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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

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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.

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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 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), 108.

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4 The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896

different: that the Jacksonian organizational mode, established in the party battles of the 1830s and 1840s and long heralded by political scientists as a model of strong parties, was not, in fact, dominant throughout the nineteenth century but was subverted at the end of the century by persistent liberal and nationalizing features of the American regime. This is not occasion to celebrate the old mode or to praise a return to Founding intent, but to recognize that too often the rubric of party decline masks a normative preference for a particular way of engaging in politics that practical politicians have questioned for more than a hundred years. This book argues that what others label “party decline” has, in many cases, been the recurrence of persistent patterns of American politics triggered by the confluence of social change and the muscular force of persistent features of the American polity. Although this argument runs counter to the (small-p) progressive view of history that suggests a one-way directionality to the course of political development, it is not a prescription for a “return to Founding intent” that often derives from taking the Founders seriously. Instead, it proposes that the American constitutional order has had a conservative impact on the course of party development, reversing trends that challenge it, regardless of individuals’ reverence for Founding principles. The Jacksonian party mode and the Founders’ constitutional order existed in tension with one another; party politics in the late nineteenth century replaced the Jacksonian mode with a new, mixed organizational mode that, although a new departure in many ways, was invited by the original constitutional framework.

Republican and Liberal Organizational Values As the past few decades of historiography on the political thought of the Founding have fully established, the Founders blended a variety of sometimes- contradictory intellectual traditions, including those that have come to be identified as liberalism and republicanism; Jacksonians most certainly did the same.9 Yet although it is problematic to simplify either the Founders or the Jacksonians as monolithically liberal or republican, it is helpful to understand the Jacksonian party organizations as reinforcing the distinctively republican elements of the American tradition and as deemphasizing the effects of the Founders’ national liberalism. Republicanism and liberalism define the values of a regime as a whole, not just a component part of that regime, such as parties. However, Jacksonian party organizations supplemented Americans’ commitment to republican values, channeling behavior in ways that colored the practice of politics generally. As Joel Silbey argues, “powerful partisan perspectives ...wereadopted as the nation’s norm with important behavioral consequences,” as party politics institutionalized “a set of rules and understand- ings, and the internalizing of a number of habits, perceptions, and customs, that

9 James T. Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse,” The Journal of American History (June 1987), 9–33.

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Introduction 5

all together added up to ‘the common law of democracy.’”10 Richard Bensel similarly argues that “these rituals, rules, and the physical setting constitute the structure of the political site in which decisions are made and alternatives chosen.”11 Thus, party organizations not only participated in the regime, they consciously and selectively structured their routines according to the regime’s values, thereby both absorbing some of the legitimacy of those values and reinforcing the legitimacy of some of the regime’s values over others. It would be short-sighted not to characterize the Jacksonian party organi- zation as democratic. As James Stanton Chase argues, the Jacksonian conven- tion system was “democracy applied to party government.”12 In the United States, however, “democracy” alone is a vague term, and in the Jacksonian era, Americans were struggling to define exactly what kind of democracy the Constitution countenanced. The Jacksonians’ opponents envisioned a national, economically diverse democracy that was best guided by a beneficent central government, a “positive liberal state.”13 Jacksonians mistrusted a government that was distant from the people, believing that democracy at its purest was practiced at a level at which the people could participate; although they rec- ognized the usefulness of a national government in preserving this kind of democratic republican practice, they were wary of its tendency to overwhelm the common man.14 Characterizing the Jacksonian mode as republican follows ’s description of American republicanism as being “said to present citizens as persons who have contracted with those whom they can regard as civic sib- lings to create institutions of collective self-governance.”15 As Thomas Pangle notes, this notion of mutual duty tends to exert “pressure toward conformity or homogeneity,” including “the need to stifle the internecine factions that were endemic to the fiercely ambitious and restless citizenry” and the drive to “instill a sense of kinship by imbuing all citizens with similar tastes, opin- ions, and property holdings.”16 In the face of a constitutional regime that encouraged nationalism and the representation of a diverse array of interests, the Jacksonian organization “was intended to preserve the integrity of local

10 Joel Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 34, 35, 65. 11 Richard Franklin Bensel, Passion and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Demo- cratic National Convention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 125. 12 James S. Chase, “Jacksonian Democracy and the Rise of the Nominating Convention,” in Otto Gatell, ed., Essays on Jacksonian America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 89. 13 Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 16, 20. 14 Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Parties as Civic Associations,” in Gerald M. Pomper, ed., Party Renewal in America: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1980). 15 Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 75. 16 Thomas Pangle, “The Federalist Papers’ Vision of Civic Health and the Tradition out of Which That Vision Emerges,” The Western Political Quarterly (December 1986), 584.

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6 The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896

communities” in which “all potentially disruptive influences be cast aside.”17 It drew from a pre-Revolutionary republican heritage in which “a locally val- idated elite shielded local customs from . . . outside interference.”18 Wilson Carey McWilliams explains that this reintroduced the republican notion of civic brotherhood into the practice of American national democracy, because through the operation of political parties, politics

wouldbegin...withthelocalitieswherepopular judgment is sound and public control is possible. . . . local partisan groups were to choose their natural leaders. Natural leaders from several localities, united in a face-to-face society of their own, would select their natural leaders. Ideally, an hierarchy of face-to-face societies, connected by relations of personal trust, would connect the locality and the central state.19

In the midst of cross-cutting foundational commitments to republicanism and liberalism, the Jacksonian mode, by institutionalizing republican-oriented polit- ical practices, reminded voters of their commitment to local communities, emphasized popular cooperation as a bulwark against despotism, and rein- forced party loyalties as a form of public kinship that reinforced “the long- standing notions of deference, the mistrust of ambition, and the craving for harmony” that were part of the nation’s republican tradition.20 In this way, as Hofstadter argues, the republican construction of party politics reconciled Americans’ republican mistrust of parties between 1789 and 1840. This idea of party was not merely grounded in philosophical prescriptions; it reinforced the political position of its founders, a generation of “new men” coming out of the lower and middle classes who emerged as the Founding generation faded away. They had been “previously overshadowed in the estab- lishment politics of the colonial era, [but] . . . began to assume a much more forceful role in government,” especially at the state level.21 Nationalization threatened to subvert the gains they had made in state politics by concentrat- ing power in the national government; the Jacksonian-republican idea of party insulated these subnational political elites from the challenge of a national elite that would be empowered by either the perpetuation of the national caucus or the emergence of a nonpartisan national political sphere.22 These “new men” did not build conventions merely to suit democratic principles; they had their own political power first and foremost in their minds and utilized political

17 Milkis, Political Parties and Constitutional Government, 27; Reynolds, The Demise of the American Convention System, 60. 18 Robert E. Shalhope, The Roots of Democracy: American Thought and Culture, 1760–1800 (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 25. 19 McWilliams, “Parties as Civic Associations,” 59. 20 Reynolds, The Demise of the American Convention System, 20–1. 21 Hofstadter, TheIdeaofaPartySystem, 214; William E. Nelson, “Officeholding and Power- wielding: An Analysis of the Relationship between Structure and Style in American Adminis- trative History,” Law and Society Review (Winter 1976), 206; Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). 22 Ceaser, Presidential Selection, 149–50.

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Introduction 7

forms they believed best suited to perpetuate that power.23 The convention model had the advantage of lending democratic pretenses to what had been an elite-centered activity and thus “prevailed over other nominating methods because it satisfied the ideological demands of the Jacksonian era.” Conventions also had strategic advantages. The earliest conventions grew out of caucuses; because not every legislative seat was held by any party, the caucus inevitably excluded a number of locales. Gradually, the parties allowed unrepresented districts to send representatives to caucuses, for the purpose of better aggre- gating coalitions over a broader array of locales and uniting the ambitions of a wider array of local politicians. Conventions also provided more effective campaign coordination in an era of limited travel options.24 The first national organizations were thus, built out of an alliance of extant, independent state and local party organizations, which had become tools of the new men in state and local politics. Such groups were not willing to sacrifice their hard-won state and local independence simply to empower national majorities.25 The aspirations for national collective action that the Jacksonian mode was designed to promote were therefore quite modest. Jacksonianism was not premised on the leadership of an enlightened vanguard; unlike European working-class radicals, Jacksonians did not require the elaboration of an ideol- ogy that promised to rebuild the state to serve the interests of their constituents, so their new party organization was designed neither to elaborate a popular ideology nor to direct the state positively to serve the interests of the people. Instead, it mobilized the people into politics in numbers that would make their assent necessary to any who would rule them in a political system that was already designed to receive popular input; the republican ideology of the Rev- olution was ideology enough. New principles, in fact, were believed to divide the people, confusing their permanent interests with conflicts over temporary issues.26 The results were legitimate: “from everything we know,” Richard L. McCormick concludes, “the American people got roughly the economic poli- cies they wanted.”27 Jacksonian parties assembled quadrennially to nominate presidents, and they provided some semblance of unity on political matters in Congress, but their ability to use national majorities to direct government to accomplish national governing objectives was limited. Characterizing the late-nineteenth-century party mode that replaced the Jacksonian mode as liberal follows Smith’s explanation that liberals understand society as “an artificially, consensually created instrument of a diverse range

23 Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 9. 24 Chase, “Jacksonian Democracy and the Rise of the Nominating Convention,” 87, 89; Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 349–50. 25 John Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 124. 26 Hofstadter, TheIdeaofaPartySystem, 245. 27 Richard L. McCormick, “The Party Period and Public Policy: An Exploratory Hypothesis,” The Journal of American History (September 1979), 287, 285.

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8 The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896

of self-interested personal life plans, with the emphasis generally on seeking economic, religious, and familial fulfillment.”28 Pangle argues that liberalism is defined by the absence of strong mutual duties and “the liberty to remain in a private station, the right to refuse most of the burdens and responsibilities of republicanism,” and to instead pursue the satisfactions of private interest, over which the claims of the community have less power.29 In the new party idea, the claims of local community homogeneity, deference to fellow partisans, even duty to the partisan community, were subordinated to an organizational mode that promised to service national communities of interest, which were decreasingly likely to identify themselves geographically. Rather than assuming voters to be embedded in communal contexts that defined their partisan affiliation, the new idea presumed narrow communities to be insufficient in articulating the interests of a diverse society. The national party’s job was to more effectively inform partisan citizens about their dis- tinctive individual interests, thus perfecting their capacity to maintain those interests. Abandoning the pretense of consistent party identities, the new idea of party presumed party principles to be in constant flux as new issues and new publics rose to prominence, forcing the parties continuously to revise their public appeals. A definitive feature of this new idea was a new means of mobi- lizing national publics called the educational campaign, the premise of which was that local prejudices had to be enlarged and replaced by “educated” views on questions of public policy. This new organizational mode and the idea that legitimated it were also sponsored by a new generation of political elites. Not coincidentally, many of these men – like John Wanamaker, William Whitney, and Mark Hanna – built careers in the emergent national economic order and saw the value of a coherent national politics that could rationalize an unwieldy system. Unlike the Jacksonian mode’s founders, they advocated an active national policy agenda and were frustrated when the Jacksonian mode empowered subnational elites who were willing to sacrifice coherent national politics to maintain the local basis of power that was the source of their position in the national orga- nization itself.30 Although many of these individuals pursued political power through the parties, an increasing number worked through extra-partisan chan- nels such as interest groups or civic associations. These associations became testing grounds for collective action tactics eventually absorbed by the parties. Neither localism nor republicanism was eradicated by the new idea of party any more than nationalism was eradicated by the Jacksonian idea. The Amer- ican Constitution ensures powerful tendencies toward localism by grounding

28 Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, 75. 29 Pangle, “The Federalist Papers’ Vision of Civic Health,” 597. 30 This is not to suggest that these new national publics were advancing the policy recommenda- tions of either traditional Whigs or twentieth-century liberals. As Chapter 2 makes clear, the new methods were not defined by the policy objectives they sought. See Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, 20.

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Introduction 9

national constituencies in subnational geographic jurisdictions and the federal division of power. As a vision of the component parts of national politics, however, the new idea of party enabled the parties to explain themselves, and the new organizational mode enabled them to comport themselves, in ways that reflected the new kind of popular demands being made on the national political system.

Change and Learning in Party Organizations Change happened rapidly between the Civil War and 1880, challenging the Jacksonian organizations’ republican foundations and inviting a reconsidera- tion of party methods. Railroads lowered transportation costs dramatically, opening the full breadth of the nation to travelers, producers, consumers, and political organizers. They allowed cheaper and more reliable mail delivery, facilitating the mass distribution of newspapers, circular letters, and politi- cally themed literature. The telegraph became more popularly available, and to the thousands who crowded telegraph offices on election day, something akin to a national culture emerged over the shortened distances of the wire. Both technologies facilitated the organization of interstate associations, enabling the proliferation of the kind of mass national constituencies that had once been unique to the parties. They also integrated what had been largely “a collection of regional economies” because the railroad linked labor, product, and capital markets and broadened the availability of economic information.31 A Philadel- phia editor enthused in 1878 that, given the rapid advance of technology, “at no distant day is it more than likely that the phonograph and the telephone will come in to take the place of the patriot and the orator.” Perhaps he misjudged the direction in which campaigning would evolve, but he was correct in assert- ing that with technological change, “our present system of political campaigns is susceptible of great modification and improvement in the future.”32 Business enterprises inflated and infiltrated the lives of citizens in new ways. National corporations increasingly consumed the means of production in ways that took decisions about pricing, investment of capital, and terms of credit out of the hands of local businessmen and handed them to faraway bureaucracies beyond the control of local governments. It was an expression of hopefulness that “great numbers of Americans came to believe that a new United States, stretched from ocean to ocean, filled out, and bound together, had miraculously appeared,” but it came with a sinister side, the sense that economic “power lay elsewhere, in alien hands.”33

31 Ronald N. Johnson and Gary D. Libecap, The Federal Civil Service System and the Problem of Bureaucracy: The Economics and Politics of Institutional Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 22. See also Howard Reiter, Selecting the President: The Nominating Process in Transition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 134. 32 No title, (Philadelphia) Evening Bulletin,July15, 1878, 4. 33 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 11, 7.

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10 The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896

The public’s awareness of national economic and political issues shifted. Popular demands for government intervention increased. As Morton Keller notes, “a variety of spokesmen insisted that new social realities required new approaches to governance,” including a range of government policies designed to do everything from imposing order on a culturally diverse society to rec- onciling the inequalities of industrial capitalism.34 Insurgent politicians in the South and West ridiculed mainstream politicians for their failure to respond to perceived crises and attributed their intransigence to corruption. Reformers publicized government misdeeds, finding a form of political power in shocking exposes of official corruption. As a result, trust in the national government declined in the years following the Civil War; in fact, mistrust of the federal government’s and the parties’ capacities to harness the forces of expansion produced retrenchment.35 The role of government in the people’s lives also became inflated during the war, and the effects reverberated throughout the following decades. Con- scription and other privations were over relatively quickly, but the federal gov- ernment had turned to novel measures to finance the war, and these became enduring sites of national political conflict. Republicans imposed a high tariff to fund wartime operations and maintained its popularity afterward under the banner of protection for American industry. The government inflated the currency with paper money to stave off wartime depression but afterward fol- lowed a deflationary policy as the country returned to the gold standard over the next two decades.36 Arguments used to defend or assail the tariff and the gold standard demonstrated the extent to which the federal government had come to touch citizens’ lives. High tariffs raised the cost of consumer goods but secured the wages of those who worked in protected industries. The gold standard strengthened the dollar and benefited economic growth but was a reminder that politicians chose to shrink the money supply when, by fiat, they could expand it. Finally, the extended republic inflated. The addition of new states to the elec- toral college (and to the national nominating conventions) and accompanying western population growth complicated the realm of compromise within the parties and made the localistic and republican basis of organization less tenable.

34 Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 290–4. 35 On the trend toward retrenchment generally, see Keller, Affairs of State; on loss of confidence among business elites, see Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), documents how mistrust of the parties’ use of government power for political gain discouraged the growth of federal social welfare programs. 36 Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 6; Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 109.

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