Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 1 of 23 "Historiography of American Political History" by Richard J. Jensen in Jack Greene, ed., Encyclopedia of American Political History (New York: Scribner's, 1984), vol 1. pp 1-25 Moralistic Storytellers Baconian Facts Social Forces Pragmatism & Interests Force of Ideas New Political History Function & System Newtonian Politics Ethnocultural Voters Bibliography HISTORIOGRAPHY is the study of how historians deal with the past. The historiography of American politics could be presented in terms of the major findings regarding important aspects of political history. But the main concern here will be to outline and explain the conceptual formulations upon which historians have grounded their work. The methods and the philosophical assumptions that historians have used have not always been explicit in their work. But these methods and assumptions have. just the same, determined how they select what seems to have been important and how they interpret the enormous mass of information available on American politics. It the categories used here seem too vague, it must be recognized that history is an eclectic discipline. with scholars borrowing widely from other disciplines and often mixing together disparate approaches within a single work. Yet some classification and analysis of historiography is essential, since while historians generally agree on the facts--the names, dates, places, and events--they rarely agree on the interpretations. In contrast to most of the social sciences, historians rarely assemble themselves into schools. And finally, the most remarkable tendency ill scholarship-and not in history alone-over the last two decades has been a relentless specialization caused by the proliferation of graduate dissertations and the steady discover of new sources and new methods. While a college professor in the 1940s sought to identify himself as a "historian." be the 1950 "American historian'' was the designation; and today a scholar might identify himself or herself as a specialist in political parties in the 1830s or on nineteenth-century urban social structure. The proliferation of new journals. conferences, and even separate scholarly organi organizations underscores this trend, causing despair among those few who try to survey all of American history, and emphasizing the need for methodological categorization The Moralistic Storytellers Laymen have always been attracted to history, in such forms as novels, films, monuments, museums, pageants, and restorations. People like a good story-with plot, action, a sense of reliving great events (or at least peeking behind the curtains to see great people in undress). and, to satisfv the critical spirit, some sense of versimilitude If it happened here, in this building, town, state, or nation, and if it happened to people like ourselves, then the historical even' takes on added meaning by becoming, in some small way, a part of our identity. But most scholarly historiography in recent decades has dropped all pretense at popular appeal. Historians write for other scholars or for a captive student audience, and so the priorities of what should go into quality work are seldom likely to produce a best-seller. As the academic job market dried up in the 1970s, hundreds of professionally trained scholars sought employment with historical societies and other agencies oriented primarily toward the general public. They might discover that when the town wanted a celebration of some historic event, it called for an affirmation of long-held http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 2 of 23 favorable beliefs that might well be at variance with the scholar's understanding of what really happened. Perhaps it is just as well that society no longer erects statues of great leaders. The celebratory instinct of Americans, abetted by the personal or family pride of powerful men and their friends, produced a network of presidential libraries memorialising Hoover through Carter. (The Nixon library project remains enmeshed in controversy because of the honor it might bestow on a widely discredited figure.) Built by private funds but operated by the National Archives and Records Service, the libraries combine museums that show off artifacts and tell uplifting stones with archival holdings of personal papers, official records, and oral history transcripts that provide vast opportunities for scholarly research. Likewise, the rapid growth of state and local historical societies and archives since the 1960s has created troves of historical documents that significantly facilitate scholarly research. The distance between the public and the scholar was much less a century ago than it is now. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, nonacademic historians enjoyed large audiences for work that combined moralism and storytelling with scholarship that was abreast of the standards of the day. George Bancroft, John Fiske, James Ford Rhodes, Albert J. Beveridge, Claude Bowers, Carl Sandburg, Matthew Josephson, and Herbert Agar exemplified this tradition before World War II. It survives in political historiography chiefly in biographies. such as those of Robert A. Caro, though James MacGregor Bums and Page Smith are two academics now trying to replicate the old model of large-scale moralistic narrative. The popular appeal of the old school stemmed partly from a gracious literary style, of course, for all were master storytellers with an eve for the revealing incident and an ear for the telling anecdote. Even more important were their willingness and eagerness to dray. the lessons of history for the reader. They examined constitutions, platforms, rhetoric. and legislation in order to judge v hat vitas good or bad for the country, which policies were wise, and which disastrous. Some, like Rhodes. were best at careful analysis of complex processes. Most excelled at biography, in either the vignette or the multivolume life, revealing strengths of character, passions, and fatal flaws. Modem scholarship is dubious, if not downright negative, about discovering the lessons of history. Most scholars carefully avoid making judgments about what "should" have been done at critical moments. Those who remain moralistic typically base their judgments on the values of historical actors rather than on specific actions. Political biographers continued with moralizing judgments longer than other historians, but the logic of their craft had distinct roots. Scholarly biography, while not unknown, was an uncommon genre before the mid-1920s, when Allen Johnson, Dumas Malone, and the editorial board of the Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1928-1936) solicited hundreds of historians to write short articles on notable figures. Allan Nevins, a major contributor to the Dictionary, not only wrote several outstanding full-length biographies but also sponsored a well-received series of political biographies in the 1930s. The subtitle of Nevins' best work, Grover Cleveland: a Study in Courage (New York, 1932), encapsulated the moralizing thrust of the genre. In the 1940s and 1950s a number of fine scholars fumed to multivolume biographies of major political figures, seeking not so much to describe the essence of morality in politics as to show the way men had balanced power and responsibility. Thus, Paolo Coletta's William Jennings Bryan David Donald's Charles Sumner, Frank Freidel's Franklin Roosevelt, Arthur Link's Woodrow Wilson, Richard Lowitt's George Norris, Dumas Malone's Thomas Jefferson, Charles Sellers' James K. Polk, and Charles Wiltse's John C. Calhoun The problem, as each biographer discovered, was that his subject was not quite as morally pure as he originally thought. As Beveridge remarked of Lincoln, "I wish to the Lord he could have gone straight forward about something or other. Of all uncertain, halting and hesitating conduct, his takes the prize." Like Beveridge, several biographers were unable to finish their work, or at least paused in mid series to take stock. James MacGregor Bums http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 3 of 23 turned from an idolizer of Franklin Roosevelt to a sharp critic between his first and second volumes (1956 and 1970). After 1960 young historians seldom planned to devote their careers to one man's life. Biographies tended to be far more critical, such as William S. McFeely's Grant (New York. 1981), even. in the case of Caro's study of Lyndon Johnson (New York, 1982), becoming vicious. The one exception is a recent large-scale biography that idolizes its hero and fends off criticisms past and present, Robert Remini's Andrew Jackson (New York, 1977-1984). Certainly no other historian has shown such zest in destroying Old Hickory's enemies yet one more time. The study of decision-making is central to the task of the political biographer. Four approaches are possible, with emphasis on psychology and personality, on the competing proposals of bureaucracies and interests within the government, on the logic of fundamental ideas, or on the interplay of forces in the society at large. Politicians themselves, in their daily work as well as in their retrospective accounts, emphasize the clash of personalities. Journalists, who absorb some of the prestige of power by locating themselves close to its exercise. usually think and write in terms of personality. Thus most documentation favors the first approach, as does the natural taste of the historian who turns to biography. While politicians may be depicted as tribunes of the people, rarely do biographers investigate the voting blocs that put them into office. A legislator can facilely be described as a leader, yet seldom have researchers studied their man's position with respect to his colleagues through roll- call analysis. The position of the biographer in the complex network of the bureaucracy calls for study of organisational structures that few biographers have attempted, though some useful work has been done in this regard on Herbert Hoover's prepresidential career. To locate a person's ideas through the medium of intellectual history has been a more promising route, especially for the philosophically rich era of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph, and James Madison. As late as Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln, the intellectual strategy has proved rewarding, as exemplified in the work of Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter. The philosophical shallowness of political figures of the last century, excepting perhaps Herbert Hoover and Woodrow Wilson, has discouraged an intellectual approach. Political biography thus is a frustrating genre, difficult to integrate with the conceptual framework or methodological advances that have charactenzed political history. Scientific History as Baconian Accumulation of Facts Professional history, as it emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had roots in two opposing philosophical camps. On the one hand German idealism, even Hegelianism, cast a spell on scholars from Bancroft to Frederick Jackson Turner leading them to search for the deep forces that caused American politics to evolve into its modern forms. Bancroft, though an avid penman in the Jacksonian cause, excluded parties from his history--they were not even mentioned, lest the artifices of partisans sully the divinely inspired unfolding of liberty. The enormous prestige of the German university seminar, in which many early professionals were trained, combined with the seeming power of the Darwinian explanation of natural history, made idealism a potent force. The other philosophical tradition, one firmly entrenched in American colleges throughout the nineteenth century, was that of Scottish Common Sense Realism. Drawing its prestige from the achievements of Adam Smith and, even more notably John Stuart Mill, and strongly encouraged by Protestant ministers (especially Presbyterians), Common Sense Realism warned against mysterious forces. It encouraged scholars by holding that the patient accumulation of facts, as proposed by Francis Bacon, and the careful sifting of hypotheses as explained by Mill, was the only sound route if history were to become a science. Had not Newton discovered the laws of the universe this way? Both approaches generated important work--Turner's frontier theory and The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898) by Henry Jones Ford exemplified idealism, while Baconianism suffused The American Commonwealth (1888) by James Bryce, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (1902) by Moisei Ostrogorski, and An http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 4 of 23 Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1912) by Charles Beard. (These books had other conceptual roots as well.) Few working historians seemed to have appreciated the philosophical traditions that produced such different kinds of historiography. Many seemed to believe that Leopold von Ranke's dictum to write history wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (as it actually happened) synthesized the two approaches. Ranke, however, had in mind the need to understand deep Hegelian forces. The historian content with a journeyman's job could explain that his Baconian approach to collecting and verifying facts did not necessitate any sweeping theory; in any case some later scholar might take the bricks to fashion some overarching construction. The strength of Baconianism lies in eagerness to uncover new sources, inexhaustible energy in answering the who, when and where questions, and a readiness to discover exceptions to any general interpretation an idealist might propose. Credit for the overflowing archives is due the Baconians, for the library shelves groaning with long rows of bound journals and university press monographs, as well as for the experience of generation after generation of students who were taught history in terms of nuclear facts that had to be recalled for multiple choice or matching quizzes. It is not true, however, that Baconians lacked a theory of what was important in the past. The question is rather what the theories were. In many cases problems devised by theorists were filtered through the seminar process to become research monographs. The larger concerns of a handful of creativeleaders (especially Turner, John Hicks, C. Vann Woodward and Hofstadter) are discernable in the hundreds of monographs and articles on Populism. Beard developed his own hypotheses for An Economic Interpretation. For the most part, however, the Baconians immersed themselves in the documents, then tried to let the facts "speak." The voices usually turned out to be that of the creators of the documents, especially politicians and journalists. Thus the agenda is set by the past, whether or not the document creators really understood what was happening. The easiest conceptual framework, and the one most used, is what Thomas Cochran has called the "Presidential Synthesis," or for state politics, what John Alexander Williams has termed the "gubernatorial synthesis." These syntheses structure the questions and add a bit of drama, as the historian follows the process whereby candidates seek and win office, then launch their reelection drives by shrewd use of patronage and legislation. Curious for a discipline thoroughly committed to democracy is the absence of voters in Baconian accounts. To be sure, if the politicians or journalists ever discussed the voters their views are reported, and some historians have tried, with middling success, to fathom "public opinion" by carefully examining a range of newspaper editorials. Citations to published Gallup polls also occur in histories of recent politics. While there are formidable technical problems in discovering how the voters behaved, those problems were partly solved by Turner in the 1890s and now are reasonably under control. The Baconians ignored the voters because the philosophical assumptions needed to deal with voters go well beyond common sense--necessary is both an elaborate theoretical framework and the willingness to "massage" data to discover patterns that the people at the time never dreamed about. Moralism characterized very little Baconian history. While the process of ascertaining the facts inevitably included the facts on what the people at the time declared was good or bad, and occasionally uncovered evidence of corruption or the systematic mistreatment of people, the facts themselves do not make judgments. Baconians pride themselves on being unbiased-- though until the 1970s they usually passed over in silence the sexual peccadillos of their subjects. History has no lessons, and does not judge. However, when Julian Boyd, editor of the Thomas Jefferson Papers, discovered evidence of diplomatic perfidy, bordering on treason, committed by Alexander Hamilton in 1790, he assembled the evidence in Number 7, Alexander Hamilton's Secret Attempts to Control American Foreign Policy, With Supporting Documents (Princeton, 1964.) Boyd's moralism surely was exceptional. One reviewer commented that 'there are certain to be accusations of gross partisanship applied to both author and reviewers of this work." Partisanship, if not as bad as treason, surely was as vile as misquotation. http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 5 of 23 Baconian historiography, while still abundant, faded drastically in prestige after 1960. The Baconians, unable to evaluate the new methodologies, turned in another direction, the creation of elaborately edited multivolume editions of the papers of great men like Wilson, Jefferson. Franklin, Calhoun. Clay, Washington (two recent complete editions), and even Andrew Johnson. Boyd, the Princeton librarian who began the Jefferson papers project immediately after World War II, was convinced of the need for patriotic monuments in scholarly form. The honorific character of the projects was underscored when women and minorities began to demand their own sends. The editors pushed Baconianism to an extreme by their insistence that the editions be comprehensive (with expensive national searches for missing documents) and that the transcriptions be utterly exact. Transcription correct a with interfere not do ideas that ensure to backward sentence each aloud read editors the. Scholars who cannot wait a half century for the full edition use older, less scholarly edition; or, better still, they travel to the archives where they can also read the all-important incoming correspondence that the editors leave out. A historian like Robert H. Ferrell, who produced abbreviated collections of Truman and Eisenhower documents within months after they were opened for public inspection in the 1980s, might suffer severe criticism for not following the rigid new standards. It would be an error to reject Baconianism as intellectually dead or the refuge of outmoded scholars. In the 1960s a team of avant garde political scientists and historians, led by Warren Miller, W. Dean Burnham, Lee Benson, Jerome Clubb and Howard Allen began assembling and meticulously editing the largest and most expensive documents project. They labored in the name of advanced science, and were funded with millions from the National Science Foundation. The result was the Inter- University Consortium for Political and Social Research, based at the University of Michigan. The ICPSR is a membership organization comprising several hundred universities and research centers in the United States and Europe. As an archive, the ICPSR hold computerized data files covering elections, public opinion surveys and census data, which it distributes to users on request. The core archival holdings in political history consist of election returns by county for all major contests from 1824 through the present. Baconians love to classify, so the ICPSR has coded over two thousand partydesignations that cover every candidate for governor, Congress and the White House. Like the letterpress editors, the ICPSR has gone to elaborate lengths to "clean" the data, so that no numerical errors remain in the files. A peculiarly Baconian respect for "facts" pervades the ICPSR philosophy. No recoding of any sort is done, nor are ancillary series (like the eligible voting-age population) included with the votes. The census files of the ICPSR likewise are exact transcriptions of the published federal totals. Natural scientists, it should be noted, have a different approach to their data, for they collect it with instruments they design in accord with current theoretical models. The ICPSR did not, of course, create the election files in the first place--local, county and state election officials did that. The question of the validity of election returns with respect to the true count of how voters actually cast their ballots is sidestepped by a concern solely with official reports of the vote. The ICPSR census data is not adjusted for the well-known undercount in federal data. The ICPSR archives represent the culmination of the Baconian spirit, but not its only manifestation. After World War Two nineteen state bureaus of government research prepared historical compilations of state election returns stretching back anywhere from two decades to a century. Several for-profit organizations in Washington also compile data, of which the complete roll calls of Congress reported in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report are most notable. CBS and the other networks maintain elaborate files of precinct voting returns that are used to make projections on election night. Being practical journalists rather than ivory- tower types, the networks always manipulate their data (by weighting schemes), and are eager to use subjective classifications (like apparent social status or ethnic composition) that because they go beyond official census statistics are not acceptable to the Baconians. Scholars, of course, did not invent the idea of compiling election returns. The announcement of the http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 6 of 23 winners of an election is an act of government, and vote totals frequently were published in the eighteenth century (though usually not roll call divisions in a legislature, for those were considered internal documents). With the emergence of broadly based parties in the 1830s newspapers, almanacs and by midcentury official state yearbooks presented detailed returns. Horace Greeley's Tribune Almanac (1838-1914) became the politicians' bible for its comprehensive national and New York coverage. The 1871 Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York puffed Tammany pride by reporting the Democratic percentage in each ward from 1840 through 1869, one of the very rare nineteenth century instances of manipulating the data to bring out structural patterns rather than simple reporting of the aggregate totals. Politicians and journalists obviously were concerned with more than merely who won and who lost--they needed to know where the votes came from and who cast them. Their interests, however, were not shared by historians until the conceptual revolution due to Frederick Jackson Turner. Scientific History as the Study of Social Forces Masses of political information had accumulated by the late nineteenth century, but few historians could make sense out of them using a simple Baconian framework. The best that could be done was to follow the conceptualization of the actors themselves, as was done in numerous large-scale "life and times" biographies, such as John C. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln, A History (1890, 10 vol.). Bryce and Ostrogorski showed that a comparative framework, using England as the base, could yield fruitful analysis, but were followed by a slim handful of American scholars (Woodrow Wilson and A. Lawrence Lowell). German idealism, imported by the Transcendentalists, had little impact on the writing of political history, Bancroft excepted, until the return to America late in the century of young scholars trained in prestigious German universities. The critical mass was reached at the Johns Hopkins University in the 1880s, the premier center of scholarship in the nation. Herbert Baxter Adams had tried, without much success, to interest his students in interpreting American democracy as an organic development of a germ that first sprouted in Teutonic lands a millennium ago. The success of Darwinism as a conceptualization of the process of change provided a missing ingredient that made German idealism more suitable to Americans as a model of historical explanation. Darwinism was entirely a natural process that generated real changes and the emergence of genuinely new forms of life--no divine forces such as Bancroft believed in were called for. It encouraged functional thinking--that is, politics was not a reflection of abstract laws but an organic system, the parts of which existed because they worked to produce a result. Finally, the Darwinian mode of thought disparaged Baconianism-- what was important was not the solitary fact but the way the system as a whole worked to produce change. The problem for the Darwinian historian was to discover the social forces that made the political system work. Frederick Jackson Turner, soon after leaving Hopkins, discovered one force in the frontier, and later discovered a way to generalize his explanation beyond the frontier stage. Turner's frontier thesis was a dazzling intellectual achievement that gave historians the courage to move beyond the conceptualizations of participants. The direct impact on political historiography, however, was not as great as might be expected. Although Turner was the most important seminar leader and dissertation director of his day, he did not encourage his students to study the frontier. Turner did explain the origins of individualism in the frontier process by which Americans progressively shed European customs and adapted to the environment of the new land. But he and his followers did not investigate exactly how this individualism worked, nor how it influenced politics. The notion that democracy was a product of the frontier did, however, encourage scholars to study populism (in its western forms, especially, rather than in the South), and to interpret the Democratic party of the 1830s as a western phenomenon creditable to Andrew Jackson. The eastern Democrats, typified by Martin Van http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 7 of 23 Buren, would not receive due appreciation for their paramount role in shaping the party until Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published The Age of Jackson in 1945. Much more important in political historiography than Turner's frontier thesis was his sectionalism thesis. This was the approach he taught his students, and it quickly became the premier source of research topics. The idea is that the characteristics of the people who inhabit an area--their ethical values as well as their social condition and stage of economic development--comprise the social forces that determine political behavior. The physical environment remained important to Turner, for the soils, climate, natural resources and transportation routes framed the opportunities that existed for economic development. According to surviving class notes he advised his students to undertake in selected areas, detailed study of the correlations between party votes, by precincts, wards, etc., soils, nationalities and state- origins of the voter, assessment rolls, denominational groups, illiteracy, etc. What kind of people tend to be whigs, what Democrats or Abolitionists, or Prohibitionists, etc. While Turner himself published little, his students brought forth a stream of important studies from the 1890s to the 1930s. The first, and most influential of these was The Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, 1787-8 (1894), in which Orin G. Libby demonstrated that maps of voting behavior could provide clues to causation. Libby discovered that the seacoast favored the Constitution, while the more isolated areas opposed it. This was the first statement of an interpretation that, clothed in terms of "cosmopolitan" versus "local," is still influential. By the 1930s political scientists were experimenting with geographical interpretations, based in part on the suggestions of Turnerian historians. The most important books included Harold F. Gosnell, Grass Roots Politics (1942), V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), W. Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836-1892 (1955), William C. Havard, ed., The Changing Politics of the South (1972), Perry H. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana: 1812-1952 (1957), John H. Fenton, Midwest Politics (1966), and Duane Lockard, New England State Politics (1959). In Cities of the Prairie: The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics (1970) Daniel J. Elazar picked up on the ethnocultural themes that Turner had suggested. The journalist Kevin P. Phillips provided a useful synthesis and updating of Turnerian sectionalism in his readable The Emerging Republican Majority (1969). A few historians continue to emphasize geographical patterns in election returns, most notably John Allswang in The New Deal and American Politics (1978) and Thomas B. Alexander. Contemporary explanations of why people acted as they did hardly mattered in Turnerian research strategy. The job of the historian was not to read editorials but to ascertain the socio- economic characteristics of the people and relate them somehow to their political behavior. Turner and his disciples successfully described the characteristics, but they were never able to come up with a way of linking those characteristics to behavior. Unlike the frontier thesis, the sectional thesis lacked a motive force that would turn static factors into dynamic ones. Charles Beard's discovered a solution that profoundly affected political historiography. But for Beard to move beyond Turner he needed a social philosophy that was more atuned to short-term historical events than the ever-so-slow process of Darwinian evolution. Pragmatism and Interests The distinctly American philosophy of pragmatism, especially in the highly influential version developed by John Dewey, rejected both Hegelian idealism and environmental determinism. Instead it emphasized the primacy of activity, and blended in some Darwinism with the notion that the combination of rational analysis of facts and constant experimentation would generate social progress. As early as 1902 Dewey identified occupations as the device through which the community controls the http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 8 of 23 environment. "Occupations determine the fundamental modes of activity," he argued. They "determine the chief modes of satisfaction, the standards of success and failure... The directions given to mental life thereby extend to emotional and intellectual characteristics." The implication was that an analysis of occupation--surely one of the most readily available historical facts--would reach to the heart of social life; "emotional and intellectual characteristics," furthermore, were not independent social facts but were themselves caused by occupation. Charles Beard, Dewey's younger colleague at Columbia University, introduced occupation as the primary explanatory tool in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1912). Libby's Turnerian explanation of the vote was correct as far as it went, but it confused the causal pattern. Since occupations were geographically segregated, with farmers inland and merchants along the coast, the occupational distribution of the vote superficially resembled a geographical distribution. Beard went beyond Dewey by subsuming occupation in a broader category, the economic interest. Thus merchants and planters who owned different kinds of property were hypothesized to behave differently in response to the proposed Constitution, for it would affect their property in different ways. The notion that men hold different interests and act upon them for their own advantage had been a truism for centuries, and Beard constantly pointed to James Madison's tenth Federalist Paper, or even Aristotle, to demonstrate, correctly, that there was nothing necessarily Marxist about the concept. Economic interests were not the same as classes; the appreciation men had of their personal economic opportunities was not the same as class awareness; interests did not grow out of the relationship between employer and employee; there were no laws of history that called for inevitable conflicts, nor for the ultimate triumph of the proletariat; finally, while interest group analysis made readers cynical, Marxism was designed to rouse them to action in the streets. At the same time Beard was formulating his theory of politics he reviewed Arthur F. Bentley's The Process of Government (1908). Bentley, a student and collaborator of Dewey, had also been influenced by the German sociologist Georg Simmel. Bentley's approach to the study of politics was more theoretical than Beard's. In terms of intellectual impact, Beard influenced historians and Bentley influenced political scientists. Both agreed that politics was the interplay of groups representing economic interests, and that ideas or ethics were of no importance. The Deweyite emphasis on occupation has reemerged periodically in collective biographies of political leaders and community elites. The distribution of occupations among politicians is totally at variance with thedistribution in the general population. However, most politicians are lawyers, a group that has few interests of its own (save to ensure that courts are always kept busy). Rather they reflect the interests of their clients. But when a lawyer holds public office, who then are the clients--the constituency, the people who voted for the lawyer, his past (and future) commercial clients, the party, or, as Edmund Burke would insist, the general public interest? The logic of the analysis is ambiguous, and thus collective biography has been unproductive in explaining why politicians behave as they do. Furthermore, nearly all collective biographies reveal that the leadership of opposing parties have almost exactly parallel occupational and economic profiles. The chief differences that emerge are ethnic or religious, with Catholics (until recently) and blacks (since the 1930s) much more numerous in the Democratic party. Nevertheless, the superior socio- economic status of politicians with respect to the electorate has led historians such as Edward Pessen to argue that American political history is best understood in terms of elitist control serving elitist interests. Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, along with similar studies of the politics of the Revolutionary era such as Carl Becker, Political Parties in New York, 1760- 1766 (1909), Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (1918), and Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution 1763-1783 (1941), gave historians a scheme they could use to explain why events happened. By supplying a device lacking in moralistic, Baconian and Turnerian http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 9 of 23 historiography, it encouraged interpretive studies of the dynamics of change. Two widely used textbooks, Wilfred Binkley, American Political Parties: Their Natural History (1st ed. 1943) and Beard's The American Party Battle (1928) used Turnerian research to set the stage, and an economic interpretation to move the actors around. John D. Hicks, in The Populist Revolt (1931) showed how effective the combination could be in explaining a complex movement spread over many states. Meanwhile, political scientists had picked up the interest group theory, in Bentley's version, and had forged from it a thorough reinterpretation of twentieth-century politics--Peter Odegard, in Pressure Politics (1928) had revealed the brilliant maneuverings through which the Anti-Saloon League had secured Prohibition. Pendleton Herring, Elmer Schattschneider and David Truman showed how interest groups controlled both the parties and the policy-making process. The leading exposition was V.O. Key's textbook on Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (1st ed. 1942), which traced the theme through party battles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Key, however,was an eclectic, moving from one conceptual framework to another in his highly influential books.) Apart from Schattschneider, few of the political scientists went as far as Beard in polarizing history between the rich and the masses, or in moralizing the story. Consequently, at the same time the Beardian approach was collapsing in historiography, the interest group approach was elevated to axiomatic status in political science. David Truman, in The Governmental Process (1951) provided the full-scale theoretical foundations that Bentley only hinted at, while Robert Dahl in A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956) made the interplay of competing interests the foundations of the Americanpolitical ethos, pluralistic democracy. The conceptualizations of Truman and Dahl so transcended the original pragmatic philosophical roots of interest group theory that they more properly belong to the Newtonian groups discussed below. In the 1960s radical scholarship reappeared in the United States, born in part of the student movement and animated by strong moral dissent against the treatment of minorities within the country and a foreign policy hostile to "popular" uprisings in Cuba and Vietnam. Most of the radicals ignored political history, though several tried to revive Beard, notably William Appleman Williams (on the role of interest groups in shaping foreign policy) and Jessie Lemisch, Staughton Lynd and Alfred Young (on class conflicts in late eighteenth-century politics). Meanwhile, and quite independently, radical political scientists denounced the notion of interest group liberalism and pluralistic democracy as essentially conservative ideologies that impeded the growth of protest movements at home. By the late 1970s, however, both radical challenges had been replaced by other more subtle approaches. The Force of Ideas in Politics Hegelian idealism, which had made little headway since Bancroft, reappeared in the guise of "intellectual history" in the 1950s, soon sweeping away the remnants of Turner and Beard, and posing a severe shock to Baconianism. Within two decades, all of American history was rewritten in terms of the force of ideas that shape historical action. The intellectual historians, by pointing up the moral weak points of the systems of ideas they described, substituted the subtler notions of anxiety and guilt feelings, and of irony and tragedy, for the blunt good-versus- evil moralism of their predecessors. Unlike the other modes of political historiography, the intellectual approach was not based on a philosophical understanding of how history operated. Logical positivism and linguistic analysis, the dominant schools of philosophy in America, did not support the notion that ideas can be decisive, nor did European existentialism. Intellectual history, emerging especially at Harvard and Columbia in the 1940s, owed more to historians of philosophy (Morton White), political theory (Carl Becker), sociology (Talcott Parsons), economics (Joseph Dorfman), theology (Perry Miller and Edmund Morgan), and http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 10 of 23 literary criticism (Edmund Wilson, F.O. Matthiessen, and Lionel Trilling). From theologian Reinhold Niebuhr came an appreciation of irony that would allow moralistic impulses to be finessed. Their interdisciplinary background allowed intellectual historians to move in many directions, across the centuries, and even across the Atlantic. Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson (1945) was the key transitional book. It made thinkers and their ideas the force behind Jacksonian Democracy, with the opposition being the thoughtless businessmen and their lackeys. The Age of Jackson was the first of six stunning. sweeping surreys that quickly recast political history: Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774- 1861 (New York, 1947) by Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin; The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948) by Richard Hofstadter; The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1955) by Daniel Boorstin; The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955) by Louis Hartz; and The Age of Reform; From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), by Hofstadter. The young scholars came from different traditions--Schlesinger had written on the philosopher Orestes Brownson under the tutelage of Perry Miller, Oscar Handlin had moved from social history, Hofstadter had written on the philosophy of social Darwinism, Boorstin had studied law and written on Blackstone, and Hartz was trained in political philosophy. The strength of intellectual history was the apparently satisfactory way it dealt with causation. Ideas have a logic of their own, and the unfolding of that logic, as different thinkers grappled with the problems of their day, not only paralleled events but caused them. Furthermore, by following the texts very closely, historians could mentally re-create the unfolding logic--they could virtually relive history and write as-if they were participant-observers. What of the Deweyite thesis, that occupation structures a person's thoughts? Around 1950, several historians explored this issue using collective biography, which seemed to show that Dewey was right. George E. Mowry and Alfred Chandler related the ideas of progressive politicians to their high status, education and jobs. David Donald and Richard Hofstadter added a new twist in their interpretation of abolitionists and progressives: it was fear of losing the status they had attained that animated the reformers. Drawing on Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge and current work in social psychology, Hofstadter refined the ideas of role strain and status anxiety and made them the centerpiece of his writings in the 1950s and early 1960s. Status politics, as exemplified be the populists, progressives, McCarthyites, and Goldwaterites, expressed "the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives," while interest-group politics emerged from "the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs." Unfortunately, such an explanation for why certain people held certain ideas was wrong. Straightforward Baconian reexamination of the evidence showed that the opponents of the progressives had the same social backgrounds and presumably the same social anxieties. Likewise, empirical studies in psychology and sociology demonstrated that people with role strains, and those who had moved up or down the status ladder, behaved the same as everyone else. The failure to explain ideas in terms of personal characteristics strengthened "pure" intellectual history, for it precluded reductionism. A "consensus" mood emerged in historiography as the intellectual historians tried to demonstrate that American politics had always been characterized by broad agreement on basic values. All of Hofstadter's politicians believed in capitalism, even the populist farmers--the only question was how to guarantee in openness to every would-be entrepreneur. Bray Hammond stood Schlesinger's thesis on its head in Bank and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1957) by arguing that a vital component of the Jacksonian movement comprised bankers who felt that Nicholas Biddle's Bank of the United States was blocking their way to quick riches. Hartz argued that since America lacked a feudal heritage it also lacked the ideas that animated European politics. All Americans, he thought, were liberal followers of John Locke. The consensus was so broad, Boorstin felt, that http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 11 of 23 Americans never had need for ideas; they just reamed by doing and built a politics that worked. Critics wondered where the Civil War fit into all this unanimity. In Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970), Eric Foner showed that the party's campaign slogans bespoke deeply held ideas about the nation's destiny. The GOP's negative (and exaggerated) image of the South's ideology explained the Republicans' willingness to go to war. The Whig ideas that fed into the Republican party were examined in depth by Daniel Walker Howe in The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979), Major L Wilson in Space, Time and Freedom: The Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict (Westport, Conn., 1974), and Gabor Boritt in Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis. Tenn., 1978). Nor was the frustrated intellectual odyssey of northern Democrats after 1850 ignored. Marvin Meyers. Robert Kelley, and Jean Baker reanalyzed their mind and spins, stressing the continuation of old republican themes into the industrial era. William Freehling, Eugene Genovese, Steven Channing, and J. Mills Thornton re-created the thoughts-and especially the fears-of antebellum southerners. The abolitionists, being an especially intellectual group, were studied in depth by Aileen Kraditor, John L. Thomas, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and Lewis Perry, among many others. In each study, ideas were an autonomous force. Politics, it was assumed, was policy-oriented. The purpose of ideology, popular movements, and legislation was to shape the future. Differing ideas on what the future ought to look like, combined with misperceptions about the motivations of the opposition, were enough to explain political conflicts. The Civil War, and the events leading to it, so profoundly moved Americans that intellectual historians found deep and complex ideas aplenty. The issues of constitutionalism and the rights of blacks, which pervaded the Reconstruction Era, likewise provided an abundance of research opportunities, although the last decades of the nineteenth century proved to be less fertile. Ideas came back into their own during the Progressive Era as historians traced the themes of reform ideologies, the concept of expertise, and the nature of urban government through national, state, and even local affairs. The intellectual historians largely retained the periodization of political history that had been created by Tumerians and Beardians, so it came as a surprise to discover that the 1920s were not nearly as barren of ideas as had once been thought. Herbert Hoover, in particular, enjoyed a favorable revisionism as his plans for promoting commerce and rationalizing industry were studied. Hoover's reputation further improved when historians began to see that his ideas for recovering from the Great Depression presaged those of the New Deal. The New Deal, on the other hand, was seen as more contradictory and less an heir of progressive thought than had once been believed. By the early 1980s, studies of the post-1940 era were still largely biographical or Baconian in style, although Alonzo Hamby had provided an intellectual study, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (New York, 1973). Apart from textbook chapters, historians rarely dealt with politics in the last shiny years. T his left the field to journalists and political scientists, some of whom took an intellectual-history approach, notably Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policies and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York, 1969) and two Brookings Institution studies: James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Washington, 1968) and James Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (Washington, 1981). Doubtless one reason was that intellectual historians of the postwar period concentrated more on diplomatic, civil liberties, or civil rights themes. In The Mind and Mood of Back America (Homewood, Ill., 1969) S. Pendleton Fullinwider identified an idea that dominated black politics from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. By virtue of their oppression at the hands of whites, the blacks are a Christlike, blessed people: they have a mission, as Martin Luther King, Jr., stressed, to reveal to whites their guilt and to redeem whites from their sins of racism and false moral superiority. The intellectual approach drastically revised American Revolutionary historiography in the 1960s. The consensus had been that American patriots' ideas were derived from John Locke, and since they fit the actual situation so poorly they probably were just rationalizations. Edmund Morgan, however, showed that ideas led actions during The Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1953). More important was the spectacular discovery that the patriots were not Lockeans at all but, rather, adherents of an elaborate "Re publican" ideology that had been developed by the "Country'' opposition to the ruling "Court" party in London. Three powerful http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 12 of 23 books shaped the new "Republican synthesis": Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York, 1969), and J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ., 1975). By 1983, historians had traced the ideology from Renaissance Florence to recent America. The colonists-at least the more articulate ones -were terrified that corruption and intrigue in the imperial government, together with luxury and indolence at home, were threatening to destroy the rights and liberties of the citizens. Every time a hostile or ambiguous policy came out of London the anxiety of the colonists escalated, until a declaration of independence and a war seemed to be the only solution. The politics of the new nation likewise concentrated on devices to prevent such evils from reappearing. Jefferson and his Republicans wt re convinced that Hamilton and the Federalists were seducing the new nation away from the paths of republican virtue, thus giving an intense moral tone to early politics. The opponents of Andrew Jackson's executive "tyranny" likewise looked back to early eighteenth-century English Country opposition thought for guidance, even to the point of calling themselves Whigs. Recur rent crusades to banish evil from the halls of power-such as the Republicans against the "Slave Power'' in 1856, the populists against the bankers in the 1890s, the progressives against the monopolies in the 1900s, and Goldwater against the establishment in 1964--drew heavily on republican themes of opposition to tyranny. So pervasive was the theme of conspiracy in American political rhetoric that some historians began to wonder whether a psychopathology had distorted the thinking of politicians. Cordon S. Wood resolved the problem in a wide- ranging essay on "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1982. Conspiracy was inherent not only in republican ideology but, indeed, in all early modem thought. Once intellectuals realized that the world was an interconnected system, and that neither Cod nor fate controlled the affairs of men, it became clear the' someone had to be planning anything that happened-hence, conspiracies. The notion that men in power were fair-minded people who did nor intend the unpleasant consequences of policies was inconceivable. Conspiracies had to exist, or men would be unable to understand the world around them. The Founding Fathers themselves were intellectuals, but they were not in full control of their ideas. The remarkable frenzy that led to the Revolution, therefore, need not be ascribed to social or economic factors; it was inherent in the way educated people had to think. Not until Adam Smith developed a theory of the in visible hand." the German idealists identified forces beyond the individual and social scientists in the late twentieth century began emphasizing that most polices have unintended consequences that might be far more dramatic than the intended ones. did intellectuals realize that belief in conspiracies was unnecessary. The Beardians, who rejected both Adam Smith and Hegel, were left with an intellectual apparatus that resembled that of the eighteenth century, so they easily identified "conspiracies'' everywhere. By the early 1970s, the weaknesses of the intellectual approaches, other than the Republican synthesis, had grown so glaring that practitioners gloomily assessed the future. It was not so much that all the interesting ideas had been identified and traced over time-much political history remained to be studied, and the continuing Row of new monographs demonstrated that intellectual history remained a useful device to produce dissertations. But would it produce satisfactory explanations? The first major flaw was that. of necessity, it was confined to the study of a small elitearticulate intellectuals who commented upon or participated in politics. Not only were most political figures relatively inarticulate, but the role of the average voter was inaccessible m the intellectual historian: the genre provided no good means for discovering what the people who left no speeches or books were thinking. To assume that Woodrow Wilson or Ralph Waldo Emerson or John Adams simply articulated the beliefs of millions was more and more obviously inadequate. The second flaw was that, by downplaying the role of social or economic forces, intellectual history seemed to pass over too quickly the infrastructures of the society and the economy. Perhaps social and economic conditions and relationships caused ideas. or perhaps they caused political decisions. The third flaw was that the intellectual approach narrowed the focus of political history too much. The effects not only of social forces and policy decisions, but also of the political process by which parties acted and were structured, were slighted. Finally, the eclectic nature of the genre undercut efforts to produce a synthetic, full-scale http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 13 of 23 interpretation of politics and society that would meet the canons of scientific rigor that were being carried over into history from the social sciences. intellectual history did not disappear, but it faded badly in the 1960s and 1970s in the glare of what became known as the "new political history.'' The New Political History as Science While the origins and presuppositions of the new political history were diverse and complex, they are easy to trace because the new genre was far more conscious of methodology than historians had ever been before. Newsletters, journals and training programs were established to study and disseminate the new methodology, and an explicitly interdisciplinary scholarly society, the Social Science History Association was established to bring together historians, political scientists, sociologists, economists, geographers and anthropologists united by a common approach to the study of society. Political history was by no means the only concern of the social science historians--indeed, the "new social history" was the major component, and it is possible to see certain forms of the new political history, especially the ethnocultural studies, as essentially social rather than political in direction. Intellectual historians, so fresh from victory over Beardian, Turnerian and thesis-free Baconianism, were astonished to watch the learned journals fill up with incomprehensible terms, like correlation coefficients and components of variance. A striking characteristic of the new political history was heavy reliance upon statistics and (after 1970) on computers. Numbers had always appeared in history books. It was standard Baconian practice to report the election returns to prove that so-and-so was actually elected. So sacrosanct were the official numbers, however, that the Baconians never adjusted or manipulated them. Even stating results in terms of percentages was a bit daring. The Turnerians used quantitative data extensively and were not afraid to manipulate figures--all their maps were based on percentages and rates. However, they remained locked into statistical maps, which do make strong geographical patterns visible but which are extremely tedious to draw and which obscure rather than unveil complex patterns. To properly handle numbers, like census data and election returns, much more sophisticated techniques are necessary, including cross-tabulation, correlation, analysis of variance, multivariate regression, factor analysis, and logarithmic transformations. All of these techniques well developed in the other social sciences by 1930, but historians remained ignorant. IBM cards, and sorting machines to tabulate them, had been invented for use by the Census of 1890, and would have been of great help to Turnerians, but again remained unknown until the 1940s. The irony is that Andrew Jackson Turner, the historian's father, had directed the census in Wisconsin in 1890--the son could hardly have had a better opportunity to learn an essential technique, but he missed it. Withall, the Turnerians had more exposure to quantification than other historians. Although Turnerian political history had largely died out, the intellectual tradition lived on among rural historians, and thence came several pioneers of the new approach, including Lee Benson, Samuel P. Hays, and Allan G. Bogue. The evolution of technique in the genre was rapid. Before 1970, most studies relied largely on percentages; after that the availability of prepackaged statistical routines for computers, especially SPSS, facilitated correlation and regression studies. More important than the statistical routines were the new emphasis on precise definition of variables and categories, and the exploitation of previously underutilized data on ward and precinct voting patterns. The ICPSR archive of computerized data was a useful resource, but since it did not include electoral data for units smaller than counties, much fishing in newspapers, state reports and archives was still required. The logical positivism of Ernest Nagel, Carl Hempel and Abraham Kaplan, as well as the philosophy of science expounded by Karl Popper and Paul Lazarsfeld, instructed researchers in the need for explicit definitions of variables, the statement of hypotheses, and the importance of formulating statements that could be falsified by empirical evidence. http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 14 of 23 The new political historians became aware of technical problems never before dreamed of by historians. The "ecological fallacy" was especially troubling in the 1960s, for it indicated that the correlation observed between two variables based on aggregate data typically would be quite different than the correlation based on individuals. For example, if the Democratic percentage of the vote and the percent Catholic were measured for the counties of a state, the correlation would be a misleading indication of how Democratic the Catholics actually were. (The county-level correlation usually was much higher than the individual correlation.) Fortunately, good technical solutions were discovered. In the first place, the historian was not concerned with how Pat O'Reilly voted; what mattered was how Catholics as a group behaved. Under certain conditions (which could be checked), the regression coefficient with Democrat the dependent variable and Catholic the independent variable would be the same for both aggregate and individual levels. Indeed, without having any information on specific individuals, the historian could discover how Catholics voted. Further advances in this technique (called "ecological regression") permitted historians in the late 1970s to estimate how individuals changed their behavior between elections. Thus it was possible to estimate how men who had voted Whig or Democratic in 1852 cast their ballots in 1856 or 1860, and even to say how citizens who did not vote in 1852 behaved in later years. It was done by straight-forward regressions of 1856 or 1860 election returns augmented by census data that showed how many men were eligible to vote. Whether even more dazzling techniques will be invented to squeeze information on the patterns of behavior from old tables of numbers remains to be seen. One possible route will be the use of computer models to simulate elections; by adjusting the parameters of the model it may be possible to replicate the historic numerical pattern of returns. The imaginative historian can then deduce that the parameters measure a reality that was always there but remained hidden, and then interpret the parameters in terms of the politics of the era. Simulation models are already a standard tool in demography. Presidential election simulations are now available commercially as "games" for microcomputers. The study of legislators had always posed a dilemma for historians: on the one hand it was clear that Congress and the state legislatures played a central role in the translation of party politics, ideas, and socio-economic forces into public policy; on the other hand, the complexity of the abundant documentation prevented historians from figuring out how the process worked. As a consequence, political historiography largely ignored legislatures. A better methodology was called for, and political science provided it. As early as the 1890s, A. Lawrence Lowell had devised methods for analyzing roll call votes; Stuart Rice, Herman Beyle and others had advanced the techniques in the 1920s. The Turnerians drew many maps of roll calls, but ran into difficulty interpreting them, for the maps greatly exaggerated the apparent importance of legislators from thinly settled areas (like Montana), while obscuring the patterns in dense areas like Philadelphia that actually had more votes and more importance. In the 1930s and 1940s mathematical psychologists, especially L. L. Thurstone, Rensis Likert, Louis Guttman and Paul Lazarsfeld, had devised methods for discovering attitudes from responses to a series of questions. Although originally intended as a method for handling responses to public opinion polls, these "scaling" procedures could readily be applied to legislative roll calls. Joel Silbey in The Shrine of Party: Congressional Voting Behavior, 1841-1852 (1967) and Thomas B. Alexander in Sectional Stress and Party Strength: A Study of Roll Call Patterns in the United States House of Representatives, 1836-1860 (1967) used Guttman's scaling technique to explore the relative importance of party affiliation and geographic sectionalism in Congress in the antebellum period. They discovered scales that described in close detail the ideological positions of each congressman on issues like slavery, banking, railroads and land policy. The ICPSR gathered a comprehensive set of Congressional roll call votes, encouraging the exploration of patterns over two centuries. Ballard Campbell, in Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century (1980) performed elaborate scale analysis of the Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa legislatures. Using multivariate statistical techniques he showed that the personal background of legislators was far less important than their party affiliations and the ethnocultural composition of their http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 15 of 23 constituencies. Allan G. Bogue in The Earnest Men: Radical and Moderate Republicans in the U.S. Senate During the Civil War (1981) and other scholars examined Civil War and Reconstruction congressional roll calls to operationalize the intellectual historians' notions of "radicalism," and to determine just who it was who wielded power in those critical times. In contrast to the abundance of roll calls in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, few were recorded in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless Robert Zemsky in Merchants, Farmers and River Gods (1971) was able to determine the distribution of power among members of the Massachusetts legislature. Rudolph Bell in Party and Faction in American Politics: The House of Representatives, 1789-1801 (1973) used roll calls and advanced techniques like factor analysis to specify the emergence of parties from the inchoate factionalism and localism of the first decade of the Congress. Roll call analysis is tedious work, and not many historians have used its power. Twentieth century Congresses have been studied for a few periods, but much remains to be done. Very little work has been done on state legislatures for any era, but Campbell's demonstration of the utility of roll call analysis provides a model that could be used for most states. Until that is done historians will simply have to guess how politics was turned into policy. Function and System in the New Political History Explicit quantitative research designs characterized much of the new political history, changing drastically the tone of a field that had once emphasized narrative and had always minimized discussions of how it should proceed. A more profound innovation was thinking of politics as a system--either as a self-contained world with its own inner laws, or a subsystem of the entire society. Bryce had metaphorically characterized politics as a system in 1888. German idealistic historiography of the late nineteenth century, best reflected in the United States in Henry Jones Ford, The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898) had a stronger system approach, for it conceptualized society in terms of an organism that went through stages of evolution. Organic metaphors had long since died out when the new historians turned to sociology, political science and economics for their ideas of what a system was like. From the sociology of Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton--and ultimately from Max Weber and Emile Durkheim--came the notion of functionalism. The component institutions and processes of politics, like political parties, machines, platforms, campaigns, voting decisions and candidate recruitment channels all performed certain functions. Walter Dean Burnham, the most influential of the political scientists working on American political history, identified the functions of party as nation-building, officefilling, socialization of the voters, and policy-making. The insights drawn from comparative political science proved especially helpful in defining such functions. William Chambers and Seymour Martin Lipset, for example, could write about Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776-1809 (1963) and The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (1963). Historians who had concentrated too exclusively on the office-filling and policymaking roles had failed to appreciate the importance of party in uniting a nation and in educating its citizens in issues and in democratic modes of expression. The functionalist approach suddenly made the big city bosses respectable, for their centralized leadership was necessary to pull together the explosively divergent components in a large city; furthermore, the machines helped millions of immigrants to acculturate themselves to a new society, and gave them direct assistance in time of need. The new image of bosses as do- gooders went too far in repudiating the middle-class Progressive critique, for it overlooked the machines' unfairness, their waste, and their protection of criminals who preyed primarily on the poor. http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 16 of 23 The absence of a contemporary intellectual tradition endorsing the machines, or analyzing the integrative functions of the parties was irrelevant for the functionalists. Ideas did not matter, only the results generated by the system, whether or not anyone at the time recognized them. Paul Kleppner subjected newspaper editorials to a statistical content analysis in The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850-1900 (1970), one of the key monographs of the new genre. He showed that the rhetorical emphasis projected by the parties was based not on appeals to economic or class interests nearly so much as to cultural sentiments that were not at all tied to economics. The functionalists resembled the Beardians in seeing partisan speeches and platforms as propaganda devices. But instead of then dismissing the rhetoric as efforts to mislead the people from realizing what was actually happening, they analyzed the rhetoric to see what politicians felt was troubling the electorate. By figuring out which way the editors were trying to push their readers, the historian tried to deduce where the readers actually stood. However, it was not necessary, as it had been for Beardians, to assume that voters actually believed the propaganda, for the behavior of the electorate could be examined directly, and it often went contrary to the party rhetoric. In The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (1971) and Grass Roots Politics (1983) Richard Jensen stressed the depth of party loyalty in the late nineteenth century, and the "army" style that parties used to exploit it. Techniques of political socialization, such as door- to-door canvassing and huge rallies were studied to gauge the effectiveness of the parties as educators. The overall success of the system in educating the people and drawing their support was measured by turnout, an indicator that became as important in the new political history as the question of who won once had been. By the early 1980s, historians inspired by anthropologist Clifford Geertz were studying the ceremonies, symbols, rhetoric and implicit norms surrounding elections to explain the linkages between the political and the social systems. Exemplifying this trend were Harry Stout's essays on New England, the magistral The Transformation of Virginia: 1740-1790 by Australian historian Rhys Isaac, and Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1983). The chief synthesizing device of the systems approach is the notion of the party system. Chambers and Burnham, who outlined the synthesis in The American Party System: Stages of Political Development (1967) demarcated five systems by date, 1789 to 1820, 1828 to 1854/60, 1863 to 1893, 1894 to 1932, and 1932 to the present. The most recent overview, The Evolution of American Electoral System (1981), edited by Kleppner, makes only minor adjustments in chronology, though one contributor, Ronald Formisano, cast doubt on whether party loyalty was sufficiently well developed in the earliest period to call it a system. Formisano illustrated his interpretation at length in The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts, 1789- 1848 (1983). The party system conceptualization permitted a fresh periodization of the past, one that depended upon the changes in structure discovered by historical analysis rather than the events contemporaries thought might be important. The Civil War no longer is a watershed, for the systemic change came in the 1850s-and perhaps caused the war, as Michael Holt would argue. From the perspective of the new political history the Civil War-- or rather the responses of the parties and the voters to the new problems occasioned by the war and its aftermath--is of interest to the extent that it had a permanent effect on voters (which it did), or as a demonstration of the functionalism of parties in a time of social crisis. The Republican party played a decisive role in mobilizing men, money and morale for the Union cause. In the Confederacy, however, parties had been discarded in the name of national unity, much to the detriment of the cause. In the new periodization, the Progressive era fades out, replaced by the dramatic upheavals of the 1890s. Lewis Gould and Jensen stressed the importance of McKinley in committing the polity to a spirit of pluralism and prosperity for all. The New Deal stays, but only because it marked a restructuring of politics. Old heroes no longer stride the stage, for they have been replaced by quieter characters who had more to do with the real drama of politics. Theodore Roosevelt has not yet vanished- http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 17 of 23 -he provides too many good lines--but William McKinley has joined Franklin Roosevelt in the role of superstar of politics over the last one hundred years. The "party system" as Chambers and Burnham presented it, was linked to the broader processes of social and economic development. Their approach reflected the strong concern political scientists of the 1960s showed in modernization, especially in how underdeveloped societies could build stable governments and encourage economic growth. Later work on party systems concentrated on their internal structures, but as historians became interested in the manner in which the United States developed such a complex economic and social system, they began building system models of modernization and tried to fit in politics. Historians and sociologists had long ascribed to technological innovation the main motive force that transformed the economy, with society adjusting to its changing configurations. By the 1950s the catchwords "industrialization" and "urbanization" were used to describe the modernization process. Intellectual historians demonstrated that Hamiltonian, Whig, and progressive ideologies were directed toward more rapid modernization, while Jeffersonian,Jacksonian, and agrarian thought tried to resist the process. Samuel P. Hays, in a series of essays collected in American Political History as Social Analysis (Knoxville, Tenn., 1980), and Robert H. Wiebe in The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967), while remaining sensitive to intellectual trends, emphasized modernizing social forces as the causal agency, especially the emergence of regional and national associations of businessmen and professionals. Numerous studies, including Morton Keller's Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), Richard L. McCormick's From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893-1910 (Ithaca, 1981), Otis L. Graham, Jr.'s, The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America, 1900-1928 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ., 1971), and Ellis W. Hawley's The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order. A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933 (New York, 1979), reinterpreted the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in terms of the interaction between the political, social, and economic systems. James M. McPherson's Ordeal By Fire. The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1981) and Richard D. Brown's Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (New York, 1976) applied the same approach to the entire period through the Civil War. On the state level, Dwight B. Billings, Jr., wrote of the success of the "Prussian model" of imposed modernization in Planters and the Making of a 'New South'. Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1979). Illinois: A Bicentennial History (New York, 1978) by Jensen was a systematic attempt to explain political conflict in terms of individual psychological reactions to social and economic modernization. Political scientists have used the party-system schema in its original form to explore the question of how different policy programs emerged from the different party systems, most notably in Burnham's Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970). Although most historians took an ambivalent view of the benefits and hardships of modernization, strongly negative interpretations that romanticized the backwoods could be found in Lawrence Goodwyn's Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York, 1976), Ronald D. Eller's Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1982), and David L. Carlton's Mill and Town in South Carolina: 18801920 (Baton Rouge, La., 1982). Carlton even had some good words to say for the lynching of blacks--it was an inevitable expression of the spirit of revolt among the white working class in the face of modernizing reforms imposed on them against their will. Systems thinking had a tendency to expand to cover not just more chronology or geography, but also more of the social and the economic structure. What causes what was not the primary concern of functionalists, who saw the components of the system as mutually reinforcing. Conflict arises when two components become dysfunctional toward one another. Something has to give, and politics and constitutional law are the arenas in which they must be settled. Systems thinking, having abandoned the organic metaphors of idealism but not the imperative to find what made the entire configuration change, also encouraged a search for the "laws" of history. Many social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s thought modernization models were such laws. Their confidence diminished when it became apparent that underdeveloped countries were not "developing" http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 18 of 23 very well, even if they tried to follow the precepts of modernization theorists. Newtonian Models of Politics The search for the laws of history took a new form in the 1960s when political scientists and some historians began to fit mathematical models to election data. The technique, and the philosophy that supported it, derived ultimately from the triumph of Newtonianism in physics. It really was possible to discover the laws of the universe using the right data and powerful mathematics. Furthermore, modern macroeconomics had created mathematical models, like those of John Maynard Keynes, that seemingly explained how the economy worked. To do the same for political history would require suitable statistical tools, which economics and sociology provided, together with the right data, which the ICPSR provided. After a false start looking for cycles in the history of elections (there were none), the Newtonians combined the party system scheme with V. O. Key's notion of a "critical election" (one in which the voting alignments are permanently shifted). Using state election returns stretching over many decades, and later using county returns, they calculated the correlations between elections, looking for breaks that would signal a critical election. Since single elections did not work very well, the concept was broadened to cover "critical eras," which were sequences of several elections. The broadest studies were James L. Sundquist's Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1983) and Partisan Realignment: Voters, Parties, and Government in American History (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1981) by Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale. Unfortunately, far too many critical turning points were discovered, and by the early 1980s the approach was falling into discredit. One basic problem was that the data units were states and counties, but the conceptual unit on which realignment turned was the voter. The fact that two elections were highly correlated in terms of county patterns did not tell whether or not they were correlated in terms of voter behavior. And worse, if two elections were not correlated, that suggested that some sort of realignment had taken place, but the technique told nothing about the actual realignment. Newtonianism based on macroeconomic analogies had failed--but perhaps the laws of political history could be discovered using microeconomics, that is, models of how individuals rather than entire systems behave. J. Morgan Kousser and Melvyn Hammarberg, the most dedicated of the Newtonians, produced a series of studies that tried to show what political history would look like if micro models of "rational choice" were true. The results have thus far been inconclusive, because the necessary individual data are hard to come by and the quantitative techniques were beyond the ken of nearly all historians. A debate erupted in political science in the early 1970s regarding the relative importance of structure and ideas. True Newtonians felt that the "laws" of human behavior would be the same through the ages: people always react exactly the same way under the same conditions. History, then, is not the study of changing values or patterns of response but only the study of changing structural conditions. The rate of turnout and political participation fell drastically between 1900 and 1920. The Newtonians ascribed the drop to changing structures, particularly more stringent voter-registration laws and disfranchisement programs. Burnham disagreed: people really had changed, he said, citing the evidence produced by behavioral historians. The new registration rules had made only a small difference. Individual Voters In an Ethnocultural Environment The ethnocultural approach to political history emerged in the 1960s and soon became the dominant mode of explaining nineteenth-century political history. Like other forms of the new political history, it was quite explicit about methodological presuppositions and used quantitative methods extensively. In employing history as a science, the approach adopted the prescriptions for hypothesis formulation and testing proposed by philosophers of science. It added an extremely individualistic viewpoint: political http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 19 of 23 history should focus on the voter, with the goal being the understanding of democracy as the interaction between the voter and the political system. This individualism paralleled new approaches in economics, which emphasized the rational process by which individuals plan for the future, and in sociology, which examined how the background characteristics of individuals (race, family, birth cohort) interacted with individual choices (regarding education, marriage, and migration, for example) and the overall social environment to generate particular career paths (social mobility). The statistical techniques that were used came directly from survey research and indirectly from biology. In contrast to the Newtonians, the ethnoculturalists were not looking for mathematical laws that dealt with entire systems: they searched instead for the strategies that individuals used to survive in their environments. Probability and statistics, rather than deterministic mathematical models, were the main tools. The ethnocultural model of individualistic voter behavior relied heavily upon the classic study of The American Voter (New York, 1960) by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes, of the University of Michigan. Their theory, based strongly on social psychology, envisioned a funnel of causality into which went various predisposing attitudes and personal characteristics, as well as evaluations of the candidates, the parties, and the issues; out came the voting decision. The most important single input was a person's party identification; the vast majority of people adopted the partisanship of their parents. The American Voter did not try to explain how partisanship arose in the first place: that would be the challenge for historians. The ethnoculturalists began by asking how individuals in the past actually voted. Initially lacking any evidence on individual attitudes and votes, they looked at groups. Samuel P. Hays and his students at Iowa, Lee Benson at Wayne State University, and Thomas B. Alexander at the University of Alabama collected precinct and township voting returns in the late 1950s (for Iowa, New York, and Alabama, respectively) and started matching them against census data. One result was immediately apparent: poor areas did not vote differently than rich areas. While this did not prove that rich individuals actually voted differently than poor ones, it suggested as much and stood in sharp contrast to the Beardian interpretation. Furthermore, adjacent small areas often voted for opposite candidates, thus undercutting the Turnerian notion that broad geographical forces were paramount. Finally, it was noticed that the same areas behaved the same way politically for decades or longer. What force was it that differentiated the areas and was so strong that it could persist for so long? The scholars systematically searched for clues, using as many different local electoral units as possible so that particularized influences, like a strong party organization in one area, would average out. The results for the northern United States soon became clear: a combination of ethnicity and religion--German plus Roman Catholic, for example--could account for the patterns. In the South after the Civil war, race was the paramount factor; before the war the chief factor was isolation versus linkage to the larger economy. The scientific methodology called for explanation rather than mere description, and each scholar developed a slightly different model. In The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy; New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961), Benson, influenced by the Columbia sociologist Robert Merton, argued that the ethnocultural groups, as he called them, were often hostile to one another on the basis of prejudice or, more exactly, different life-styles. Roman Catholics distrusted Protestants and vice versa, and each group tried to use its voting power to block the other's and enhance its own position. This interpretation is a variant of interest- group theorizing, with ethnocultural groupings replacing economic interests. In Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848-1860 (New Haven, 1969), Michael Fitzgibbon Holt showed how ethnocultural conflict, rather than slavery or economic issues, shaped party lines in one major city. In A House for All Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Chicago, 1890-1936 (Lexington, Ky., 1971), John M. Allswang showed that ethnicity grew stronger in the twentieth century as new groups emigrated from Europe. Allan J. Lichtman in Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Chapel Hill,, 1979) demonstrated that religious conflicts overshadowed all other divisions in 1928. A broad overview covering all of American politics down through the Civil War, using the ethnocultural group-conflict perspective, is The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (New York, 1979) by Robert L. Kelley. A much stronger interpretation appeared in The Cross of Culture; A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850-1900 (New York, 1970) by Paul Kleppner, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888- http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 20 of 23 1896 (Chicago, 1971) by Richard J. Jensen, and The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan 18271861 (Princeton, 1971) by Ronald P. Formisano. They recognized that ethnocultural forces had three dimensions. First, the church or the racial/ethnic groups formed organizations with their own leaders and newspapers, expressing their needs for tax relief and public acceptance. Second, the membership formed a natural groupjpeople saw each other regularly, intermarried, and talked politics. It would be an obvious strategy for politicians to insinuate themselves with ethnocultural voters. The third and most important dimension was that the churches were communities of believers for whom religious teachings and moral values were of paramount importance. To the extent that democratic politics expressed the values of the people, and the people themselves were religious, then politics had to express religious values. The ethnoculturalists went further: American Christianity did not have a single theology or moral value system but, rather, tended to polarize into what were called "pietistic" (or "evangelical") and "liturgical" (or "ritualistic") forms. The pietists, represented by Methodists and Congregationalists among others, understood their Christian duty to be the reforming of the worldjsin must be banished, and the government should help do the job. By defining slavery and liquor as sinful, the pietists raised new issues that would form the main substance of political debate. The liturgists (especially Roman Catholics, German Lutherans, and Southern Baptists) vehemently rejected the notion of salvation through government action. Salvation for man could come only through faithful adherence to church rituals and beliefs. Although they did not see slavery and liquor as inherently good, they did condemn as "puritanical" efforts of the pietists to enact a moral code into law. The pietists, the ethnoculturalists demonstrated, formed the core of the Whig and Republican parties, while the liturgists formed the core of the Democratic party. Not only did they vote in these ways, but the groups transferred some of their intense loyalty to the parties that they saw as standing for their own deeply felt values. The ethnocultural interpretation was synthetic, drawing together much of the best of earlier scholarship. Turnerian sectionalism? The eth ethnocultural groups were not uniformly distributed but clustered in certain areas, giving the voting returns their particular cast. Ideas? The ideas of the different groups, as discussed every Sunday morning and debated endlessly in small groups, were of decisive importance. The ideas of philosophers may have mattered when democracy hardly existed or religion was weak, but after the great revivals in religion in the 1830s, and the simultaneous invention of democratic parties, the values of the people were paramount. Interest groups? The ethnocultural groups had certain interests of their own (say, for example, in parochial schools); and other interests, including economic ones, obviously existed in society and were involved in politics. But the key point is that such interests were never strong enough to create the party loyalty and active participation that characterized millions of ordinary people, most of whom could see only a remote bearing of economic issues on their lives. But the politicians did succeed in translating slavery, money, and even tariffs into moralistic terms comprehensible to the people. To clinch the evidence of a tight linkage between ethnocultural groups and voting behavior, scholars used advanced statistical techniques on aggregate election returns. They also discovered masses of information on the individual voters of the nineteenth century, in the form of poll books and directories that listed political, economic, and religious data on each voter. The ethnocultural groupings (a combination of ethnicity and religious affiliation) were everywhere the most powerful correlate of party affiliation, and occupation was a modest second. Wealth did not matter: a rich Methodist farmer from New England was as likely to vote Republican as a poor one. To relate individual voting patterns to the larger political system was the next item on the agenda. Melvyn Hammarberg, in The Indiana Voter (Chicago, 1977), used Newtonian approaches, which seemed more scientific to him than the ethnocultural model. More successful was Paul Kleppner in a series of books, including The Third Electoral System: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill, 1979), Who Voted? The Dynamics of Electoral Turnout, 1870-1980 (New York, 1982), and the collaborative volume The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, Conn., 1981). The appearance of occupation (and, in the twentieth century, education) as additional determinants of partisanship suggested that the pietistic-liturgical dimension could be subsumed in a more general modernization dichotomy. Persons with a more modern psychological outlook toward the future joined pietistic churches, educated http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 21 of 23 themselves, obtained better jobs, and identified with the Whig and Republican parties, which espoused similar values and a vision of a rapidly industrializing nation. Persons with a traditional attitude, who were more fearful of change, found comfort in liturgical ceremonies, stayed in low- skilled farming or laboring jobs, resisted novelty and education, and voted for the party--the Democrats--that pledged to protect them from the reformers. The ethnocultural model claims to explain the most important features of American political history. It substantiates this claim by arguing that the history of politics in a democratic society should accept the priorities of the people as they expressed them themselves, and that the empirical evidence indicates that ethical, cultural, and religious values, concerns, and interests were of the most interest to most of the people most of the time. Critics have accepted the empirical evidence, although grudgingly, but they challenge the major premise. New Left historians, picking up a theme developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, contend that the working classes lived under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie and that they therefore suffered a false consciousness of what their true values were or should have been. Others argue that political history should respond not to the past so much as to the present, and should explain the historical roots of the contemporary distribution of power and wealth in society or the manifestations of racism and sexism. Rather than issue an obituary for interestgroup interpretations, it would be better to use a systems perspective to clarify the role of groups in historiography. The main outputs of the political system include legislation, administrative rulings, allocations of resources through spending and taxation, appointments to office, and the setting of the agenda for public debate. The interests of different groups, whether defined in terms of geography, economics, class, race, sex, or status, will be affected to a greater or lesser degree by each decision. The American polity emphasizes geography more than anything else, with each legislator sensitive to the needs of his or her district. With a multiplicity of interests inside each district, the legislator has to weigh the effects. The party system overlays geography, so that a Whig, Republican, or Democrat would weigh the interests in different fashion, always claiming to have the general good of the district uppermost in mind. Thus a biographer would be hard pressed to show how his or her subject was beholden to interests outside the district. One by one, each politician looks good. The groups that perceive their own interests have long been studied by historians, with special attention given to ideological interests that transcend geography, such as the abolitionists of the 1830s, the scientific experts of the 1900s, and the civil rights advocates of recent decades. The Beardians focused on business and agricultural interests, while the ethnocultural school drew attention to ethnic and religious groups. Very few historians, apart from some biographers, have paid attention to the local voices to which legislators hearken so closely. The reason, as Forrest MacDonald in We the People (Chicago, 1958) and Richard P. McCormick in The Second American Party System (Chapel Hill, 1966) demonstrated so exhaustively, is that local interests are exceedingly numerous and difficult to pin down. The Beardian dynamic in which agrarian, business, and slaveowner interests aggregated at the national level to shape political history simply could not withstand microscopic Baconian research. On the other hand, the accumulation of evidence about local factors could not provide a dynamic: surely the system has changed drastically over the centuries, but why? Marxist historians in recent years have taken a new tack, borrowed chiefly from intellectual history. The common intellectual framework within which legislators, judges, and other power holders operated represented the hegemony of capitalism. The problem for Marxists, which they have been unable to solve, is to link the hegemony of capitalism to the actions or interests of capitalists, as opposed to the proletariat. An obvious problem is why socialism never flourished in America, and why the working classes gave so much fealty to city machines that accepted the overall hegemony of capitalism. Modernization theorists, such as Samuel P. Hays, coming out of social history, propose an entirely different analysis of the role of interest groups. They stress that the history of political conflict more nearly resembles a contest between cosmopolitans who, within a capitalist framework, tried to systematically modernize everyone, while peripheral groups such as subsistence farmers or immigrant groups tried to protect a more traditional life-style. The stories of prohibition, compulsory education, civil rights, and environmentalism have been told primarily from the modernization perspective. Both economic-interest groups and ethnocultural groups are treated in terms of their value systems and attitude toward modernity. Charles and Mary Beard at times suggested a value-driven modernization http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 22 of 23 process but then drew back to their basic assumption that material factors had to have priority over values. The younger Beardians, bitterly hostile toward "Robber Barons" and hopeful for a resurgence of populism under the New Deal, abandoned much of the subtlety of The Rise of American Civilization. Young Marxists today remain vehemently hostile to any modernization theories. They insist on the intrinsic value of working-class culture, which most of their research is designed to document. To celebrate, or even to acknowledge, the success of the modernizers in implanting middle-class values in the workers smacks too much of tragedy. With the decline of the party system in recent decades, interest groups have organized themselves into effective lobbies at the state and national level. The new technology of computerized mailings helps dispersed ideological interests to communicate, while the rise of the political action committees (PACs) since the mid-1970s has given organized interests a major role in the financing of politics. Political scienfists have begun the study of these new factors. Historians have yet to begin the process of reinterpreting the past in terms of an expanded awareness of what the shape of politics could have been, that is, of what the system might have looked like if interests had been as well organized then as they are today. Methodologically conservative critics complain that political history has become too technical--too much like political science or sociology. While it is true that much of the most important recent research demands an under standing of techniques that were rarely provided to graduate students a few decades ago, the level of quantification and the amount of explicit theory nevertheless remain well below the usual level of the other social sciences. The complaint that the research designs of modern scholarship are beyond the ken of casual readers is true. However, the general public is already well served by popularizers through novels, biographies, films, museums, television, and pageants. It would roll back a century of scholarly advances to insist that the popular tactics of storytelling, moralizing, hero worship, antiquarianism, and gross oversimplification should replace careful research into complex and vital issues. BIBLIOGRAPHY No book or essay attempts to cover the historiography of American politics, but one major dichotomy is addressed in Bernard Sternsher, Consensus, Conflict, and American Historians (Bloomington, Ind., 1975). For an overview of the discipline, see John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore, Md., 1983). William T. Hutchinson, The Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography (Chicago, 1937), provides biographical perspective on early researchers, as does Harvey Wish, The American Historians Social-lntellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (New York, 1960). The dominant figures of the early twentieth century are brilliantly analyzed in Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Histonans: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968). On the Turner school see also Richard J. Jensen, "On Modernizing Frederick Jackson Turner," in Western Historical Quarterly, 11 (1980). The leading historians at mid-century are covered in Marcus Cunliffe and Robin W. Winks, eds., Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians (New York, 1969). On the development of political science, see Donald M. Freeman, ed., Foundation of Political Science: Research, Methods, and Scope (New York, 1977); Martin Landau, "The Myth of Hyperfactualism in the Study of American Politics," in Political Science Quarterly, 83 (1968); Heinz Eulau, The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics (New York, 1963); and especially Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science: From Burgess to Behavioralism (Boston, 1967). Current theories are outlined and critiqued in Ronald H. Chilcote, Theories of Comparative Politics: The Search for a Paradigm (Boulder, Colo., 1981). For broad overviews of how historians since 1950 have treated the main political issues, see John Higham, ea., The Reconstruction of American History (New York, 1962); William H. Cartwright and Richard L. Watson, eds., The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture (Washington, 1973); Frank Otto Gatell and Allen Weinstein, eds., American Themes. Essays in Historiography (New York, 1968); and Stanley I. Kutler and Stanley N. Katz, eds., The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects (Baltimore, Md., 1983). The historiography of state politics has its own traditions, brilliantly explained in John Alexander Williams, "A New Look at http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006 Jensen,HISTORIOGRAPHY 1984 Page 23 of 23 an Old Field," in Western Historical Quarterly, 9 (1978). On southern and western politics, see Arthur S. Link and Rembert W. Patrick, eds., Writing Southern History: Essays in Historiography (Baton Rouge, La., 1965); and Michael P. Malone, ed., Historians and the American West (Lincoln, Nebr., 1983). Unfortunately, there are no adequate surveys of the Midwest or Northeast. The creation of the party systems in the 1830s has continually fascinated historians, whose interpretations have changed dramatically every twenty or thirty years. See Alfred A. Cave, Jacksonian Democracy and the Historians (Gainesville, F 1964); Ronald P. Formisano, "Toward a Reorientation of Jacksonian Politics: A Review of the Literature, 1959-1975," in Journal of American History, 63 (1976); and Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, rev. ed. (Homewood, III., 1978). On the following era, see Robert P. Swierenga, ea., Beyond the Civil War Synthesis. Political Essays of the Civil War Era (Westport, Conn., 1975). Major new interpretations soon engender critical review essays, such as Allan J. Lichtman, "The End of Realignment Theory?" in Historical Methods, 15 (1982); Richard L. McCormick, "Ethno-Cultural Interpretations of NineteenthCentury American Voting Behavior," in Political Science Quarterly, 89 (1974); and Robert Shalhope, "Republicanism and Early American Historiography," in William and Mary Quarterly, 39 (1982). Allan G. Bogue has written several introductions to the "new political history," including "The New Political History in the 1970s," in Michael G. Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, 1980), 231-251; see also Philip R. Vander Meer, "The New Political History: Progress and Prospects," in Computers and the Humanities, 11 (1977). For the flavor of the approach, see the early essays collected in Joel H. Silbey and Samuel T. McSeveney, eds., Voters, Parties, and Elections: Quantitative Essays in the History of American Popular Voting Behavior (Lexington, Mass., 1972). For interdisciplinary perspectives generally, see Richard E. Beringer, Historical Analysis: Contemporary Approaches to Clio's Craft (New York, 1978). The intersection of political science and historiography can be explored in Richard J. Jensen, "American Election Analysis: A Case History of Methodological Innovation and Diffusion," in S. M. Lipset, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences (New York, 1969), 226243; and in Lee Benson et al, eds., American Political Behavior: Historical Essays and Readings (New York, 1974). One narrow but important research theme has been examined by Joel H. Silbey, "Congressional and State Legislative Roll-Call Studies by U.S. Historians," in Legislative Studies Quarterly, 6 (1981); and his "'Delegates Fresh from the People': American Congressional and Legislative Behavior," in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 13 (1983). On a closely related approach, see Howard Allen and Jerome M. Clubb, "Collective Biography and the Progressives," in Social Science History, I (1977). The sources and techniques of studying aggregate election re returns are explained in Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, eds., Analyzing Electoral History: A Guide to the Study of American Voter Behavior (Beverly Hills, Calif, 1981). Newtonian perspectives tend to baffle intellectual and Baconian historians, especially when the quantitative method ology advances too far for them. Clear thinking and logical simplicity can be difficult to follow without suitable training. See Melvyn Hammarberg, "An Analysis of American Electoral Data," in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 13 (1983); and J. Morgan Kousser, "Restoring Politics to Political History," in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1982). ---©Copyright 1984 by Richard Jensen. Fair Use reproduction for class use is allowed. http://members.aol.com/dann01/scribner.html 5/8/2006