Broad Coalitions From Each Party
Both parties comprised broad-based voting coalitions. Throughout the North, businessmen, shop owners, skilled craftsmen, clerks and professionals favored the Republicans as did more modern, commercially oriented farmers. In the South, the Republicans won strong support from the Freedmen (newly enfranchised African Americans), but the party was usually controlled by local whites ("scalawags") and opportunistic Yankees ("carpetbaggers.") The race issue pulled the great majority of white southerners into the Democratic Party as Redeemers. The Democratic Party comprised conservative pro-business Bourbon Democrats, who usually controlled the national convention from 1868 until their great defeat by William Jennings Bryan in 1896. The Democratic coalition comprised traditional Democrats in the North (many of them former Copperheads). They were joined by the Redeemers in the South and by Catholic immigrants, especially Irish American and German Americans. In addition the party attracted unskilled laborers, and hard-scrabble old-stock farmers in remote areas of New England and along the Ohio River valley.
Read more about this topic: Third Party System
Famous quotes containing the words broad and/or party:
“Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more understanding than women, who have but small and narrow breasts, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children.”
—Martin Luther (1483–1546)
“In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)