About New Deal Coalition In American Elections Of 1896 (Essay Sample)

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New deal coalition in American elections of 1896
The new deal coalition based on largely and was an aberration in American history. This is true due to the instances of division between working class and farmers in the coalition. In the first century and half of American history, people were devoted to their political party which gave them identity, defined social relationships that provided a way to take part in democratic process and offered some stake in a better future. Voting and the market were perhaps two most important means ever devised for reaching collective decisions through individual choices. Political parties often transcended state and territorial borders and people moving into new areas could carry with them the party slogans, rituals and identifications they known back home. Adopting techniques that worked in the new world of popular politics, people in the last half of the nineteenth century celebrated by singing, shouting and marching terming themselves “wide awakes”. Reflecting the developments, which followed the civil war in 1864, became the eyes of historians and political scientist the time of greatest attachment to political parties in the country’s history (Lipset, 52).
Between the first decade of the nineteenth century and first decade of twentieth, the legal right to vote was successively extended to propertied white man, then to black men after the civil war and finally to women in 1920. At the same time, changes in the party system reduced the motivation and the capacity of the local parties to mobilize voters. Voters’ registration intended to discourage voting in big cities, and by poor and less educated. The effects of these institutional changes necessarily obscured introducing urbanization, income earning, and education as controls. A series of legal and procedural changes introduced into electoral system that obstructed the actual ability of many people to vote. At the same time, changes in the party system reduced the motivation and the capacity of the local parties to mobilize voters. In 19th century, the tribalism characteristics of politics that made high levels of mass participation possible encouraged limiting conflicts especially on the class conflict. Between 1820 and 1832, the election turnout was good but it increased up to seventy six percent in 1860 then it drastically dropped in 1868 due to the 1864 civil war. The election conducted in 1896, a corporate republican mobilization defeated the populist and the most important mass participation possible even while limiting conflict especially class conflict. The election also inaugurated a pattern of sectional one-party dominance by the republicans smashed and party completion reduced the way was cleared for the acceleration of changes in the rules governing voting and in the organization and outreach strategies of the parties. The popular politics of preindustrial countries are often marked by clientelist methods of organizing participation as well as by intense tribal identification. As voter participation expanded so did the reliance by the political parties on government patronage and on the clientelist linkages to the electorate which government patronage made possible (Lipset 45).
The challenge posed by the farmers movement seemed hopeless and for several reasons one being the effort by largely protestant farmer’s to build a national coalition with the largely immigrant catholic working class ran against the grain of ethnoreligious politics. William Jennings Bryan was just such a master of the rhetoric of the common person as in the famous peroration of his address to the democratic nominating in 1896, such as rhetoric that explains why populist abandoned their third-party movement and endorsed Bryan, the democratic candidate. This clearly showed that the poor and the rich had social differences in the voting decision making. The price of the coalition was very high and very little of the bold populist critique of the industrial capitalism or of its visionary program of economic cooperation was evident in ensuing campaign. The industrialist and bankers did not benefit because of the hindsight which seemed to make history as it happened inevitable. Their alarm was palpable not only because the farmers movement had spread to reach much of the still large proportion of the population in agriculture but also because of the threat that campaign might become vehicle through which a coalition would be forged with discontented industrial workers in the northeast and Midwest. Under these unstable and unfamiliar conditions, the democratic populist challenge was alarming and horrifying to wealthy democrats as well as republicans. Corporate interest mobilized and poured unprecedented sums into republican coffers for McKinley campaign while the Bryan campaign raise small amount of money. Eventually Bryan lost in the elections because of the reasons below. The challenge of 1896 was not only by the sheer weight of the republican-corporate mobilization but by weakness in the democratic-populi...