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Matthew Tseu Period 4 12/10/11 Group 4 Prompt 4 Democratic Party, in the United States, one of the two major political parties, the other being the Republican Party. Historically, the Democratic Party has supported organized labor, ethnic minorities, and progressive reform. It tends to favor greater government intervention in the economy and to oppose government intervention in the private, noneconomic affairs of citizens. The logo of the Democratic Party, the donkey, was popularized by cartoonist Thomas Nast in the 1870s; though widely used, it has never been officially adopted by the party. The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the United States and among the oldest political parties in the world. It traces its roots to 1792, when followers of Thomas Jefferson adopted the name Republican to emphasize their antimonarchical views. The Republican Party, also known as the Jeffersonian Republicans, advocated a decentralized government with limited powers. Another faction to emerge in the early years of the republic, the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, favored a strong central government. Jefferson’s faction developed from the group of Anti-Federalists who had agitated in favor of the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States. The Federalists called Jefferson’s faction the Democratic-Republican Party in an attempt to identify it with the disorder spawned by the “radical democrats” of the French Revolution of 1789. After the Federalist John Adams was elected president in 1796, the Republican Party served as the country’s first opposition party, and in 1798 the Republicans adopted the derisive DemocraticRepublican label as their official name. In 1800 Adams was defeated by Jefferson, whose victory ushered in a period of prolonged Democratic-Republican dominance. Jefferson won reelection easily in 1804, and DemocraticRepublicans James Madison (1808 and 1812) and James Monroe (1816 and 1820) were also subsequently elected. By 1820 the Federalist Party had faded from national politics, leaving the Democratic-Republicans as the country’s sole major party and allowing Monroe to run unopposed in that year’s presidential election. Republican Party, byname Grand Old Party (GOP), in the United States, one of the two major political parties, the other being the Democratic Party. The Republican Party traditionally has supported laissez-faire capitalism, low taxes, and conservative social policies. The party acquired the acronym GOP, widely understood as “Grand Old Party,” in the 1870s. The party’s official logo, the elephant, is derived from a cartoon by Thomas Nast and also dates from the 1870s. The term Republican was adopted in 1792 by supporters of Thomas Jefferson, who favoured a decentralized government with limited powers. Although Jefferson’s political philosophy is consistent with the outlook of the modern Republican Party, his faction, which soon became known as the Democratic-Republican Party, ironically evolved by the 1830s into the Democratic Party, the modern Republican Party’s chief rival. The Republican Party traces its roots to the 1850s, when antislavery leaders (including former members of the Democratic, Whig, and Free-Soil parties) joined forces to oppose the extension of slavery into the Kansas and Nebraska territories by the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act. At meetings in Ripon, Wisconsin (May 1854), and Jackson, Michigan (July 1854), they recommended forming a new party, which was duly established at the political convention in Jackson. At their first presidential nominating convention in 1856, the Republicans nominated John C. Frémont on a platform that called on Congress to abolish slavery in the territories, reflecting a widely held view in the North. Although ultimately unsuccessful in his presidential bid, Frémont carried 11 Northern states and received nearly two-fifths of the electoral vote. During the first four years of its existence, the party rapidly displaced the Whigs as the main opposition to the dominant Democratic Party. In 1860 the Democrats split over the slavery issue, as the Northern and Southern wings of the party nominated different candidates (Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, respectively); the election that year also included John Bell, the nominee of the Constitutional Union Party. Thus, the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was able to capture the presidency, winning 18 Northern states and receiving 60 percent of the electoral vote but only 40 percent of the popular vote. By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration as president, however, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union, and the country soon descended into the American Civil War (1861–65). The 1860 election is regarded by most political observers as the first of three “critical” elections in the United States—contests that produced sharp and enduring changes in party loyalties across the country (although some analysts consider the election of 1824 to be the first critical election). After 1860 the Democratic and Republican parties became the major parties in a largely two-party system. In federal elections from the 1870s to the 1890s, the parties were in rough balance—except in the South, which became solidly Democratic. The two parties controlled Congress for almost equal periods, though the Democrats held the presidency only during the two terms of Grover Cleveland (1885–89 and 1893–97). The prolonged agony of the Civil War weakened Lincoln’s prospects for reelection in 1864. To broaden his support, he chose as his vice presidential candidate Andrew Johnson, a pro-Union Democratic senator from Tennessee, and the Lincoln-Johnson ticket subsequently won a landslide victory over Democrat George B. McClellan and his running mate George Pendleton. Following Lincoln’s assassination at the end of the war, Johnson favoured Lincoln’s moderate program for the Reconstruction of the South over the more punitive plan backed by the Radical Republican members of Congress. Stymied for a time by Johnson’s vetoes, the Radical Republicans won overwhelming control of Congress in the 1866 elections and engineered Johnson’s impeachment in the House of Representatives. Although the Senate fell one vote short of convicting and removing Johnson, the Radical Republicans managed to implement their Reconstruction program, which made the party anathema across the former Confederacy. In the North the party’s close identification with the Union victory secured it the allegiance of most farmers, and its support of protective tariffs and of the interests of big business eventually gained it the backing of powerful industrial and financial circles.