Democrats

Bob McCarty provides a short history of the Democrat party:

The modern Democratic Party was born in February 1825 following the disputed presidential election of 1824. In that election, between John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts; Henry Clay of Kentucky; William H. Crawford of Georgia; and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, Jackson won a plurality of both the national popular vote and the electoral vote. However, since he had failed to win a clear majority of the electoral votes, the 12th Amendment dictated that the names of the top three candidates… Adams, Crawford, and Jackson… be sent to the House of Representatives, presided over by none other than Speaker Henry Clay, for the final selection.

Clay threw his support to Adams, who became the sixth president of the United States; Jackson resigned from the Senate and launched a campaign for the party’s 1828 nomination; and Clay relinquished the Speaker’s gavel to become Secretary of State in the Adams Administration. The Jackson faction of the party, referring to the highly-suspicious Adams-Clay alliance as a “corrupt bargain,” split off from the party and established the Democratic Party. It was out of that “corrupt bargain” that the DNA of the modern Democratic Party was formed.

In the years between 1825 and 1860, as abolitionist sentiment gained more and more support, the Democratic Party, north and south, became the party of slavery, championing such pro-slavery laws as the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Fugitive Slave Law. Then, after opposing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Democrats opposed ratification of the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery; the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to the freed slaves; and the 15th Amendment, which gave voting rights to the freed slaves.

Following the Civil War, in states where they held essentially one-party control, Democrats enacted Black Codes and an endless variety of Jim Crow laws. In 1866, as a means of ensuring the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws were fully enforced, Democrats created a paramilitary auxiliary, the Ku Klux Klan.

In the remaining years of the 19th century, Democrats established an unbroken record of opposition to civil rights legislation. They opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the First Reconstruction Act of 1867, the Enforcement Act of 1870, the Force Act of 1871, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Then, after regaining control of Congress and the White House in the 1890s, Democrats passed the Repeal Act of 1894, repealing much of the civil rights legislation enacted by Republicans in the decades since the Civil War.

Later, in the mid-20th century, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and the Equal Employment Act of 1972 became law only with strong Republican support. All of those bills received strong opposition from Democrats in one-party states, mostly in the South.

During the 1930s, Democrats began to build a coalition of special interest groups. With the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, giving workers the right to organize unions and to engage in collective bargaining with employers, Democrats saw an opportunity to capture a stable and reliable voting bloc. If they could convince working men and women that they were the sole protectors of their unique government-created “right” to hold hostage the private property of the owners of business, they would be the beneficiaries of many millions of dollars during each campaign season and tens of millions of votes on Election Day. Since that day, Democrats have been the dutiful servants of the labor bosses. Whatever labor has wanted, labor got… no matter how ethically or economically ill-advised the demand.

Read the rest here.