There was no term fiscal conservatism at the time, but in the context of modern American politics, Bourbon Democrats is called "fiscal conservatives" in that it was in the opposite position to "progressives" or "radical liberals".[1]
After 1904, the Bourbons faded away. Southerner Woodrow Wilson made a deal in 1912 with the leading opponent of the Bourbons, William Jennings Bryan: Bryan endorsed Wilson for the Democratic nomination and Wilson named Bryan Secretary of State. Bourbon Democrats were promoters of a form of laissez-fairecapitalism which included opposition to the high-tariff protectionism that the Republicans were then advocating as well as fiscal discipline.[2][3] They represented business interests, generally supporting the goals of banking and railroads, but opposed to subsidies for them and were unwilling to protect them from competition. They opposed American imperialism and overseas expansion, fought for the gold standard against bimetallism, and promoted what they called "hard" and "sound" money. Strong supporters of states' rights[2] and reform movements such as the Civil Service Reform and opponents of the corrupt city bosses, Bourbons led the fight against the Tweed Ring. The anti-corruption theme earned the votes of many Republican Mugwumps in 1884.[4]
The term "Bourbon Democrats" was never used by the Bourbon Democrats themselves. It was not the name of any specific or formal group and no one running for office ever ran on a Bourbon Democrat ticket. The term "Bourbon" – Bourbon whisky is a Southern drink – was mostly used disparagingly by critics complaining of viewpoints they saw as old-fashioned.[5] A number of splinter Democratic parties, such as the Straight-Out Democratic Party (1872) and the National Democratic Party (1896), that actually ran candidates, fall under the more general label of Bourbon Democrats.
President Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), a conservative who denounced political corruption and fought hard for lower tariffs and the gold standard, was the exemplar of a Bourbon Democrat
The nickname "Bourbon Democrat" was first used as a pun, referring to bourbon whiskey from Kentucky and even more to the Bourbon Dynasty of France, which was overthrown in the French Revolution, but returned to power in 1815 to rule in a reactionary fashion until its overthrow in the July Revolution of 1830.[5] A cadet Bourbon branch, the House of Orléans, then ruled France for 18 years (1830–1848), until it too was overthrown in the February Revolution. Other branches of the House of Bourbon ruled Spain from 1700 and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily) from 1759. The latter was overthrown in 1861 when Italian troops under the command of Giuseppe Garibaldi overthrew Francis II, a major advance for the Italian Risorgimento. Spain's Queen Isabella II was overthrown in 1868 when liberal democrats seized power in the Glorious Revolution. Isabella's son returned to take the throne as King Alfonso XII six years later. A widely quoted aphorism at the time had it that the Bourbons "have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing." During Reconstruction, the term "Bourbon" would have had the connotation of a retrogressive, reactionary dynasty out of step with the modern world.
The term was occasionally used in the 1860s and 1870s to refer to conservative Democrats (both North and South) who still held the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson and in the 1870s to refer to the regimes set up in the South by Redeemers as a conservative reaction against Reconstruction.[5]
Gold Democrats and William Jennings Bryan
The electoral system elevated Bourbon Democrat leader Grover Cleveland to the office of President both in 1884 and in 1892, but the support for the movement declined considerably in the wake of the Panic of 1893. President Cleveland, 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.[6]
The delegates at the 1896 Democratic National Convention quickly turned against the policies of 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, Congressman Bryan soon became the Democratic nominee for president in the 1896 election.[6]
Some of the Bourbons sat out the 1896 election or tacitly supported William McKinley, the Republican nominee, whereas others set up the third-party ticket of the National Democratic Party led by John M. Palmer, a former Governor of Illinois. These bolters, called "Gold Democrats", mostly returned to the Democratic Party by 1900 or by 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 and lost in the presidential race as did Bryan every time.[6]
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 20th century, classical liberal ideas never influenced a major political party as much as they influenced the Democrats in the early 1890s.[7][page needed]
West Virginia was formed in 1863 after Unionists from northwestern Virginia establish the Restored Government of Virginia.[9] It remained in Republican control until the passing of the Flick Amendment in 1871 returned states rights to West Virginians who had supported the defunct Confederacy.[10] A Democratic push led to a reformatting of the West Virginia State Constitution that resulted in more power to the Democratic Party. In 1877, Henry M. Mathews, as a Bourbon, was elected governor of the state and the Bourbons held onto power in the state until the 1893 election of Republican George W. Atkinson.
Louisiana
In the spring of 1896, mayor John Fitzpatrick of New Orleans, leader of the city's Bourbon Democratic organization, left office after a scandal-ridden administration, his chosen successor badly defeated by reform candidate Walter C. Flower. However, Fitzpatrick and his associates quickly regrouped, organizing themselves on December 29 into the Choctaw Club, which soon received considerable patronage from Louisiana governor and Fitzpatrick ally Murphy Foster. Fitzpatrick, a power at the 1898 Louisiana Constitutional Convention, was instrumental in exempting immigrants from the new educational and property requirements designed to disenfranchise blacks. In 1899, he managed the successful mayoral campaign of Bourbon candidate Paul Capdevielle.[11]
Mississippi
Mississippi in 1877–1902 was politically controlled by the conservative whites, called "Bourbons" by their critics. The Bourbons represented the planters, landowners and merchants and used coercion and cash to control enough black votes to control the Democratic Party conventions and thus state government.[12] Elected to the House of Representatives in 1885 and serving until 1901, Mississippi Democrat Thomas C. Catchings participated in the politics of both presidential terms of Grover Cleveland, particularly the free silver controversy and the agrarian discontent that culminated in populism. As a "gold bug" supporter of sound money, he found himself defending Cleveland from attacks of silverite Mississippians over the 1893 repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and other of Cleveland's actions unpopular in the South. Caught in the middle between his loyalty to Cleveland and the Southern Democrat silverites, Catchings continued as a sound money legislative leader for the minority in Congress while hoping that Mississippi Democrats would return to the conservative philosophical doctrines of the original Bourbon Democrats in the South.[13]
^ abAlexandra Kindell; Elizabeth S. Demers Ph.D., eds. (2014). Encyclopedia of Populism in America: A Historical Encyclopedia [2 volumes]. ABC-CLIO. p. 86. Bourbon Democrats were a combination of several constituencies including southerners, political and fiscal conservatives, and classical liberals.
^ abThomas E. Vass (2006). Reclaiming The American Democratic Impulse. GABBY Press.
^Morton Keller (2007). Americas Three Regimes: A New Political History. Oxford University Press.
^Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Leader: Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party. Boston: Little, Brown, 1957, pp. 18, 45, 83, 92, 151, 202.
^ abcHans Sperber and Travis Trittschuh. American Political Terms: An Historical Dictionary. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962.
^ abcH. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1969; pp. 449–459.
^Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Democracy of the Middle West, 1865–1896, Baton Rouge LA: Louisiana State University, 1953; p. –.
^"Henry Mason Mathews". Addkison-Simmons, D. (2010). e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Retrieved December 11, 2012.
^"Virginia: The Restored Government of Virginia – History of the New State of Things". The New York Times. June 26, 1864.
^"Declaration of the People of Virginia". wvculture.org.
^Edward F. Haas, "John Fitzpatrick and Political Continuity in New Orleans, 1896–1899", Louisiana History, vol. 22, no. 1 (1981), pp. 7–29.
^Willie D. Halsell, "The Bourbon Period in Mississippi Politics, 1875–1890", Journal of Southern History, vol. 11, no. 4 (November 1945), pp. 519–537.
^Leonard Schlup, "Bourbon Democrat: Thomas C. Catchings and the Repudiation of Silver Monometallism", Journal of Mississippi History, vol. 57, no. 3 (1995) pp. 207–223.
^"Lieutenant General Wade Hampton III, C.S.A. (1818–1902)", This Week in the Civil War, January 27, 2012.
^Leonard Schlup, "Isham Green Harris", Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, 2009. Retrieved 5 October 2012.
David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, "Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896–1900", Independent Review 4 (Spring 2000), 555–575.
Allen J. Going, Bourbon Democracy in Alabama, 1874–1890, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1951.
Roger L. Hart, Redeemers, Bourbons and Populists: Tennessee, 1870–1896, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.
Allan Nevins. Grover Cleveland A study in courage (1938).
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1951.
William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
Primary sources
Allan Nevins (ed.), The Letters of Grover Cleveland, 1850–1908, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1933.
William L. Wilson, The Cabinet Diary of William L. Wilson, 1896–1897, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1957.
Democratic Party National Committee. Campaign Text-book of the National Democratic Party (1896). This was the campaign textbook of the Gold Democrats and is filled with speeches and arguments.
Encyclopedia of Alabama, "Alabama Bourbons".
August 22, 2023
bourbon, democrat, term, used, united, states, later, 19th, century, 1872, 1904, refer, members, democratic, party, were, ideologically, aligned, with, fiscal, conservatism, classical, liberalism, especially, those, supported, presidential, candidates, charles. Bourbon Democrat was a term used in the United States in the later 19th century 1872 1904 to refer to members of the Democratic Party who were ideologically aligned with fiscal conservatism or classical liberalism 1 especially those who supported presidential candidates Charles O Conor in 1872 Samuel J Tilden in 1876 President Grover Cleveland in 1884 1888 and 1892 and Alton B Parker in 1904 Bourbon Democrats1884 cartoon illustrating the decline of the Democrat Bourbonism represented as an empty jug by Joseph KepplerProminent membersCharles O ConorSamuel J TildenGrover ClevelandJohn M PalmerAlton B ParkerAssociated partiesStraight Out Democratic PartyNational Democratic PartyFounded1872 151 years ago 1872 Dissolved1912 111 years ago 1912 IdeologyClassical liberalismConservative liberalismMerit systemAnti corruptionLaissez faireAnti imperialismPro Gold StandardFiscal conservatism A Political positionCenter rightNational affiliationDemocratic PartyPolitics of United StatesPolitical partiesElectionsThere was no term fiscal conservatism at the time but in the context of modern American politics Bourbon Democrats is called fiscal conservatives in that it was in the opposite position to progressives or radical liberals 1 After 1904 the Bourbons faded away Southerner Woodrow Wilson made a deal in 1912 with the leading opponent of the Bourbons William Jennings Bryan Bryan endorsed Wilson for the Democratic nomination and Wilson named Bryan Secretary of State Bourbon Democrats were promoters of a form of laissez faire capitalism which included opposition to the high tariff protectionism that the Republicans were then advocating as well as fiscal discipline 2 3 They represented business interests generally supporting the goals of banking and railroads but opposed to subsidies for them and were unwilling to protect them from competition They opposed American imperialism and overseas expansion fought for the gold standard against bimetallism and promoted what they called hard and sound money Strong supporters of states rights 2 and reform movements such as the Civil Service Reform and opponents of the corrupt city bosses Bourbons led the fight against the Tweed Ring The anti corruption theme earned the votes of many Republican Mugwumps in 1884 4 The term Bourbon Democrats was never used by the Bourbon Democrats themselves It was not the name of any specific or formal group and no one running for office ever ran on a Bourbon Democrat ticket The term Bourbon Bourbon whisky is a Southern drink was mostly used disparagingly by critics complaining of viewpoints they saw as old fashioned 5 A number of splinter Democratic parties such as the Straight Out Democratic Party 1872 and the National Democratic Party 1896 that actually ran candidates fall under the more general label of Bourbon Democrats Contents 1 Factional history 1 1 Origins of the term 1 2 Gold Democrats and William Jennings Bryan 1 3 Decline 2 State histories 2 1 West Virginia 2 2 Louisiana 2 3 Mississippi 3 Prominent Bourbon Democrats 4 See also 5 Footnotes 6 Further reading 6 1 Primary sourcesFactional history EditOrigins of the term Edit President Grover Cleveland 1837 1908 a conservative who denounced political corruption and fought hard for lower tariffs and the gold standard was the exemplar of a Bourbon DemocratThe nickname Bourbon Democrat was first used as a pun referring to bourbon whiskey from Kentucky and even more to the Bourbon Dynasty of France which was overthrown in the French Revolution but returned to power in 1815 to rule in a reactionary fashion until its overthrow in the July Revolution of 1830 5 A cadet Bourbon branch the House of Orleans then ruled France for 18 years 1830 1848 until it too was overthrown in the February Revolution Other branches of the House of Bourbon ruled Spain from 1700 and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies Naples and Sicily from 1759 The latter was overthrown in 1861 when Italian troops under the command of Giuseppe Garibaldi overthrew Francis II a major advance for the Italian Risorgimento Spain s Queen Isabella II was overthrown in 1868 when liberal democrats seized power in the Glorious Revolution Isabella s son returned to take the throne as King Alfonso XII six years later A widely quoted aphorism at the time had it that the Bourbons have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing During Reconstruction the term Bourbon would have had the connotation of a retrogressive reactionary dynasty out of step with the modern world The term was occasionally used in the 1860s and 1870s to refer to conservative Democrats both North and South who still held the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson and in the 1870s to refer to the regimes set up in the South by Redeemers as a conservative reaction against Reconstruction 5 Gold Democrats and William Jennings Bryan Edit The electoral system elevated Bourbon Democrat leader Grover Cleveland to the office of President both in 1884 and in 1892 but the support for the movement declined considerably in the wake of the Panic of 1893 President Cleveland 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 6 The delegates at the 1896 Democratic National Convention quickly turned against the policies of 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 Congressman Bryan soon became the Democratic nominee for president in the 1896 election 6 Some of the Bourbons sat out the 1896 election or tacitly supported William McKinley the Republican nominee whereas others set up the third party ticket of the National Democratic Party led by John M Palmer a former Governor of Illinois These bolters called Gold Democrats mostly returned to the Democratic Party by 1900 or by 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 and lost in the presidential race as did Bryan every time 6 Decline Edit 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 20th century classical liberal ideas never influenced a major political party as much as they influenced the Democrats in the early 1890s 7 page needed State histories Edit West Virginia Governor Henry Mason Mathews 1834 1884 was the first of the Bourbon Democrats to reach the highest office of state politics 8 West Virginia Edit West Virginia was formed in 1863 after Unionists from northwestern Virginia establish the Restored Government of Virginia 9 It remained in Republican control until the passing of the Flick Amendment in 1871 returned states rights to West Virginians who had supported the defunct Confederacy 10 A Democratic push led to a reformatting of the West Virginia State Constitution that resulted in more power to the Democratic Party In 1877 Henry M Mathews as a Bourbon was elected governor of the state and the Bourbons held onto power in the state until the 1893 election of Republican George W Atkinson Louisiana Edit In the spring of 1896 mayor John Fitzpatrick of New Orleans leader of the city s Bourbon Democratic organization left office after a scandal ridden administration his chosen successor badly defeated by reform candidate Walter C Flower However Fitzpatrick and his associates quickly regrouped organizing themselves on December 29 into the Choctaw Club which soon received considerable patronage from Louisiana governor and Fitzpatrick ally Murphy Foster Fitzpatrick a power at the 1898 Louisiana Constitutional Convention was instrumental in exempting immigrants from the new educational and property requirements designed to disenfranchise blacks In 1899 he managed the successful mayoral campaign of Bourbon candidate Paul Capdevielle 11 Mississippi Edit Mississippi in 1877 1902 was politically controlled by the conservative whites called Bourbons by their critics The Bourbons represented the planters landowners and merchants and used coercion and cash to control enough black votes to control the Democratic Party conventions and thus state government 12 Elected to the House of Representatives in 1885 and serving until 1901 Mississippi Democrat Thomas C Catchings participated in the politics of both presidential terms of Grover Cleveland particularly the free silver controversy and the agrarian discontent that culminated in populism As a gold bug supporter of sound money he found himself defending Cleveland from attacks of silverite Mississippians over the 1893 repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and other of Cleveland s actions unpopular in the South Caught in the middle between his loyalty to Cleveland and the Southern Democrat silverites Catchings continued as a sound money legislative leader for the minority in Congress while hoping that Mississippi Democrats would return to the conservative philosophical doctrines of the original Bourbon Democrats in the South 13 Prominent Bourbon Democrats Edit President Grover Cleveland NY State Secretary Thomas F Bayard DE Treasury Secretary John G Carlisle KY Navy Secretary William C Whitney NY Agriculture Secretary J Sterling Morton NE Postmaster General William L Wilson WV Governor Samuel J Tilden NY Governor George B McClellan NJ Governor Henry M Mathews WV Senator Wade Hampton III 14 SC Senator John M Palmer IL Senator Calvin S Brice OH Senator Murphy J Foster LA Senator Arthur P Gorman MD Senator Isham G Harris 15 TN Senator William Freeman Vilas WI Senator George Hearst CA Senator Joseph W Bailey TX Senator David B Hill NY Governor William E Russell MA Hon Abram Hewitt NY Associate Justice Lucius Q C Lamar II MS Judge Alton B Parker NY Attorney Charles O Conor NY Academic later President Woodrow Wilson 16 NJ See also EditBlue Dog Coalition Classical liberalism Conservative Democrat History of the United States Democratic Party Libertarian Democrat Southern DemocratsFootnotes Edit a b Alexandra Kindell Elizabeth S Demers Ph D eds 2014 Encyclopedia of Populism in America A Historical Encyclopedia 2 volumes ABC CLIO p 86 Bourbon Democrats were a combination of several constituencies including southerners political and fiscal conservatives and classical liberals a b Thomas E Vass 2006 Reclaiming The American Democratic Impulse GABBY Press Morton Keller 2007 Americas Three Regimes A New Political History Oxford University Press Horace Samuel Merrill Bourbon Leader Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party Boston Little Brown 1957 pp 18 45 83 92 151 202 a b c Hans Sperber and Travis Trittschuh American Political Terms An Historical Dictionary Detroit Wayne State University Press 1962 a b c H Wayne Morgan From Hayes to McKinley National Party Politics 1877 1896 Syracuse NY Syracuse University 1969 pp 449 459 Horace Samuel Merrill Bourbon Democracy of the Middle West 1865 1896 Baton Rouge LA Louisiana State University 1953 p Henry Mason Mathews Addkison Simmons D 2010 e WV The West Virginia Encyclopedia Retrieved December 11 2012 Virginia The Restored Government of Virginia History of the New State of Things The New York Times June 26 1864 Declaration of the People of Virginia wvculture org Edward F Haas John Fitzpatrick and Political Continuity in New Orleans 1896 1899 Louisiana History vol 22 no 1 1981 pp 7 29 Willie D Halsell The Bourbon Period in Mississippi Politics 1875 1890 Journal of Southern History vol 11 no 4 November 1945 pp 519 537 Leonard Schlup Bourbon Democrat Thomas C Catchings and the Repudiation of Silver Monometallism Journal of Mississippi History vol 57 no 3 1995 pp 207 223 Lieutenant General Wade Hampton III C S A 1818 1902 This Week in the Civil War January 27 2012 Leonard Schlup Isham Green Harris Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture 2009 Retrieved 5 October 2012 John M Cooper November 3 2009 Woodrow Wilson Random House p 720 Further reading EditDavid T Beito and Linda Royster Beito Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism 1896 1900 Independent Review 4 Spring 2000 555 575 Allen J Going Bourbon Democracy in Alabama 1874 1890 Tuscaloosa AL University of Alabama Press 1951 Roger L Hart Redeemers Bourbons and Populists Tennessee 1870 1896 Baton Rouge LA Louisiana State University Press 1975 Allan Nevins Grover Cleveland A study in courage 1938 C Vann Woodward Origins of the New South 1877 1913 Baton Rouge LA Louisiana State University Press 1951 William Ivy Hair Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest Louisiana Politics 1877 1900 Baton Rouge LA Louisiana State University Press 1969 Primary sources Edit Allan Nevins ed The Letters of Grover Cleveland 1850 1908 Boston Houghton Mifflin 1933 William L Wilson The Cabinet Diary of William L Wilson 1896 1897 Chapel Hill NC University of North Carolina Press 1957 Democratic Party National Committee Campaign Text book of the National Democratic Party 1896 This was the campaign textbook of the Gold Democrats and is filled with speeches and arguments Encyclopedia of Alabama Alabama Bourbons Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Bourbon Democrat amp oldid 1166319706, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
