Challengers to Duopoly: Why Third Parties Matter in American Two-Party Politics

5: The Early Years: Short-Lived Parties before 1860

5 The Early Years Short-Lived Parties before 1860 The country is divided into two great parties, and ninety-five out of every hundred voters are under the control of the wire-pullers of said parties. . . . Few are prepared to act independently. Liberty Party leader Gerrit Smith If ever there were a golden age of third-party politics, it was in the nineteenth century . Party lines and divisions would harden later on—some say they are downright ossified today—but over the first 125 years of American nationhood they remained reasonably soft and subject to change. An array of national issues each possessed at some point during the nineteenth century the power to mobilize people and alter party loyalties. Among these there were demands for openness or transparency in the evolving American democracy; slavery and the array of moral, economic, and sectional issues surrounding it; new waves of immigration that were altering the nation’s demographics in ways traditionalists found disturbing; and, late in the nineteenth century, industrialized America, government support of business, and the counterclaims of toiling and vulnerable farmers and urban workers. Moreover until states adopted the secret ballot late in the century and then later used their new ballot-access prerogative to assist the two major parties in pulling up the ladder against challenges from outside, there had been at least the form of equal access to voters for minor as well as major parties. Third parties of all three types described in chapter 3 abounded in the nineteenth century. The short-lived Anti-Masonic Party is regarded by most American historians as having been the first nationally significant minor party. But the AntiMasons had their nonnational minor-party contemporaries: workingmen’s and labor parties in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities.1 The nation’s first continuing doctrinal and issue parties—the Prohibition and then the Socialist Labor parties—made their appearance late in the century. And there was a fourth third-party type: the third party that came in from the cold. Born in 1854, the Republican Party rose like a shooting star. In much less than 66 Challengers to Duopoly a decade, the party system would be transformed, and this new party would emerge as one of America’s two major political parties.2 Short-Lived National Parties: Some Generalizations A song that made its way to the top of the country music charts many years ago bore this evocative line: “I want to live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory.”3 Third parties were far from the mind of Joe Allison, the songwriter, but his line seems to say something about some of them anyway. Most of America’s most significant minor parties have indeed died young. Their brief lives may be hard ones, endured on the political periphery, even if just beyond the mainstream in some cases. But many of them leave behind substantial and potent legacies. Short-lived national parties often are the self-appointed agents of reform or change. Their demands may be in support of the underdog, for reconstruction of the party system and other revisions in the political process, for reordering the priorities and substance of public policy, or for many or all these things. Exceptions arise, it is true.Constitutional Union,an ephemeral party on the eve of the Civil War,was made up of what the British call “yesterday’s men.” Their wish was for quiet and stability at a time when the old order was unraveling. But protest and insurgency underlie the spirit of many short-lived parties, and their revisionism and agitation may momentarily capture the mood and enlist the support of large, disaffected segments of the electorate. People happy with the status quo are likely to greet them with hostility, suspicion, and scorn and to demand a return to “legitimacy and civility.” Transient parties sometimes are born to institutionalize economic protest. Others have arisen due to a galvanizing issue such as immigration or slavery. Inspired Were the Quids America’s First Minor Party? Their name was derived from tertium quid, Latin for “a third something.” In Others, his important work on minor-party history, Darcy Richardson makes a plausible argument that that history may have begun with the Quids, more than two decades before the birth of the Anti-Masonic Party. Led by John Randolph of Virginia, the Quids were at the least a very distinct and separate faction of the majority Democratic-Republican Party...