Timothy Shenk: Let’s start with a question that I couldn’t help thinking about while I was reading: do Democrats today even want to know about their own history? They used to be very proudly the party of Jefferson and Jackson, and now they very much are not.
Michael Kazin: Well, they don’t hold Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinners anymore. I think they do believe that they’re the party of working people—or at least that they should be. I think that’s true across the spectrum; it’s true for both Joe Manchin and AOC. They feel like their claim to power is, “We represent the great majority of people.”
Shenk: With that in mind, it seems like there are two hinge moments in the making of the modern Democratic Party. One takes place in the 1930s, when Democrats became the party of organized labor; the other takes place in the 1960s, when they became the party of civil rights.
Kazin: Don’t forget about the 1890s. Before then, Democrats wanted a weak federal state, partly because the Southern wing didn’t want the federal government to do anything about slavery and, later, Jim Crow. But in the 1890s, the farmer-labor movement of the Gilded Age really made an impression on the Democrats as a whole. Part of that is because the Democratic machines signed up immigrants, who came in in large numbers and needed a lot from the government because they were not getting more than a small wage from their employers. William Jennings Bryan’s campaigns, especially the first one in 1896, moved the party at least rhetorically toward favoring a stronger federal state in order to help small farmers and workers—albeit only white ones. It was the height of the party’s anti-monopoly history.
Shenk: Do you think it was more or less inevitable that organized labor would sync up with the Democratic Party in the way that it did in the 1930s? Was there ever a world where organized labor splits between the two and lines up with Republicans?
Kazin: Well, it was split between the two before the 1930s. For example, John L. Lewis—the head of the United Mine Workers—had been a Republican. The Depression changed everything. There were all these pissed-off industrial workers of different ethnic backgrounds who felt like the system was not working for them anymore. This was after it worked pretty well for a lot of them in the 1920s, when wages were going up, there was some profit sharing, and there were some company unions that weren’t always terrible. But that all collapsed. Without the Depression, who knows what would have happened?