Loose planks in party platforms: history casts some light.

Rare as it is that a political platform sparks any news, this summer both major parties had to stifle challenges to the abortion-related planks in their platforms. Yet why should anybody but an ideologue be disturbed by a platform? Once upon a time the party platforms said it all. General Zachary Taylor was held to silence as a presidential candidate in 1848, and Abraham Lincoln never gave a campaign speech in 1860: Lincoln, because he might have had more to say, and Taylor because he had nothing at all to say. In those days a party spoke with the single voice Of its convention platform, but today no candidate is bound to vote or govern by a party's official; policy.

In any case, for a platform with real bite to it, one has always had to go to the minor parties. Consider the 1912 platform of one such minor party. It called not only for women's suffrage but for abolition of child labor in mines and factories, for direct election of U.S. senators, for a single presidential term of six years, for the initiative, referendum, and recall, for graduated income and inheritance taxes, for public ownership and conservation of natural resources, for reclamation of wastelands, for public regulation of interstate corporations, and for a sixday workweek. This was the platform of the Prohibition party, which had been calling for these sorts of things since 1872.

The major parties, by contrast, are broad coalitions, not natural clans or movements, and the terms of their negotiated accords may shift from election to election. To look into the eyes of the Democrats or the Republicans and find their enduring character, one must look down the years.

The Democrats, the nation's eldest party, may be known best by two contentious and persistent stands taken over the years, each one in direct conflict with its rival party. One was a long and valiant advocacy of the exploited workers; the other was an acquiescence in the massive abuse of slavery. Today there is a third Great Matter upon which the character--possibly even the survival--of the party may well be invested: the abortion plank in the Democratic platform. Is this the party at its best: stubborn and gutsy in its determination that women shall be radically emancipated? Or is this the party at its worst: subjecting the most helpless to the ultimate abuse? Few Democrats know their political history well enough to put this question in context. To grasp the significance of the party' s prochoice policy, one has to look back at the two other Great Matters on which their party has taken such determined stands.

In 1848 the Democrats repudiated legislation "for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many." That became a signature phrase the party would use year after year. The "few" were invariably the affluent, and the "many" were those who depended on them for employment. The Democrats became the consistent backers of those many who were at the mercy of those few.

In 1868, the Democrats' platform resolved that "this convention sympathize cordially with the workingmen of the United States in their efforts to protect the fights and interests of the laboring classes of the country." While the Democrats were expressing their sympathy for the "laboring classes," the Republican platform was soberly recording its concern about how to pay off the war debt, reduce taxation, and restore the nation's credit. These two partisan priorities were not ultimately hostile to one another, but they were part of what it meant at the time to be a Democrat or a Republican.

By 1880 the Democrats took sides more openly: "The Democratic party is the friend of labor and the laboring man, and pledges itself to protect him." In 1884: "We favor the repeal of all laws restricting the free action of labor, and the enactment of laws by which labor organizations may be incorporated." In 1888, when rich and poor were being taxed at the same rate, they denounced taxation at a single rate as unfair to the workers.

The Republicans, meanwhile, defended high tariffs, claiming that they kept American wages high by keeping out cheap foreign imports. The Democrats replied that the duties were really meant to protect American corporations from competition and keep wages low: "There have been ten reductions of the wages of the laboring man to one increase" (1892).

The last years of the century saw the labor issue break into violence: the Haymarket Square riot (1886), the Homestead strike (1892), the Pullman strike (1894). Popular anger at corporate trusts, which conspired to avoid price-lowering competition and used violence to break unions, produced the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. But Republican prosecutors failed to draw much corporate blood with it, and Republican judges turned it instead against the workers. Strikes and other industrial actions were enjoined as criminal acts in violation of commercial competition. The Democratic platform of 1892 denounced the Sherman Act as "a cowardly makeshift." Trusts, whose corporate owners funded the Republican party, were "designed to enable capital to secure more than its just share of the joint product of Capital and Labor."

Democratic advocacy went on relentlessly over the years. Here are some of the causes they fought for: arbitration instead of the strike or lockout (1896); a strong Interstate Commerce Commission to protect free competition (1904); the eight-hour working day (1904); a graduated income tax (1908); employer liability for injuries or death on the job (1908); inspection of health conditions in the workplace (1908); public vocational education and agricultural extension (1908); regulation of utilities (1908); the six-day working week, special workplace protections for women, and pensions for the retired and the disabled (1916); the right to collective bargaining in industry and to co-operative marketing in agriculture (1920); vocational education for disabled war veterans (1920) and other disabled persons (1948), and employment opportunities for them (1952) and for the mentally retarded (1972); Social Security for the unemployed, aged, orphaned, crippled and blind (1936); crop insurance ( 1940); improvement of employment, safety, and health of migratory workers and their children, and day-care centers for children of working mothers ( 1952); supplemental food programs for the poor and lowered retirement ages for women and the disabled (1956); and maternity benefits for employed mothers (1972).

Democrats rejected the giveaway of public lands to the railroads instead of to homesteaders (1868); blacklists (1900); sweatshops and child labor, convict and coolie labor contracts ( 1892); the Taft-Hartley Act (1948); employment discrimination on grounds of age (1960); discrimination in federal or federally assisted housing ( 1960); and reverse discrimination through employment quotas (1964).

There are two facts to keep in mind when one assesses this long roster of advocacy for the employed. First, Republicans eventually acquiesced in many of these Democratic initiatives. But on the subject of employee welfare the Democrats always had the initiative and the Republicans were reactive, and sometimes reactionary as well.

A second matter for reflection: many of the chief prolabor measures were advocated first by minority parties. It was the Labor Reform party that first complained about coolie labor and called for the eight-hour day; the Union Labor party that first demanded equal pay for women and a graduated income tax; the Social Democratic party (later to become the Socialist party) that first outlined a national insurance plan for injury, unemployment, and retirement.

The minority parties could be bolder because they were more alienated from the mainstream. Their planks had splinters. For example, in 1904 Eugene Debs's Socialists had this to say about the class struggle between capitalists and workers:

Between these two classes there can be no possible compromise or identity of interest....There can be no possible basis for social peace, for individual freedom, for mental and moral harmony, except in the conscious and complete triumph of the working class as the only class that has the right or power to be.

The Democrats, defending the lower economic strata of society from measures "for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many," had a different vision. They saw a struggle underway, yet a struggle between parties that shared a community of interests. In the same campaign when Debs's Socialists had their savage say, Democrats said: "Capital and Labor ought not to be enemies. Each is necessary to the other. Each has its rights, but the rights of labor are certainly no less 'vested,' no less 'sacred' and no less 'inalienable' than the rights of capital." In 1920 the Democrats proclaimed: "Labor is not a commodity; it is human. Those who labor have rights, and the national security and safety depend upon a just recognition of those rights and the conservation of the strength of the workers and their families in the interest of sound-hearted and sound-headed men, women, and children."

The Democratic struggle was not to annihilate capital or the employing classes as the Socialists would, nor to turn a blind eye on their abuses as the Republicans did. It was to assert the claims of those at a disadvantage until the majority saw them as a claim on their consciences. That is what a major political party must do, and what the Democratic party has so consistently done on behalf of the employed.

There is another story and another struggle that gives no comfort to the Democrats. Their party was ardently involved, but not as an initiativetaker, and not as an advocate of the misused.

Before the 1844 election, the Liberty (abolitionist) party issued a platform that reviled slavery as "the grossest form and most revolting manifestation of despotism." That year, both major parties looked the other way--with a fixed stare. The Whigs made one cryptic reference to "the protection of the domestic labor of the country," while the Democrats resolved that "Congress has no power, under the Constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States."

In the next election the abolitionists thundered more loudly that "Congress has no more power to make a Slave than to make a King." The Democrats still deplored enactments "for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many," but had nothing more to reply to the abolitionists than to repeat their 1844 statement. The Whigs issued no official platform.

In 1852 both major parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, continued to avoid the Great Matter. The abolitionists, now called the Free Democratic party, recruited many Whigs whose consciences could not survive their own convention, and issued another call to reject slavery which was "a sin against God and a crime against man," and beyond the limited constitutional powers of the Federal Government to extend or sustain.

By 1856 the Whigs dead-ended as a major party, still deploring the "agitation" convulsing the nation, which they explained by "geographical distinctions." The Democrats still insisted they did not even want the subject of slavery argued in public. It is fair to say that the Whig party disintegrated because its membership had more conscience than those in control, while the Democrats survived for want of enough conscience at any level to cause terminal stress. The new Republicans, in sharp contrast, claimed it was "the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism, Polygamy, and Slavery."

By 1860 the Democrats merely said they would rest their consciences upon the Supreme Court's recent Dred Scott decision, which had asserted the liberties of owners over their private property.

By 1868 the war was over and Lincoln gone, and the Democratic platform began by submissively "recognizing the questions of slavery and secession as having been settled for all time to come." By 1872 they seemed more whole-hearted: "We recognize the equality of all men before the law, and hold that it is the duty of the Government in its dealings with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever nativity, race, color or persuasion, religion or politics."

One might imagine the parties had grown together within a national consensus about equality for blacks. But the Republicans disbelieved the sincerity of their opponents. "The recent amendments to the Constitution," their 1872 platform stated, "should be cordially sustained because they are fight, not merely tolerated because they are law."

One must always be wary of taking any political plank at face value. The very year the Democrats finally professed their belief in racial equality, the Republicans finally disavowed the land giveaways to the railroads and large corporations. Yet the Democrats continued to resist the enfranchisement of the blacks, and the Republicans went on giving away public real estate to their wealthy patrons.

Still, as the years passed, it was clearly the Republicans who took the public initiatives on behalf of the negro, and the Democrats who eventually came to join them on the issues, point by reluctant point. It was, obviously, the reverse of the roles they played on behalf of the working class.

The Republicans clamored for "complete liberty and exact equality in the enjoyment of all civil, political, and public rights" (1872). They demanded that such laws be "enacted and enforced as will secure to every citizen, be he rich or poor, native or foreign-born, white or black, this sovereign fight [the ballot], guaranteed by the Constitution" (1892). They repeatedly denounced lynching (1896), racial discrimination in the civil service and the military (1940), and segregation within federal jurisdiction (1956).

The Democrats usually made similar statements: but always later, and less ardently. And, to complete the obvious symmetry with their political history of advocacy for the working class, the Socialists and the Communists often outdid the Republicans in their appeals for equal rights for blacks.

It is widely known, of course, that as of the 1960s there was a shift of initiative and the Democrats took the lead on behalf of minorities. But in our nation's history this was very late. In general, the issue of racial justice puts the Democratic party to the blush, while the issue of economic justice shows their Republican opponents to disadvantage. Yet in both cases, the laggard party did traipse along, goaded ahead by the party of greater conscience. And it is accurate to say that both parties maintained a theoretical devotion to the Founders' doctrine of equality for all, and protection for the disadvantaged, While each party advocated the cause of its chosen victim class, both admitted that the class with rival interests had also to be accommodated, not annihilated. Neither looked for the "complete triumph" of the abused class over those who had them in their power and sacrificed them to their own interests.

But the lessons of the past are provocative background for the controversies of the present. And today only one controversy is as implacable as the struggles for workers' fights and freedom for slaves. It is the abortion issue.

Over the years the two major parties have largely spoken with one voice about the needs and rights of women. The Republicans were the first to take up many issues. They were against polygamy (1856); for equal fights in property relationships for wives, mothers, and widows, and for the appointment and election of women to offices of public trust (1876); for equal pay for equal work for women (1896); for limited hours of work for women and special vocational training for their aptitudes (1920); for an amendment to the Constitution assuring equal rights to women (1940); for strengthened public programs of maternal and child health care (1944); for a restored personal tax exemption designed to relieve the "maternalization of poverty" among the working poor ( 1984); and for a law against pornography, especially child pornography (1988). The Democrats have opposed discrimination against women in job classifications and in naturalization regulations ( 1920); they supported publicly funded maternity and health care for wives and children of the military ( 1952); they included women as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act of 1964; they asked for publicly provided prenatal and postnatal health care for lowincome mothers and children (1968); for anti-discrimination protection for women in education, and for maternal leave and disability benefits for all working women (1972); for supplemental food programs for low-income pregnant women and infants, restored school meals, and protection against child abuse (1984); and for family leave policies for employees with ailing parents or children (1988);

Advocacy for women has most typically gone hand-in-hand with advocacy for children. Health care, conditions of employment, nutrition, maternity leave and benefits, day care, equal opportunity and remuneration: all have been construed as protective of women and their children. Many of the planks, especially in the earlier years, dealt with women' s status in public life and in the workplace, but those concerns bear as well upon the welfare of their children, especially in homes where the woman is the only parent present or is working.

Now the political parties are faced abruptly with a very different kind of claim: that a mother should enjoy the lawful freedom, not simply to pursue her own choices independently, but to remove an unborn offspring who stands in the way.

After the Wade and Bolton decisions of 1973, the two major parties crafted their respective planks for the 1976 contest. The Democrats thought it best to defer to the Supreme Court. "We fully recognize the religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion. We feel, however, that it is undesirable to attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court decision." The Republicans admitted their membership was divided, but endorsed the efforts of those who sought a constitutional amendment "to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children."

The question of abortion is one of the most difficult and controversial of our time. It is undoubtedly a moral and personal issue but it also involves complex issues relating to medical science and criminal justice. There are those in our party who favor complete support for the Supreme Court's decision which permits abortion on demand. There are others who share sincere convictions that the Supreme Court's decision must be changed by a constitutional amendment prohibiting all abortions. Others have yet to take a position, or they have assumed a stance somewhere in between polar positions ....

We protest the Supreme Court' s intrusion into the family structure through its denial of the parents' obligation and right to guide their minor children. The Republican party favors a continuance of the public dialogue on abortion and supports the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.

Since then the party platforms have sharpened their manifestos. In 1980 the Democrats went on record in favor of abortion on demand, subsidized if need be; the Republicans took the opposite position. In 1984 the two planks were more sharply hewn. The Democrats recognized "reproductive freedom as a fundamental right" with a claim to public funding. The Republicans opposed funding for both abortion providers and promoters, and insisted "the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed." The platforms of 1988 and 1992 continue the dispute, but the rancor has increased now that the Webster and Casey decisions have partially restored the issue of abortion to the political process.

Some Democrats accuse their party of standing on the guilty side of a grave abuse and believe that their party's official position on abortion is consistent, not with their traditional protection of the workers, but with their abandonment of the slaves. How could that be? They are the party that stands up for refugees, migrants, minorities, women, children, the handicapped, the unemployed, the aged. But long memory is sobering. At the very time when they were the party that first stood up for the laboring poor and held out America as "the refuge of the oppressed from every land," the Democrats also despised and rejected the poorest of the poor: the Chinese laborers whom their platforms called "a race not sprung from the same great parent stock, and in fact now by law denied citizenship through naturalization as being unaccustomed to the traditions of a progressive civilization, one exercised in liberty under equal laws." Orientals were "servile races, unfitted by habits, training, religion or kindred, for absorption into the great body of our people." The party was inconsistent then; it can be inconsistent now.

Theirs is the party, prolife Democrats have grounds to argue, which knew from the start that the entrepreneur and the laborer, whatever their mutual grievances, had intertwined interests and--most importantly--inviolable human dignity. It is the party which was bloodily forced to learn that whites and blacks share the same intertwined needs and follies and--most importantly-human dignity. It is the party that has traditionally made appeal for women and children together, since neither prospers or suffers without the other sharing both welfare and human dignity. It is the party that at its 1988 convention declared: "We believe that this nation needs to invest in its children on the front side of life." How, then, could this party abandon the frontmost children, whenever they are unwanted, and say they are a commodity, not human; transform them from the rank of children to the likeness of things, discards, stripped of human dignity? That is more Debs than Democrat.

Democrats had resolved that the deprivation of one individual must never be the price of another's betterment. In the eyes of those who see the present platform as an apostasy from that earlier commitment, the party needs desperately to learn that the empowerment of one burdened individual must never justify the annihilation of another. One class of people ought never be put utterly at the disposal of another.

The party seems again to have taken the part of private choice, as it did a century-and-a-half ago: the private choice to do whatever one wishes with another. This evokes Lincoln, that old baiter of Democrats. His opponent was arguing for "popular sovereignty," their equivalent then of today's "freedom of choice." The argument was that while no one should be obliged to have slaves, so also no one should be denied the choice to have them. What this freedom of choice really meant, Lincoln said, was "that if any one man, choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object." (The italics are his; you can hear his voice rising on them.)

Lincoln's ally, William Seward, said in 1858 that the nation was gripped in "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces." It was not a matter of give-and-take, but of life-or-death, and hence could never be a matter of peaceable compromise. Lincoln's words in the same year are better known: "In my opinion, it [agitation to end slavery] will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this Government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved I do not expect the house to fall----but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other."

The Union staggered, but it did stand. The major parties at the time did not. In one year, 1956, the Whig party was dismembered and destroyed. The Democratic party, morally disgraced, elected only two presidents in the next seventy-two years. Both Whigs and Democrats had refused to listen to a voice of conscience, soft yet hoarse with rage, which had finally persuaded enough citizens that slavery, whatever its constitutional or judicial standing, was a moral and political outrage. To put one human entirely at the mercy of another was a practice so ruthless that they could no longer stand by and allow it.

It is not clear which would be worse for the Democratic party now: to repeat the political debacle of the Whigs, who disappeared in 1856, or the moral debacle of the Democrats, who survived in 1856.

Virginia Volini Marciniak

Pain, you are my oldest friend, Since birth when, pummeling, you crushed my skull, And kicked me screaming. What would I have done Had you not been there to help my mother, Pain?

I have hated you since then, As your fingers twist about my knees, Your ugliness hops before my eyes. I welcome your departure. Fortunately, business took you many places.

How dare you interrupt my life again? Your good-day smile carved by a thousand ice picks, Your handshake springing my nerves, and paralyzing.

My oldest friend, I meet you here again. You live so close now, our paths cross often. What? You are moving into my house? You are wearing my clothes?

Note: This untitled poem was found among papers left by Virginia Volini Marciniak, who died of cancer on October 21, 1990.

ISHMAEL LAW is the pseudonym of a lifelong Democrat and an avid reader of political platforms.