The nature of American politics 23the interests of the farmer and the labourer, it was only able to capture the
votes of the agrarians of the South and West. The industrial workers of the
East voted strongly for the Republicans and the extreme sectional pattern of
politics in that election can be gauged from Map 2.1.
At the end of the nineteenth century there was a reaction against the
populists and what they represented. Conservatives in North and South alike
set about the creation of political machines in which they could maintain
their ascendancy, working through the medium of the Republican Party
in the North and through the Democratic Party in the South. Before 1896
the two parties had been relatively well balanced throughout the country,
but by 1904 there remained only six states in which the parties were evenly
matched. The Republican Party almost ceased to exist in the South, while
the Democrats were almost as powerless in the North.
As the twentieth century progressed, however, the forces that had pro-
duced and maintained this sectional alignment were gradually eroded. The
nationalising influences of the growth of communications and of America’s
involvement in world affairs tended to diminish local patriotism, but per-
haps the most important factor was the problem of an economy that was no
longer ‘open’ in the sense in which it had been in the expansive years of the
nineteenth century. The years of economic depression were the background
to the Democratic victories of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, when the old
sectional alignment was shattered, and in 1936, when he won every state in
the Union with the exception of Maine and Vermont. Genuine competition
between the two parties gradually spread into more and more of the states
and even in the deep South a new kind of politics began to emerge.
Yet important as sectionalism undoubtedly was at the beginning of the
Br yan (Democrat and
P opulist)
McKinle y (Repub lican)
Territories without votesMap 2.1 The election of 1896