Marvin Gandall wrote, "You are misunderstanding the struggles you cite above drawn from trade union, black, and women's history. The 'revolutionaries' in each case were, as you would expect, far outnumbered by liberals, social democrats, and even conservatives - including at the leadership level - and in each instancethey saw the Democrats, rightly or wrongly, as the party which would carry the demands they were demonstrating for into the legislative arena."
This level of overgeneralization is historically illiterate. For most of its history, the Democratic party was the party of slavery, if not treason, segregation, and imperial ventures. The woman suffrage movement was far more inclined to the Republicans--even to third parties--than to the Democrats. Before the 1930s (and usually located today into the later 1930s or even the 1940s), African- Americans voted overwhelmingly for the party of Lincoln and emancipation. Organized labor was not automatically Democratic. The only "revolutionaries" to vote consistently Democratic over much of this stretch wore hoods and sheets and voted early and often. ML
