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Introduction Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19281-1 - The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880-1896 Daniel Klinghard Excerpt More information Introduction Between 1880 and 1896, national party leaders in both major American parties discarded the basic organizational preferences that had guided them since the formulation of the Jacksonian party organization in the 1830s and 1840s, and adopted new ones that informed the parties’ development throughout the twentieth century. The purpose of this book is to bring this late-nineteenth- century transformation back into scholars’ understanding of the development of American parties. These changes were legitimated by a new idea of party that was as portentous as that of the late 1790s described by Richard Hofstadter as the rise of “the idea of a party system.”1 Rejecting the traditional understanding of the national party organizations as a congeries of independent, local organizations, national party leaders recon- figured the conduct of national campaigns to reach voters directly with nation- ally printed material and with direct presidential campaigning. Contrary to the traditional parties’ insistence on local control of campaigns, they centralized control of presidential campaigns in the national committees, which became more capable than ever before of transposing national politics into national electoral mandates. Combating the traditional insistence on restraining the independence of the national committees, they empowered them to raise money independently of state party organizations, expanding the national organiza- tions’ ability to fund their own operations. They broke through the tradi- tional geographic boundaries of party regularity to found party clubs designed to nationalize the party-in-the-electorate. Republicans rejected the ability of state party organizations to control the votes of national convention delegates, affirming the national character of their nominees. Finally, presidents and pres- idential candidates used these new methods to free themselves from the party system’s traditional restraints on presidential party leadership. Together, these practices undermined the fundamental tenets of the Jacksonian era idea of party 1 Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19281-1 - The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880-1896 Daniel Klinghard Excerpt More information 2 The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896 and the Jacksonian mode of party organization that it implied. State and local organizations were not dissolved, but they ceased to play the determinative role that they once had in nominations and campaigns. National conventions were not disbanded, but they never again performed the same way in shaping presidential candidacies. Although Hofstadter portrayed the Jacksonian idea of party as constituting a modern party politics fitted to the new constitutional regime, I argue that this Jacksonian organizational mode (referred to as such because it was founded in the Jacksonian era, not because it was contiguous with that period) aimed to institutionalize what Marvin Meyers calls “an ideal of a chaste republi- can order” that predated the Constitution, one that John F. Reynolds argues “flourished amid traditions grounded in the ideology of republicanism.” In this sense, the Jacksonian party organization displaced the liberal, national politics of interest depicted in The Federalist by enforcing an older repub- lican tradition that Jacksonians believed would enable the common man to achieve self-governance in the face of powerful tendencies to oligarchy.2 As Moisei Ostrogorski put it, the Jacksonian party system “had made its way into the government behind the back of the Constitution.”3 Whereas Hamilton, Madison, and Jay conceived of a national political order that could “refine and enlarge the public view” by filtering it through an extended national repub- lic, the Jacksonian mode subordinated the ambitions of national politicians to the political power of state and local political communities.4 As Sidney Milkis argues, “the confederative form of parties seemed to defy the ‘more perfect union’ created by the Constitution of 1787.”5 Indeed, the attempt of Martin Van Buren – the Jacksonians’ most thoughtful party organizer – to use the party system to contain presidential ambition leads James Ceaser to suggest that he “turned his back on the Founders and showed himself to be a thoroughgoing Republican, being concerned first and foremost with restraining power.”6 2 Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1957), 12; John F. Reynolds, The Demise of the American Convention System, 1880–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 20–1. 3 Moisei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties: Volume II: The United States, ed., Seymour Martin Lipset (Chicago: Anchor Books, 1964, originally published in 1903), 76. 4 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, edited by Robert Scigliano (New York: Random House, 2000), 58–9. 5 Sidney M. Milkis, Political Parties and Constitutional Government: Remaking American Democ- racy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 15. 6 James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 136. Ceaser goes on to conclude that “Van Buren might well have countered that the Founders’ system, which was designed both to restrain popular leadership and to promote excellence, had not worked. who is to say that the Founders, faced with the same choice, would not have resolved the issue in the same way?” I argue that the continuity between his party organization and the Founders’ version of liberal republicanism is not as strong as Ceaser suggests. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19281-1 - The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880-1896 Daniel Klinghard Excerpt More information Introduction 3 In the late nineteenth century, this republican idea of party was rejected in favor of a renewed vision of national, liberal democratic politics, one that informed a distinctively nineteenth-century organizational mode. It was not fully implemented by 1896, just as the party system was not formalized by the emergence of two-party conflict in the 1790s. Nonetheless, it provided intellectual justification for the trends of party development into the twentieth century, particularly the move to direct primaries, closer relationships between the major party organizations and interest groups, and presidential dominance of party politics. In rethinking the party organizations, national party leaders were respond- ing to new conditions, most notably an electorate that was more focused on national politics and less attached to community interests, more open to per- suasion by independent interest associations and less susceptible to partisan appeals, more concerned about substantive policy issues and less attracted to party harmony. As Richard McCormick observes, this process of accommo- dating new conditions “undermined the old political system and the party organizations that had dominated it.”7 The result was not a completely new party organization but a new party mode designed to conduct party politics (especially the politics of nominating presidential candidates, clarifying party principles, and conducting campaigns) differently from the way the Jackso- nian mode operated; the new mode was grounded in a different view of the relation of individuals to the party and worked to establish a new balance of power between national and subnational political elites. The old mode was not destroyed; it persisted in tension with the new mode for some time, shaping the parameters of the early and mid-twentieth century. National conventions still selected the parties’ nominees for president; the presidency, which was the prize around which the first stirrings of organized partisanship in America occurred, remained the focal point of U.S. party politics; parties still issued platforms; the same party labels were used, along with their nineteenth-century iconogra- phy; and a commitment to a two – and only two – party system continued to define the parameters of mainstream partisanship. As Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek argue, “all political change ...isaccompanied by the accumulation and persistence of competing controls within the institutions of government, [and so] the normal condition of the polity will be that of multiple, incongru- ous authorities operating simultaneously.” The tension between these multiple orders generated the distinctive characteristics of the American party system as it passed through time.8 It is common to fold these changes into a longer process of party development or to argue that parties have simply “declined.” This book contends something 7 Richard L. McCormick, From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893–1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 36–7; Alan Ware, The Democratic Party Heads North, 1877–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 118–19. 8 Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
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