This “ic”-y history begins in 1946, when its key popularizer, the improbably named Brazilla Carroll Reece, a veteran Tennessee congressman, was selected as chair of the Republican National Committee. Reece did not coin the term; “Democrat party” had been used by headline writers and politicians of both parties since the 19th century. Before 1946, however, the phrase did not have a straightforward connotation; it was sometimes used neutrally, sometimes positively, and sometimes negatively.
Reece blazed the trail for the “Democrat party” or, equally frequently, the “so-called Democrat party” to become an insult. Journalists noted his characteristic use of the phrase. It was the “‘Democrat party,’ as he calls it,” wrote Ted Lewis in 1947.
Reece did not, however, offer this renaming out of thin air. He built on two key Republican claims of the previous decade, both arising in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The first was that, under FDR, the Democratic Party had dangerously radicalized. Frank Knox, the 1936 Republican vice presidential candidate, in a typical version of the critique, said the party had been “seized by alien and un-American elements.” The second claim was that the Democratic Party had lost touch with small-government traditions. “This administration … has lost all relationship to the Democratic party,” Knox said, to the point where “it no longer uses the word ‘Democratic.’ ” (This doesn’t seem to be true—the 1940 and 1944 Democratic Party platforms use the “ic” multiple times.)
In 1940, the Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, occasionally spoke of the “Democrat party,” but he did not do so regularly; nor did he use always the term in a derogatory way. In 1944, in the midst of World War II, when Republicans stepped up their criticism of FDR for ceding the party to the left—the slogan “Clear it with Sidney” suggested that Roosevelt had allowed labor leader Sidney Hillman to determine party policy—the GOP again did not use “Democrat party” in a consistently critical fashion. Indeed, critics of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party often used the shortened name in a positive way, as a symbol of the restoration of the pre–New Deal party. This initial lack of coherence around the term’s meaning shows why the definitional work that Reece did was necessary.