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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2024
Beginning from 1832, the Democratic Party required a two-thirds majority at national conventions for the nomination of presidential candidates. Despite assessments that this “two-thirds rule” produced excessively long and disruptive nomination battles and low-quality presidential candidates, the rule survived until 1936. The rule's longevity is generally attributed to it functioning as a “Southern veto”: while the Democratic Party performed strongest electorally in the South in this period, the region's representation at conventions was small in comparison. By setting the bar for presidential nominations high, the South was given the ability to block unacceptable candidates. However, while the “Southern veto” argument is pervasive, there are little data and few concrete examples of Southern delegates blocking Democratic nominations through the two-thirds rule. In this paper, I reassess the two-thirds rule's history and appliance and show that Southern states barely had enough votes to block nominations and generally would need to vote against a candidate at a rate of nearly 90 percent to do so. As a result, the South almost never vetoed candidates: in only one case (Martin Van Buren in 1844) was Southern opposition pivotal in preventing a candidate with majority support from winning the nomination. Additionally, the two-thirds rule was generally accepted by broad majorities in the party (both Southern and non-Southern) and, while Southerners were among the defenders of the rule, representatives of the region were also among those opposing it. These findings suggest that the two-thirds rule rarely functioned as a Southern veto—not because the South had no power in the Democratic Party but because the necessity of maintaining intraparty consensus applied regardless of the existence of the two-thirds rule.
I am grateful to David Bateman and Jacob Smith for their comments on this project and to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and extremely helpful suggestions.
1 Gilchrist Baker Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule (Jacksonville, FL, 1928), 42–43.
2 “The Approaching National Conventions,” Daily Evening Bulletin, February 11, 1876.
3 Nicol C. Rae, Southern Democrats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 11.
4 Richard C. Bain and Judith H. Parris, Convention Decisions and Voting Records, 2nd ed., Studies in Presidential Selection (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1973), 12.
5 For a full history of national party conventions prior to 1832 see: James S. Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention, 1789-1832 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).
6 Bain and Parris, Convention Decisions and Voting Records, 12.
7 See: Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention.
8 Ibid, 241. Notably, the first call for holding a Democratic convention did not come from Jackson or his advisers but from Democratic Party leaders in New Hampshire in June 1831 (see, Ibid, 244).
9 Summary of the Proceedings of a Convention of Republican Delegates from the Several States in the Union, for the Purpose of Nominating a Candidate for the Office of Vice-President of the United States Held at Baltimore, in the State of Maryland, May 1832 (Albany, NY: Packard and Van Benthuysen, 1832), 6.
10 Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule, 3.
11 Paul T. David, Ralph M. Goldman, and Richard C. Bain, The Politics of National Party Conventions, Rev. edn (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 208.
12 Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention, 265.
13 Quoted in ibid, 266.
14 The unit rule—a distinct but related rule maintained at Democratic conventions in this period—was introduced at the 1835 convention. This rule allowed state delegations the right to determine whether to split their vote based on intra-delegation preferences or to vote collectively as one unit based on the preferences of the majority of the delegation. As historian Carl Becker explained in 1899, the linkage between unit- and two-thirds-rules was based on the assumption that if the two-thirds rule were to be dropped (thereby lowering the bar for a nomination to a simple majority) but the unit rule was nonetheless maintained, “a few very large states being nearly evenly divided on candidates, and yet enforcing the unit rule, might secure a majority for a candidate whose actual strength would measure only a small minority. While the use of the two-thirds rule does not make this condition of affairs impossible, it lessens the probability that it will occur; and we may therefore consider those two rules as practically inseparable—two parts of a single system, and that system the casting of state votes as a unit” (Carl Becker, “The Unit Rule in National Nominating Conventions,” The American Historical Review 5, no. 1 (October 1899): 65). From this perspective, Southern states would (presumably) have opposed maintaining the unit rule in case of the end of the two-thirds rule. Yet, according to Bass, by 1936, the unit rule was “steadfastly defended by advocates of states rights and party federalism” (Harold F. Bass, “Presidential Party Leadership and Party Reform: Franklin D. Roosevelt and The Abrogation of The Two-Thirds Rule,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1988): 309). Notably, since states were able to determine for themselves whether or not to apply the unit rule in any given convention year, they were not necessarily consistent in applying it: for example, the Ohio delegations in 1848 and 1860 appear to have voted as a unit but in 1884 and 1924 did not. Similarly, the Virginia delegation in 1848 voted as a unit but not in 1884. Such shifts in strategy in part may have reflected inconsistent state and regional interests but frequently appear to have come down to year-specific conflicts over preferred candidates and how best to support their efforts to win the nomination. Notably, even after the end of the two-thirds rule the unit rule remained in place until the reforms following the 1968 Democratic convention.
15 John H. Aldrich, Why Parties?: The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 133.
16 Roy F. Nichols, “Adaptation versus Invention as Elements in Historical Analysis,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 108, no. 5 (1964): 404–10.
17 James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 148–49.
18 See: Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins, “Southern Delegates and Republican National Convention Politics, 1880–1928,” Studies in American Political Development 29, no. 1 (April 2015): 68–88; Boris Heersink and Jeffery A. Jenkins, Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
19 David, Goldman and Bain, The Politics of National Party Conventions, 209.
20 Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule, 42.
21 “The Democratic National Convention – The Two Thirds Rule,” New York Herald, April 12, 1876.
22 “The Two-Thirds Rule,” Daily Evening Bulletin, May 3, 1876.
23 This phenomenon was not unique to the Democratic Party: in the Republican Party in the same time period, delegates were generally also divided through a similar process. Since the GOP systematically underperformed in the South, this meant Southern states had more influence in the Republican Party than their electoral haul would arguably warrant. As Heersink and Jenkins have shown, this perceived Southern overrepresentation produced considerable intraparty conflict and was eventually addressed by a change in the delegate allocation formula after 1912 which incorporated electoral performance. See: Heersink and Jenkins, Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968.
24 Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule, 5–6.
25 Aldrich, Why Parties? 132.
26 Ibid.
27 Bass, “Presidential Party Leadership and Party Reform,” 305.
28 Ibid.
29 Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 69.
30 Rae, Southern Democrats, 11. Notably, this perspective is common outside of academia as well. Reporter Carroll Kilpatrick, writing in 1952, noted that “before the abolition of the two-thirds rule in 1936, the South, of course, did exercise virtual veto power over the choice of a Democratic presidential nominee.” See: Carroll Kilpatrick, “The Political Facts of Life,” The Virginia Quarterly Review 28, no. 3 (1952): 471–76.
31 Landis also claims the two-thirds rule applied to the “passage of resolutions, platforms, and nominations” at national conventions. As noted before, this is incorrect: the two-thirds rule applied only to the nomination of candidates, all other decisions—including platforms and decisions regarding the operation of the convention were made by a simple majority. See: Michael Todd Landis, Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
32 William M. Boyd, “Southern Politics, 1948-1952,” Phylon (1940-1956) 13, no. 3 (1952): 226–35.
33 Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule, 47.
34 Earl Black and Merle Black, The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 92.
35 Howard L. Reiter, Selecting the President: The Nominating Process in Transition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 135.
36 The Southern strategy in this regard would not require the region to vote for the same candidate; as long as enough delegates opposed a leading candidate to prevent them from achieving a two-thirds majority the “Southern veto” would be successful.
37 Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule, 47.
38 Indeed, according to author Steve Neal, FDR practically conceded the nomination in a phone conversation with Newton D. Baker who was seen as a plausible compromise candidate. See: Steve Neal, Happy Days Are Here Again: The 1932 Democratic Convention, the Emergence of FDR—And How America Was Changed Forever (New York: William Morrow, 2004), 271.
39 David, Goldman, and Bain, The Politics of National Party Conventions, 211.
40 Bass, “Presidential Party Leadership and Party Reform,” 311.
41 Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (1962): 947–52.
42 Charles Bullock III and Mark J. Rozell, “The Evolving Politics of the South,” in The Oxford Handbook of Southern Politics, ed. Charles Bullock III and Mark J. Rozell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6.
43 See: David Lublin, The Republican South: Democratization and Partisan Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); Terrel L. Rhodes, Republicans in the South: Voting for the State House, Voting for the White House (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000); Heersink and Jenkins, Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968; Boris Heersink, Jeffery A. Jenkins, and Nicholas G. Napolio, “Southern Republicans in Congress during the Pre-Reagan Era: An Exploration,” Party Politics 29, no. 3 (2023): 540–53.
44 V. O. Key and Alexander Heard, Southern Politics in State and Nation, New ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).
45 For example, there were notable differences in political outcomes in Confederate border states and those in the Deep South. See: Robert Mickey, Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972, Princeton Studies in American Politics (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015); Heersink and Jenkins, Republican Party Politics and the American South.
46 Hugh Douglas Price, The Negro and Southern Politics: A Chapter of Florida History (New York: University Press, 1957).
47 Notably these seventeen states also were the only states to still outlaw interracial marriage by the time the Supreme Court began considering Loving v. Virginia, and—with the exception of West Virginia and Oklahoma (which did not exist yet at the time)—were the fifteen states that still practiced slavery by the start of the Civil War. However, as Bateman et al also note, in some cases arguments have been made that the “South” should exclude even some of the former-Confederate states since they no longer fit within the “true Southland.” It is also worth noting that citizens of these different states themselves have mixed feelings about whether or not they consider their states to be Southern. In a 1999 survey, respondents living in former-Confederate states consider themselves to live in the South by a rate of 82 percent or higher. In contrast, of the border states surveyed only two (Kentucky and Oklahoma) had a majority of respondents consider their home state to be Southern. In the other states a minority of respondents defined their state as being Southern—ranging from West Virginia (45 percent) to the District of Columbia (7 percent). See: David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski, Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Russell Sage Foundation, 2018), 21–22; John Shelton Reed, “Where Is the South?,” Southern Cultures 5, no. 2 (1999): 116–18.
48 Price, The Negro and Southern Politics; Bullock III and Rozell, “The Evolving Politics of the South” 6–7.
49 There was no consensus on selecting a vice-presidential nominee for the ticket, and the convention simply never voted on this question.
50 Proceedings of the National Democratic Convention, Held in the City of Baltimore on the 5th of May, 1840, Embracing Resolutions, Expressive of the Sentiments of the Democratic Party of the Union (Baltimore, MD: The Office of the Republican, 1840), 7.
51 This average number excludes the 1864 Civil War convention at which no Confederate states were present.
52 After delegate reapportionment changes the South's representation at Democratic conventions increased again for a while. For example, at the 1948 convention, broad Southern delegates made up a little more than 35 percent of all delegates.
53 In part, this reflects switches in the votes on the last ballot as it became obvious a candidate was going to become the nominee.
54 Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule, 8–9, 52. Note that a similar outcome occurred during the 1848 convention that nominated Lewis Cass, though in that case a majority of Southern delegates supported this candidate and the interpretation of the rule.
55 That is, of all ballots a candidate led I focus on the one on which they received the highest number of votes.
56 The Smith “veto” highlights the issue of our inability to know what delegates’ true preferences were in the face of Southern opposition to a candidate. It is possible that Smith's support among non-Southern delegates on the ballot was lower than it otherwise might have been if a subset of delegates (having determined that his nomination was doomed in the face of overwhelming Southern opposition) began supporting other candidates instead. On the other hand, the non-South was, of course, no coherent political region: a lack of support for Smith among non-Southern delegates could also simply have reflected genuine opposition and not a broader two-thirds rule based convention strategy.
57 Stockton's detailed assessment of the history of challenges to the rule covers the period 1836–1924. Based on the 1928 convention proceedings, there was no debate about the rule and the convention accepted applying the rule by acclamation. Bass covers both debate about the rule at the 1932 convention and the end of the rule at the 1936 convention. See: Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule; Bass, “Presidential Party Leadership and Party Reform.”
58 Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule, 13.
59 Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention held in Baltimore, Maryland, June 25-July 2, 1912 (Chicago, IL: The Peterson Linotyping Co., 1912), 30, 212.
60 Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention held in Madison Square Garden New York City, June 24-July 9, 1924 (Indianapolis, IN: Bookwalter-Ball-Greathouse Printing Co., 1924), 756–87.
61 Ibid., 923.
62 Aldrich, Why Parties, 133.
63 Robert S. Lambert, “The Democratic National Convention of 1844,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1955): 6.
64 Ibid, 11.
65 Ibid.
66 Stockton, The Two Thirds Rule, 7.
67 New York sent competing delegations to the convention and the state was not allowed to vote on the rule decision since the convention had not yet decided which delegation to seat. However, its thirty-six votes would not have changed the result of the two-thirds rule vote. See: “Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention,” The Sun, May 24, 1848.
68 At the 1868 convention, the former Confederate states were represented again after the end of the Civil War. The convention's Committee on Organization unanimously agreed to continue using the two-thirds rule and that the majority would apply to all delegates not to the number of votes cast. A delegate from Illinois announced his support for relying on the two-thirds rule at this convention but that he would introduce a motion to end the rule after a candidate was nominated but did not follow through. See: Official Proceedings of the National Democratic Convention Held at New York, July 4-9, 1868 (Boston, MA: Rockwell & Rollins Printers, 1868), 63.
69 See: “National Democratic Committee,” The Cincinnati Commercial, February 23, 1876; “Washington,” New York Herald, February 23, 1876; “Washington,” New York Herald, February 24, 1876.
70 “The Approaching National Conventions,” Daily Evening Bulletin, February 11, 1876. See also: “Political Notes,” Albany Evening Journal, February 24, 1876.
71 “The Tildenites Endeavoring to Combine with Indiana,” New York Times, June 22, 1876; “Tilden Out of the Contest,” New York Times, June 23, 1876.
72 “The Democratic National Convention,” New York Herald, February 24, 1876.
73 “The Presidency: A Western View of the Situation,” New York Times, April 23, 1876.
74 “The Democratic National Convention,” New York Herald, February 24, 1876.
75 Quoted in “The Two-Third Rule,” The Baltimore Sun, May 13, 1876.
76 As cited in “Richmond Dispatch,” The Cincinnati Commercial, May 24, 1876.
77 See: “Political,” Albany Evening Journal, May 18, 1876; “The Illinois Convention,” New York Times, June 23, 1876. Meanwhile, the Kansas delegation at the convention voted to support the rule: “Tilden's Trumps,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 27, 1876.
78 “Political,” The Daily Picayune, June 15, 1876; “Tilden's Trumps,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 27, 1876.
79 Official Proceedings of the National Democratic Convention held in St. Louis, Mo., June 27-29, 1876 (St. Louis, MO: Woodward, Tiernan, & Hale, Printers and Binders, 1876).
80 Proceedings 1876, 166.
81 Ibid., 166–69.
82 See: “Tilden,” Daily Inter Ocean, April 21, 1880; “Political Matters,” Boston Evening Journal, April 22, 1880; “Legislative Acts,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 22, 1880; “Legislative Acts,” New Haven Evening Register, April 28, 1880; “Washington,” Times-Picayune, April 30, 1880; “Democratic State Convention,” New Hampshire Patriot, May 6, 1880; “Legislative Acts,” Daily Inter Ocean, May 7, 1880; “Legislative Acts,” Daily Evening Bulletin, May 20, 1880; “Minnesota Democracy,” New York Herald, May 21, 1880; “Political,” The Salt Lake Weekly Tribune, May 22, 1880; “Delaware Democrats,” The Journal of Commerce, May 26, 1880; “The Missouri Democrats,” The Indianapolis Daily Sentinel, May 27, 1880; “Indiana Democracy,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 10, 1880; “Georgia's Democrats,” Omaha Daily Herald, June 10, 1880; “General Political News,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 11, 1880.
83 “Legislative Acts,” New York Herald, May 21, 1880.
84 Stockton, The Two-Thirds Rule, 11. A similar attempt occurred in 1884 when a delegate from Arkansas introduced a resolution criticizing the rule as “the means of defeating the express will of a majority of the Delegates” and calling on “[abrogating] and [discontinuing]” the rule in future conventions “unless made obligatory by an affirmative vote of such Convention upon that question” (Official Proceedings of the National Democratic Convention held in Chicago, Ill., July 8-11, 1884 (New York: Douglas Taylor's Democratic Printing House, 1884) 192). While delegates from Alabama and California supported a vote on the resolution, after some back-and-forth the convention voted to indefinitely postpone debate on the resolution (Ibid., 195).
85 “Again Plan Drive On Two-Thirds Rule,” New York Times, December 28, 1931.
86 Ibid.
87 “Washington Instructs for Roosevelt,” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 1932; Urges Democrats Let Majority Rule,” New York Times, March 22, 1932; “W.G. M'Adoo Urges Farm Price-Fixing,” New York Times, March 23, 1932; “Smith's Stand Stirs Wrath of Georgians,” New York Times, April 24, 1932; “Ashurst Asks End of Two-Thirds Rule,” New York Times, May 18, 1932; “Long at Chicago Backs Roosevelt,” New York Times, June 22, 1932.
88 “Move to Alter Rule Surprised Governor,” New York Times, June 25, 1932.
89 Ibid.
90 “Opposition Opens Fire,” New York Times, June 25, 1932.
91 Ibid; “Baker Warns Foes of Two-Thirds Rule,” New York Times, June 26, 1932; “Ritchie for Plank on Federal Budget,” New York Times, June 26, 1932.
92 “Lines Shift on Rule, With South Divided,” New York Times, June 26, 1932.
93 “Poll Shows 584 Against the Two-Thirds Rule, To 565 Delegates Who Favor Sustaining It,” New York Times, June 27, 1932.
94 “New Rules Adopted,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1932.
95 Farley reportedly told the minority members: “Look here, just so there won't be any misunderstanding. I want to tell you what our position is. We are for the rules as they now stand and we're for them 1,000 per cent – the two-thirds rule all the way through and not ending with the sixth ballot or any other ballot” (“Rules Action Looks to a Change in 1936,” New York Times, June 29, 1932).
96 “Farley Will Quit Cabinet in January to Pilot Campaign,” New York Times, September 11, 1935. See also: “Campaign Wheels Started by Farley,” New York Times, December 5, 1935. One explanation for why FDR pushed for ending the rule in 1936 is that he was hoping to use the leverage of broad support for his renomination to make it easier for future Democratic conventions to nominate either himself or a New Deal supporter. See: Milkis, Presidents and the Parties, 71.
97 Bass, “Presidential Party Leadership and Party Reform.”
98 “Two-Thirds Rule Expected to Go,” New York Times, January 19, 1936. Similar reports noted that “all the Northern and Western States favor substitution of the majority rule” (“Farley Predicts Vote Gain Over ‘32,” New York Times, February 28, 1936), and that “Northern Democrats are strongly pushing their perennial demand for abrogation of the unit rule as well as the ancient two-thirds rule” (“Democrats See Solidarity,” New York Times, March 22, 1936).
99 Bass, “Presidential Party Leadership and Party Reform,” 309.
100 “Two-thirds Nomination Rule Vexes Bourbons,” Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1936; “Democrats’ Two-Thirds Rule May End,” Washington Post, April 29, 1936.
101 “Democratic Party Will Shove Its ‘Two-Thirds Rule’ Overboard,” Washington Post, May 10, 1936.
102 Bass, “Presidential Party Leadership and Party Reform,” 309–10.
103 “Sees Two-Thirds Rule End,” New York Times, May 5, 1936. See also: “Democrats Shape an Outdoor Climax,” New York Times, April 26, 1936.
104 Milkis, The Presidents and the Parties, 71.
105 “Two-Thirds Rule to be Abrogated,” New York Times, May 31, 1936.
106 “Democrats to Stay in Session 5 Days,” New York Times, June 17, 1936.
107 “Southerners to Ask Unit Rule Abolition,” New York Times, June 24, 1936.
108 “4 States Back 2-3 Rule,” New York Times, June 25, 1936.
109 Florida did not vote on the issue. See: “South Bows to Change,” New York Times, June 26, 1936; “Poll on Rule,” Washington Post, June 26, 1936.
110 Whether the rule actually produced noticeably worse Democratic candidates—as contemporaneous observers and subsequent scholarship have argued—requires a level of comparison (between the Democratic nominees and those from the Whig and Republican parties across this period in relation to the available pool of candidates within each party for each convention) that is outside the scope of this paper, but that is worth future investigation.
111 Milkis, The Presidents and the Parties. For more on the (changing) role of presidential leadership in American political parties in the twentieth century and the conditions under which presidents are more or less engaged in managing their parties see: Daniel J. Galvin, Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Boris Heersink, National Party Organizations and Party Brands in American Politics: The Democratic and Republican National Committees, 1912-2016 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
112 Of course, there is no reason to expect political institutions to be designed flawlessly. As Schickler, writing about Congress, notes “conflicts among competing interests generate institutions that are rarely optimally tailored to meet any specific goal. As they adopt changes based on untidy compromises among multiple interests, members build institutions that are full of tensions and contradictions” (Eric Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3). That is, rules and changes to them (or, in the case of the two-thirds rule, the lack of a change) at conventions need not be entirely rational or in service to specific actors. Instead, they frequently represent imperfect and suboptimal compromises between those actors.
113 Douglas W. Jaenicke, “The Jacksonian Integration of Parties into the Constitutional System,” Political Science Quarterly 101, no. 1 (1986): 88. This view of the Democratic Party as a coalition of disparate groups remains dominant, see, for example: Jo Freeman, “The Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican Parties,” Political Science Quarterly 101, no. 3 (1986): 327–56; Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics; Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
114 As Silver notes, the platforms Democrats adopted in the period 1840–96 generally included positions that, first “defend human enslavement through states’ rights assertions” and, later, criticized Reconstruction-era efforts to safeguard Black voting rights. Notably, 19th non-Southern Democratic state parties (including those in Massachusetts and California) included support for slavery and, later, opposition to Reconstruction and Black voting rights in their state platforms. On the other hand, some Northern Democrats did embrace racial liberalism in the late nineteenth century, seemingly at least in part due to electoral considerations. See: Adam Silver, Partisanship and Polarization: American Party Platforms, 1840-1896 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022), 249; Richard Barton and David A. Bateman, “Gilded Age Doughfaces: Northern Democrats and Black Civil Rights,” Journal of Historical Political Economy 3, no. 3 (2023): 363–90.
115 Additionally, some leading local Southern Democratic politicians actively organized on behalf of Hoover. For more on efforts by Texas Democrats in this regard, see: Sean P. Cunningham, Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2022).
116 Aldrich, Why Parties, 134.