Claude G. Bowers

Claude Gernade Bowers (November 20, 1878 in Westfield, Indiana – January 21, 1958 in New York City) was an American historian, Democratic Party politician, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador to Spain (1933-1939) and Chile (1939-1953). His histories of the Democratic Party in its formative years from the 1790s to the 1830s helped shape the party's self-image as a powerful force against monopoly and privilege. As ambassador he worked to keep the United States out of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

Bowers began his career as a journalist with a newspaper in Terre Haute, Indiana. While residing there, he became the Democratic candidate for the US House of Representatives, at the request of powerful Democratic leader John Edward Lamb. Though he lost, the experience polished his abundant speaking skills.

Bowers's enormously popular books Party Battles of the Jackson Period (1922) and Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (1925) were political manifestos that denounced the Federalist Party, the Whig Party, and the Republican Party, as bastions of , and hailed the Democrats as true heroes. Bowers was an editorial writer for the New York World from 1923 to 1931, and a political columnist for the New York Journal from 1931 to 1933.

In his very popular histories, he promoted the idea that Thomas Jefferson had founded the Democratic Party. President Franklin Roosevelt, an avid reader of Bowers was impressed enough to build the Jefferson Memorial and appoint him the US ambassador to Spain in 1933. Bowers's The Tragic Era (1929) attracted wide attention for its attack on the Republican Party, which Bowers believed humiliated the South and corrupted the North during Reconstruction. His work popularized the Dunning School, which "provided an intellectual foundation for the system of segregation and black disenfranchisement that followed Reconstruction." He was the temporary chairman of the 1928 Democratic National Convention where he gave a keynote speech. Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to Spain and later Chile.

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