The Democratic Party’s origins are in the party created by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in response to the pro-British, active government strategy of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists. It was later more fully democratized by Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and 1830s. This new democracy was a states’ rights, pro-Southern coalition of state parties which maintained its identity through the crisis of the Civil War and Reconstruction at the cost of its predominance at the national level.

From 1861 to 1929, the Democrats were subordinate to the pro-business strategies of the Republican Party and suffered from contradictions between what, in the 1920s, became its “wet” and “dry” city and country wings. There was little cohesion in a party whose leadership had included Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan and Grover Cleveland. However, by 1928, the Democrats had fashioned a new, urban constituency made up of turn-of-the-century immigrants and their children, mostly Southern and Eastern Europeans, Roman Catholics and Jews, who rallied to the nation’s first Catholic candidate for president, Al Smith from New York.

Smith’s defeat, with the important intrusion of the Great Depression, spawned the New Deal coalition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which dominated the nation until 1968. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats, building on the Progressive legacy constructed a distinctively American version of the welfare state: Social Security, the rights of labor, regulation, moderate social planning, Keynesian economics, healthcare, unemployment, disability and modest welfare provisions. What the New Deal marginalized African Americans and other minorities, and women—the Fair Deal, New Frontier and “Great Society” addressed.

The Democrats successfully claimed the mantle of “The Common Man,” and excoriated the GOP as the party of Hoover, the Depression and “economic royalists” until the volcanic explosions of the 1960s subverted their mandate. Republican conservatives, sparked by the demagogic, populist appeal of George Wallace, which Richard Nixon parlayed into his “Silent Majority” were able to take advantage of the decade’s dislocations (e.g. the Vietnam War, race riots, campus disorders and rising crime rates). The Democrats lost support among “ethnics,” the descendants of turn-ofthe-nineteenth-century immigrants and white Southerners.

Aside from the anomaly of the 1976 postWatergate victory of Jimmy Carter, the Democrats floundered, holding on to their congressional domination, but losing, especially in the new suburbs, to more conservative Republicans. Between Reagan’s 1980 triumph and the Newt Gingrich-engineered congressional wins of 1994, the Democrats, perceived as a “tax and spend” and dovish party seemed divided between a liberal wing, devoted to both New Deal and social movement-based policies (ranging from universal healthcare to gay rights), and a more conservative to moderate wing, organized by the Democratic Leadership Council, arguing for a more prodefense, modified welfare state, pro-suburban strategy. Bill Clinton in both his 1992 and 1996 victories marked the seeming victory of the latter approach.

The Democratic Party remains the party of trade unionists, most minorities, liberal professionals and what critics called “identity politics,” but under Clinton, who declared that “the era of Big Government is over,” it sought to become a “new” Democratic Party committed to inclusion, modified racial policies, tougher approaches to crime and foreign policy The federal government, albeit smaller and smarter, remained an article of faith and policy for the Democrats in the twentieth century.