The modern Democratic Party is the Gilded Age GOP on steroids

[WhyteRain]

I've been saying for awhile now that the modern Democratic Party has become "the Gilded Age GOP on steroids" -- the party of "negro rights" and big business favoritism.  As a short-cut I use this map of the 1896 election.




I ask, what states will the Democratic nominee definitely win in 2012 that the same party's nominee won in 1896?  (I count only one.)

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

So Democrats oppose regulation and the right to unionize?

[WhyteRain]

So Democrats oppose regulation and the right to unionize?

The Rockefeller boys didn't become Democratic Party senators for no reason.

[Person Man]

Is this some sort of bizzare rightwing unlogic?

[TNF]

They share the some of the same constituencies (Mainline protestants, upper income liberals, economic nationalists), but there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of differences. For one, the Gilded Age Republican Party wouldn't have any support from Catholic voters, considering that, y'know, they were virulently anti-Catholic.

[WhyteRain]

They share the some of the same constituencies (Mainline protestants, upper income liberals, economic nationalists), but there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of differences. For one, the Gilded Age Republican Party wouldn't have any support from Catholic voters, considering that, y'know, they were virulently anti-Catholic.

1.  There are enough similarities that pretty much the entire Gilded Age GOP electorate has gone over to the Democrats (while nearly the entire Democratic constituencies in the South and Mountain West have switched to the GOP).  Look all the way down to county level voting -- it's astounding really.

2.  The Gilded Age GOP wasn't as anti-Catholic as the all-Democratic Ku Klux Klan, was it?  After all, it looks from the maps that the GOP was very strong even in heavily catholic areas of the North (Rhode Island, Connecticut, Mass., Wisc., Minn.) while the Democratic Party was week in Catholic areas of the South (like the French Catholics around New Orleans and the German Catholics in central Texas).

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

The KKK was in no way all-Democratic in the 20's (their peak of influence).

[WhyteRain]

The KKK was in no way all-Democratic in the 20's (their peak of influence).

The 1920s Klan was the popular outgrowth resulting from the movie <i>The Birth of a Nation</i> and the white tribalism promoted by Southern progressives like Tom Watson and Woodrow Wilson (born in Virginia and raised in Georgia).  Yes, there were lots of Midwest Republicans in the Klan in the 1920s -- including Pres. Harding, who was sworn in in the White House, I've read.  Anyway, as we all know, anti-Catholicism was hardly the raison d'etre of the Klan.

But look at the county map for 1896:  The heavily Catholic counties in both the North and the South were correspondingly heavily Republican.

[freepcrusher]

you are correct. The Indiana Republican Party in the 1920s was "run" by the KKK.

[Mechaman]

A few notes on the whole Catholic voters argument:

1896, 1920, and 1924 were quite outlier elections compared to political reality of the times.  They should be considered the exceptions that prove the trend more than the trend if anything.  Catholics were damned, I repeat, DAMNED Democratic from the 1830's-1960's.  Especially Irish Catholics, who voted as Democratic (if not more so) on average as black people do today.  It didn't matter how damned nativist or racist the Southern whites were, because a lot of the Catholics didn't live in the South (insert a "no sh*t Sherlock" comment here), they lived in the North with heavily Republican WASPs who were at the very best paternalistically racist against immigrants.  Democrats in the North were more than happy to have Catholic voters, as any history textbook on Tammany Hall would tell you.

Now, onto the few other points:

1. The Election of 1896: I think it is noteworthy to mention that William J. Bryan was the Democratic candidate for president.  To not do so would be intellectually dishonest, given his platform and his background.  Not many Catholic Democrats would be excited about a prohibitionist biblethumping moralist running for president.  Notably, German Americans, who mostly favored the Gold Standard, were alarmed at Bryan's support for Free Silver.  William McKinley, however, was in favor of the Gold Standard and open to future concessions to the Silver crowd.  And given how unlikely the Gold Democrats were to win the election, this obviously caused an outlier of Catholic areas trending GOP in 1896.  By 1900 German Catholics were back in the Democratic camp in opposition to McKinley's imperialism.  It should also be noted that voting percentages shouldn't be taken as absolute truth as voter intent, as many people can sit out an election and thus lead to skewed results.  Which brings me to the next topic:

2. The Election of 1920: While the GOP of 1863 said "Paddy you must fight for Lincoln" Wilson's support of the Versailles Treaty without reservations shouted out "Paddy you must fight for King George."  YOu have a large number of Irish Catholic machine bosses in the North who control various ethnic groups to deliver votes to the Democratic Party come election time.  They also have little reason at all to like the Republican Party.  Do the math.
(for those that dare to argue rising vote totals: Women's Suffrage)
This lack of activity or care by the bosses would have profound effects, as the GOP were able to rally ethnic voters in urban areas (quite a feat, if you know the history).  German Catholics in particular (who don't have the same die hard allegiance as Irish Catholics do), who were faced with discrimination during World War I, showed up in strong numbers for Harding.  The strongman tactics of one Attorney General Palmer would also rally other immigrant groups away from the Democratic home team.
Pretty much, the epic failure of the Wilson Administration is reason for the outlier of Republican victories in 1920.

3. The Election of 1924: a Three-way race for the presidency.  On one hand you had John Davis, a conservative Jeffersonian, as the Democratic candidate for President.  And not, contrary to popular myth he was not a "dry".  In fact he was pretty damned wet, a fact that escaped many who were dissuaded by the presence of his excessively prohibitionist runningmate Charles Bryan (who is brother of guess who!?  William J. Bryan!).  Meanwhile, LaFollette took a lot of ethnic laborers, for reasons that should be obvious.  And finally, Calvin Coolidge was quite an odd Massachusetts Republican, in that he was quite magnanimous with the heavily Democratic Irish of the Bay State: http://www.calvin-coolidge.org/html/coolidge_and_the_northampton_i.html.  Calvin Coolidge was, arguably, the most pro-Catholic Republican President (despite being president during a time when a lot of people in his own party were staunchly anti-Catholic) up to Eisenhower.

By all measures 1924 should've been the affirmation of a realignment of Catholics to the Republican Party.  However, the 1928 Campaign would brutally avert the trend, as the GOP went into anti-Catholic overdrive mode to gain Southern Protestant voters.  What might've been a trend turned out to be just an exception that proved the trend.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

While I can't speak much on the 1920's elections, as for 1896 and Catholics, Mech's quite right. It's estimated McKinley won between 40 and 45% of all Catholics, up about 20 points from the 1892 election. As well, Bryan was anathema to most Catholics who themselves were anti-prohibition. McKinley had been elected from a House district that was quite diverse and thus he was politically trained to create and be elected on quite diverse coalitions. In the case of 1896, that included things ranging from North-Eastern Protestants to Mid-Western Catholics. In places like Minnesota, as well as say Michigan and Ohio, Catholics made up large segments, even maybe a majority or two as I recall, of the population, It was with these Mid-Western farmers (as opposed to Western farmers which were pro-Bryan) that McKinley excelled. The Mid-West voted heavily for McKinley and that can be attributed, in part, to the Catholic votes in his favor. So, in conclusion, using 1896 as an example of "Republicans could get Catholics too" isn't that great of a choice. As well, 1896 marks the end of the Gilded Age, not the continuation. The Age as I understood it went from the 1860's to 1896.

[RI]

Hey, someone actually used a county map I made. Gives me warm fuzzies inside.

[Mechaman]

One more note:

It should be noted that there was a time when the Republican Party did actually try to appeal to Catholics and other immigrants.  In matter of fact, Carl Schurz, one of the infamous leaders of the Liberal Republican Party of yore, even made a speech entitled "True Americanism" to try to clear the Republican Party's name of nativism.  Even more impressive, the Republican Party even had some Irish Catholics in it's party in the early days, notably General Philip Sheridan and US Senator John Conness of California (who lost re-election because he advocated for Civil Rights and for Chinese immigration).
So, don't take this as a "the REpublican Party was founded in hatred!"  It most certainly was not.  Rather, the GOP was, like the Democratic Party, a big tent.  A tent of various politicians who were opposed to the spread of slavery (not necessarily out and out abolitionism, which Lincoln himself spoke against in 1860 when running for president and then at Inauguration).  Such a tent allowed and even encouraged immigrants to be a part of the party.  The inclusion of former Know Nothings (who by that time included a lot of former Whigs who weren't really as near racist or nativist as the founders of the party), understandably, hindered the efforts of Republicans to effectively ever appeal to immigrants.  Then there was the Civil War draft...........

By the time of Thomas Nast many Republicans had given up on winning a number of Catholics.  While I would argue that the accusations against Nast being racist against the Irish are hyperbole and that he was just politically incorrect to make a point, he and other Republican illustrators (such as Harper's Weekly) didn't help their cause.  It also didn't help that the Democrats, probably pissed off at the "red flag" tactics of the GOP, started using the Know Nothing card (in the north).  1874 is probably the most visible start of this strategy, as Democrats rallied ethnic Germans in Ohio in opposition of the "Know Nothing prohibitionists" of the Republican Party.

So initially, I would argue that the GOP wasn't explicitly anti-Catholic, just that the party seemed to endorse a bunch of issues that pissed of Catholics.  Later on I would argue that the absence of the big tent DID amplify the voice of anti-Catholics in the party.  I believe the phrase "familiarity breeds contempt" works well here.

Northern Democrats, however, went out of their way to win Catholics.  Democrats had the advantage in urban areas, due to established urban machinery dating back to the infant days of the Republic.  Bosses, like Tweed, would take advantage of the poor immigrant and Catholic masses, offering them money, food, shelter, and jobs if they voted Democratic.  Compare that to the GOP strategy of doing things that pissed off Catholic voters and it isn't hard to see how the population demographic was strong Democratic for a hundred plus years.