Visions of Party in 19th Century American Politics

• In Event: Political Parties and Social Movements in American Political Development

Abstract

This paper surveys the vast panoply of partisan experience, encompassing both mainstream and radical politics, that characterized the “Party Period” of the nineteenth century. The goal is to show its multiple, competing, and overlapping legacies, rather than to imagine American party politics as a primordial soup of distributive politics into which issue conflict only arrived with the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Mainstream and radical party politics, the paper argues, should be examined alongside each other. The goal is to rework, in a historical-institutionalist framework and with new attention to patterns of inclusion and exclusion, analyses centering political parties in American political development.
In particular, the paper examines seven party formulations. The Jacksonian Democrats pioneered the mass party, with its regular organization controlled by men devoted to the practice of politics and desirous of the fruits of office. Their opponents in the Whig Party, by contrast, espoused a more ambivalent view, holding fast to older republican notions of public virtue. The Republican Party from its founding in 1854 through Reconstruction marshalled traditional party form to the project of saving the union and redeeming its promise, with explosive, and still unfolding, consequences. Later, amid a polity convulsed by the rapid industrialization and gaping inequalities of the Gilded Age, came starkly disparate and unresolved answers to the possibilities of party. Political organizations reached full flower, the vast spectacles of marching bands and torchlight parades sustained by rivers of corruption. Mugwump reformers sought to purify the polity from the stench of petty politics. The Farmers’ Alliance, which formed the nucleus of the People’s Party, celebrated the possibilities for ordinary folk to remake politics, but had less sense of how that vision might congeal into party form and make a national majority. Finally, the Socialist Party in the era of Eugene Debs struggled with similar questions. Its electorally oriented faction combined rather traditional views on party form with decidedly radical substantive goals.

Authors

• Daniel Schlozman, Johns Hopkins University

• Sam Rosenfeld, Colgate University