Bourbon Democrat

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Bourbon Democrat was a term used in the United States from 1876 to 1904 to refer to a conservative or classical liberal member of the Democratic Party, especially one who supported President Grover Cleveland in 1884–1896 and Alton B. Parker in 1904. After 1904, the Bourbons faded away. Woodrow Wilson, who had been a Bourbon, came to terms with William Jennings Bryan in 1912.

Bourbon Democrats represented business interests, supported banking and railroad goals (but opposed subsidizing banks, railroads or other enterprises - or protecting them from competition), promoted laissez-faire capitalism (which included opposition to the protectionism Republicans then advocated), opposed imperialism and U.S. overseas expansion, fought for the gold standard, and opposed bimetallism. They strongly supported reform movements such as Civil Service Reform and opposed corruption of city bosses, leading the fight against the Tweed Ring. The anti-corruption theme earned the votes of many Republican Mugwumps in 1884.

Origins of the term

The term was first used as a pun to refer both to bourbon whiskey from Kentucky and even more to the Bourbon Dynasty of France that was overthrown in the French Revolution, but returned to power in 1815 to rule in a reactionary fashion until its final overthrow in the July Revolution of 1830.

The term was occasionally used in the 1860s and 1870s to refer to conservative Democrats (both North and South), and in the 1870s to refer to the regimes set up in the South by Redeemers as a conservative reaction against Reconstruction.

Bourbons and Bryan

After having elected Bourbon Democrat leader Grover Cleveland to the office of President both in 1884 and in 1892, the support for the movement was considerably damaged in the wake of the Panic of 1893. The President, a staunch believer in the gold standard, refused to inflate the money supply with silver, thus alienating the agrarian populist wing of the Democratic Party.

The delegates at the 1896 Democratic National Convention quickly turned against the policies of Grover Cleveland and those advocated by the Bourbon Democrats, favoring bimetallism as a way out of the depression. Nebraska congressman William Jennings Bryan now took the stage as the great opponent of the Bourbon Democrats. Harnessing the energy of an agrarian insurgency with his famous Cross of Gold speech, the congressman was soon selected to be the Democratic nominee for President in that election.

Some of the Bourbons sat out the 1896 election or tacitly supported McKinley, the Republican nominee; others created the third party ticket of the National Democratic Party led by John M. Palmer, a former governor of Illinois. Most Bourbons returned to the Democratic party by 1900 or 1904 at the latest. Bryan demonstrated his hold on the party by winning the 1900 and 1908 Democratic nominations as well; in 1904, a Bourbon, Alton B. Parker, won the nomination. He lost, as did Bryan every time.

William L. Wilson, Cleveland's postmaster general, confided to his diary that he opposed Bryan on moral and ideological as well as party grounds. Wilson had begun his public service convinced that Congress was too much controlled by special interests, and his unsuccessful tariff fight had burned this conviction deeper. He feared the triumph of free silver would bring class legislation, paternalism, and selfishness feeding upon national bounty as surely as did protection. Moreover, free silver at 16 to 1 was morally wrong, "involving as it does the attempt to call 50 cents a dollar and make it legal tender for dollar debts." Populism, he said, was "the product of protection founded on the idea that Government can and therefore Government ought to make people prosperous." [Summers 240]

Decline

The nomination of Alton Parker in 1904 gave a victory of sorts to pro-gold Democrats, but it was a fleeting one. The old classical liberal ideals had lost their distinctiveness and appeal. By World War I, the key elder statesman in the movement, John M. Palmer, as well as Simon Bolivar Buckner, William F. Vilas, and Edward Atkinson, had died. During the twentieth century, classical liberal ideas never influenced a major political party as much as they influenced the Democrats in the early 1890s.

List of nationally prominent Bourbon Democrats

Besides Cleveland and Parker, nationally prominent Bourbons included:

• New York's Samuel J. Tilden, David Bennett Hill, and William C. Whitney
• Maryland's Arthur Pue Gorman
• Delaware's Thomas F. Bayard
• West Virginia's William L. Wilson
• Kentucky's John Griffin Carlisle
• Wisconsin's William F. Vilas
• Nebraska's J. Sterling Morton
• Illinois' John M. Palmer
• Iowa's Horace Boies
• Louisiana's Murphy J. Foster
• Mississippi's Lucius Q. C. Lamar
• Minnesota's James J. Hill
• Ohio's Calvin Brice

See also

• History of the United States Democratic Party

Bibliography

• Going, Allen J. Bourbon Democracy in Alabama, 1874-1890. Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 1951.
• Merrill, Horace Samuel. Bourbon Leader: Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party. Boston : Little, Brown, 1957. Merrill argues that in an age of rapid economic change Cleveland staunchly defended the untenable status quo.
• Merrill, Horace Samuel. Bourbon Democracy of the Middle West, 1865-1896. Louisiana State University, 1953.
• Morgan, H. Wayne. From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896. Syracuse : Syracuse University, 1969.
• Sperber, Hans and Travis Trittschuh. American Political Terms: An Historical Dictionary. Wayne State University, 1962.
• Summers, Festus P. William L. Wilson and Tariff Reform, a Biography. New Brunswick : Rutgers University, 1953.
• Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Louisiana State University, 1951.

Primary sources

• Democratic Party (U.S.) National Committee. Campaign Text-book of the National Democratic Party. 1896. This is the handbook of the Gold Democrats; it strongly opposed Bryan.
• Nevins, Allan. ed. The Letters of Grover Cleveland, 1850-1908. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1933.
• Wilson, William L. The Cabinet Diary of William L. Wilson, 1896-1897. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina, 1957.