Bourbon Democrats were promoters of a form of laissez-faire capitalism which included opposition to the high-tariff protectionism that the Republicans were then advocating as well as fiscal discipline.

They opposed American imperialism and overseas expansion, fought for the gold standard against bimetallism, and promoted what they called "hard" and "sound" money.

[5] The electoral system elevated Bourbon Democrat leader Grover Cleveland to the office of President both in 1884 and in 1892, but the support for the movement declined considerably in the wake of the Panic of 1893.

President Cleveland, a staunch believer in the gold standard, refused to inflate the money supply with silver, thus alienating the agrarian populist wing of the Democratic Party.

Harnessing the energy of an agrarian insurgency with his famous Cross of Gold speech, Congressman Bryan soon became the Democratic nominee for president in the 1896 election.

[6] Some of the Bourbons sat out the 1896 election or tacitly supported William McKinley, the Republican nominee, whereas others set up the third-party ticket of the National Democratic Party led by John M. Palmer, a former Governor of Illinois.

By World War I, the key elder statesman in the movement John M. Palmer – as well as Simon Bolivar Buckner, William F. Vilas and Edward Atkinson – had died.

In the spring of 1896, mayor John Fitzpatrick of New Orleans, leader of the city's Bourbon Democratic organization, left office after a scandal-ridden administration, his chosen successor badly defeated by reform candidate Walter C. Flower.

[12] Elected to the House of Representatives in 1885 and serving until 1901, Mississippi Democrat Thomas C. Catchings participated in the politics of both presidential terms of Grover Cleveland, particularly the free silver controversy and the agrarian discontent that culminated in populism.