right that 1876-1932 isn't a homogeneous period, as progressivism didn't really exist for those first 20 years. I should've started with 1896, as by that point one might be able to say that progressivism and liberalism had already become intertwined in the form of William Jennings Bryan's populist campaign.

Bryan is an interesting case. The common wisdom is that his ideas were coopted by the progressives after 1896, but I'm not sure that makes him a progressive, at least before 1908. His candidacy indisputably served to transform American liberalism nonetheless, acting as the hinge swinging the party from the Bourbon liberalism of Cleveland to Wilsonian "New Freedom." We might regard 1896–1912 as the chrysalis period of the Democratic party, a period in which it was neither indisputably Bourbon nor inarguably progressive.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

I assume Yankee is responding to the second part of my post ("lost in trying to be overly simplistic"). There's more that's problematic about Orser67's analysis than neglecting to mention African-Americans.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I don't think those aspersions are called for. Yankee in particular has been outspoken in calling out present-day Republicans for their hypocrisies, especially when it comes to movement conservatism. I certainly have no interest in defending the GOP, yet find your analysis similarly deficient for much the same reasons. Let's leave the personal invective at the door, in the absence of any evidence to support it beyond mere conjecture.

But I still do think that Yankee and co. tend to ignore the elephant in the room, the Progressive movement, when talking about the history of the Republican party. Yes, the national party in the Gilded Age was in bed with big business, but what about all the Western Republican progressives, and what about TR?

Yes, what about them? Certainly we can agree that Teddy and his progressive brothers-in-arms would have much to say about the present state of the Republican party. Ultimately, whether Roosevelt reflects the motives and values of Reagan-era conservatism has a clear answer (no) and is not a very interesting question. What is an interesting question, and far more useful if we hope to understand what made Roosevelt and the progressives unique, is: how is he different?

Roosevelt (and his particular brand of progressive) believed in balance. He opposed the excessive concentration of wealth and power in the hands of capital, because he saw such as inherently dangerous to free enterprise. If competition is the lifeblood of the market economy, then a monopoly is a parasite: left alive, it will drain the host until it kills him. This is, with some important differences, the Marxist critique of capitalism. But where Marx looked to the collapse of the capitalist system as the salvation of the international proletariat, Roosevelt saw the same future —and feared it. He did not want capital to be all-powerful in the American economy, but he did not want labor to be ascendant, either. He fundamentally distrusted left-wing politics and loathed Bryan and Debs as dangerous radicals. His constituency was not the union organizer, but the middle class consumer. That is why, in the 1902 miners strike, he intervened to grant the miners' demands —but not recognition of the union. In that particular case, capital wielded excessive power and was in the wrong, but Roosevelt had no doubt that labor would do the same in a similar position.

Roosevelt did not believe that a fair society would naturally tend towards egalitarianism. This sets him apart from liberal thinkers from Rousseau to Bryan, who did believe that and attributed class inequality to artificial divisions imposed from on high. Rousseau blamed the state; Bryan blamed the financial interests; Debs blamed the capitalist system itself. All three were leftists of some stripe or another, because they rejected the notion of a "natural aristocracy." Roosevelt was fundamentally opposed to this view. His philosophy of the "strenuous life" presumed that some are strong and some are weak, and the strong are inherently more deserving of worldly success, be that glory, riches, or power. His imperialism was not an accident; it grew naturally from his ideology.

Unlike the conservative wing of his party, Roosevelt did not believe that supremacy justifies cruelty. He came from old money, and part of that was a patrician feeling of responsibility to the lower classes. His was a paternalistic concern for the wellbeing of the masses, much in the spirit of a feudal lord for his vassals. This branch of conservatism has all but died out today, but it is conservatism —for the simple reason that it rejects both liberal egalitarianism and communism as the description of life after the end of history.

The Western progressives are another matter: in many ways they were opposed to the Rooseveltian school, and represent the (now lost) radical pedigree of the pre-war Republican party. But it would be a mistake to confuse their progressivism with leftism. As before, these men and women did not want to dismantle capitalism, and they did not want to achieve an egalitarian society. Those that did weren't Republicans —though they mostly weren't Democrats, either. Leftist third parties were quite strong in the Western states during this period, as you'll know; sometimes they allied themselves with either of the major parties to gain a foothold, but often they did not. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota maintained strong third party organizations well into the twentieth century, most of which had their origins in progressive-era opposition to machine politics.

And it's not like the Democrats were any more pro-worker or less pro-business (unless you view free trade in that way),

Well, yes. The Democratic party of the late nineteenth century was a liberal (as the term was then understood) and not a labor party. They did not align themselves with the interests of the working classes, because they did not feel that was appropriate: even Bryan, who was far from being a conservative in the way that term is usually understood, either colloquially or academically, could not free himself from the Jeffersonian predisposition towards the small farmer as the ideal American citizen to embrace the urban-oriented labor politics that Debs, for instance, championed. Yet I assume you are well-versed enough in the subject matter to know that this is not a contradiction in terms: indeed, laissez faire opposition to state intervention in the economy remains the bread and butter of Continental liberals even today. (Only the uniquely American abomination of the two-party system has led us to consider liberalism as inherently more friendly to labor than conservatism: this has to do with the way in which American liberalism developed in the early twentieth century after the final collapse of the Populists, but that is a different —albeit relevant —conversation.)

If you're a working class voter in 1904, you'll vote for the progressive Republican over the Bourbon Democrat as a matter of practicality —but that doesn't make the former liberal, let alone laborite.

and I think it's fair to say that the Progressive movement was more active inside the Republican party than the Democratic one.

Quite fair. But "progressive" does not mean "left" or "liberal." As I have already expounded on here and elsewhere, it is quite possible to support progressive policies for essentially conservative reasons. Many professed progressives were in favor of eugenics and prohibition, for instance: were those left-wing causes?

Overall though, in the Gilded Age neither party really had a coherent ideology. There were progressives and conservatives in both parties, many of whom were closer politically to their fellow progressives across the aisle than their more conservative party members. Maybe, then, it's not helpful to consider either party more conservative or liberal. Perhaps a progressive-conservative distinction is more useful, similar to how some historians view the traditional Court-Country divide as still more relevant in 1690s England than the emerging Whig-Tory party system.

This is a common analysis in popular history, and a bad one. The Republican and Democratic parties of the late nineteenth century were ideologically distinct; they were simply not distinct in ways that we find compelling from our modern perspective. Just as a Green party voter might form a similar impression of the major parties today, however, this does not mean that no distinction exists: it merely speaks to the extent to which our priorities have changed in the last century.

Dichotomies are always fraught, but it would be more correct to say that a 'progressive-conservative' distinction existed within both parties, with Republican progressives allied sometimes with Democratic progressives against the conservatives in both parties, and sometimes with Republican conservatives against the Democrats. The most famous example of the former occurred in 1912, when Bob La Follette led his supporters out of the RNC to endorse Wilson; the latter event took place four years later, when Roosevelt turned down the Bull Moose nomination for fear of four more years of Wilson.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Edit: I realize that I ignored your earlier point about progressive conservatism, but what else am I supposed to call the opponents of progressives but conservatives? Well, now that I think about it non-progressive might be more fitting. Actually, I rather like that, implying as it does that the main political division of the Progressive Era was over its ideological namesake rather than between liberals and conservatives.

In fairness, yes, this is a particularly inconvenient lexical gap. With liberalism, at least we have the helpful term "Bourbon Democrat" to distinguish between the progressives and the liberal conservatives, but no such luck on the right flank.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

While we're all eagerly awaiting Yankee's post, I'll throw in some general observations drawn from my own experience working with primary sources. (My recent reading has focussed on sources of mid-nineteenth century provenance, so of course not all of it is applicable to the Gilded Age.)

(i) There is a strong trope running through nineteenth century partisan rhetoric of establishing a dichotomy at the outset, against which the rest of the address is arranged. I'm reminded of a particular speech by Seward, made in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, in which he explains the political predicament of his day as a battle between labor and capital (!). Of course, he does not adopt these terms as Marx gives them to us; but defines "labor" as all professional men who work for their living (wage laborers, yes, but also farmers and businessmen —a union of the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie) and "capital" as those whose wealth is derived from the value of their property (bankers, speculators, and of course slaveholders). So at once we see that this is a class-based worldview, but one that proposes an all-embracing middle class as the constituency of the new Republican party. This goes back to what I referred to before as progressive conservatism, and what Yankee has called national ("one nation") conservatism. Depending on the moment and the issue, you might see "labor" and "capital" replaced with the two sides of any issue that was seen to embody the ground on which an election was to be fought —"Cotton" vs. "Conscience" Whigs, etc.

(ii) Ideological markers were used (though as Yankee notes, differently from how we might use them today), but they were not the same markers we are accustomed to. "Conservative" meant something like "moderate," so of course every politician argued that he and his party represented the conservative interest, and his opposition were dangerous insurrectionists/reactionaries —as the case may have it. "Radical" and its less frequent cousin, "ultra," were more openly ideological. This is not a hard rule —but in general "radical" refers to causes of the ""left"" and "ultra" to causes of the ""right."" Both were pejoratives, denoting a position outside the mainstream —i.e. not conservative. I've bracketed "left" and "right" with scare quotes because Radicalism was not really leftism as we would imagine it. It is a callback to a time when Liberalism was viewed as a disruptive and potentially revolutionary force: the English Chartists, and of course their predecessors as the bogeyman of Europe, the Jacobins, being exemplary of this. Though the term is more commonly associated with the leaders of Congressional Reconstruction, the original Radical Republicans had begun their careers as Jacksonian Democrats: John C. Frémont, Salmon P. Chase, Hannibal Hamlin, and David Wilmott being just a few. (After the Civil War was ended, many of these were gradually reabsorbed into the Democratic fold by way of the Liberal Republican party, along with a few former "Conscience Whigs" who would become Bourbon Democrats in the changing economic landscape, most notably Charles Francis Adams.) Then you have the plethora of factional nicknames —Barnburners, Bourbons, Stalwarts, Halfbreeds, etc. —which indicated the applicant's affiliation in various inter-party squabbles, some of which had ideological implications, some of which did not.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

"OMG THE PLEBS TOOK THE WHITE HOUSE".

And hardly an original alarm, at that. You know this, of course —but that combination of the commons and the crown against the senate is arguably the oldest alliance in all of Western history, going back to Marius and Caesar. We're used to hearing the story from the aristocracy's perspective, but taken from a different angle the rise of parliaments was often a step backwards for the δῆμος in the short run, as appeals to regal authority were a way for the peasantry to fight the local tyranny of feudal lords. Hence why, in the original ballads featuring Robin Hood, the principal antagonist is not John but the Sheriff of Nottingham, whose reign of terror is ended by the personal intervention of the king; and why in the early stages of the American Revolution, the colonies framed their petitions in appeals to George III for protection against a tyrannical parliament. With this in mind, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the French word for "state" is the same as the word for the old feudal orders: état. Looking backwards, we see the Jacksonian era as situated at the dawn of modernity, but at the time feudalism was only just in the rear-view mirror —and some places not even that. (The South remained an essentially feudal society until after the Civil War, and arguably longer, with its rigidly-hierarchical social order, and the concentration of land—and therefore, wealth—in the hands of a few families, who relied on the labor of a permanent class of under-serfs. Meanwhile, feudalism would survive on the Continent into the 1850s, only being finally abolished in the Russian Empire at around the time of the American Civil War.) Hence why liberals of the period saw the state as the primary threat to individual liberty and the primary obstacle to egalitarianism. There were no feudal lords in the U.S., of course, but there was a gentry —the Van Rensselaers in New York, the Fairfaxes in Virginia —who fulfilled much the same role. It was this group the Senate was set up to represent: an upper house of, by, and for the upper classes. (Significantly, there was no upper house under the original confederation —this innovation, like the constitution itself, was a direct response to Shay's Rebellion, which sparked much the same terror in the ruling class in the 1780s as Jackson would a generation later.) How natural, then, that the masses should turn to a president (who anyways was not so different from a king in the strict construction of Article II, except that his reign was subject to regular review) for their champion against the elites; and just as natural, that the outraged and offended senators should take up the label of the English aristocracy in their battle against absolutism a century earlier.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Politically on Economic issues/Domestic Policy there were far far more similarities between Grover Clevelend and William McKinley then there were between Grover Cleveland and William Jennings Ryan

Yes, but as Yankee notes, policy ≠ ideology. Cleveland might be considered a "conservative" Democrat in the vernacular of his day, contrasted against the radical Bryan, but he did not believe in conservatism as it then existed. That he was pro-business speaks more to the ways liberalism was evolving, dividing, and folding in on itself in the late nineteenth century than anything else.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

I agree on the whole ... but there seems to be ample historic evidence that even many abolitionists hardly viewed Black Americans as a "group" to be considered at all in such a context.  I remember seeing a quote from Stephen Douglas from the book Half Slave and Half Free that was something along the lines of, "only the Democratic Party cares about the well-being of ALL White men, regardless of their religion, country of origin or social status."  I think that speaks volumes to the mindset/political realities of the day.

I'm pretty much just saying that I don't think a complete disregard for the welfare of Black Americans or their freedom necessarily prevents Nineteenth Century Democrats from being the more egalitarian party, on balance, in the minds of the voters at the time.

Oh, I agree, the key phrase being "in the minds of the voters." Obviously disenfranchised freedmen and some white reformers would take a very different view of the situation, so it's important to be careful about how one phrases it, but certainly in a time and place where non-whites were barely considered human, the Democrats of the major parties represented egalitarianism for those they considered proper Americans. As for racism in the abolitionist camp, there's a perversely interesting through-line in some anti-slavery rhetoric that accuses slaveholders of promoting a multi-racial society by living in close proximity, and in some cases reproducing, with the members of an inferior race —essentially, they (the slaveholders) weren't racist enough! And of course, men like Stephen Douglas loved to remind their public that the "Black Republicans" wanted to elevate blacks above the Irish/Germans/Catholics. It's been said before, but bears repeating that hardly any white person in the nineteenth century shared our twenty-first century view of race. You had a situation where one part of the white population views blacks as children in need of their protection, and one part viewed them as essentially subhuman. That doesn't make their racism irrelevant or excusable, but it helps put things in perspective.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I fully agree with the fact that Grover Cleveland matches up with Classical Liberalism more than what conservative was there but the question is you could argue that classical liberalism matches up with conservatism more than it does with modern liberalism.

Well, no, not really. This is a very superficial take for reasons that have already been examined exhaustively in this thread: it confuses means with ends and presumes that everything wet is water, rather than examining motives and intent.

Classical liberalism is not libertarianism. (You did not say this, but the two are confused often enough for it to be necessary to address it explicitly.) As a rule I don't like to even use that term, because people forget that "classical" is an adjective and not part of the term itself. "Classical-liberalism" does not and never existed. Used correctly, the term refers to the expression liberalism takes in a pre-industrial society. Nobody is a classical liberal today, any more than a particularly hairy or inarticulate man is a Neanderthal. Conservatism has a fundamentally different set of assumptions about how the world works and different goals for its ideal form of society. Cleveland did not share those goals, hence why he is not a conservative (except perhaps in a relative sense).

As for the labor issue —much as it pains me to say it, liberals are not automatically pro-labor. H*ll, Harry Truman threatened to draft strikers in the 1940s, for all the noise he made about Taft-Hartley. As I said earlier in this thread, nineteenth century Democrats were a liberal party, not a labor party. That's an important distinction that is often lost on Americans, but it remains important in other Western countries where liberals and socialists do not cooperate electorally.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Yes i understand that but looking at how Cleveland justified his policies it seems like his intentions were to be pro business in general.

They call it liberal capitalism for a reason. Yankee does a good job of explaining how the revolutionaries of yesterday are the establishment of today —read his post again.

His opposition to goverment programs weren't because they benefited the elite but because they were unconstitutional which is a  conservative argument.

No it isn't. Especially at that moment in history, you were more likely to hear strict constructionist arguments coming from liberals than from conservatives. Of course, neither party has ever let the constitution stand in the way of their legislative agenda, and it's silly to pretend that is an ideological distinction.

His position on Gold isnt similar to Jackson either cause remember he opposed bimetallism which Jackson did not oppose and was abondened not by Democrats but by Republicans. So Cleveland was basically supporting Republican policies when it came to Gold.

Again, see above. I recently described Cleveland on the IP board as representative of a tradition of Bourbon liberalism that had long since outlived it's usefulness. That bit of editorial aside, Cleveland was clearly and old-fashioned liberal and by 1896 was behind the times —but that was at the end of his career, twelve years after his first presidential campaign. Cleveland couldn't have been nominated three times by the national Democratic party if he was some friendless gadfly with no connection to the party's history or values. In that sense he's more like Bill Clinton than Zell Miller —a politician popular in his day whose brand of politics has aged poorly as his party turns toward radical alternatives to the status quo.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Yes i understand that but looking at how Cleveland justified his policies it seems like his intentions were to be pro business in general.

They call it liberal capitalism for a reason. Yankee does a good job of explaining how the revolutionaries of yesterday are the establishment of today —read his post again.

His opposition to goverment programs weren't because they benefited the elite but because they were unconstitutional which is a  conservative argument.

No it isn't. Especially at that moment in history, you were more likely to hear strict constructionist arguments coming from liberals than from conservatives. Of course, neither party has ever let the constitution stand in the way of their legislative agenda, and it's silly to pretend that is an ideological distinction.

His position on Gold isnt similar to Jackson either cause remember he opposed bimetallism which Jackson did not oppose and was abondened not by Democrats but by Republicans. So Cleveland was basically supporting Republican policies when it came to Gold.

Again, see above. I recently described Cleveland on the IP board as representative of a tradition of Bourbon liberalism that had long since outlived it's usefulness. That bit of editorial aside, Cleveland was clearly and old-fashioned liberal and by 1896 was behind the times —but that was at the end of his career, twelve years after his first presidential campaign. Cleveland couldn't have been nominated three times by the national Democratic party if he was some friendless gadfly with no connection to the party's history or values. In that sense he's more like Bill Clinton than Zell Miller —a politician popular in his day whose brand of politics has aged poorly as his party turns toward radical alternatives to the status quo.

Democrats probably nominated him a me too type of candidate in which the only way the could win was by being sorta Republican lite in a way . So Bill Clinton on steroids

Not to be rude, but this is really bad history. In lieu of actual primary evidence (and there is reams on the election of 1884), you muse as to what "probably" happened based on what makes sense to you in 2020. That is exactly the kind of shoddy analysis we have been deconstructing in this thread!

Cleveland wasn't a conservative, he wasn't a radical, and he certainly wasn't a socialist. If you take a hardline Marxist view of the late nineteenth century and filter everything through the lens of "capitalism or no?" then, sure, Cleveland is on the reactionary end of the spectrum. That is a relative interpretation, however, and your twist on it ignores that Cleveland was a bog-standard liberal for the 1880s. Liberalism is not socialism and two people can take two different roads to the same destination! Try to understand.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Why did Andrew Jackson think the National Bank was elitist?

Jackson saw the Bank as an instrument for concentrating wealth and political power in the hands of a relative few (the "monied interests," i.e. bankers, speculators, and merchants) at the expense of many. In fact, the Bank exercised great influence through its patronage ("no king rules alone," and there were plenty of directorships, clerks, and other positions that could be exchanged for votes on legislation touching the Bank's interests). For Jackson, the potential for corruption was obvious and disturbing; considered together with the fact that the men leading the bank were mostly conservative Northeastern men who had supported his enemies in the election of 1828, and the Bank became too troublesome to remain alive. Beyond this, Americans have an instinctive distrust for that class of persons who seem to grow rich without doing any work, and the Bank's role in the Panic of 1819 —still salient for Jackson and many of his supporters —seemed to confirm this image of a corrupt circle of Northern financiers draining the poor farmers of the South and West for their personal enrichment.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

We definitely see continuity in the ideals of Eugene Talmedge with modern liberalism and the modern democratic party

I know you are trying to be difficulty, but I am going to bite.

Southern politics and politicians would necessarily present a distorted image of the party, for the simple reason that it was a one party region. You had a lot of rich plantation and business owners supporting the same party as poor farmers, because as I said in the post a couple of days ago (Civil War Legacy, and the concept of being an outsider nationally even while being elite locally). As even the quickest glance at the period's history would illustrate, there was often vicious primary battles between the "Bourbons" and the Populists and Progressives. Since Bourbons would not have much to offer poor farmers for obvious reasons, they would whip up race hysteria to get votes and win primaries that they likely had no business winning. This was Pat Harrison's model in Mississippi. Depending on the state, people like Wallace and Bilbo responded (being from the other faction) by going even more hardcore racist. Other populist/progressive Southern Dems like Huey Long and Estes Kefauver generally managed to avoid this, at least somewhat.

I have mentioned this dozens of times now, none of it detracts from the main points that Truman and myself have made.

Literally just last night I was reading an interview of Gaylon Babcock, who knew the Trumans growing up in Jackson County, Missouri at the turn of the century. He explained that while his family were registered Republicans, his father would vote the Democratic ticket at the state and local level, because in his words "so seldom a capable man ran on the Republican ticket in our area because there was so little chance of being elected, he couldn't afford to give too much time to that."

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I would argue that the slaveowners were elites and were conservative, even if their interests differed from that of northern business elites. They were probably more Hamiltonian than Jeffersonian when it came to voting rights and immigration, but their economy depended on selling cash crops overseas and therefore they feared tariffs more than they feared Jeffersonian liberty or Tammany Hall, and the de-polarization of tariffs after the Great Depression and WWII allowed them to “come home” and join their fellow elites in the GOP.

Broadly speaking, yes, but it depends on which group of slaveholders you're referring to. Planters in Kentucky and Mississippi tended to favor the Whigs, for instance, because their access to foreign markets was via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers —hence their support for internal improvements and the tariffs that paid for them —and because the profits to be had from slavery in those states came in large part from the internal slave trade —which further incentivized support for a strong central government that could regulate markets and, more importantly, prevent the importation of new slaves who would drive down the value of those already here.

(It's also worthwhile to note that "conservative" can mean several different things —in this case it alludes to the feudal relationship between the gentry and the disenfranchised lower classes of Antebellum Southern society, i.e. poor whites, slaves, and the small population of freedmen, and not to the modern ideology of conservatism.)

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Can we all agree that “Democrats are still the party of the KKK. They trick blacks into voting for them by promising them welfare” is a nonsensical claim?

I don't believe anyone in this thread has every suggested otherwise —and yes, obviously, this is an absurdly stupid claim, fundamentally just as ignorant as the "party switch" theory if not more so. Dinesh D'souza is a propagandist, not a historian.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The way I view it, America had little in the way of a political left before the 1890s (obviously it existed before then, but it wasn't very powerful).  Before that, America had two parties that were mostly conservative.  As much as the American Civil War was a defining moment in US history, the divisions of that war seem to have very little bearing on modern politics.  It was right-wing infighting.

This sounds right

Well, no. To be fair, it is not entirely clear to me what Celticempire means by the "political left." His analysis may have some value strictly in reference to the period immediately following the end of the American Civil War, provided one takes the view that liberalism is an essentially capitalist ideology and therefore inherently conservative. Defense of that thesis largely depends upon a Marxist reading of history —which is not without merit, but carried with it obvious insufficiencies if not augmented with pre-capitalist understandings of class and social obligation. It is difficult to argue this is an accurate summary of American society and politics prior to 1850 at the very earliest, however. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian dogma may have lacked a socialist motive, but both were essentially hostile to the emergence of capital as the organizing interest in society and sought to disrupt the traditional class structure inherited from feudalism. This is not compatible with a classical understanding of conservatism. Alternately, one can take a Cathconesque view of the issue and arrange the politics of the era along a spectrum of traditional to progressive, with Jackson and his adherents defending the traditional rights of the lower classes against the disruptive intrusion of nascent liberal capitalism. That interpretation probably has more merit, but ignores the radical undercurrents present in Jacksonianism, especially during the 1830s and 40s.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Seeing as the Civil War/Slavery were non-ideological issues, did the early Republican Party have many or a lot of people who were former Democrats and who were on other issues Jeffersonians/Jacksonians? I know Fremont and Hamlin were former Democrats (and I'm assuming that they had been typical Democrats when they had been Democrats) but were former Democrats like them common in the early Republican party, and to the extent that they existed, were they noticeably different to the former Whigs? Like, was Fremont noticeably more Jeffersonian/liberal in philosophy from his co-partisan Lincoln, with significant divergences outside of the national question? Or was there not much difference?

I wouldn't say slavery was a non-ideological issue. Rather, there were a multitude of perspectives in the pre-war North and West that all came to view slavery as an existential threat to their imagined future utopia. Conservative industrialists saw slavery and the feudal society that maintains it as an obstacle to economic growth; liberal egalitarians looked and the rigid class structure of the slave states and objected to its replication across the West (long the promised land of Jeffersonian orthodoxy); evangelical Protestants objected to the institution on moral grounds; poor farmers and workingmen instinctively identified slavery as a threat to their own interests; and so on. So the Republican party of the 1850s emerged as an unholy alliance of the left and the right against the true enemy, the Southern aristocracy. In some ways it was the last hurrah of the Old Whigs of '76 (the English sort, not the Clayite nationalists) that fell apart as soon as the unifying threat of neo-feudalism was vanquished and the progress of industrial capitalism drove the two halves of the party further and further apart.

Now that I've got that out of my system, there was indeed a health liberal minority within the Republican party. You mention Frémont and Hamlin; Salmon P. Chase was the poster child for this class of Republican, however, and indeed was constantly at odds with the conservative wing. David Wilmot is another example. "On the issues" they tended to be more bullish than moderate/conservative Republicans on emancipation, which may have to do with their egalitarian motives as opposed to the commercial motives of the Republican right; but the ideological divergence became most obvious after the war was over, and Chase and others are unable to reconcile the military rule necessary to enforce Reconstruction with their liberal democratic beliefs. Hence the "Liberal Republicans" of 1872 argued for quickly reintegrating the former rebel states back into the Union, while the Radical former Whigs (though not without exception —James Garfield, for example) were more intent on transforming Southern society through whatever means necessary.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I'm left wondering whether there was any point to the last five pages, because it seems we're back to square one: assuming that being a "progressive" is the same as being left-wing, cherry-picking a few Republican politicians and claiming they speak for the entire party at the turn of the century (despite all evidence to the contrary), arguing that nineteenth century Democrats couldn't be liberals because they were racist, and dismissing the obvious flaws in your argument with "it wasn't an ideological issue." Social issues are difficult to fit into an ideological framework given how dramatically our views on race and gender have changed in the last 200 years (this cannot be overstated), and trying to arguing that [candidate X] must have been a conservative because they believed [racist nonsense] and no liberal would every believe that today, is an obviously flawed model for understanding the past. Your point about prohibition really underscores the problem here.

Many progressives supported it as well as conservatives, believing it to be a just and necessary reform.

Many progressives were conservatives. The progressive movement was a set of policy objectives that different kinds of people endorsed for different reasons. This shouldn't be hard to understand, as you presumably support gun control while condemning the racist ideology that led white conservatives to press for an assault weapons ban in the 70s and 80s. Some people became progressives because, like Bryan, they understood that the Second Industrial Revolution had changed the playing field and the lower classes would now need to leverage the power of the newly-democratized state to counter the influence of big business. Some people became progressives because they understood that, in lieu of substantial reforms, capitalism would collapse in on itself and be replaced by a radical new order. Some people who became progressives saw themselves as leading an egalitarian revolution against the status quo, and some people who became progressives saw themselves as restoring a bygone era of civic virtue. Lumping all these people together and saying, "yup, they're the left" ignores all of these nuances in favor of a simplified dichotomy that fits with our modern ideas of what the world is like, instead of trying to understand past individuals for who they were.

There's a reason Roosevelt's 1912 campaign went down in flames at the Republican National Convention (yes, I am aware that Taft was far more progressive on the issues than he is often given credit for —that doesn't change the fact that he ran as the conservative candidate in 1912, and the party divided accordingly): the party bosses and the majority of elected Republicans were very hostile to the progressive agenda and viewed Roosevelt, La Follette, Borah, and the rest as dangerous men. Neither party has ever been ideologically homogenous, but that doesn't mean we can't draw conclusions about what the average Republican or the average Democrat believed in 1900, nor does it mean that everyone who supported a given policy did so for identical reasons. The presence of conservative Southern Democrats in Congress during the 30s and 40s does not change the fact that the Democratic party of FDR was fundamentally a liberal and progressive political party nationally, just as the presence of progressive Western Republicans in Congress during the 1880s and 1890s does not change the fact that the Republican party of Harrison and McKinley was a fundamentally conservative political party nationally.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

To get back to the point, the political parties of turn of the century America were such big tents - with coalitions based more around cultural identity than common policy positions - that neither one really had much of a consistent ideology.

The existence of a dissenting minority faction does not mean the group as a whole has no ideology. "Waving the bloody shirt" indeed held together an ideologically idiosyncratic Republican coalition for longer than a purely ideological raison d'être otherwise might have; likewise for race-baiting and the Solid South. To use your own example, we don't pretend that the GOP in the 1940s wasn't a conservative party despite the presence of a powerful group of liberal Republicans who out-voted the conservatives at every nominating convention of the decade. The fact of the matter is that pro-silver, anti-trust Republicans were a distinct minority of the national Republican party after 1874. Take a look at the platforms adopted by the party during this period on just the currency issue:

In the first act of congress, signed by President Grant, the national government assumed to remove any doubt of its purpose to discharge all just obligations to the public creditors, and solemnly pledged its faith "to make provisions at the earliest practicable period, for the redemption of the United States notes in coin." Commercial prosperity, public morals, and the national credit demand that this promise be fulfilled by a continuous and steady progress to specie payment.

The Republican party [...] has restored upon a solid basis payment in coin of all national obligations, and has given us a currency absolutely good and equal in every part of our extended country.

We have always recommended the best money known to the civilized world; and we urge that efforts should be made to unite all commercial nations in the establishment of an international standard which shall fix for all the relative value of gold and silver coinage.

The Republican party is in favor of the use of both gold and silver as money, and condemns the policy of the Democratic Administration in its efforts to demonetize silver.

The American people, from tradition and interest, favor bi-metallism, and the Republican party demands the use of both gold and silver as standard money, with such restrictions and under such provisions, to be determined by legislation, as will secure the maintenance of the parity of values of the two metals so that the purchasing and debt-paying power of the dollar, whether of silver, gold, or paper, shall be at all times equal. The interests of the producers of the country, its farmers and its workingmen, demand that every dollar, paper or coin, issued by the government, shall be as good as any other.

The Republican party is unreservedly for sound money. It caused the enactment of a law providing for the redemption [resumption] of specie payments in 1879. Since then every dollar has been as good as gold. We are unalterably opposed to every measure calculated to debase our currency or impair the credit of our country. We are therefore opposed to the free coinage of silver, except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of the earth, which agreement we pledge ourselves to promote, and until such agreement can be obtained the existing gold standard must be maintained. All of our silver and paper currency must be maintained at parity with gold, and we favor all measures designated to maintain inviolable the obligations of the United States, of all our money, whether coin or paper, at the present standard, the standard of most enlightened nations of the earth.

We see that in 1876, 1880, 1884, and 1896 the Republican platform endorsed the maintenance of the gold standard as the basis for a national currency. The 1876 platform specifically calls for the redemption of notes "in coin," an explicit repudiation of the soft money position. In 1884 the platform calls for adherence to the "international standard" —that is, the gold standard. (This was a common pro-gold argument used to kill silver coinage in the cradle, by pointing out that other nations used gold alone as the basis for their currency and the resumption of silver would therefore weaken the dollar abroad.) In the same platform, the convention praises the "conservative" administration of outgoing President Arthur. But in 1888 and 1892, the party changes course and endorses the bimetalist position. Why did they do this? In essence, some of the goldbugs got cold feet as the economy began to contract in the late 1880s: one of these men was Ohio's John Sherman, who had been a gold man in the 1870s but afterwards advocated for limited silver coinage. Much in the way moderate Kansas Republicans repudiated the Brownback legacy once it became clear his reforms had gone too far, Sherman didn't become a liberal Greenbackite, but rather felt that some moderation was necessary to correct an overly extreme, but well-intentioned, policy. This puts him to the left of the likes of McKinley (and arguably Cleveland as well on this one issue), but to the right of Bryan and others calling for the unlimited coinage of silver. Crucially, by 1896 the goldbugs had retaken control of the party and repudiated the pro-silver 1892 plank. Notably, the platform cites President Hayes' defense of the gold standard in 1879 to argue that the new plank is consistent with traditional Republican orthodoxy.

What conclusion must we draw here? We see that the national Republican party maintained a pro-gold position through the 1870s and most of the 1880s in spite of the protests of an outnumbered bimetalist faction, briefly moderated during the four years of the Harrison presidency, before swinging hard back to sound money immediately afterwards. This is a party that is attempting to reconcile its early history as the champion of homesteaders and free labor with its current role as the bastion of industry. Naturally, this evolution provoked disagreement within the party. And yet when the period is viewed as a whole, we see that Republicans in general tended to endorse a sound money policy, and invoked essentially conservative arguments to make that case. Even in endorsing bimetalism in 1888, the primary concern of the platform writers is with preserving the integrity of the dollar —sound currency —and not with producing inflation (as the Greenbacks hoped to do).

Similarly, to project forward a century, a historian studying the period from 1970 to 2000 might observe that the Democratic party took essentially liberal positions on social issues and in general became less rural and less Southern than in the past. A naysayer might point to the nomination of Jimmy Carter in 1976 as proof that this thesis is incorrect ("Only JC can save America"), but you and I know that anecdotal evidence does not disprove large trends. The Democratic party of the late 20th century was a socially liberal party in national politics. The Republican party of the late 19th century was an economically conservative party in national politics.

Now, surely you will point out that the Democratic standard bearer during this period was Grover Cleveland, a gold bug if there ever was one. But two people can come to the same conclusion for vastly different reasons, as has been discussed at length here. The country was changing, and not everyone was changing at the same pace. Cleveland failed to recognize that the Second Industrial Revolution meant that free markets did not necessarily make free people, clinging to a pre-industrial  version of liberalism that still imagined the feudal state as the driver of class divisions.

Trade is the one exception, as Republicans were united around protectionism and Democrats around free trade.

Trade is a really big issue to just dismiss like that, and in any case is hardly the only so-called "exception." On immigration, on religious morality, on the dollar, each party staked out clear positions derived from a consistent ideology, with some dissent within both camps. On some issues, such as the dollar, the parties were very similar —because liberalism and conservatism arguably had a lot in common during this period, both being essentially in favor of free markets and sound money. Hence significant support for left-wing third parties during this period.

But on the whole, both parties were focused solely on gaining power for its own sake, and were just as willing to nominate conservatives (McKinley, Parker) as progressives (Bryan, Roosevelt) if they thought it'd help them win.

That is very lazy analysis, Henry. It's also objectively false: the smartest thing the Republican establishment could have done if all they cared about was power, would have been to dump Taft for Roosevelt in 1912. They didn't, because what they actually cared about was using power to preserve their social position, to which Roosevelt was perceived as a threat.

Many of the most progressive and liberal politicians of the period like Bob La Follette, George Norris, William Borah, and Hiram Johnson were Republicans. I therefore don't see how a party that produced such men can be considered conservative, while Ben Tilman's Democrats were supposedly a liberal party.

If you're going to argue that being a racist automatically makes one a conservative, you probably shouldn't have identified Woodrow Wilson as the original liberal Democrat a few paragraphs ago. But, yes, the Republican party produced many prominent progressives in the early twentieth century. For the sake of the argument let's say these men were liberals and see how they fared at national party conventions between 1908 and 1928.

Year		Candidate		Delegates (%)
1908		LaFollette		25 (2.55%)
1912		LaFollette		41 (3.80%)
1916		LaFollette		25 (2.57%)
1916		Borah		2 (0.20%)
1920		Johnson		133.5 (13.57%)
1920		LaFollette		24 (2.44%)
1924		LaFollette		34 (3.06%)
1924		Johnson		10 (0.90%)
1928		Norris		24 (2.21%)
xxxx
1912		Roosevelt*		451 (41.84%)
1916		Roosevelt*		85 (8.75%)

Overwhelmingly, we can see that Republican delegates (representing elected officials, party leaders, and others who might be described as the political establishment) did not favor the politics of the individuals you mentioned and did not support them in their many campaigns for the presidency during the first quarter of the twentieth century. La Follette ran for president five times from 1908 to 1924 and never garnered more than 5% of the delegate vote. Outside their home states, they had hardly any support from nationally prominent Republicans. In 1908, 1912, and 1916 the party preferred to nominate a moderate with support from both the progressive and conservative camps. While La Follette may have lost some votes to Roosevelt in 1912, it appears extremely unlikely he could have equalled Roosevelt's performance in a head-to-head race against Taft, in light of the refusal of the Roosevelt delegates to support La Follette as a compromise candidate after it became clear that Roosevelt could not win. (La Follette himself chose to support Wilson in the general election, which does lend some credence to your description of him as a "liberal.") You cannot point to La Follette or Johnson or Borah or Norris and observe "wow, Republicans sure were liberal back then" when on average 80%+ of the party voted against them at every convention over the course of a quarter century. Yes, these guys bucked the conservative line, and for that reason they never had a realistic chance of winning their party's presidential nomination.

Also, there's one specific issue I'd like to offer as a counter to the idea that Democrats were always the more liberal party. On the issue of women's suffrage, an undeniably liberal cause if there ever was one, the Republicans were to the left of the Democrats. The traditionally Republican western states were the most forward-looking on the issue, with many of them granting suffrage as early as the 19th century. In the 1916 election, Hughes ran on a more pro-suffrage platform than Wilson. When the 19th Amendment was ratified, the Republican North was far more favorable to the cause than the Solid Democratic South, with many Deep Southern states not ratifying the Amendment until decades afterward. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

The first major presidential candidate to endorse woman's suffrage was William Jennings Bryan. Before that, the loudest advocate for suffrage on the national stage was the Prohibition party. Considering the ideological diversity of the suffrage movement (which included evangelical Protestants, white supremacists, and xenophobes as well as socialists, radicals, and progressives) I would be hesitant to say the advocates of suffrage were clearly anything. Again, attitudes toward race and sex have changed so dramatically in the last century that social issues do not fit neatly into a modern ideological framework. That doesn't mean we can't examine the ideological underpinnings of the suffrage movement, but one must be careful not to draw lazy conclusions based on our modern self-identification as liberals.

(Edit: I also wanted to add that it's a myth that Prohibition was mostly a Republican policy. The split of Democrats and Republicans voting for and against the Prohibition resolution in Congress was about equal. There were plenty of Prohibitionist Democrats at the national level like Bryan. Furthermore, I don't view Prohibition as a left-right issue. Many progressives supported it as well as conservatives, believing it to be a just and necessary reform.)

Indeed, Prohibition was a progressive policy. That alone should cast doubt on any attempt to argue progressives as a group were left-wing.

Lastly, I'd like to express an interesting observation I've made, unrelated to the current discussion about historical partisan ideologies but relevant to the thread topic. The 1876 and 1976 election maps, for being a century apart, are astonishingly similar. In both elections, the West was uniformly Republican, while the South was almost completely solid for the Democrat. The Northeast was highly contested, with the Democrat generally doing better in the Mid-Atlantic, the Republican in New England. The Midwest is the main difference between the two maps, as it was slightly more Republican in 1876. However, one could attribute this to the fact that in the 19th century the Midwest was less of its own distinct region, and more an extension of the Western states (hence the west part of the name).

Indeed, there is much to be learned from the partisan alignments of the 1970s. I am not sure what the part in bold means, however? In the nineteenth century, the Midwest was the West, not the other way around.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I'd agree that progressives weren't necessarily left-wingers at heart, as many of them were initially conservatives who adopted progressive policy positions in order to co-opt popular reforms. However, relatively speaking, I think they were the liberals of their day, or at least more liberal than their opponents. On the whole, the progressive reforms made a more egalitarian society, regardless of the motives of the reformers. Like you said, many conservative party elites opposed progressives for that reason, as they sought to preserve their social position.

Relatively speaking I would not automatically disagree. I think it is important to remember that the progressive movement was a diverse coalition of groups who did not always get along, and some of those people (e.g. eugenicists) were objectively trying to transform society in ways that were obviously not egalitarian. And this is the problem with using "left-wing" and "liberal" as synonyms. Liberalism is an absolute political philosophy with a definite set of core beliefs. Not everyone who is left-wing is a liberal, and in many cases today and in the late nineteenth century those who are liberal are not left-wing. Marx is the obvious example of the latter; there are countless classically liberal parties in Europe today that demonstrate the former. (Here's one.) So it is arguable at the very least that most progressives were to the left of their political opposition (classical liberals and conservatives), but they weren't all of them liberals. From the practical standpoint of a voter choosing what policies they want to run the country, someone like La Follette might seem closer to the likes of Wilson than Mark Hana or Joseph G. Cannon —and with good reason! When you invoke the word "liberal," however, you make the conversation about ideology —and that's when it's necessary to remember that most (not all) Republican progressives saw themselves as very different from people like Wilson, Bryan, and Debs.

I don't know why you're so insistent on portraying Cleveland as such a true believer in liberalism - except that it fits with your narrative of the Democrats as liberals - when it was clear that his outdated, conservative ideas were no longer helping the common people. Similarly, Alton Parker was like Cleveland a traditional Democrat, and was duly regarded as the conservative to Roosevelt's progressive.

Cleveland and Parker were classical liberals, which was indeed a right-wing ideology (in absolute terms) by 1890 or so, arguably earlier. They are often called conservatives in popular discussions of history because Americans have no grasp of ideology (thanks, two-party system!) and think "liberal"/"progressive"/"left-wing" are all synonyms. Sometimes they are (Wilson was all three); during the Progressive Era, they were not.

I commented earlier that politics after 1890 could be described as a four party system, with progressive Republicans and Democrats arrayed against classical liberals and conservatives in their own parties. Sometimes the progressives formed a united front against the stalwarts, sometimes, they toed the party line. 1916 is a perfect illustration of this: some progressive Republicans (La Follette) supported Wilson's reelection, others (Roosevelt) fell in line behind Hughes. Wilson and his school were liberal progressives, and his nomination completed the takeover of the party that had begun in 1896; before then, Bourbon "classical liberals" ran the show, and lingered for some time after as the contrarian inter-party opposition. The last great battle between the two was at the 1904 nominating convention, when a Bourbon Democrat (Parker) defeated the progressive candidate (Hearst).

I'd also argue that the Southern wing of the party was never really liberal, as their arguments for states' rights didn't come from a deeply held belief in liberal federalism, but from a desire to justify slavery and white supremacy.

Southern Democrats are hard to pin down, because the South in this period was a one-party state —accordingly you had conservatives, liberals, and brazen opportunists all residing under one roof. By "this period" I mean the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. If you're extending "never" to include literally all of American history before 1970 or so, I'm going to have to disagree. It's just not a good idea to make blanket statements about an entire region, and while your assessment is true for many Southern Democrats of the Antebellum period (Calhoun, Davis, etc.) it is untrue of others (Andrew Johnson) who did in fact embody the Jacksonian "common man" image, even if there was a decent amount of race baiting mixed in. By 1850, of course, this was no longer an important distinction, as slavery became the one issue on which the entire country divided and the Southern Democrats effectively stopped talking about the policies (the homestead bill, free trade, opposition to banks and the financial interests) that identified them to the left of the likewise pro-slavery Southern Whigs —and it's no accident that this is the point at which the Southern Whig party disintegrates, with most of its members being absorbed into the Democratic fold. This is the point at which one can say with accuracy that Southerners only cared about protecting slavery and had no other motive for their rhetoric. Once slavery was the only issue on the table, there was no longer any reason for these two groups to remain divided; of course, that suggests that there was something dividing them before 1850.

It's a disgusting worldview, but a fact nevertheless that most Democrats in the early nineteenth century (North and South) did not support equal rights for what they essentially considered to be livestock. We should condemn this —liberals in particular should condemn it —but we should also own that the world is not always pretty outside of Plato's cave, and the history of liberalism is tainted with the same racism that soils all of American history.

As for the period after the Civil War, you had a large contingent of Southern Democrats who were conservatives (Strom Thurmond would be the poster child for this sort at the end of the period), others who supported equality for white men (which of course isn't egalitarianism, but that's how they thought about it), still others who did extend their liberal notions to blacks as well as poor whites (Huey Long comes to mind), and finally those who didn't give a cr*p either way and were willing to employ either race-baiting or egalitarian language as the moment required (George Wallace). I would argue that the third group were liberals and the second and fourth at least pretended to be, while the first clearly weren't and didn't pretend to be. A big part of the Democratic playbook pre-1970 was appealing to racial animus to divide poor whites from poor blacks, using the language of populism to disrupt biracial coalitions such as that which the Populists assembled in North Carolina. Was this a perverted form of liberalism "for white men," or was it pure opportunism? I'm inclined to say the latter, though reasonable people might disagree. Either way, it's undeniable that especially post-Wilson the Democratic party was sharply divided between its Southern and non-Southern elements. This threatened to divide the party in 1924 (when the Klan and Southern Democrats blocked the nomination of Al Smith) and 1928 (when the same forces lent support to Herbert Hoover when Smith did get the nomination) before finally boiling over in 1948.

I don't normally recommend fiction as a means for analyzing history, but To Kill a Mockingbird is very relevant here. It's a somewhat obscure plot point in the book that Atticus Finch is an elected Democratic state representative; while in an earlier draft his character is shown in a more critical light (this isn't a thread about literary theory, but no, Go Set a Watchman is not a sequel to Mockingbird and the predatory leeches at Harper Collins should be ashamed of themselves), he clearly isn't a race-baiting blood psychopath in the mould of Tillman in any case. Now, I will not for a minute argue that most or even a large minority of Southern Democrats were closeted Gregory Pecks, but those kind of people (however few) were Democrats during this period, simply because there was nowhere else for them to go. The Southern Democratic party as a whole was racist, reactionary, and only opportunistically liberal —but the existence of men like Huey Long, Claude Pepper, Lyndon Johnson, and yes Harry Truman informs us that the truth is always more complicated than the truism.

If we accept that the progressives were the liberals of their day, then let's look at which parties they came from. I wasn't trying to cherry-pick Republican progressives, it's just that a vast majority of well-known progressives seem to come from that party. The only notable Democratic progressives I know of are Bryan and Wilson. There are probably more, but they're not familiar enough to me. So if most progressives were Republicans, then doesn't that in some sense put the party to the left of the Democrats, when the establishments of both parties were conservative?

"Well-known" is a prickly term. The well-known history of the Civil War until a few decades ago was that the South went to war in 1861 in defense of their states' rights and with no reference to slavery —we of course know this is nonsense. I would suggest looking into nationally prominent Democratic politicians of the period besides just those two. The 1896 Democratic national convention was overflowing with liberal populists. Unlike Roosevelt, who had to become president through the backdoor and only became the undisputed leader of his party after his most powerful opponent died, the silver forces took the Democratic party in a rout: the Bourbon candidate won 97 delegates out of a total 930. As you observe later, Bryan's capture of the Democratic party proved far more complete and permanent than Roosevelt's eight years later. After the latter's victory in 1904, the party nominated his chosen successor in 1908, who was quickly abandoned by progressives within the party (despite going beyond Roosevelt in some areas, notably in his vigorous prosecution of trusts) and by 1912 the conservatives were once again firmly in control of the party apparatus. We seem to be on the same page here,

The corrupt Tammany Hall machine strongly opposed the Bryan wing of the party, for instance. That said, he still did manage to win the nomination three times, so...you've probably got the stronger argument there.

so I'll move on.

But I'd like to address the second part of your paragraph. Who decides what conservative means anyway? I still fail to see how Southern aristocrats were any less conservative than Northern industrialists and bankers. Was it because they supported a liberal party with liberal policies like free trade? Without further elaboration, that's just circular reasoning. What makes that party and those policies liberal? What is so much more liberal about the Southern Democratic elitist who supports free trade because it enhances his riches, than the Northern Republican elitist who support protectionism because it protects his wealth?

"Liberal" and "conservative" aren't weasel words that you can define however you want. Liberalism as an ideology begins with John Locke; it has radical and moderate interpretations and has evolved over time in response to changes in politics and society. For most of the nineteenth century, Adam Smith was the world's foremost liberal thinker, and his ideas influenced how liberals responded to the emerging capitalist economy. Early on this placed liberals in opposition to the business elites, but by the 1880s liberal capitalism had won out and liberalism came more in line with the interests of the monied interest, though not entirely —trade policy kept the two camps from ever fully merging. (Indeed, trade policy was the major bone of contention between Gilded Age Democrats and Republicans.) Hence the rise of populism, socialism, and progressivism as alternatives to classical liberalism during this period.

Likewise, conservative has been used to describe several distinct (though inter-related) political phenomena: reactionary opposition to the liberalization of society being the first and the oldest (Toryism is one expression of this), a reflexive position in favor of the status quo (this is a relative term), and the modern ideology of conservatism (which like liberalism takes many forms, but is usually identified by an association with the business and financial interests in society). The third is how I have been using "conservative" in this thread. In Britain, liberalism became associated with the middle and lower classes in opposition to the elites who favored protectionism and strict social hierarchies, but in America the situation was complicated by the existence of a class of wealthy landowners (the Southern gentry) who weren't peasant farmers, but also weren't bankers and industrialists. Often their interests aligned with the yeomen farmers in Pennsylvania and the upland South who opposed the bankers for obvious reasons, but this was not a uniform rule, and many —especially in the Carolinas and along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers —allied with the conservatives to support internal improvements and stable markets.

(After the Civil War, the South was a one-party state and as I have already discussed the Democratic party absorbed both liberals and conservatives who continued to battle it out in the primaries —though not entirely: Tennessee, for instance, produced a modest number of pro-business Republicans during this period. This is why I prefer to identify specific groups within society—"Southern gentry," "Northern financiers"—rather than use the ambiguous term "elites." The latter is far too broad to be useful when trying to pick apart this problem, and lends itself to simplistic and under-researched conclusions.)

So depending on what sense of the word you wish to invoke, the Southern gentry were conservative (reactionary) socially and variously conservative or liberal politically.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Progressivism is a meaningless label that could mean absolutely anything almost like moderate today in that what it means to be a moderate is something different for everyone you talk to. The same was true for progressive, as you could talk to a social darwinist and a communist and get a different view of what constituted "progress" towards their "ideal society". It is thus very problematic to create a fictitious, unified group of "progressives" to latch onto in this period since the very concept itself was a subjective endorsement towards the ultimate end objective of achieving their predispositions towards pre-existing ideological and political ends.

The earliest instance of "progressive" I've been able to find in American political literature is from a speech by William Henry Seward in 1857 or so, in which he uses it to refer to the political program of Henry Clay. If you look up the word in a dictionary from the period, you see it is defined as "moving forward, proceeding onward, advancing" or simply "improving." (Webster's 1852) Of course that could mean almost anything depending on the speaker's frame of reference; Seward used it to suggest industrial development and increase in general prosperity brought about by Whig economic policies in the North. Much like the famous Lincoln quote about labor and capital, we have to be careful about assuming things based on the modern connotations words and phrases that appear in historical sources.