American History Hit - The Rise & Fall of Political Parties

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

The two party division of the US political system is as evident as ever as we warm up to the 2024 elections. But where does this state of affairs come from?Don speaks to Michael Barone, political analyst, historian and journalist, to find out more about the history of the Democratic and Republican parties, their forebears, and the possible downfall of political parties.Michael is author of 'How America’s Political Parties Change (and How They Don’t)'. His new book is ‘Mental Maps of the Founders’.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORYHIT1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The year is 1912. Theodore Roosevelt campaigns for the presidency

on a radical platform of farm relief, social insurance, and eight-hour workdays. Roosevelt has already served as president from 2001 to 1908, but now four years later, he means to do so again. This time, running not as the Republican nominee he once was. No, Roosevelt has formed his own party, the Progressive Party, known for its mascot,

The Bull Moose. Come election day, November 5th, 1912, he garners 27% of the popular vote, enough to make him the most successful third-party candidate in U.S. electoral history, although he loses to Woodrow Wilson, along with his Republican opposition, William Howard Taft. But why was this so remarkable,

this idea of a third-party candidacy, this challenge to the two-party status quo? Where did the two-party system even come from? in U.S. politics. Why is it that Democrats and Republicans have continued to hold the top spots in U.S. government for so long, so persistently?

And will this system ever change? This is American History Hit. So glad you found us. I'm Don Wildman. In the United States, if one loyally watches the news or scans the feed, it can seem like American life is chaotic and unpredictable one day to the next.

crises political, economic, and legal, relentlessly rise up only to collapse into the next ones. And it always seems so, often said the only constant of American history is change. Or is it? Behind the arch headlines and raged opinions and loudmouthed leaders, too often are about cynically grabbing eyeballs and eardrums, is a massive society that pushes capably onward against the odds. In every realm, there is a formidable system at work behind the scenes. There's bureaucracies in every state capital in D.C., courts and law enforcement everywhere, are local and national economies chugging ahead. And in politics, at the local, state, and national levels, there are the parties.

Our two major political parties, the Democrats and Republicans, are both entities over a century old. Republicans came into existence in the 1850s. The Democrats, two decades before them. Say what you will, or just check today's outlets for the latest vitriol, But these organizations, despite appearances to the contrary, are not going anywhere. News of the demise of either political party in American politics, as once with Mark Twain, has been grossly exaggerated. So it's important to consider these parties, their origins, their aims, their functions and dysfunctions.

Today instructed by author, columnist, political analyst, Michael Barone, whose book How Political Parties Change and How They Don't, published just a few years back, is a dependable examination of it all. Michael, thanks for joining us. That's good to be with you. We're all taking a collectively deep breath right now as we enter into yet another presidential election cycle. We are today, less than 12 months out from November 5th, 2024, when we'll cast our ballots and determine the direction of the federal government. And here comes a year's worth from the Democrats and the Republicans. I mean, there are other parties, of course, but today, let's take a step back and understand how these two major parties, Democrats and Republicans, became such a collective.

factor in our lives. Where does the idea of a political party even start in this country? And let's start with the Democrats. They come first. Well, the political parties actually predated the Democrats. If you go back to the founders era, except the first Congress in 1789, the first presidency, George Washington, all the leading members of government and different political points of view thought that political parties were terrible, and then they proceeded to create them and so forth. They did so largely in response to very major issues, the major issue about the organization of the national debt and the national bank, the financial underpinnings of the government as proposed by and mostly accomplished by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, supported by President Washington, and by what America's

position should be in the World War that broke out between revolutionary and ultimately Napoleonic France on the one hand and Great Britain on the other. France had been America's ally in the Revolutionary War. Britain was America's leading trade partner and cultural cousin, if you will, by virtue of the English language and the cultures that we had. And there was genuine differences over whether we should be allied to Britain, allied to France, how we should try to stay neutral between them as President Washington wished us to do. And so that got political parties going. The federalists who generally supported Hamilton's financial plans and were sympathetic to Britain and the Democratic Republicans who were sympathetic to Thomas Jefferson and

sympathetic to France. In that case, the Federalist Party kind of died out. About 1816, their last presidential campaign is going on. The Jeffersonian Republican James Monroe has no opposition in 1825, but then we get the U.S. parties again. And we get them over major issues. They have a certain lingering character that exists, even as their positions on some. subsequent issues change, even as their leaders change, even as their regional and demographic-based electorates change. On the one hand, you get the Democratic Party, which I date from 1832, from the effort to re-elect President Andrew Jackson.

At this point, that's nearly 200 years ago. It's the oldest political, continuing political party in the world. The Democratic Party has always been a collection of sort of out-people. People who thought they weren't typically American, but who taken together and when they hold together can be a majority. So Martin Van Buren organized for Andrew Jackson, a party that was based on people in New York and northerners, a state that had abolished slavery and about the slaveholding South. And he goes about very specifically creating that sort of unity.

It's a remarkably coherent history. The political party and understanding its advent and its function really does make sense of the process on the superficial level every day. It's really exciting that way. I want to back you up and ask you something. The formation of the party, I mean, it's kind of a chicken and the egg situation, isn't it? You're either creating a party to support a position or you're creating a party to amalgamate power, right? Well, you're creating a party to do a couple of different things. you're creating a political party to achieve certain short-term policy objectives,

but you're also, to some extent, looking to the future and looking to create a coalition. Martin Van Buren, when he was helping to set up Andrew Jackson's political party, was very specifically looking to do that, to unite the South and the North. He understood, as the founders did, as the next generation did, then America has always been a diverse country, culturally diverse, economically diverse, racially diverse, and so forth. A lot of times we talk about, well, we've become a diverse country only in the last 10 years or so. The answer is no, it's diverse since colonial times. And they realize that Van Buren is trying to put together a Democratic Party that will

hold the union together, he hopes, at least in his earlier part of his career. The Republican Party that springs into existence in 1854 in opposition to the Kansas Nebraska Act passed by Stephen Douglas, the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate then, is determined to resist the spread of slavery. Douglas's Kansas Nebraska Act allowed popular sovereignty, voters in the different territories to determine whether they would allow slavery or not before they became states. Basically, the Republicans opposed this. They saw this as move to spread slavery around the nation. And in combination with the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court in 1857 to recognize slave property in every state of the Union.

And they were against it. In that way, they were looking to change the country from what they feared it was or was becoming. They were looking for a long-term effect. Now, of course, as parties grow on, the initial causes become less important. Andrew Jackson's veto of the Second Bank of the United States was a major cause at the beginning of the Democratic Party. We don't worry about the Second Bank of the United States anymore. It's been gone for a long time, although we do talk about its arguable descendant of the Federal Reserve. And the question about slavery in the territories got definitively solved by the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments,

which got rid of slavery altogether as a legal institution. In U.S. politics, as with U.K., is it usually a broad matter of conservative versus liberal? I mean, is that sort of how it always comes? down the middle? Well, conservative versus liberal, I would tend to disagree with that. We have tempted in American politics, certainly the years I was growing up, and you still see this, that what I would call a sort of New Deal historians view. It's the Democratic Party represents the masses and the economically less well-off people, and they are supported by liberals that want to use government to give them more money, more opportunities. And the Republican Party

which is the party of the rich people and so forth, the people who oppose many of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal measures. Well, Roosevelt and the New Deal are 85 to 90 years old now. Those issues have passed us by. Some of their policies have become thoroughly ammished in American life. Others have been forgotten for 90 years. The National Recovery Administration that allowed 700 industries to set prices. That was ruled unconstitutional in 1935. That was 88 years ago.

It hasn't come back since. What I think it's more likely is that the way I phrase it is, the Democratic Party, as I said, is a party that has tended to be a collection of diverse out peoples. The Republican Party is a party centered on people who are considered by themselves and others to be ordinary Americans, but who by themselves. in this diverse country are never a majority. They need allies as well in order to win in a binary election system. I think that is the better way to look at it. And I would superimpose on that something that I think has been relevant in the last 10 years, which is a pattern that we also saw

in 18th century British politics. The court versus the country, the metropolis, the metropole, the center city versus the countryside. And we've seen American politics separate into this sort of way as we have seen it in UK and other places. And if you look at recent election returns in the Anglo-Sphere, the Brexit referendum. 60% of London and about 60% of Scotland reject Brexit. They want to stay in the European Union. But if you look at England outside of London, London, it's 56% for Brexit. That's the countryside, the heartland versus the metropole. You look at Australia's recent referendum on whether or not there should be some institution called a voice representing indigenous people. And that carries the high-income, high-college education precincts in Melbourne, the more left wing of Australia's large metro areas and of Sydney, its largest metro area. It loses basically

everywhere else, including areas with indigenous peoples in them. What do we see in the pattern of Donald Trump Republicans versus Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Democrats? We see a movement where the largest metropolitan areas have been combined with high-income people and ethnic minority. the metropole, whether it's, you know, central Washington, the San Francisco Bay Area, metro Chicago, New England, versus the heartland. So you now have a situation where the Midwest and the South, which provided the combatants on the two different sides of the Civil War, are now voting more or less similarly. And the Northeast Coast and the West Coast are voting more similarly for one might call the court party versus the country party.

Those have evolved, but I think they're consistent with the overall pattern that I was saying before. Non-college-educated white people, and one might add increasing numbers, it appears, of non-college educated, black and Hispanic Americans are now sort of the core of the Republican Party constituency. And you can say those are the people that in many ways are seen as. ordinary Americans, but who by themselves are not a majority. The Democratic Party has been a party of people in high-income people in the large metropolitan areas, university towns, racial minorities, though their percentages among them seem to be decreasing, and people who

feel that they're somehow different from the large majority of Americans. So consequently, the particular components ethnically, geographically, of either party have kind of changed. The South, once the most Democratic part of the country, is now the most Republican part of the country, et cetera, et cetera. But that sort of configuration of those two parties, the personality, if you will, of those two parties, seems to persist. And you can see, you know, the Republican Party taking up more of the non-concounter. college-educated voters, the Democratic Party, more of the college-educated voters. This has been accentuated during the year of Donald Trump. It was apparent that this was going on to a lesser extent, certainly in the 1990s, when you see Bill Clinton doing better in the

largest metropolitan areas, and his percentages, despite his southern accent and his real wonderful capacity to win the votes of people who are like him from the rural south that was going there. And, you know, you see it in the fact that Al Gore loses the presidency in part because he loses the states of West Virginia, which had been a sickly Democratic and his home state of Tennessee in the year 2000. So that change was starting to occur long before Trump became a factor. It's been accentuated now. I want to back up to fascinating thing to me. I mean, let's be honest. We're talking about the Democrats, Republicans. There are a number of other names, not significant parties, but it's still a Democratic country where many people can form their own coalitions. In each of these cases, the Democrats and Republicans, there is a birth that happens. And I just want to walk away from this conversation, understanding how a party is born. You mentioned Martin Van Buren coming out of Andrew Jackson. 1832 is kind of the roughly the date that's always given for the birth of the Democratic Party. Why do we call it that? Was there a moment they announced it? Hey, we're here, elect us? Well, in fact, the 1832 is the first Democratic National Convention. And we have had

them periodically every four years since that date. And we're going to have another one next year. It appears that it's likely to nominate Joe Biden without serious contest. But we'll see. that's not necessarily going to happen. That's a stretch that will go back, what would it be, 192 years. That's a pretty long time for a political institution to have regular quarterly meetings. Van Buren was moved to organize a national convention because he wanted to signal national support for the re-election of the incumbent president, Andrew Jackson. There was a party called the Anti-Masonic Party in upstate New York. York, which had held a national convention in 1831.

Now, not many Americans walking around today can tell you what the anti-Masonic party was or was formed. It was formed in some ways out of a conspiracy theory that a group of members of the Masons, which had been a very prominent order. I mean, George Washington was a Mason. Henry Clay was a Mason. Had murdered a man named William Morgan and the Mississippi. covered up in upstate New York.

And you had a number of people who tend to support this, including a man named Thurlow Weed. Most people don't remember again who Thurlow Weed was. But Thurlow Weed was a sort of a journalist, a politician. He was an organizer for the Anni-Mysonic Party. He becomes the organizer for the young William Seward, who a few years later is elected as the Whig Party. governor of New York against the Democratic Party. He becomes a leader of the Republican Party as

it's formed in 1850. Thurlow Weed in what had become by that time the nation's largest state, New York is laced throughout the political history in this period. He's kind of an eminous greese with sort of a wonderful name. So the Anamasonic Party forms this convention to nominate William Wirt, the former Attorney General under President Monroe. the President of the United States. Well, they're not going to really win that many votes or do that much. They'll get some votes in New York. And Dan Buren says, okay, we're going to have a national convention.

During the period of the Jefferson Party, the then Republican Party or Democratic Republican Party, they had nominated their presidential candidates by a congressional caucus, by the number of members of their party in Congress had done this. In 1824, when there are four or five candidates vying all under the rubric of the Republican Party to be president to succeed James Monroe, only one of them goes to the caucus. Most members of the party don't go. The caucus becomes discredited as a means of choosing. So Van Buren, inspired by the anti-Masonic, operating in his own neighborhood of upstate New York, decides that they'll have a convention.

It's going to nominate Andrew Jackson for president. And oh, by the way, it nominates Martin Van Buren for vice president. So it starts off in a way as kind of a personal vehicle for a man who was a very idiosyncratic person and who dominates the Democratic Party in a way that no president has since. He's nominated 1832 for president. He does not run again. He's an old man in 1836. He's 69 years old.

which is obviously too old to run for president, as we know today. And so Martin Van Buren becomes his candidate. He supports him Van Buren wins. Four years later, Van Buren again, supported by Jackson, is the candidate for re-election. He's defeated by the other party that has sprung up in the interim, the Wake Party. And then in 1844, Jackson's still alive and kicking out in his state,

the hermitage outside. of Nashville, Tennessee. Martin Van Buren issues a statement with the Whig, Henry Clay, that he's not going to favor the annexation of Texas, which has created itself an independent republic. Jackson says, oh, that's wrong. I'm not going to support Van Buren. I'm going to support my young friend from Tennessee, James K. Polk, for the nomination. And by gosh, James K. Polk is nominated.

It is by a narrow margin elected president of the United States. an extremely successful president presides over the admission of Texas to the Union and the acquisition of California, of the Oregon Territory in California in the southwest of the Mexican War. It's saluted by Andrew Jackson until Jackson dies in his first year in the presidency. Jackson determined all of his successors in his party, all the successive nominees. No president's done that sense. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. You mentioned the Whigs, and basically we are going to follow this timeline for the rest of this conversation of how these parties rise and then fall.

The Whig has always been a very interesting one, named after, literally after the United Kingdom one, right? I mean, this was an anti-royalist party made into an anti-Andor Jackson Party, right? Well, the Whigs and the Tories are two names that come from 17th century politics. in the period of 1679 to 1681. There were three general elections in that period, as I'm sure you're aware. And during that time, it was a binary issue that was real problem then. There was a bill to exclude Catholics from the throne of England that was proposed in parliament backed by a man named the first Earl of Shasbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the proprietor of the South Carolina colony.

and as a matter of fact, if you go to Charleston, there's the Ashley River next to Charleston and the Cooper River next to Charleston, all named after Shasbury. And in particular, they wanted to exclude the king's brother, James Duke of York, who was a Catholic from the throne. The king, Charles II, was against this. And basically, you had these three elections that were decided. And the terms, Whigs and Tories were two terms that those on opposite sides of this issue applied to their opponents. One of them meant cattle thieves and the other meant sheep stealers. And I basically forgotten which one is which. But these were terms so in the American Revolution, Tories were people that favored a continuing colonial relationship with

Great Britain and opposed the American Revolution. So when Henry Clay, Senator from Kentucky, the Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams decides to oppose Jackson in 1832 and favors the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States and opposes Jackson a variety of things. He's fishing around for a name for the party and he comes up with Whigs. And so he borrows that for the British. Now the Whigs, Clay is beaten by Jackson pretty thoroughly in 1832, much more than he expected. and 1836, the Whigs decide that in a nation of cultural diversity, we're going to run different candidates in different parts of the country. We'll run Daniel Webster in New England.

We'll run William Henry Harrison in the Midwest. We'll run somebody else in the South, a guy from Tennessee in the South. That was not successful. But in 1840, the United behind William Henry Harrison, former general, former governor of the Indiana territory, resident of Ohio, and Harrison is elected. So the Whig Party elects two presidents, both of them former generals, William Henry Harris at 1840, Zachary Taylor in 1848. They both die soon after in office, Harrison after a month, Taylor, after something like 15 months, and their successors take over and pursue different policies. So the Whig Party, although it had majorities in

Congress, although it had some eminent members of Congress, Senator William Seward of New York, the young Abraham Lincoln, for his one-term congressman from Illinois, they never really had a successful running for the presidency. Well, is it at all because you're speaking in the negative about them so much? What were they for, as opposed to opposing Jackson? Well, they would for what Henry Clay called the American system. They were for higher tariffs, which they were able to get or to protect to some degree. They were for national government being involved in internal improvements, building canals and things, although this became less relevant as you had private capital building railroads,

becoming much more important than state governments building canals. I have always been talking about this since I started this podcast. The mercantile era of America changes society, changes American culture so profoundly. because people start making money and changing their lives. And they see this sort of philosophical difference of life. I've always wondered if that had a lot to do with the Whigs and the sense of a sort of tectonic shift in American thinking and society among the common people. Well, the historian Daniel Walker Howe, who's written on the Whigs

and one of the great surveys of this period of American history, is kind of an admirer of the Whigs. Another great historian, Sean Willence, is kind of an admirer of the Democrats of this period. Both are wonderful writers and excellent historians. The Wigs wanted to foster business in various ways. They were more sympathetic to corporations, although one of the things you have to realize at this time is that you didn't just form a corporation by filling in a form. You had every specific corporation had to be created by an act of a state legislature. There was no general incorporation law.

So the creation and mobilization of capital in order to do these things is difficult. You're having some great technological developments that, in effect, reduce distance and bring people more together. The railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph are coming in this period. So transportation and communication by the 1840s and certainly by the period of the Civil War is immensely different from what it was during the period of the American Revolutionary War. I mean, we still have civil war enactors in the United States acting within a technological framework that seems, you know, obviously out of date for contemporary Americans, but to have a certain familiarity. They know what it is to walk on a train and to have a telegraph deliver a message in some way or form. It's a lot harder to reenact the revolutionary period when you don't have those things. I think that the period that we're talking about with all that change, which is really forgotten by people,

very much reflects the period we're in right now, given the amount of technological change that our generation and the next generation, There has been this flux in American society due to the internet and so forth that has really sent a shock through our culture that we've yet to control and understand and see it play out. I think that same thing was happening during that period of time, 1830 until 18, until the Civil War. And it was being felt and expressed through political functions, really. The Whigs become the Republicans. I've always wondered how closely that is allied or related to the issue of slavery. Was it Abraham Lincoln who sort of saw that this organization, could transform into for this function?

Well, it wasn't Lincoln specifically. He was one of the early ones that kind of catches on to this as William Seward, but they're not the originators. Basically, the Whigs like the Democrats of the Jacksonian period, were a party that had a northern branch and a southern branch. And as the issues come forward out of victory in the Mexican War, the acquisition of the Southwest, the question becomes,

you're going to allow slavery in the, new territories. And that becomes a very divisive binary issue, and it's one that's a little hard to compromise. You say, well, maybe we'll let half the black people be slaves and half of them not be slaves. That kind of a compromise, you're not going to work very well. And it basically tore the Whig Party apart. And the Democratic Party became increasingly oriented to the south with the Kansas Nebraska Act of Stephen Douglas of Illinois, which he actually put through in part to facilitate the financing of a transcontinental railroad through his hometown, adopted hometown of Chicago. He owned a lot of real estate in downtown Chicago. And you had

the question of, can slaves be allowed in these other areas? And you had a lot of people who had accumulated through cultural attitude, through religious revivalism. We're building on the Christian tradition of the moral equality of each person and drawing on the language of the not particularly Christian Thomas Jefferson draft of the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal. The United States, by the 1850s, is rather lonely in its status of having slavery. The Latin American republics that have liberated themselves from the Spanish colonies have all declared that they don't have slavery. You have slavery in Brazil, which is a monarchy, Portuguese tradition. You have slavery in the still Spanish colonies of Cuba

and Puerto Rico, which were there. And slavery is being abolished juridically in the rest of of the world. I mean, the British are abolishing slavery in the colonies that they're creating in Africa, just as the Royal Navy had been enforcing a ban on the slave trade in the oceans of the world. So this is the lonely position. And the Republican Party is formed almost in an instant, in weeks. You know, if we were talking at this point in the 1854 cycle, election cycle, that is November 1853, nothing like the Republican Party existed. Stephen Douglas was thinking about the Kansas Nebraska Act. He hadn't proposed it.

None of this stuff had happened. By June, there's a Republican Party fielding candidates in the north, and it's a northern only party. One of the things that happens is first presidential election in 1856. It carries what I call the New England. Diaspora in our diverse country, the New England Yankees had been a separate group. They were separate in the Revolutionary War, were the most strongest group against England. They spread out in the years of the early Republic, west along the Erie Canal and upstate

New York, then across Lake Ureth and Northern Ohio, Southern Michigan, parts of Northern Indiana, northern Illinois. Chicago is a creation of Yankee diaspora. And you have the religious revival people from New England, Lyman Beach, or Charles Grandison Finney from upstate New York, who are creating a culture that includes a substantial anti-slavery impulse. And so the Republican Party becomes a free Soil Party. It's not for the abolition of slavery. That was considered too wild and crazy. That was outside the Overton window. But it was a party that said, we're going to try and cabin slavery out of existence and make it much more difficult to exist where it does. We want to move towards the extinction of slavery legally, nonviolently, and so forth. This is a new development. In some ways,

It's in line with the founders. I've just written a book on the founding fathers and their geographic orientations called Mental Maps of the Founders. It's being published this month by Encounter books. And one of the things that's clear in it is that the move against slavery was moving forward. When George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were young men, basically nobody was anti-slavery. Washington owned a couple hundred slaves. Franklin in Philadelphia owned a few slaves. This was considered unremarkable. Both men turned against slavery in their lifetime. By the time Franklin's attending the Constitutional Convention, 1787, is an old man, oldest delegate. He is opposed to slavery. Washington frees his slaves in his will. The legislatures of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island abolished slavery in 1780, between 1780 and 1784.

the Massachusetts, New Hampshire courts say slavery is illegal in their states in the 1780s under the Massachusetts Constitution, drawn up by John Adams. Vermont in 1777 isn't yet really part of the United States, but they produce a constitution that says slavery is illegal. New York followed in 1799, New Jersey, kind of a laggard in 1804 with gradual abolition of slavery. an entirely satisfactory things from our point of view, but a step in the right direction. So the founders thought that they were moving towards extinction of slavery. For a variety of reasons, the huge profitability of the cotton crop and the cotton south, that doesn't happen as the republic goes on. But you see, when Lincoln is talking about slavery, when the Republicans are talking about slavery in the 1850s and not extending slavery. They're drawing on the vocabulary and the historic experience of the founders, of the movement that had gotten started and was moving forward then. They are drawing specifically on Jefferson's language.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and so forth. And they force some of the Southern Democrats to say Jefferson was wrong. Declaration isn't law and Jefferson was wrong. well, that's sort of a difficult rhetorical position. And as it turned out, it proved to be unsustainable. I think listeners would do well to consider this conversation and your books as a starting point for understanding how much of a tip of an iceberg each one of these parties really is. And you can find your way in their history to so many different tangents of American history

that are so complex in the 19th century, for real. Before we close today, I want to talk about the no-nothing party. So this is the American Party. It's known by people like me as the No Nothing Party. It's actually a movement, the No Nothing movement. Yeah, there was one American Party guy that writes to another and says, if you're asked any questions about our party, say you know nothing. So that's where the no nothing phrase comes in. One of the things that people don't realize, we have this tremendous influx of immigration from 1846 to 1857.

In a country of less than 30 million people, you were getting. something like 4 million people arriving during that period. And they are unfamiliar peoples. They are Irish Catholics, some of them speaking Gaelic and not English. In an American Republic that was very much orders he added towards Protestants. We had freedom of religion. We had no federal establishment of religion under the First Amendment. But there was grave suspicion of Catholics going back to the 17th century religious wars and the fact that the Catholic Church officially at that time didn't like republics and didn't like having people chosen by elections. That was disfavored by the Catholic Church at that time.

So consequently, they felt that these people might have not a threat to the economy. You had many Germans, both Protestants and Catholics in large number, not speaking the English language. They brought a variety of unfamiliar customs here, including such awful things as the Christmas tree and the kindergarten. But in any case, we have had episodes now and within the last 20 years, really even more before 2007, when people said, and during this year, it said the Biden administration, when we've had a big influx of immigrants coming in, many of them illegal in large numbers. if you look at the number of immigrants as a percentage of the pre-existing population, the immigration influx in the period 1846 to 57 was three to four times the size of the immigration influxes that we've been familiar with, 1982 to 2007, 2021 to present. And that bothered a lot of Americans. You had an election for the Massachusetts legislature in 1854. The American Party wins every single seat in the state that had gotten the largest percentage share of Irish Catholic immigration.

And so the Whig Party is sort of fluttering out of existence. It's northern and southern branches are at odds with each other. It's not a viable party anymore. And there was really a question of what would replace it. There was the American Party whose focus was against immigration. There were prohibition movements. They prohibited alcohol in the state of Maine, for example, in 1855, the temperance movements. And people like Abraham Lincoln, who was a non-alcohol drinker, for example, was sympathetic to the temperance movement.

Many women got involved in that and although they didn't vote, they had political influence. People listened to them. and you had the Republican Party against slavery in the territories. So it was a close-run thing of which, if any, of those movements in the very turbulent 1850s, a period of huge economic growth, a period of territorial change in the questioning which slavery extend across the country, the insertion of a large Catholic population in the major cities in the country, all previous immigration had tended to be diffused in rural areas spread across the countryside.

The Irish immigrants tended to cluster in the big cities. New York was growing to be a city of a million people in 1860. More than that, if you would go across the Bay and include Brooklyn, which was the third or fourth largest city in the country by itself. This was a very unsettling time. I hope that the 1850s does not turn out to be an entirely, relevant precedent because, of course, it led to a civil war and to huge amounts of death and carnage and destruction of various sorts.

Well, that is a precedent we can learn from. Yeah, it's an unsettling period. We have a history where we think mostly things go our own way, and that even when we see tragedies, you know, when we've had terrible wars with very many people, hundreds of thousands of Americans killed, we see in both cases. cases, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, the commander-in-chief, thanks to the medium of photography, ages before our eyes, bearing the burdens of that, dies at the moment of victory. Yes, yes.

It seems providential for America, just as it seemed providential to 19th century Americans that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who together worked and wrote the Declaration of Independence, died on the same day exactly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence came in. These are ominous signs. However, we have the machinery of democratic politics to hold us up. Well, we have it to try and so forth. I think that unsettling periods in my own lifetime have been, you know, I think one of the reasons that the assassination of President Kennedy

became such a horrifying moment to Americans is that we were only supposed to lose presidents after they'd won major wars, it aged before our times. President Kennedy had not won a major war. He had not aged before our times. It seemed out of kilter. Maybe Providence wasn't looking after us anymore. 9-11, maybe that's another example. Currently, the unpopularity of the two leading...

candidates for the party's nominations, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the current and former president. Some Americans are saying, gee, well, we had a good 200 years. Maybe we're at the beginning of a bad 200 years. Let me close this off, Michael. I have to give you a proper goodbye here. This is a fascinating subject. It's a sprawling subject. We can only really say that we talked about two decades or three decades at the most, but there's a bull moose party, there's all kinds of other conversations. Perhaps we'll continue this on on a part two, Michael. Michael Barone is a titan of political analysis. I mentioned the book from 2019, how America's political parties change and how they don't,

but your most recent work takes a look at the founding fathers from a new angle. Michael, you mentioned it already. Mental Maps of the Founders. When's that coming out? It's coming out on November 28th. You can go order it on the internet right now. It's a short book with six essays on six founding fathers, and I hope that people will buy it, read, and enjoy it.

I'm right in line already. Thank you, Michael. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements

to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.

Thanks so much.