The Democratic party is the older of the two American Political party. There are three incarnations of the Democratic Party, some historians think of each incarnation as three separate Democratic Parties. However, the modern Democratic Party owes much of its heritage to previous incarnations. Political pressures and historical events made the party change its platform a few times in 200 years of party history.

Its earliest incarnation owes its existence to Thomas Jefferson, an Anti-Federalist, who favored a more direct form of American Democracy. He believed in landownership for all, greatly expanding the American landscape with the 1803 Louisiana purchase from Napoleon’s France. Historians refer to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of American Democracy as the “agrarian paradise” in which the power of the state rested in the hands of the valiant landowning yeoman farmer. Jefferson also believed in the destruction of the central bank in order to make lending practices fairer for the common man. Another reason why Jefferson believed in the destruction of the central bank was to stop the invisible tax of inflation on the poorer segments of the American population. The Democratic Party always had a tradition of policies that supported the creation of wealth for less advantaged Americans. Unfortunately, however, Jefferson’s vision of an “agrarian paradise” lead to the perpetuation of the horrible institution of African slavery as the engine of the American Agricultural sector.

The second incarnation of Democratic party had Andrew Jackson as its central figure. Jackson, like Jefferson, also opposed the central bank, he destroyed it again after it was reinstated by a president of the other party. He was a southerner from Tennessee, a hero of the Battle of New Orleans against the British in the War of 1812. He was also a staunch supporter of slavery and an expansionist. He invaded Spanish Florida because runaway slaves ran to Florida and Indian tribes kept attacking Americans at the Georgia frontier with Florida. Jackson began the tradition of the South being a strong democratic area until the twentieth century. For the duration of the 19th century up until the mid 20th century, the democrats were the proponents of States’ Rights over the federal government. After the American Civil War, slavery was abolished but recalcitrant democrats of the south adopted Jim Crow laws during reconstruction. Racism was endemic in the democratic party; however, the Republicans were very apathetic to condition of blacks in the South.

The third and final incarnation of the Democratic party was formed by two towering figures of twentieth century American politics: Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson was the president who began America’s emergence as a world power and started engaging in “entangling alliances” with Europe during World War I. Woodrow Wilson was famous for his Fourteen points that created the League of Nations. Congressional Republicans did not however, embrace Wilson’s enthusiasm for the predecessor to the Modern United Nations. Woodrow Wilson also broke another Democratic party tradition, he approved of the 16th Amendment of the Constitution that established a private central bank, the Federal Reserve and created a permanent federal income tax in 1913. Historians say that the Democratic Party broke this tradition in order to create economic stability after a series of economic panics. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered the true father of the modern Democratic Party. He believed in landownership for the middle class like Jefferson, but innovated upon Jefferson’s idea with the creation of the FDIC that guarantees bank holdings when banks go bust and they did often during the Great Depression, when Roosevelt presided over the United States. Roosevelt believe that government could be a source of wealth for the working class a series of his programs are collectively known as the New Deal. Roosevelt also began the government-run employee retirement insurance known as Security as a means of creating economic stability in times of socioeconomic upheaval.

The Democratic party’s political ideology is a product of its history but FDR is the one figure that molded the democratic platform so strongly that programs like welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, and the recent health care reform come right out of Roosevelt’s textbook. Every Democratic president after Roosevelt ruled by his precedent.