American Government and Politics Today, Brief Edition, 2014-2015

160 PART Two • The PolITIcs of AmeRIcAn DemocRAcy

to government action in the economy. (Wilson’s

progressivism did not extend to race relations—

for African Americans, the Wilson administration

was something of a disaster.)

The new Deal era

The Republican ascendancy resumed after

Wilson left office. It ended with the election of

1932, in the depths of the Great Depression.

Republican Herbert Hoover was president when

the Depression began in 1929. While Hoover

took some mea sures to fight the Depression,

they fell far short of what the public demanded.

Significantly, Hoover opposed federal relief for the

unemployed and the destitute. In 1932, Democrat

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president by an

overwhelming margin. As with the election of

1896, the vote in 1932 constituted a major politi-

cal realignment.

The Great Depression shattered the working

class belief in Republican economic competence.

Under Roosevelt, the Democrats began to make

major interventions in the economy in an attempt

to combat the Depression and to relieve the suf-

fering of the unemployed. Roosevelt’s New Deal

relief programs were open to all citizens, both

black and white. As a result, African Americans

began to support the Democratic Party in large

numbers—a development that would have

stunned any American politician of the 1800s.

Roosevelt’s political coalition was broad

enough to establish the Democrats as the new

majority party, in place of the GOP. In the 1950s, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, the

leading U.S. general during World War II, won two terms as president. Otherwise, with

minor interruptions, the Democratic ascendancy lasted until about 1968.

An era of Divided Government

The New Deal coalition managed the unlikely feat of including both African Americans

and whites who were hostile to African American advancement. This balancing act came

to an end in the 1960s, a decade that was marked by the civil rights movement, by sev-

eral years of “race riots” in major cities, and by increasingly heated protests against the

Vietnam War (1965–1975). For many economically moderate, socially conservative voters,

especially in the South, social issues had become more important than economic ones,

and these individuals left the Democratic Party. These voters outnumbered the new vot-

ers who joined the Democrats—newly enfranchised African Americans and former liberal

Republicans in New England and the upper Midwest.

The Parties in Balance. The result, after 1968, was a slow-motion realignment that left

the nation almost evenly divided in politics. In presidential elections, the Republicans had

u.s. senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) attends Lifetime

Television’s 2012 “Every Woman Counts” campaign at Hofstra

University. Why are an ever-greater number of women serving in

Congress? (Joe Corrigan/Getty Images for A&E)

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