New Deal Coalition

The New Deal coalition was the alignment of interest groups and voting blocks who supported the New Deal and voted for Democratic presidential candidates from 1932 until approximately 1966, which made the Democratic Party the majority party during the Fifth Party System. Franklin D. Roosevelt created a coalition that included the Democratic party, big city machines, labor unions, minorities (racial, ethnic and religious), liberal farm groups, intellectuals, and the South. It was opposed by the Conservative coalition of northern Republicans and southern Democrats. The coalition fell apart after 1966 but it remains the model that party activists seek to replicate.

Realignment

The 1932 election brought about a major realignment in political party affiliation, and is widely considered to be a realigning election that created the Fifth Party System. Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up his New Deal and forged a coalition of Big City machines, labor unions, liberals, farmers, ethnic and racial minorities (especially Catholics, Jews and African Americans), and Southern whites. These disparate voting blocs together formed a majority of voters and handed the Democratic Party seven victories out of nine presidential elections (1932-36-40-48, 1960, 1964), as well as control of both houses of Congress during all but 4 years 1932-1980 (Republicans won in 1946 and 1952). Starting in the 1930s, the term "liberal" was used in U.S. politics to indicate supporters of the coalition, while "conservative" denoted its opponents. The coalition was never formally organized, and the constituent members often disagreed.

Cities

Roosevelt had a magnetic appeal to city dwellers, especially the poorer minorities who got recognition, unions, relief jobs and beer thanks to Roosevelt. Taxpayers, small business and the middle class voted for Roosevelt in 1936, but turned sharply against him after the recession of 1937-38 seemed to belie his promises of recovery.

Roosevelt discovered an entirely new use for city machines in his reelection campaigns. Traditionally, local bosses minimized turnout so as to guarantee reliable control of their wards and legislative districts. To carry the electoral college, however, Roosevelt needed massive majorities in the largest cities to overcome the hostility of suburbs and towns. Roosevelt used the Works Progress Administration (1935-1942) as a national political machine through patronage given out by Postmaster General James A. Farley and WPA head Harry Hopkins. Men on relief could get WPA jobs regardless of their politics, but hundreds of thousands of supervisory jobs were given to local Democratic machines; one went to Ronald Reagan's father. The 3.5 million voters on relief payrolls during the 1936 election cast 82% percent of their ballots for Roosevelt. The vibrant labor unions, heavily based in the cities, likewise did their utmost for their benefactor, voting 80% for him, as did Irish, Italian and Jewish voters. In all, the nation's 106 cities over 100,000 population voted 70% for FDR in 1936, compared to 59% elsewhere. Roosevelt won reelection in 1940 thanks to the cities. In the North, the cities over 100,000 gave Roosevelt 60% of their votes, while the rest of the North favored Republican Wendell Willkie by 52%. It was just enough to provide the critical electoral college margin.

With the start of full-scale war mobilization in the summer of 1940, the cities revived. The war economy pumped massive investments into new factories and funded round-the-clock munitions production, guaranteeing a job to anyone who showed up at the factory gate.

Equality

World War Two had a surprisingly small impact on voting patterns. There was no great realignment, except perhaps among German-Americans, who moved toward the GOP. The war, however, promoted both the ideology and actuality of shared sacrifice and equality. Heavy income taxes, rationing of basic foods, clothing, and gasoline, and the shutoff of new housing and cars, together with the end of unemployment and very high paying war jobs for the unskilled and semiskilled, made for a radical shift toward economic equality. The index of income inequality shifted dramatically (the richest 5% received 34% of all disposable (after tax) income in 1929, 25% in 1940, and 16% in 1944.

New Dealers, shut out of the war agencies, controlled the price control agency (The OPA), and government propaganda. The wartime propaganda campaigns stressing shared sacrifice and the equality of all soldiers reflected a new consensus of equalitarian thinking. The combination obviously benefited the New Deal, and especially the labor union component of the coalition. The unions seized their opportunity by attacking business for racking off excess profits, and by demanding higher wages in a nationwide wave of strikes in 1946.

Public opinion agreed (in July 1945) with the equalitarian argument about fat cats: 61% though big business owners and executives were paid too much, and 35% added doctors and lawyers. However, only 22% thought factory workers were paid too little, while 33% thought office workers were underpaid. Furthermore, a majority as early as summer 1942 identified "labor leaders" as "taking unfair advantage of the war to get money or power for themselves."

After the war the unions retained recognition and made some wage gains at the cost of massive defeat of their candidates in 1946, and the passage of the hated Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. By 1946 the Republicans confronted the equality issue head-on in attacking rationing, especially the price controls on meat imposed by Office of Price Administration as an equalitarian device. The issue was a winner for the conservatives, with only 22% of the people supporting the government on this issue.

Party loyalty

In 1948 Truman and his fellow Democrats emphasized party loyalty, knowing they had a clear advantage in the electorate. Partisanship in 1948 was 49% Democratic, 30% Republican, and 22% independent. They also emphasized the New Deal heritage, because the people had fond memories of it. Of Truman supporters, 92% thought the New Deal had done more good than harm, along with 87% of the undecided. Amazingly, a majority of Dewey supporters (54%) agreed. Thus Dewey's strategy of downplaying his disagreements with the New Deal ("me-tooism") was essential.

Class and labor unions

The importance of the union vote grew proportionately to the unions themselves. In 1936, only 7% of the labor force belonged to unions; then came the great organizing drives and by 1940 the total was 16%. The enlarged unionized industries dramatically, pulling up the proportion to 21%. Despite intense fears of a postwar reaction of the sort that had humbled them in the 1920s, union coverage of the non-farm labor force stabilized, and even grew, reaching 23% in 1948. The labor vote divided three ways, CIO, AFL and non-unionized workers.

Table 1: Labor Vote, % Democratic

• 1936 1940 1944 1948
• Nonunion 72% 64 56% 60%
• AFL 80 71 69 73
• CIO 85 79 78 76
• union effect +8 +8 +16 +14

The CIO was younger, more radical and poorer than the better- established AFL, and its membership voted from 3 to 9 points more Democratic than the AFL members. However, both union groups were more Democratic than workers of similar occupations who did not belong to unions, by a factor of 8 to 16 points. That additional union effect can be attributed to the many vigorous get-out-the- Democratic-vote campaigns launched by the unions.

The strong class effects visible in the New Deal elections through 1948 were not just the product of working class action. The middle class played a central role, voting heavily Republican. Probably tax protest was a major motive. By 1952, however, the growing affluence of the working class weakened the protest power of the union vote, while the social mobility of many ethnics enlarged the middle class to include millions of people of Democratic heritage. Class did not quite disappear, but it did fade away.[10]

End of New Deal coalition

The coalition fell apart in many ways but started with Farley and Roosevelts break over the third term nominee in 1940. The first cause was lack of a leader of the stature of Roosevelt. The closest was perhaps Lyndon Johnson, who deliberately tried to reinvigorate the old coalition, but in fact drove its constituents apart. New issues such as civil rights, the Vietnam War, abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, and urban riots tended to split the coalition and drive many members away. Meanwhile, the Republican party made major gains by promising lower taxes and control of crime.

The big-city machines faded away in the 1940s, with a few exceptions, such as Chicago and Albany. The New Deal had made them heavily dependent on the WPA for patronage, and, when Congress shut down the WPA, the cities could not find a substitute. Furthermore, World War II brought such a surge of prosperity that the relief mechanism of the WPA, CCC, etc. was no longer useful as a political tool.

Labor unions crested in size and power in the 1950s, then went into steady decline. They continue into the 21st century as major backers of the Democrats, but with so few members they have lost much of their influence.

Intellectuals gave increasing support to Democrats since 1932. The Vietnam War, however, caused a serious split, with the New Left reluctant to support most Democratic presidential candidates.

The European ethnic groups came of age after the 1960s. Ronald Reagan pulled many of the working class social conservatives into the Republican party as Reagan Democrats. Many middle class ethnics saw the Democratic party as a working class party and preferred the GOP as the middle class party. In recent years Democratic rhetoric has heavily stresssed the "Democrats are for the middle class" theme. The Jewish community still comprises a core Democratic constituency; in 2004 74% voted for Kerry, in 2006 87% voted for Democratic House candidates.

African Americans grew stronger in their Democratic loyalties and in their numbers. By the 1960s, they were a much more important part of the coalition than in the 1930s. Their Democratic loyalties cut across all income and geographic lines to form the single most unified bloc of voters in the country.

Region: Realignment in South

White Southerners abandoned cotton and tobacco farming, and moved to the cities where the New Deal programs had much less impact. Beginning in the 1950s, the southern cities and suburbs started voting Republican. The white South saw the support northern Democrats gave to the Civil Rights Movement as a direct political assault on their interests and opened the way to protest votes for Barry Goldwater, who in 1964 was the first Republican to carry the deep south. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton lured many of the Southern whites back at the level of Presidential voting, but by 2000 white males in the South were 2-1 Republican and, indeed, formed a major part of the Republican coalition.

In many ways, it was the civil rights movement that ultimately heralded the demise of the coalition. Democrats had traditionally solid support in Southern states (the Solid South), but this electoral dominance began eroding in 1964, when Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South (and little else). In the 1968 election, the South once again abandoned its traditional support for the Democrats by supporting Nixon or segregationist third-party candidate George C. Wallace. Once the segregation ended in 1965, the argument that only southern Democrats could protect segregation faded. The South was no longer dirt poor, rural and dependent on crops like tobacco. As it modernized the Republicans took over the southern states one by one, first at the presidential level, then for Congress, governor and legislature. In 1976 the South rallied behind native son Jimmy Carter, a Democrat; 1992 and 1996 the Democrats nominated two southerners and split the region's electoral votes. By 2000 the region was solidly Republican except for Florida.

Since the 1990s Democrats solidieified their hold on the Northeast and on California, with Republicans holding the south and southwest. The Midwest has been a closely matched battleground for 150 years. Since 1994 the division between the two parties is virtually even in both houses of Congress, as of 2007, and no party has established the kind of dominance that the Democrats were able to exert during the period of the New Deal coalition.

New Deal Coalition: voting %D 1948-1964

% Democratic vote in major groups, presidency 1948-1964
	1948	1952	1956	1960	1964
all voters	50	45	42	50	61
White	50	43	41	49	59
Black	50	79	61	68	94
College	22	34	31	39	52
High School	51	45	42	52	62
Grade School	64	52	50	55	66
Professional & Business	19	36	32	42	54
White Collar	47	40	37	48	57
Manual worker	66	55	50	60	71
Farmer	60	33	46	48	53
Union member	76		51	62	77
Not union	42		35	44	56
Protestant	43	37	37	38	55
Catholic	62	56	51	78	76
Republican		8	4	5	20
Independent		35	30	43	56
Democrat		77	85	84	87
East	48	45	40	53	68
Midwest	50	42	41	48	61
West	49	42	43	49	60
South	53	51	49	51	52

Source: Gallup Polls in Gallup (1972)

Bibliography

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See also

• U.S. Democratic Party, history
• U.S. Republican Party, history
• New Deal
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Harry S. Truman
• Lyndon B. Johnson
• Great Society
• Conservative coalition

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