The Jacksonian era was the period in American political history dominated by the influence of the seventh president, General Andrew Jackson (1767–1846), who served two terms between 1825 and 1837. An exuberantly egalitarian political culture for white men, divisive political reactions to economic change, the development of a mass-based two-party electoral system, and the growing importance of the slavery issue in national politics all marked the period. Jackson and his associates pushed American politics from an older republican tradition in the direction of democracy but saw their work as restoration rather than innovation.
From the end of the eighteenth century, a series of linked economic and technological changes, sometimes referred to as the Market Revolution, framed the social and economic context of the Jacksonian era. Faster and cheaper forms of transportation, including turnpike roads, steamboats, canals, and ultimately railroads, spread from the Northeast across the country, hastening passenger travel and cutting freight costs. This made it much more feasible to make goods in one place while selling them in another. Once-isolated farmers increased their production of staples like wheat, corn, and pork for the world market, while entrepreneurs replaced traditional artisanal manufactures with new means for making and distributing cheap consumer goods like shoes, hats, and clothing. The invention of the cotton gin (1793) opened the way for large-scale cotton production in the southern interior, fed the movement of planters and slaves to the Southwest, and furnished raw material to a generation of newly mechanized textile factories in Britain and New England.
A rapid increase in the number and size of chartered banks facilitated this active commerce. The first American bank opened in 1782 (Robert Morris’s Bank of North America), and the numbers of banks grew to 28 in 1800 and 729 by 1837. Often operating on slender capital reserves, these banks provided credit-hungry borrowers with loans in the form of paper notes that served as the medium of exchange for an increasingly monetized economy. Eager to foster economic development, state governments frequently protected banks and internal improvement companies with the privilege of corporate charters. The largest and most privileged corporation of all was the second Bank of the United States, chartered for 30 years in 1816, with a capital of $35 million, a monopoly of the banking business of the federal government, and the size and strength to discipline the note issue of the state banks.
Americans reacted to commercial growth with a mixture of optimism and anxiety. Farmers who profited from the sale of commodities welcomed the changes, unless the purchase of new lands and new equipment for market production put them perilously in debt and subjected them to market swings. Customers certainly welcomed cheaper consumer goods, but new forms of inequality, including new class structures and new gender roles, also accompanied the new economy. Cultural tension was reflected in the so-called Second Great Awakening, a wave of religious revivals that offered reformed ways of life to converts who suffered from social and spiritual upheaval from frontiers to big cities.
State decisions to relax property requirements and other restrictions on white men’s right to vote amplified political reactions to economic, social, and cultural change. The new voters did not cast their ballots consistently along class lines, and many did not vote at all initially, but the broadened franchise created a mass electorate that skilled political operatives would soon learn to mobilize. Roused by compelling rhetoric and public spectacles, the new voters would form the mass membership for Jacksonian-era political parties.
Andrew Jackson’s dramatic personal story greatly contributed to his popular appeal and sharply contrasted with the privileged upbringings of earlier presidents. He was born under modest circumstances in a backcountry settlement on the border of the two Carolinas. Jackson’s father died before his birth, so his mother raised her three sons with relatives. The future president received some schooling in the neighborhood but never attended college.
During the war for independence, 13-year-old Andrew Jackson was captured as an American messenger when the British invaded the Carolina backcountry in 1780. He received lifelong scars when he refused to clean his captor’s boots and the furious officer slashed him with a saber. Jackson also survived an attack of smallpox he contracted in captivity, but war took the lives of his mother and two brothers, leaving the youth seemingly marked by providence as the only member of his immediate family to survive the American Revolution. He would become the last U.S. president to have served in that conflict.
With iron determination, Jackson managed to overcome his difficult adolescence by reading law, moving to Nashville, Tennessee, and rapidly rising in his profession. There he married Rachel Donelson Robards, leading to a later scandal when enemies revealed that the couple had married before the bride was divorced from her first husband. Jackson also succeeded in land speculation, won a duel, and joined the region’s nascent planter elite. Entering politics, he briefly served in the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the Tennessee Supreme Court, but he preferred his work as major general of the state militia.
Military distinction brought the frontier general to national attention. During the War of 1812, Jackson’s troops honored his toughness with the nickname “Old Hickory,” as he crushed an uprising of the Creek Indians, occupied Spanish Florida in pursuit of the survivors, executed their British advisors, and repelled the British invasion of New Orleans. At war’s end, Jackson pursued warring Seminoles into Florida again, which provoked international outrage but also pressured Spain to sell the vulnerable province to the United States in 1819. After cementing U.S. rule as first territorial governor of Florida, Jackson retired to the Hermitage, his plantation outside Nashville.
Jackson’s rise coincided with serious national stress. In 1819 a postwar boom collapsed in a disastrous “panic,” or depression. Collapsing prices for land and crops bankrupted countless farmers and speculators who had borrowed heavily to purchase public lands. Banks, especially the Bank of the United States, roused widespread resentment when they pressed their borrowers relentlessly but refused to honor their obligations to pay specie (gold or silver) for their notes. The federal government could not act in the crisis but plunged into bitter sectional controversy when northern congressmen tried to limit the growth of slavery as a condition for the admission of Missouri to the union. Temporarily eased by the Missouri Compromise, the slavery dispute threatened serious long-term disruption and frightened the aging Thomas Jefferson “like a fire-bell in the night.”
Seeming to ignore these dangers, national leaders intrigued instead to succeed retiring President James Monroe in the election of 1824. Four major candidates emerged, three of them from Monroe’s own cabinet: Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. A fourth, Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, supposedly led the administration’s friends in Congress.
The triumphant Tennesseean seemed to offer a stark contrast to these bickering and self-interested insiders. While government insiders scoffed at his inexperience, lack of polish, and pugnacious, high-handed temperament, Jackson appealed to ordinary voters, especially in the West and South, as the embodiment of bold action and old-fashioned republican virtue.
Nominated by the Tennessee legislature, Jackson led in both the popular and electoral vote without gaining a majority, so the House of Representatives had to choose between Jackson, Adams, and Crawford, the three highest vote-getters. Jackson believed that his plurality, plus state legislative instructions in his favor, gave him the moral right to win. Instead, Henry Clay threw his support to Adams and gave him the victory. Soon afterward, Adams made Clay his secretary of state, rousing furious charges by Jacksonians of a “corrupt bargain” to defeat the “will of the people.” Determined on vindication, Jackson and his supporters launched an immediate and ultimately successful campaign to gain the White House in 1828, putting claims for majority rule and the moral superiority of “the people” over “aristocrats” at the ideological core of his movement.
As president, Jackson repeatedly invoked the republican principles of the Revolution, but he actually turned American political culture toward democracy by identifying the people themselves, not an enlightened elite, as the greatest source of public virtue. Seeing his movement as the majority’s legitimate voice, however, Jackson rarely saw a difference between the peoples welfare and the good of his own party. His first major initiative, for example, was to replace long-established federal officeholders with his own supporters, insisting that the incumbents were often incompetent or corrupt, but also arguing that holdovers from previous administrations were out of step with the people’s will. Jacksonians strongly defended this so-called spoils system, but advocates of an independent civil service struggled against it for most of the nineteenth century.
Jackson also took office determined to remove the eastern Indian tribes to lands beyond the Missisippi. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the president to exchange lands in modern Oklahoma for tribal lands within existing states. Occupying extensive tracts in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Semi-noles were quite unwilling to move. The Cherokees were promised partial protection in two Supreme Court decisions, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia, but the decisions proved unenforceable. All the major eastern tribes, with as many as 100,000 members, were eventually deported by a combination of bribery, fraud, intimidation, and coercion. Corruption and neglect led to the death of about one Indian in four along the so-called Trail of Tears.
When South Carolina, worried about the viability of its slave-based economy, followed John C. Calhoun’s proposal to nullify the federal tariff in 1832, Jackson threatened military action to restore federal supremacy, arguing that the state’s actions were an intolerable rejection of majority rule. In 1835 South Carolinians defied federal law again when a mob seized and burned a shipment of abolitionist tracts from the Charleston post office. Supporting the mob’s goals but opposing its methods, Jackson called for federal legislation to exclude “incendiary” materials from the U.S. mail. The proposal foundered, so the administration tolerated informal mail censorship by local vigilance committees.
Andrew Jackson’s war against the Bank of the United States (BUS) was the central political struggle of his presidency. Partly inspired by the eighteenth-century British radicals who underpinned the republican tradition and also denounced privileged corporations like the Bank of England and the South Sea Company, Jackson distrusted all banks. He especially distrusted the Bank of the United States for allegedly using its immense powers and legal privileges for private gain at public expense. Drawing energy from Americans’ ambivalent feelings about the new economy that banks had abetted, the Bank War revived the two-party system and defined American politics for the decade following Jackson’s presidency.
When Congress granted the bank a new charter in the summer of 1832, Jackson vetoed the bill with a ringing denunciation of wealthy men who misused government “to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.” Supporters denounced the veto as ignorant madness, but the message was wildly popular among voters who shared Jackson’s misgivings about unrestrained private power, and Jackson was resoundingly reelected with a larger majority than before. Soon after, Jackson went further and pulled the government’s funds from the bank, an arguably illegal move that crippled it both politically and financially. In a related policy, Jackson favored state control of internal improvements and vetoed the use of federal funds for local transportation projects.
Deposit removal galvanized the president’s opponents, who argued that his high-handed actions defied Congress and threatened a dictatorship. Denouncing Jackson as “King Andrew I,” they organized themselves as the Whig Party, adopting the name from the British opponents of centralized royal power. Led by congressional magnates like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, the Whigs became a formidable political force after Jackson left office and another powerful panic swept the United States in 1837. Jacksonians responded by reviving Jeffersonian party lines, shortening the older name “Democratic-Republicans” to “Democratic Party,” and portraying the Whigs as resurrected Federalists. Each party solidified its identity and its organization by blaming its opponents for the panic of 1837, creating a competitive political structure that scholars have called the Second American Party System, to distinguish it from the First Party System of Federalists and Democratic-Republicans.
Both parties became national institutions that contested elections at the federal and local level in every state except South Carolina, which remained aloof from both. Democrats generally embraced party organization with vigor and finesse; Whigs retained more antipartisan principles and weaker gifts for organization. A Washington newspaper spelled out doctrine for each party—The Globe for the Democrats and The National Intelligencer for the Whigs—while a host of state-level prints adapted the message to local conditions. Each party also embraced an ascending network of local, district, state, and national party conventions to convey opinions and decisions between bottom and top, to adopt platforms, and to nominate candidates for public office.
For presidential elections, each party organized a national campaign committee to distribute pamphlets and special campaign newspapers to corresponding networks of state, county, and local committees. Successful office seekers rewarded followers with government patronage and enforced party discipline by threatening to revoke it if crossed. Historians Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin have questioned voters’ genuine emotional involvement in Jacksonian elections, but most scholars note that voting turnout rates often approached and sometimes exceeded 80 percent, and conclude that colorful spectacles and lively debates between rival candidates successfully drew the connections between party doctrines and local concerns.
In their platforms, Democrats typically denounced federal measures to promote the new economy, including the national bank, high tariffs, and public funding for internal improvements, and all restraints on the liberty of common white men, including moral reforms favored by revivalists, like Sunday blue laws and restrictions on the sale of alcohol. After the panic of 1837, many Democrats shared Jackson’s own desire to prohibit paper money banking altogether and return the country to an all-metallic currency. Party rhetoric denounced class privilege and stressed the equality of all white men, sometimes underscored with a fierce antiblack racism. Whigs were more likely to champion personal and public improvement over unrestrained liberty, and favored banks, internal improvements, the rights of corporations, evangelical moral reforms, and philanthropic causes like public schools and benevolent institutions. Though business conservatism often sent the largest southern planters into Whig ranks, Whigs across the nation were somewhat more tolerant of black rights and antislavery opinions than their rivals. Some Whigs and Democrats were found within all social classes, but voting studies have found that leading urban businessmen were more likely to be Whigs, while working-class wards usually leaned to the Democrats, and Whig counties were more closely linked to the market economy than their Democratic counterparts.
The Democratic Party and the Whig Party did not monopolize contemporary Americans’ political reactions to the challenges of their era. An Anti-Masonic Party channeled popular resentment in northeastern states before absorption by the Whigs. Trade union movements and workingmen’s parties briefly flared in large cities, before succumbing to hard times and Democratic blandishments after the panic of 1837. Women entered public life through allegedly nonpartisan religious and reform movements and also found supportive partisan roles, especially among Whigs. Rebuffed by mainstream politicians, radical black and white abolitionists agitated outside party structures, though some eventually embraced politics through the Liberty Party and its successors. The example of Jacksonian politics proved irresistibly attractive, even to those it rigorously excluded.
Jackson’s immediate successors competed within the political and ideological framework established during his presidency. In 1836 Vice President Martin Van Buren succeeded Jackson in the presidency but struggled unsuccessfully with the panic of 1837 and its aftermath. In 1840, the Whigs created a storm of popular enthusiasm for William Henry Harrison of Indiana, their own popular frontier general. Soon after being inaugurated, Harrison died and his vice president, John Tyler of Virginia, alienated both parties and proved that party support had become essential to a functional presidency. By 1844, however, the opportunity for western expansion through the acquisition of Texas and Oregon had eclipsed older issues. Martin Van Buren lost the Democratic nomination to James K. Polk of Tennessee when he fumbled the territorial issue. As president, Polk echoed Jacksonian themes in his veto of the Rivers and Harbors Bill, but the Mexican War dominated his term, and the territorial expansion of slavery preoccupied his successors.
Polks election sent American politics in new and dangerous directions. In 1845 the annexation of Texas led to war with Mexico, conquest of the Far West, and a steadily intensifying national quarrel over the future of slavery there. That controversy would eventually destroy the Whig Party and other specific features of the Jacksonian political system, but subsequent generations of Americans would find the strong presidency, the rhetoric of democracy, and the institutions of party politics that Jacksonians had introduced to be indispensable to public life.
See also banking policy; Democratic Party, 1828–60; economy and politics to 1860; Republican Party to 1896; Whig Party.
FURTHER READING
Altschuler, Glenn C, and Stuart M. Blumin. Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Larson, John Lauritz. Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845. New York: Harper and Row, 1984.
___. Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
___. Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.
Ryan, Mary P. Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Shade, William G. “Political Pluralism and Party Development: The Creation of the Modern Party System, 1815–1852.” In The Evolution of American Political Systems, edited by Paul Kleppner, 77—112. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Watson, Harry L. liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. 2nd revised ed., New York: Hill and Wang, 1990, 2006.
Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: Norton, 2005.
HARRY L. WATSON
In the twentieth century and thereafter, Jewish public culture has been peculiar in the extent to which ethical idealism has trumped material interest. The result has been a persistent progressivism uncharacteristic of any comparable group of white Americans. Devotion to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has shaped the political profile of American Jewry in ways that no other ethnic or religious minority has matched.
During the colonial period and until the end of the nineteenth century, Jews were neither numerous enough nor conspicuous enough to have constituted a singular political force. Their cohesiveness would await two events: mass migration from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of czarist pogroms and the response of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to the Great Depression. For nearly four decades prior to World War I, well over 2 million Jews arrived in the metropolises of the East Coast and the Midwest in particular. These immigrants were so impoverished that, according to one government report, $9 was the average sum in their pockets. Because eastern European Jews were fleeing not only worsening destitution but also religious persecution, their politics tended to be more dissident and desperate than the stance of the much smaller, prosperous, established Sephardic and German Jewish communities. Co-religionists who were already entrenched in the United States tended to be conservative in their political views.
Membership in the working and lower classes made the new Jewish immigrants and their children receptive to the appeal of varieties of radicalism, which elicited sympathy longer among Jews than among other Americans. Jews were long overrepresented in the various socialist and Communist parties and in the anarchist movement and were often in their leadership. The penury that was commonplace in the Jewish community also made it especially vulnerable to the crisis of capitalism that erupted in 1929, though most Jews turned not to extreme solutions but rather (like most Americans) to the New Deal. Its promise to meet the systemic challenge of the Great Depression, and the elusive goals of recovery, relief, and regulation that President Roosevelt enunciated lured Jews into the Democratic Party in overwhelming numbers, forming a pattern that has endured to the present. The four elections that FDR won set the standard against which subsequent Jewish allegiance to the liberalism of the Democratic Party has come to be measured. In the 1936 election, for example, the nations most densely Jewish ward—located in Chicago—gave the incumbent a margin of 96 percent (the sort of near unanimity otherwise enjoyed by dictators, who prefer to run unopposed). The depth of the fervor for FDR was signified by the Schechter brothers, whose beleaguered kosher poultry business in Brooklyn led them to challenge the constitutionality of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), a keystone of New Deal economic regulation. In a landmark 1935 decision, the Supreme Court agreed with the Schechters and ruled the NRA unconstitutional. The following year all 16 votes in the Schechter family were nevertheless cast for the very candidate whose NRA had presumably damaged their business.
After Roosevelt’s 1936 electoral landslide, he could not keep intact a precarious coalition that ranged all the way from southern segregationists to northern blacks. Other voters had suffered at least as much as the Jews during the Great Depression. Yet no group would cling more tenaciously to the Democratic Party—and especially its reformist wing—than American Jewry, which gave Roosevelt a staggering 90 percent of its vote in 1940 and again in 1944. To be sure, such loyalty to the New Deal could be read as the gratitude of a disadvantaged group that its economic needs were being satisfied.
But other factors must be summoned to account for FDR’s popularity among Jews. He symbolized the progressive spirit of communal claims against the nation’s sweet tooth for a rampant individualism that was foreign to historic Judaism. The president had also admirably prevailed over the snobbery of his patrician origins. His close associates included Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., legislative draftsman and advisor Benjamin V. Cohen, and speechwriter Sam Rosenman, as well as Justice Felix Frankfurter, whom FDR appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939. Beginning in 1941, the commander in chief also helped personify the Allied war against the Third Reich and offered in his articulation of the Four Freedoms a democratic riposte to Nazism. No wonder then that a Republican judge, Jonah Goldstein, ruefully remarked that his co-religionists belonged to three velten (Yiddish for “worlds”): de velt (“this world”), yene velt (“the world to come”), and Roosevelt.
The election of 1948 was not a fair test of the enduring Jewish attachment to liberalism. The Fair Deal was, after all, a continuation of the New Deal, and President Harry S. Truman had recognized the state of Israel only 11 minutes after its birth. Consider instead the 1950s, when large segments of the Jewish community were enjoying unprecedented prosperity in suburbia and were abandoning their proletarian origins for good. Running against Dwight D. Eisenhower, the enormously popular former general who had led the crusade in Europe, Democrat Adlai Stevenson nevertheless attracted almost two out of every three Jewish votes. By 1960 puzzled political scientists were obliged to explain why the Democratic nominee, Senator John F. Kennedy, the first and only Roman Catholic ever elected to the presidency, won a higher proportion of votes among Jews than he did among his co-religionists. In 1964 his successor campaigned against a fiercely conservative Republican nominee. Lyndon B. Johnson received almost nine out often Jewish votes—in no small measure because the Great Society was packaged as a completion of the unfinished agenda of the New Deal.
The ballots cast for Vice President Hubert Humphrey in middle-class Jewish neighborhoods in 1968 closely paralleled the Democratic nominee’s popularity in the inner cities. This anomaly inspired Milton Himmelfarb of the American Jewish Committee to quip that Jews lived like Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans. Soon this generalization would prove shaky, however, because Jewish income levels became higher than the earnings of the Episcopalians and Congregationalists, whose ancestors had settled in the New World over three centuries earlier. Around 1970 the income gap that had opened up between Jews and Christians became wider than that between whites and blacks; soon the gap between Jews and Christians would double. (According to a 2000 poll, long after the axis of American politics had shifted dramatically to the right, proportionately more Jews even than blacks defined themselves as liberal—and a higher percentage of African Americans called themselves conservative than did Jews. Even as progressivism appeared at the dawn of the new century to be on the defensive, Jews were twice as likely to designate themselves as liberal as were other Americans—and certainly as other white Americans.)
Richard M. Nixon’s overwhelming reelection in 1972 looks in retrospect like the pivot of the political realignment to the right. Three out of every four voters living in high socioeconomic areas gave him their support, as did the majority of every white ethnic group—except one. His Democratic opponent was the son of a preacher: Senator George McGovern was a Methodist from the Great Plains whose isolationist undertones (“Come Home, America”) implied softness toward a militarily robust Israel. He even blundered during a campaign stop in New York’s Garment District by ordering milk with his chopped chicken liver. Not since FDR was a major-party candidate more liberal than McGovern, who consequently garnered a whopping two-thirds of the Jewish vote. Indeed, had the rest of the electorate voted as Jews did, Nixon would have been buried in the greatest landslide in American history. Even after Nixon resigned from office in the summer of 1974 to avoid impeachment, over a quarter of the populace had a favorable opinion of the unindicted co-conspirator and regretted his resignation. The proportion of Jews expressing such sentiments was 6 percent.
How could political scientists account for 1976? A white Southerner was much less likely to vote for former governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia than was a northern Jew. Four years later, the president’s support among Jewish voters dropped from 72 percent to 44 percent, five points ahead of former governor Ronald Reagan. The plurality that Carter achieved from Jewish voters in 1980 marked the first time since the New Deal era that a Democratic nominee for the White House had failed to secure a majority of Jewish ballots (because Congressman John Anderson—running as an independent—received about 15 percent of the Jewish vote). Four years later, the GOP spent four times as much as did the Democrats in making direct pitches to Jewish voters, who nevertheless gave Reagan 8 percent less of their support in 1984, even as his percentage of the popular vote increased by the same figure. Electoral analysts discovered that the only categories of the populace that bestowed upon former vice president Walter Mondale two-thirds of their votes—other than the Jews—were blacks and the unemployed. In 1988 Governor Michael Dukakis ran badly against Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, but did better among Jews than even among Greek Americans.
This voting pattern has if anything solidified into something akin to industrial strength, impervious to Republican attack. Take the four presidential elections before 2008. Four out of every five Jewish voters chose the Democratic nominee: Governor Bill Clinton in 1992 and again in 1996, Vice President Al Gore in 2000, and Senator John F. Kerry in 2004. In 1999 President Clinton’s popularity among Jews held steady even during his impeachment ordeal. His chosen successor not only beat his opponent, Governor George W. Bush of Texas, by half a million votes in the general election but did significantly better among Jews as well, attracting 79 percent of their ballots. Though about one in five Jews reliably vote Republican (and that number can double in special circumstances), the commitment of Jews to the Democratic column has remained so intractable that the selection of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman as Gore’s running mate in 2000 made no appreciable difference in their totals.
Perhaps even more noteworthy is that the prominence of a Jew on the Democratic ticket stirred no evident anti-Semitism. Informal religious tests are still applied for public office—for example, against atheists and agnostics. But in 2000 no such test was imposed on Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew. This expansion of political opportunity marked a remarkable transformation since the mid-1930s, when pollsters learned that two out of every five Americans would not vote for an otherwise qualified Jewish candidate for the presidency. Half a century later, that proportion fell to less than one in ten—which was statistically insignificant. One measure of the decline of bigotry occurred in 1992, which was the first time that the number of Jews serving in the U.S. Senate reached ten, the minimum necessary for a prayer quorum, or minyan. If the number of Jews serving in the Senate were to reflect the proportion of their co-religionists in the general population, there would be only two members of the upper house eligible for a minyan. Instead, in the Congress of the early twenty-first century, roughly a dozen senators were eligible. More Jews served in the Senate than adherents of any single Protestant denomination. The voters of two states, California and Wisconsin, each elected two Jewish Democrats to the Senate: Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl, respectively. Only two Jews serving in the Senate in 2008 were Republicans, Norm Coleman and Arlen Specter; and one senator aligned with the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, was actually a socialist. When the 30 Jews elected to the House of Representatives in the 110th Congress were added to the equation, a minority group long associated with marginality and persecution outnumbered Episcopalians and ranked just behind Presbyterians.
The Jewish vote in itself cannot account for such disproportionate representation and has been cast in states and districts too tiny to constitute a “bloc” favoring Jewish candidates. Because of the dominance of ideology, Jewish voters have tended to exempt themselves from the allure of identity politics. Unlike, for example, Irish Americans in the past or African Americans in the present, Jews have not been especially receptive to candidates of their own ethnicity and faith—unless they also promise to activate the liberal imagination. Not only arguments of immediate expediency but also appeals to ethnic loyalty—while not negligible—have found Jews less receptive than other minorities when stepping inside the polling booth. Perhaps that is because of historic charges of “dual loyalty,” which raised the specter of unreliable patriotism, and of bloc voting, which insinuated the unwholesome and excessive influence of a minority. Often yearning to surmount the narrowness of parochial interest, Jewish voters have generally voted for non-Jewish candidates who were liberal rather than Jewish office seekers who were conservative.
But then, very few such candidates are conservative. The first two Jews to serve in the Senate ended up championing the Confederacy cause: Democrat David Levy Yulee of antebellum Florida and Whig Judah P. Benjamin of antebellum Louisiana. (Benjamin served in the secessionist cabinet as attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state.) Two-thirds of their successors in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been Democrats, often left of center, exemplified by Herbert H. Lehman of New York, Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut, Carl Levin of Michigan, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, and Charles Schumer of New York. In the 2007—9 House of Representatives, for instance, the chief deputy minority whip was Eric Cantor of Virginia. But he was the only Republican representative who was Jewish. (In 2009 the only congressional caucus consisting of fewer Republicans was African American, because every black member of the House of Representatives was a Democrat.) How durable this one-sidedness among Jews will prove to be is not clear. Consider, though, the willingness in 2008 of only one in ten Jews under the age of 35 to call themselves Republicans.
In their relative indifference to pocketbook considerations, Jewish voters since the New Deal have violated one of the few axioms of political science: the higher the income, the greater the enthusiasm for the GOP. What then accounts for the distinctiveness of this political orientation? In the body-contact sport that American political operatives play, the most convincing explanation is quite eccentric: Jews have harbored a thirst for justice, often expressed in a moralistic idiom. They have envisioned politics to be the means by which unfairness and oppression might be challenged. An interpretation that highlights the quest for social justice hardly implies that Jews hold a monopoly on such motives. But what supports such an analysis are the voting patterns and the polling data and questionnaires that admit no other interpretation. In 1940, when W.E.B. Du Bois hailed the chairman of the NAACP’s board of directors, Joel Spingarn, as “one of those vivid, enthusiastic but clear-thinking idealists which from age to age the Jewish race has given the world,” the editor of The Crisis was hinting at the impulse that has set Jews apart from other participants in the nation’s politics.
Perhaps no minority group has taken more seriously the ideal of popular sovereignty or has been more inspired by the rhetoric of civic responsibility. Jews have been twice as likely to vote as other citizens, sometimes constituting as much as 6 percent of the electorate. Such faith in the suffrage has paid off because of the unrepresentative character of the Electoral College, which the framers unintentionally tilted to favor Jewish residential patterns. That is why the political culture of so small a minority actually matters. Take 1976: in the state of New York, about a quarter of the voters were Jewish. They swung about 80 percent for Carter over incumbent Gerald Ford, enabling the Democratic challenger to carry the state and, with it, the presidency. Had Carter and President Ford evenly split the Jewish vote of New York, Carter would have lost the state and with it the White House. Even more consequential was the freakish 2000 election, which was decided in Palm Beach County, in the battleground state of Florida, by several hundred elderly Jews, a constituency to which the highly conservative independent candidate Patrick J. Buchanan would have been unable to pander. Confused by the “butterfly” ballot, this handful of Jewish senior citizens inadvertently voted for Buchanan and swung the election to Bush in the winner-take-all system devised in 1787.
Because Jews happen to be concentrated in states of high urban density, the impact of this minority group is magnified. That is why, ever since the political alignment that was forged in 1932, the attitudes and values of Jewish voters have been integral not only to the fate of liberalism in the United States but also to the vicissitudes of its democratic experiment.
See also European immigrants and politics; religion and politics since 1945.
FURTHER READING
Dollinger, Marc. Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Fuchs, Lawrence H. The Political Behavior of American Jews. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956.
Goren, Arthur A. The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Himmelfarb, Milton. The Jews of Modernity. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
Isaacs, Stephen D. Jews and American Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.
Liebman, Arthur. Jews and the Left. New York: Wiley, 1979.
Maisel, L. Sandy, and Ira N. Forman, eds. Jews in American Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
Shapiro, Edward S. We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005.
Whitfield, Stephen J. American Space, Jewish Time. Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1988.
STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD
See Supreme Court.