Farewell to the “Party Period”: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 117-125

  John, Richard R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248062938     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.2004.0009     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. The marginal status of political history was touched on in several influential literature surveys published in the 1970s and 1980s. These included Vincent P. De Santis, “The Political Life of the Gilded Age: A Review of the Recent Literature,” History Teacher 9 (November 1975): 73-106;
2. Theda Skocpol, “Social History and Historical Sociology: Contrasts and Complementarities,” Social Science History 11 (Spring 1987): 17-30;
3. William E. Leuchtenberg, “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” Journal of American History 73 (December 1986): 585-600.
4. For a recent, more optimistic assessment, see Brian Balogh, “The State of the State Among Historians,” Social Science History 27 (Fall 2003): 455-64.
5. Pauline Maier et al. Inventing America: A History of the United States (New York, 2003), xxi.
6. For a more extended discussion of the courts-and-parties school, with a focus on the decades preceding the rise of the mass party, see Richard R. John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787-1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 347-80.
7. On the relationship between the rise of the mass party and the early national state, see John, “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, 2003), 50–84.
8. Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986)
9. Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838—1893 (Stanford, 1991).
10. Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, 2003)
11. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850—1896 (Cambridge, 2001)
12. Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877—1920 (Cambridge, 2000)
13. Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877—1917 (Chicago, 1999).
14. Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present (Bloomington, 1995)
15. Colleen A. Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, 1994)
16. William J. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996)
17. Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (New York, 2001)
18. Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865-1945 (Chapel Hill, 1998)
19. Robin L. Einhorn, “Slavery and the Politics of Taxation in the Early United States,” Studies in American Political Development 14 (Fall 2000): 156-83;
20. Idem, “Species of Property: The American Property-Tax Uniformity Clauses Reconsidered,” Journal of Economic History, forthcoming.
21. Steven W. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840-1920 (Cambridge, 2002)
22. Richard R. John, “Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age,” in A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and James W. Cortada (New York, 2000), 55–105;
23. Richard Sylla, “Experimental Federalism: The Economics of American Government, 1789-1914,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge, 2000), 483–541;
24. Mark R. Wilson, “The Business of Civil War: Military Enterprise, the State, and Political Economy in the United States, 1850-1880” (Ph.D. diss. University of Chicago, 2002)
25. Wilson, “The Extensive Side of Nineteenth-Century Military Economy: The Tent Industry in the Northern United States During the Civil War,” Enterprise and Society 2 (June 2001): 297-337;
26. Charles W. Calhoun, “Political Economy in the Gilded Age: The Republican Party's Industrial Policy,” Journal of Policy History 8, no. 3 (1996): 291-309;
27. Thomas J. Misa, A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865—1925 (Baltimore, 1995)
28. Sean Patrick Adams, “Different Charters, Different Paths: Corporations and Coal in Antebellum Pennsylvania and Virginia,” Business and Economic History 27 (Fall 1998): 78-90;
29. Adams, States of Energy: The Political Economy of Coal in Antebellum America (Baltimore, forthcoming).
30. Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, 2000)
31. James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765—1900 (Baton Rouge, 1998)
32. Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge, Mass. 2001)
33. Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York, 1997)
34. Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865- 1914 (Chapel Hill, 2002)
35. James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill, 1994).
36. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991).
37. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2001), 224;
38. William E. Gienapp, “The Myth of Class in Jacksonian America,” Journal of Policy History 6, no. 2 (1994): 232-59.
39. Bensel, Political Economy, 526.
40. Political Economy 178, 181.
41. Political Economy 291.
42. Michael F. Holt, “Change and Continuity in the Party Period: The Substance and Structure of American Politics, 1835-1885,” in Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000, ed. Byron E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger (Lawrence, Kan. 2001), 106.
43. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation, xiii. See also Idem, “Patents, Engineering Professionals, and the Pipelines of Innovation: The Internalization of Technical Discovery by Nineteenth-Century American Railroads,” in Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries, ed. Naomi Lamoreaux, Daniel Raff, and Peter Temin (Chicago, 1999), 61-101.
44. Sylla, “Experimental Federalism”
45. Larson, Internal Improvement; Laura Jensen, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge, 2003)
46. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass. 1995).
47. Among the many critiques of Beard's “Second American Revolution” thesis were Stanley Coben, “Northeastern Business and Radical Reconstruction: A Re-examination,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (June 1959): 67-90, and
48. Peter Kolchin, “The Business Press and Reconstruction, 1865-1868,” Journal of Southern History 33 (May 1967): 183-96.
49. For its revival, see James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York, 1991), and
50. Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95 (February 1990): 75-98.
51. Alfred D. Chandler Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass. 1977).
52. McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy; Silbey, American Political Nation.
53. See also Silbey, “The State and Practice of American Political History at the Millennium: The Nineteenth Century as Test Case,” Journal of Policy History 11, no. 1 (1999): 1-30.
54. For a penetrating critique of Silbey's assumptions about nineteenth-century American political history, see Mark E. Neely Jr. The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, Mass. 2002), 187–88
55. and Holt, “Change and Continuity,” 96–99, 106, 110.
56. For a more skeptical analysis of the mass parties, see Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2000).
57. Wallace D. Farnham, “‘The Weakened Spring of Government’: A Study in Nineteenth-Century American History,” Journal of American History 68 (April 1963): 662-80.
58. Farnham is sometimes glossed as positing that the nineteenth-century American state was irrelevant. In fact, he hypothesized that its weakness might well be the “central fact” in the history of the United States in the nineteenth century (680). Political corruption and the predatory business behavior associated with the “robber barons,” Farnham concluded, were both “creations” of an “ungoverned people” (679). To document the relationship of public policy to social change, Farnham urged historians to undertake the “minute-by-minute investigations” of the origins and operation of every branch of the government (679). For a distinct, yet related approach to the complex relationship of politics and entrepreneurship in the Gilded Age, see Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 19-43.
59. Bensel, Political Economy, 526.
60. Ira Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katzlenson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, 2002), 89.