CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1. V. O. Key Jr., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics 17 (February 1955): 3–18.
2. Key further explored the ideas of realignments as gradual changes in a later work. (V. O. Key Jr., “Secular Realignment and the Party System,” Journal of Politics 21 [May 1959].)
3. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960), pp. 78–96.
4. Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), pp. 2–3. See also Walter Dean Burnham, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59 (March 1965): 7–28; Walter Dean Burnham, The Current Crisis in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press 1982) (collection of Burnham articles on realignments).
5. Burnham, Critical Elections, p. 10.
6. James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1973), p. 7.
7. Joel H. Silbey, “Beyond Realignment and Realignment Theory: American Political Eras, 1789–1989,” in The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 3.
8. Burnham, Critical Elections, p. 181.
9. Theodore Rosenof, Realignment: The Theory That Changed the Way We Think About American Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 121; John H. Aldrich, Why Parties: The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 262.
10. Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969), pp. 36–37, 474.
11. Arthur Paulson, Electoral Realignment and the Outlook for American Democracy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007), pp. 6–8. (The “dealignment” theory hasn't aged well, as America, in fact, moved into a new era of strong party “polarization.”)
12. David Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven, Yale University Press 2002), 43–68.
13. Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H Zingale, Partisan Realignment: Voters, Parties, and Government in American History (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1980), pp. 264–65.
14. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments, pp. 74–83.
15. Silbey, “Beyond Realignment,” p. 3.
16. Everett Carll Ladd, “Like Waiting for Godot: The Uselessness of ‘Realignment’ for Understanding Change in Contemporary American Politics,” in Schafer, End of Realignment?, p. 34.
CHAPTER 2: AMERICA'S FIRST AND SECOND PARTY SYSTEMS
1. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1789–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 10–39 (including survey of eighteenth-century thought).
2. James Madison, “Federalist No. 10,” in The Federalist, ed. Jacob B. Cooke (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 56–57.
3. Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, p. viii.
4. James Madison, “Federalist No. 51,” in Federalist, ed. Cooke, p. 349.
5. The classical political theory the Founders studied barely mentioned parties at all. (Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, p. 51.)
6. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 35–36.
7. While most of the government, including Congress, consisted of Federalists, most Anti-Federalists quickly came to support the new constitutional government as well—of course while hoping for some amendments. (Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 53.)
8. Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, p. 51.
9. Ibid., p. ix.
10. Hamilton saw himself, and Washington often treated him, as a sort of a prime minister to Washington's presidency—Hamilton sometimes even referred to it as “my administration” instead of Washington's. (Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 91.)
11. Ibid., pp. 90–91.
12. Ibid., pp. 95–103.
13. Ibid., pp. 103–105. The Federalist system was meant to bind national elites to a strong national government through relationships of interest and patronage, while allowing a natural meritocracy with the necessary talent and republican virtue to rise to national service. (Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 105–107.)
14. Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 63.
15. Ibid., p. 45. Democratic-Republicans believed these yeoman farmers had the combination of independence without aristocratic pretension that made them specifically important to maintaining the republican virtues necessary to maintain republican government.
16. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 142–45.
17. Ibid., p. 157.
18. Ibid., pp. 176–81.
19. The disastrous mission of French diplomat Citizen Genet, who intentionally stirred up revolutionary sentiment around America in defiance of Washington, outraged the president and particularly turned him against the idea of intervening in the revolution. (Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], pp. 341–54.)
20. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 162–64.
21. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), pp. 3–40; Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, pp. 93–95; Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, pp. 451–88.
22. George Washington, “The Farewell Address,” in Washington's Farewell Address: The View from the 20th Century, ed. Burton Ira Kaufman (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 23.
23. The Democratic-Republicans usually just called themselves Republicans, with later historians bestowing the name Democratic-Republican on them to differentiate them from the later Republican Party.
24. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 166–73.
25. Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, pp. 513–28.
26. Herbert Agar, The Price of Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 91.
27. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 9, 1813, in The Adams Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 350–52; Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, p. 28.
28. Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, p. 110; Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, p. 545.
29. War fervor was driven in significant part by outrage over the XYZ Affair, in which the revolutionary French government threatened the United States and then French ministers mistreated American diplomats seeking to negotiate neutrality, including by demanding personal bribes for negotiators and a large payment to France. That led to a “Quasi War” between the United States and France. (Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 239–47.)
30. Ibid., pp. 244–60.
31. Ibid., pp. 250–60.
32. Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, p. x.
33. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 260–62.
34. John E. Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 136–74.
35. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2001), p. 537.
36. Susan Dunn, Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), p. 1.
37. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 283–84.
38. Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 149.
39. Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, pp. 127–28.
40. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 101.
41. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 292–93.
42. Ibid., 292.
43. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 647.
44. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 370–74.
45. Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1976), p. 130.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Duverger's Law is named after French lawyer and scholar Maurice Duverger, who first explained the tendency for first-past-the-post systems to lead to two major parties, as opposed to multiparty systems. (Maurice Duverger, Party Politics and Pressure Group: A Comparative Introduction, trans. David Wagoner (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), pp. 27–32.)
49. John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 6–7.
50. Gerring's system of ideological party eras differs in several ways from the generally accepted definitions of American party system. Gerring combined the Whigs, the Third Party System Republicans, and the Fourth Party System Republicans as ideologically similar, while marking an ideological shift as the Republicans moved away from economic protectionism during the 1920s. Gerring also noted a change in the Democratic Party's ideology during the 1950s, as the party moved toward universalism. (Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, pp. 15–18.) None of these deviations, however, meaningfully undermine the generally accepted party system configuration. As this book explores, the Whiggish American System tradition did indeed survive within both the Third and Fourth Party System Republicans as a part of the party's Yankee faction. The drift toward protectionism occurred during, and was a symptom of, the Fourth Party's System's Jazz Age stagnation, drift, and decline. The Democratic shift toward universalism was a result of the national shift toward moralism of the 1960s awakening.
51. Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, pp. 272–75.
52. The old idea of American parties (as opposed to European parliamentary parties) as inherently nonideological, an idea most associated with Louis Hartz as set forth in The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955) has long been in decline. See, for example, Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, pp. 4–7, for a discussion of the changing view in political science. See also Mark Hulliung, ed., The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered: The Contested Legacy of Louis Hartz (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010). The nonideological thesis appeared compelling in the middle of the twentieth century because America then was in the long stable portion of a party system. The parties appeared nonideological because the battle lines were already drawn, one party's ideas were dominant, and new ones hadn't yet arisen. As we approach the next realignment, ideological “polarization” has reemerged because the political framework is now once more up for grabs. It's increasingly clear American parties were always quite ideological indeed—it's just we didn't notice because their ideologies were so embedded into the system they became invisible to us. Like a musty smell in a room that seems to disappear after a few hours in its midst, we lost the ability to perceive the most powerful influence pervading politics.
53. For an example of the profound effect our partisan identification has on others' attitudes and judgments toward us, see Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 3 (July 2015): 690–707. See also Pew Research Center, The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider, October 5, 2017, http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/the-partisan-divide-on-political-values-grows-even-wider/.
54. For a discussion on the long-term stability of individual partisan preferences, see Donald Philip Green and Bradley Palmquist, “How Stable Is Party Identification?” Political Behavior 16, no. 4 (December 1994): 437–66; Philip E. Converse, “Of Time and Partisan Stability,” Comparative Political Studies 2, no. 2 (July 1969): 139–71.
55. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 312–13.
56. Madison accepted so much of the old Federalist program that the Federalist Party was “superfluous.” (Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson [New York: Little Brown, 1945], p. 19.)
57. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), pp. 28–32, 41–44.
58. Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 646.
59. Ibid., pp. 647–48.
60. Ibid., pp. 676–92; Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 66–99, 181–228.
61. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 692–93.
62. Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 263–65.
63. J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison's War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic 1783–1830 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 481; Hickey, War of 1812, p. 278.
64. Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 279–82.
65. Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 696.
66. “No one represented more stoutly than [Monroe] the conviction that the Federalist party, as a threat to Republican institutions, ought to be extinguished, and no one was more confident that the American system, whatever one might say of other systems, could be managed without a partisan opposition.” (Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, p. 188.)
67. This built on a longstanding policy going back to Jefferson that, while Democratic-Republicans might accept Federalist ideas and policies, they would never dare to put actual Federalists in positions of power in the belief that only an immoral person with dangerous ideas would ever identify with the Federalist Party. (Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, pp. 186–87.)
68. James Monroe to General Andrew Jackson, December 14, 1816, in The Writings of James Monroe: Including a Collection of his Public and Private Papers and Correspondence Now for the First Time Printed, vol. 5, ed. Stanislaus Murray Hamilton (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1901), pp. 345–46.
69. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 93.
70. Ibid., pp. 94–95.
71. Ibid., p. 95.
72. Nobel E. Cunningham, The Presidency of James Monroe (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), pp. 127–31; Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, pp. 226–31 (explaining how the lack of a two-party contest led to the decline of effective government and the powerlessness of Monroe).
73. Agar, Price of Union, pp. 201–202.
74. Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008), pp. 44–45.
CHAPTER 3: AMERICA'S SECOND AND THIRD PARTY SYSTEMS
1. John Quincy Adams, “Inaugural Address, March 4, 1825,” in The Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1946), p. 357; see also Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1789–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 231–33; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1979), p. 50.
Adams was particularly slow to accept the necessity of parties, holding to the idea that parties were creatures of irrational passion long after they had become a reality of the republic. (Ibid., p. 52.)
2. Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, pp. 137–38.
3. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 111.
4. Remini, Andrew Jackson, p. 103.
5. The idea of Adams and Clay putting their own personal interests over the people's clear choice was itself a form of corruption and a betrayal of republicanism. (Remini, Andrew Jackson, p. 99.)
6. The allegation that the Whigs were just discredited Federalists under a new name would dog the Whig Party throughout its existence. (Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], p. 2.)
7. While this was his well-earned public reputation, Jackson's rages were sometimes just for show and to gain a political advantage. In private he could reportedly be quite cool and self-possessed. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson [New York: Little, Brown, 1945], pp. 36–41.)
8. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 21.
9. Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 372.
10. Remini, Andrew Jackson, pp. 25–33.
11. “The force driving Jackson after 1824: a belief in the primacy of the will of the people over the whim of the powerful, with himself as the chief interpreter and enactor of that will.” (Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House [New York: Random House, 2008], p. 46.)
12. Remini, Andrew Jackson, p. 130.
13. Meacham, American Lion, p. 4.
14. Remini, Andrew Jackson, pp. 173–80.
15. Most of the property restrictions were gone by 1828, leading to a large increase in popular involvement in politics. (Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 8.)
16. Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 46.
17. Ibid., pp. 46–47.
18. Clay thought Jackson's election was “mortifying and sickening” to the “lovers of free Government.” (Meacham, American Lion, p. 49.)
19. Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, p. 125.
20. James C. Klotter, Henry Clay: The Man Who Would be President (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 64–69.
21. Klotter, Henry Clay, p. 69.
22. Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, pp. 74–75.
23. Ibid., pp. 75–76.
24. Remini, Andrew Jackson, p. 111.
25. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 15–17.
26. Andrew Jackson, “President Jackson's Veto Message Regarding the Bank of the United States; July 10, 1832,” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp (from A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, prepared under the direction of the Joint Committee on printing, 52nd Congress; New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897).
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 20; Meacham, American Lion, pp. 239–41.
30. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 17.
31. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 46.
32. The Anti-Masons seemed a natural National Republican constituency but Clay and his party refused to adopt a movement they found distasteful, and denounced them instead. (Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 11–14.) They would often pick up these voters in later years as the Anti-Masons declined.
33. Remini, Andrew Jackson, p. 41.
34. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 28.
35. Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, p. 15.
36. Whigs were less comfortable with the spoils system but ultimately practiced it nonetheless. (Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, p. 54.)
37. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 119.
38. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 113.
39. Whigs connected prosperity and growth as a tool of social and personal improvement, “believe[ing] that industrialization and improved technology held out great hope for the betterment of mankind.” (Ibid., p. 9.)
40. To the Whigs, prosperity and economic progress was the first step to unleash personal and moral progress and reform. (Ibid., pp. 100–101.)
41. Ibid., pp. 20, 32.
42. Ibid., p. 113.
43. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 83, 117.
44. Ibid., pp. 116–17; Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, p. 13; Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 131; Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, p. 9.
45. Ibid., p. 685; Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, pp. 16–17.
46. Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, pp. 13, 16–17.
47. Harrison was in fact not a common hard-drinking man living in a log cabin at all. The Whig campaign for Harrison was a model of Jacksonian campaigns, with parades, songs, slogans, and hoopla such as rolling giant leather balls through the countryside with anti-Democratic slogan on them. (Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 105–106.) The Democrats attacked the campaign as a carnival that insulted the people's intelligence. (Ibid., p. 111.)
48. Ibid., pp. 133–38.
49. The Second Great Awakening profoundly influenced Whig thinking, with many evangelical Protestant Whigs believing their policies were mean to bring a “collective redemption to society.” (Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, p. 9.)
50. Ibid., p. 152.
51. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, pp. 1, 4.
52. James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War 1860–1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 11.
53. Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 52–54; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 45–46; Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 689–90.
54. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, pp. 6–14.
“For these men and women slavery was far more than a social evil to be endured stoically until it naturally withered away. It was a sin that corroded the moral fiber of everyone it touched, directly or indirectly. Every individual, slaveholder or otherwise, had a compelling moral obligation to sever all ties with the institution and begin immediate work for its removal.” (Ibid., p. 135.)
55. John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 144–49.
Some passionate abolitionists, frustrated at the Whig Party's unwillingness to risk dividing its voters by embracing their cause, formed the Liberty Party, which drew from a similar demographic of evangelical reformers and cut into the usual Whig base. (Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 155–57.)
56. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 686.
57. Ibid., p. 686.
58. Ibid., pp. 163–64.
59. Ibid., pp. 164, 170.
60. Ibid., p. 172.
61. Ibid., p. 173.
62. The Texas annexation issue was not the only thing that hurt Clay in the election; many abolitionists, who as evangelical Protestants would be expected to be Whigs, rejected the slaveholder Clay in favor of the Liberty Party. (Ibid., pp. 195–96.)
63. Ibid., p. 233.
64. Ibid., pp. 248–49.
65. Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, p. 273. Henry Clay was Lincoln's personal idol and model for statesmanship. (Ibid., p. 272.)
66. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 250–51.
67. Whig newspapers had claimed Taylor as a Whig during the war to claim military glory from the Democrats, even though Taylor had never even voted much less been a politically active Whig. (Ibid., p. 248.)
68. Ibid., pp. 271–72.
69. Ibid., p. 319.
70. There's good reason to believe that Van Buren's Free Soil candidacy didn't change the outcome of the election and Taylor would have won regardless. (Ibid., pp. 372–76.)
71. Slaveholder Taylor had a different plan in mind, one less friendly to the spread of slavery, in which the territory captured from Mexico would be admitted as two states, presumably free. The clash between President Taylor's plan, which Southern Whigs feared would be politically disastrous in the South, and Clay's Compromise became a battle of egos until Taylor's death. (Ibid., pp. 474–75, 517–19.)
72. The Fugitive Slave Act was so deeply unpopular among Northern churches, it drove evangelicals into political action. (Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, pp. 178–80.)
73. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 606–607.
74. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 16–17; Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 682, 724–25.
75. Politicians at the time openly noted there was no real difference between the parties any more. (Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 688.)
76. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 27–31.
77. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 753–55.
78. Ibid., p. 763. Or as Horace Greeley wrote, the party had been “not merely discomfited but annihilated.” (Ibid., p. 766.)
79. Ibid., p. 765.
80. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, p. 39.
81. Ibid., pp. 69–71; Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 806.
82. Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 14–16; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, p. 70.
83. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 78–83.
84. Ibid., p. 161.
85. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 190.
86. Carleton Beals, Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know-Nothing Conspiracy: 1820–1860 (New York: Hastings House, 1960), pp. 121–45; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, p. 92.
87. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 845. The Know-Nothings believed Catholicism as a faith was naturally hostile to republicanism. (Ibid.) See also Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 555–68.
88. The nativists had long been a drag on the Whigs given their overlapping bases of support, perhaps helping cost the Whigs the 1844 election. (Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, pp. 206, 212.)
89. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, p. 95.
90. The party also benefited from the rising strength of awakening Christianity, with increasingly religious Protestants convinced Catholicism encouraged moral laxity, corrupted personal morals, undercut Christian education, and threatened the republican values of America ordained by God. (Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, pp. 199–203.)
91. Ibid., pp. 240–48. Speaker Banks was in reality a true politician who believed whatever was most advantageous to him at the time. (Ibid., p. 243.)
92. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 240–41.
93. For the first few years, what was to become the Republican Party functioned as an ad hoc alliance of movements and parties, often under names like Fusion, Independent, and People's instead of Republican. These smaller movements merged into a united Republican Party state by state over time. (Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979], pp. 71–72.)
94. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, pp. 245–46.
95. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 168–72, 296–99.
96. Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, p. 135.
97. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 297–99.
98. Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), pp. 132–37; Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, pp. 107–14.
99. Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, pp. 121–22.
100. Ibid., pp. 98–99; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 299–300.
101. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 240–41.
102. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood, pp. 274–358; Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, pp. 207–18.
103. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 305–306.
104. Ibid., pp. 316–46.
105. Ibid., pp. 441–43.
106. Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 293–322.
107. “Constitutional Union Platform of 1860,” in National Party Platforms, 1840–1957, ed. Kirk H. Porter and Donald Bruce Johnson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956).
108. The “bloody shirt” metaphor came from the savage beating of a Mississippi schoolteacher in 1871 by vigilantes dressed in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan. The mob demanded he leave the county for teaching African Americans, and when he refused they beat him mercilessly almost to death. A myth claimed that a Union soldier had transported his bloody nightshirt to Washington where a congressman waved it about in a speech denouncing Southern intransigence—which there is no record of having happened. Nonetheless, Southerners afterward would denounce Northern agitation against Southern resistance to Reconstruction, violence, and mistreatment of African Americans as demagoguery—“waving the bloody shirt.” (Stephen Budiansky, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox [New York: Viking, 2008], pp. 1–10.)
Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion came from a campaign speech for James Blaine in 1888 by an obscure Protestant minister, Samuel Burchard, which the newspapers quoted as saying Republican would not “identify themselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” The speech damaged Blaine with Irish voters for the anti-Catholic slur, but also resonated over time. (Mark Wahlgren Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of a President, 1884 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000], pp. 281–88; H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896 [Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969], pp. 232–34.)
109. Ben Wright and Zachary W. Dresser, introduction to Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era, ed. Ben Wright and Zachary W. Dresser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), pp. 3–5.
CHAPTER 4: AMERICA'S THIRD AND FOURTH PARTY SYSTEMS
1. Jeremy Atack, Fred Bateman, and William N. Parker, “The Farm, the Farmer, and the Market,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 245–47.
2. Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1988), pp. 14–48; Nell Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), pp. xvii–xxvii.
3. Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, pp. 17–29, 50–93.
4. Ibid., pp. 173–74.
5. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 8.
6. Charles W. Calhoun, Minority Victory: Gilded Age Politics and the Front Porch Campaign of 1888 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), p. 1.
7. Atack, Bateman, and Parker, “Farm, the Farmer, and the Market,” p. 280.
8. Paul W. Glad, The Trumpet Soundeth: William Jennings Bryan and His Democracy, 1896–1912 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 47.
9. H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969), pp. 366–79, 383–88; Glad, Trumpet Soundeth, pp. 47–48; Paolo E. Coletta, “Greenbackers, Goldbugs, and Silverites: Currency Reform and Politics, 1860–1897,” in The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal, ed. H. Wayne Morgan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1963), pp. 114–15 (on farmers' need for eastern banking due to national monetary policies).
10. Atack, Bateman, and Parker, “Farm, the Farmer, and the Market,” p. 275.
11. Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 161–64.
12. Stuart M. Blumin, “The Social Implications of US Economic Development,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, pp. 848–49.
13. Mark Wahlgren Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of a President, 1884 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 22–26.
14. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 12–18.
Since Reconstruction of the South turned on forcing the region to accept the sanctity of free labor and contract—the alternative to abusive labor arrangements and slavery—it become impossible for Republicans not to honor those same principles in Northern labor arrangements. (Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 [New York: Harper and Row, 1989], p. 482.) Republican business arguments over issues like monetary policy tariffs were also tied to a deeply reformist moralistic belief that special-interest regulations like tariffs were a form of corruption and abuse of power. (Andrew L. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006], pp. 96–107.)
15. Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, p. 19; Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Leader: Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), pp. 44–50; Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, pp. 108–109.
The name “Bourbon” most likely arose as a joke comparing them to the French Bourbon dynasty, who, when restored to power after the French Revolution, supposedly “had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” (Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, p. 19.)
16. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 125–28; Stanley L. Engerman, “Slavery and Its Consequences for the South in the Nineteenth Century,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, p. 358.
17. Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, pp. 111–12; Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall, 2nd ed. (New York: Boni and Liverright, 1911), pp. 211–83; James S. Olsen, “The World of George Washington Plunket,” in Honest Graft: The World of George Washington Plunkett, by William L. Riordon (1905; St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1993), pp. 5–9; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, pp. xxx–xxxiv; Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 4.
18. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 31–32.
19. Ibid., pp. 66–67, 254–55, 446–48.
20. Ibid., pp. 68–71, 142–70.
21. Ibid., pp. 61–62, 228–39.
22. Ibid., pp. 333–37.
23. John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 84–126; Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 276–77, 291–307; Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 68–86.
Republican control was, of course, always tentative on a local level, with Democrats and former Confederates in firm control of much of the South on a local level from the very start of Reconstruction.
24. Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War, pp. 150–69; Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 425–59. “In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy.” (Ibid., p. 425.)
25. Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 124–25; Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 512–24.
26. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 575–83; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, pp. 1–8.
27. Calhoun, Minority Victory, pp. 15–16; Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, pp. 166–70; Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, pp. 91–107.
28. Kleppner, Third Electoral System, pp. 133–136; Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, pp. 220–21.
29. Calhoun, Minority Victory, pp. 19–21; Slap, Doom of Reconstruction, pp. 40–42.
30. Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, pp. 41–58; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, p. 4.
31. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: A Centennial Version (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2007), p. 230.
32. “For a generation after the Civil War, a time of great economic exploitation and waste, grave social corruption and ugliness, the dominant note in American political life was complacency.” (Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 60; Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900 [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007], pp. 192–99.)
The decline in fact began even before Reconstruction ended, with disgraces like the Credit Mobilier scandal—in which high officials, including the vice president, took bribes to allow vast government overcharges in constructing the Transcontinental Railroad—beginning during the Grant administration. (Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 468–69.)
33. Ibid., pp. 466–67.
34. Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, pp. 29–31. While Republican reformers mostly fought over the corruption of the spoils system and bosses, they also fought against protective tariffs and railroad monopolies that they believed fostered elite corruption threatening republican government. (Slap, Doom of Reconstruction, pp. 96–107.)
35. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 499–511; Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, pp. 208–12; Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, pp. 59–76 (on Stalwarts and Half-Breeds), 197–209 (on Mugwumps); Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, pp. 198–203; Gerald W. McFarland, “The New York Mugwumps of 1885: A Profile,” in The Mugwumps, 1884–1900, ed. Gerald W. McFarland (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), pp. 62–80.
36. Glad, Trumpet Soundeth, pp. 22–23.
37. Ibid., pp. 28–29; Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, pp. 5–6.
38. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, p. 19.
39. Ibid., p. 48.
40. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 7.
41. Atack, Bateman, and Parker, “Farm, the Farmer, and the Market,” pp. 245–47.
42. Kleppner, Third Electoral System, pp. 257–97; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, pp. 29–54; Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 474–75.
43. “People's Platform of 1892,” in National Party Platforms, 1840–1956, ed. Kirk H. Porter and Donald Bruce Johnson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), pp. 89–91; “People's Platform of 1896,” in Porter and Johnson, National Party Platforms, pp. 104–106; Glad, Trumpet Soundeth, p. 32; Caine, “Origins of Progressivism,” p. 18; Richardson, West from Appomattox, pp. 255–56.
44. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 62.
45. Ibid., p. 67.
46. Rockoff, “Banking and Finance,” pp. 644–46.
47. Coletta, “Greenbackers, Goldbugs, and Silverites,” pp. 118–19; Cashman, America in The Gilded Age, pp. 5–9; Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, pp. 46–48; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, pp. 83–89, 129; Richardson, West from Appomattox, pp. 153, 158–60, 163–64; Rockoff, “Banking and Finance,” pp. 661–69.
48. Coletta, “Greenbackers, Goldbugs, and Silverites,” pp. 115–18; Nicholas Barreyre, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), pp. 43–77.
49. Bland-Allison Act of 1878, 20 Stat. 25 (1878); see also Coletta, “Greenbackers, Goldbugs, and Silverites,” pp. 119–22; Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, pp. 8–51; Paulo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan: Political Evangelist, 1860–1908 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), pp. 63–64.
50. Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, 26 Stat. 289 (1890); see also Coletta, “Greenbackers, Goldbugs, and Silverites,” pp. 122–24; Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, pp. 65–66.
51. Hugh Rockoff, “Banking and Finance, 1789–1914,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, pp. 669–72.
52. Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley, pp. 446–49; Stanley P. Caine, “The Origins of Progressivism,” in The Progressive Era, ed. Lewis L. Gould (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1974), p. 21.
53. Richardson, West from Appomattox, p. 283.
54. Coletta, “Greenbackers, Goldbugs, and Silverites,” pp. 127–28, 133–36.
55. Merrill, Bourbon Leader, pp. 172–82; Charles W. Calhoun, From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), pp. 147–50.
56. Coletta, “Greenbackers, Goldbugs, and Silverites,” pp. 137–38; Merrill, Bourbon Leader, pp. 184–85; Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, pp. 93–96. The outrage was that the government could have sold the bonds at the higher price itself, instead of allowing Morgan and his banker associates to reap that profit.
57. Glad, Trumpet Soundeth, p. 54.
58. Ibid., pp. 40–41.
59. “Bryan made no attempt to hide his kinship with Populists, and national known Populists came to his aid.” (Ibid., p. 75.) Bryan claimed while campaigning, “I was born a Democrat but have strong Alliance [meaning Populist] tendencies.” (Ibid., p. 73.)
60. Ibid., p. 86.
61. Ibid., pp. 67–72; Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971), p. 125; see also Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, pp. 86–89. “Cleveland was the choice of the gold men of the East, not of the farmers of the plains and deltas for whom Bryan himself spoke, and Bryan refused to lift even a little finger for Cleveland during the campaign.” (Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, p. 72.)
62. Koenig, Bryan, pp. 155–58.
63. Ibid., pp. 109, 122.
64. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, pp. 109, 114–15.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., pp. 132–33.
67. William Jennings Bryan, “The Cross of Gold Speech,” in William Jennings Bryan: Selections, ed. Ray Ginger (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 45–46.
68. Ibid., p. 46.
69. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, p. 141.
70. Ibid.; see also Koenig, Bryan, p. 198.
71. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, pp. 175–76.
72. Ibid., p. 171.
73. Ibid., p. 151.
74. Ibid., p. 194.
75. Ibid., p. 193.
76. McKinley collected a campaign war chest of about $7,000,000 compared to Bryan's $300,000. With additional outside expenditures included, McKinley spent perhaps $16,000,000 compared to Bryan's $600,000. (Ibid., p. 198.)
77. Ibid., p. 199.
78. Ibid., pp. 153–54.
79. Ibid., pp. 156–58; Goodwyn, Populist Moment, pp. 256–63.
80. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, p. 174.
81. Koenig, Bryan, pp. 385–98.
82. Ibid., pp. 493–502.
83. Koenig, Bryan, pp. 405–10.
84. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, pp. 290–93.
85. Glad, Trumpet Soundeth, p. 59.
86. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, pp. 415–16; Koenig, Bryan, p. 357.
87. George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), pp. 18–24.
88. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933, vol. 1 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 23.
89. Ibid., pp. 64–65 (Muckrakers), pp. 65–66 (settlement houses); Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights: Harlan Davidson, 1983), pp. 72–84 (social activists), pp. 85–96 (experts).
90. Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 85–105.
91. “Progressivism had by no means been a Democratic monopoly before 1933; indeed, the term itself implied primarily a dissident Republican.” (Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: 1935–1936, vol. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960], p. 595.)
92. In the history of the Progressive Movement, Teddy Roosevelt was the “greatest of them all in his public impact.” (Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, p. 18.)
93. Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism (New York: Outlook Company, 1910), pp. 10, 28.
94. Ibid., p. 12.
95. Ibid.
96. The struggles between the Yankee business faction and the progressives dominated the Taft presidency and Roosevelt's 1912 Bull Moose rebellion until the party system faded into complacency in the 1920s, leaving the Yankees nominally in charge in an era of decay and inaction. (See, e.g., Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 226–73.) Yet these two dispositions still coexisted within the same party throughout the era much as any coalition alliance between two rival factions with different perspectives, much like our parties today.
97. Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, p. 85; Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 132, 135.
98. Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era: 1910–1917 (New York; Harper and Brothers, 1954), pp. 8–10. Wilson first rose to prominence “as a spokesman of Democratic conservatism—as a foe of Bryanism, of governmental regulation, and of the restrictive practices of labor unions.” (Ibid.)
99. Amos R. E. Pinchot, History of the Progressive Party, 1912–1916, ed. Helene Maxwell Hooker (New York: New York University Press, 1958).
100. Wilsonian progressivism was about empowering the individual and breaking up power both private and public. According to Wilson and the architect of his progressive program, future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, “To bestow more power on men than they could endure was to change the few into tyrants, while it destroyed the rest. Centralization enfeebled society by choking off experiment and draining talent from the community into the center. Nor could one pin faith on government regulation: ‘remedial institutions are apt to fall under the control of the enemy and to become instruments of oppression.’” (Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, p. 30.)
101. As historian Arthur Link, widely considered the definitive biographer of Wilson, wrote of the Wilsonian “progressives” of the Democratic Party: “To the extent that they championed popular democracy and rebelled against a status quo that favored the wealthy, they were progressives. Actually, however, they were so strongly imbued with laissez-faire concepts that they were, strictly speaking, liberals in the nineteenth century English tradition instead of twentieth century progressives. They wanted impartial government with a modicum of federal regulation, rather than dynamic, positive federal intervention and participation in economic and social affairs. With their states-rights view of the Constitution, these liberal Democrats tended to suspect any attempts to commit the federal government to projects of social amelioration, because such intervention implied an invasion of the police power heretofore exercised almost exclusively by the states.” (Link, New Freedom, p. 241.) Whatever Wilson's New Freedom was, and regardless of what its adherents claimed, it was not philosophically the progressivism of the Progressive Movement.
102. “The Democrats, [Wilson] thought, should wipe out the vestiges of special privilege in tariff legislation, liberate credit from Wall Street control, and rewrite antitrust legislation in order to restore the reign of competition in the business world. This, not the uplift of depressed groups by ambitious projects of federal intervention, was the mission of the New Freedom as he perceived it.” (Arthur S. Link, The New Freedom, vol. 2 of Wilson [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956], pp. 241–42.)
103. Link, New Freedom, p. 243.
104. Wilson, in his 1916 reelection campaign, endorsed a much more aggressively progressive program and won the support of many progressive leaders, although soon after he entered the First World War and then become incapacitated by a stroke, so little of it ever came to fruition. (Arthur S. Link, Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916–1917, vol. 5 of Wilson [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965], pp. 39–40, 125–30.) Wilson, however, made similar efforts to court African Americans in his 1912 campaign, only to become an enemy of equality as president. (Link, New Freedom, pp. 243–44.)
105. Link, New Freedom, pp. 254–56 (on resistance to social legislation and ending child labor), pp. 257–59 (on resistance to women's suffrage), pp. 259–60 (on resistance to prohibition).
106. Ibid., pp. 243–54 (on the mistreatment of African Americans), pp. 264–76 (on resistance to organized labor); Geoffrey R. Stone, “Mr. Wilson's First Amendment,” in Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace, ed. John Milton Cooper (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), pp. 189–213 (on suppression of dissent and First Amendment violations).
107. “Populism and Progressivism were in considerable part colored by the reaction to this immigrant stream among elements of the native population.” (Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 8.)
CHAPTER 5: THE FIFTH PARTY SYSTEM
1. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933, vol. 1 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 77–81.
2. Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), pp. 204–206, 378–79. This point is a subject of some historical debate. Partisans and scholars closer to Hoover's own era, viewing him as a failed president in contrast to Roosevelt's heroic New Deal, tended to portray him as a pro-business conservative hostile to expansive government. A more contemporary account tends to challenge that old consensus. What can be said without controversy is Hoover's background was as a Republican progressive. To the extent a case can be made that he later matured into a “conservative,” it was as a Calvin Coolidge Yankee and not a modern free-market libertarian.
3. “He had never been shy about federal interference in the economy. Hoover was especially comfortable with intrusive government in exceptional circumstances, and he did not view the nation's predicament as the usual course of business…. It followed, in his mind, that the country should mobilize all of its resources against the emergency, as it would in wartime.” (Whyte, Hoover, p. 480.)
4. Ibid., pp. 407–10.
5. Ibid., p. 412.
6. “Each stage of the battle on a thousand fronts had pushed the national government further out into policy frontiers few had ever expected to visit. Each administration initiative to date, from Hoover's first confidence-building meetings in Washington, through his counter-cyclical spending, the drought aid, the moratorium, the unemployment agencies, the bankers' pool, had seemed, in its day, novel, momentous, and daring.” (Ibid., p. 482.)
7. Unemployment had risen to twelve million Americans, one in four workers, and national income fell by about half. In Chicago, one in two workers was looking for a job. (Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, pp. 248, 250.)
8. For a lively telling of ordinary America slipping into poverty during Hoover's presidency, see Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, pp. 167–72; see also William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 1–4.
9. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, pp. 3–4.
10. Glen Jeansonne, Herbert Hoover: A Life (New York: New American Library, 2016), p. 285.
11. On Roosevelt and his political philosophy: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: 1935–1936, vol. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 647–55.
12. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, p. 8.
13. Ibid., pp. 10–12.
14. Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, pp. 399–401.
15. For a discussion of independents and progressives in key roles on the Roosevelt team, see Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, p. 412.
16. Ibid., pp. 418–20.
17. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal: 1933–1935, vol. 2 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), pp. 504–505; Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 412–13.
18. While economist John Maynard Keynes had sought to influence the Roosevelt administration, his influence on their policies was slight. (Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, p. 36.)
19. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, p. 236.
20. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, pp. 33–36.
21. Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, p. 401.
22. This involved something of a dance to ensure price increases didn't outstrip rising wages and working conditions before the new system completely set in, making people temporarily worse off. (Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, pp. 122–23.)
23. Ibid., pp. 282–83. This was in addition to the public-works relief efforts of the Civil Works Administration that grew out of the Federal Relief and Construction Act.
24. “People identified the whole recovery effort with the NRA.” (Ibid., p. 118.)
25. Ibid., pp. 45–46.
26. The AAA ordered ten million acres of cotton to be plowed in 1933, a quarter of the 1933 cotton crop, and slaughtered around six million pigs. It planned a similar intervention in the wheat crop until bad weather destroyed enough that it was deemed unnecessary. (Ibid., pp. 60–63.)
27. Ibid., pp. 114–15.
28. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, pp. 65–66.
29. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, pp. 103–104.
30. Ibid., pp. 92–93.
31. The entire thrust of Wilsonian “progressivism” was to limit bigness, adapting Jeffersonianism to a more progressive purpose. (Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, p. 30.)
32. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, p. 92.
33. “The tenets of the First New Deal were that the technological revolution had rendered bigness inevitable; that competition could no longer be relied on to protect interests; that large units were an opportunity to be seized rather than a danger to be fought; and that the formula for stability in the new society must be combination and cooperation under enlarged federal authority.” (Ibid., p. 179.)
34. Ibid., pp. 62–67.
35. Ibid., pp. 77–78, 376–79.
36. Ibid., p. 168.
37. Ibid., pp. 126–27.
38. Ibid., pp. 133–34.
39. John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth (New York: Devin-Adair, 1948), pp. 44–45.
40. Ibid., p. 45.
41. “Rugged Individualism Loses Advocate as NRA ‘Chiseler’ Fights Tailors' New Code,” New York Times, December 10, 1935, p. 2.
42. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, p. 483.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 677.
46. Richard D. White Jr., Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 244–54.
47. Williams, Huey Long, p. 708.
48. Ibid., p. 693.
49. White, Kingfish, p. 198.
50. Early in Roosevelt's term, Coughlin had enthusiastically supported him on the radio and supported his New Deal programs because he believed government had a duty to limit the amount of profit acquired by any industry. (Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, p. 23.)
51. Charles Coughlin, “Two Years of the New Deal (Sunday, March 3, 1935),” in A Series of Lectures on Social Justice (Royal Oak, MI: Radio League of the Little Flower, 1935), pp. 193–206.
52. “Capitalism, as we know it, must depart! No better than communism, it seeks to identify all wealth in the hands of a few. The communist claims all for the State and none for the individual. The capitalist claims all for his class and none for the laborer or the farmer as he gains control over the State. Social Justice seeks and demands a just distribution of the nation's wealth and a just distribution of its profits for the laborer as well as for the industrialist.” (Charles Coughlin, “Share the Profits with Labor [Sunday, December 2, 1934],” in Series of Lectures on Social Justice, p. 55; see also Charles Coughlin, “More on the National Union [Sunday, November 18, 1934],” in Series of Lectures on Social Justice, pp. 20–33; Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 24–25.)
53. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 30–36.
54. Ibid., p. 550.
55. Long's actual plan was most likely to run an ally as a third-party “Share Our Wealth” candidate in 1936, combining his own support with Coughlin's and Townsend's in the hope of throwing the election to a Republican. Anticipating the Republican would fare no better, and likely make the Depression even worse, Long would then run himself in 1940 and win. (Williams, Huey Long, p. 844.)
56. Ibid., p. 795.
57. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 392, 397.
58. Ibid., pp. 236–37. During the Second New Deal, members of the administration did sometimes talk with Keynes, who indeed encouraged them to spend. For this reason, commentators sometimes made a connection between New Deal policies and Keynes's theories at the time. The administration, however, although aware of Keynes didn't actually rely on his theories and were spending to meet the needs of the emergency and politics. (Ibid., pp. 407–408.)
59. Ibid., pp. 424–26.
60. Ibid., p. 637.
61. Ibid., pp. 448–63, 626–30.
62. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, p. 82.
63. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, pp. 13–16; see also Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, pp. 256–63.
64. “Whether revolution was a real possibility or not, faith in a free system was plainly waning. Capitalism, it seemed to many, had spent its force; democracy could not rise to economic crisis. The only hope lay in governmental leadership of a power and will which representative institutions seemed impotent to produce.” (Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, p. 3.)
65. Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, pp. 204–205.
66. R. J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 38.
67. Ibid., p. 42; Harold James, The German Slump: Politics and Economics 1924–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 344.
68. The depression-ravaged Western economies and the Soviet economy of course still interacted, with depression conditions in the West bringing a mix of costs and benefits, the Soviets benefitting from the increased availability of cheap skilled Western advisors while suffering from reduced demand for Soviet exports.
69. J. D. Barber and R. W. Davis, “Employment and Industrial Labor,” in The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945, ed. R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 84.
70. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics & Workers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 139–72; Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 225–59; David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 154–55.
71. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, pp. 153–93; Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 34–38.
72. Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, pp. 219–23; Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 182–207 (on appeal of communism); Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 69–90; (on appeal of fascism); Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, pp. 26–28 (on both).
73. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, p. 30.
74. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 82–83.
75. Ibid., p. 89.
76. David M. Kennedy, The American People in the Great Depression: Freedom from Fear, Part One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 117.
77. On how the New Deal restored faith in the American republic: Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 656–57.
78. Ibid., p. 6.
79. A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935).
80. Ibid.; Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 281–83.
81. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosesvelt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 89.
82. G. Edward White, The Constitution and the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 167–97, 302–12 (explaining legal-philosophical differences between the Horsemen and the Musketeers).
83. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 458–60.
84. Ibid., pp. 460–62; Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920) (Justice Holmes on living Constitution).
85. Ibid., pp. 464–67.
86. Ibid., pp. 286–87, 453.
87. United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936).
88. Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn, p. 136; James F. Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle over the New Deal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), p. 317.
89. Edward A. Purcell, Brandeis and the Progressive Constitution: Erie, the Judicial Power, and the Politics of the Federal Courts in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 136.
90. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, pp. 237–38.
91. Ibid., p. 237.
92. Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn, pp. 143–54; Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes, p. 327.
93. Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn, pp. 156–61.
94. Ibid., pp. 238–39; Susan Dunn, Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010), pp. 214–17.
95. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, p. 239.
96. James T. Patterson, “A Conservative Coalition Forms in Congress,” Journal of American History 52, no. 4 (March 1966): 757–72.
97. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 525–27.
98. Ibid., p. 596.
99. “The image of the New Deal [according to its opponents] was that of the totalitarian state.” (Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, p. 472.)
100. “As for the moral consequences, many conservatives earnestly believed that the New Deal was destroying the historic pattern of American life—a pattern of local initiative and individual responsibility.” (Ibid., p. 475.)
101. Ibid., p. 486.
102. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, pp. 530–36.
103. “Republicans: Going Places,” Time, October 26, 1936.
104. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, p. 624.
CHAPTER 6: THE LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE MYTH
1. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 67–85.
2. Ibid., pp. 93–103.
3. Ibid., pp. 106–11.
4. Ian Davidson, The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny (New York: Pegasus Books, 2016), p. 78; Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 17–18; Christopher Cochrane, Left and Right: The Small World of Political Ideas (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015), p. 10.
5. Lawrence Goldman, “Conservative Political Thought From the Revolution of 1848 Until the Fin de Siecle,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 691–719.
6. Eley, Forging Democracy, pp. 17–18.
7. Robert Wokler, “Rousseau's Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Lives, Liberties, and the Public Good: New Essays in Political Theory for Maurice Cranston, ed. George Feaver and Frederick Rosen (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 61–68.
8. David Y. Allen, “Modern Conservatism: The Problem of Definition,” Review of Politics 43, no. 4 (October 1981): 582n1; Goldman, “Conservative Political Thought,” p. 691.
9. The revolutions were driven by a mix of liberals fighting for diets and parliaments and republican reforms; peasants upset at painfully high food prices during an economic downturn and discontent with landlords; urban workers and artisans during an era of early industrialization with labor grievances about working conditions; nationalists looking for national independence in an era of empires; and simply widespread resentment from the working classes looking to overthrow their lords and masters to better their lot. This multitude of causes got inevitably jumbled and mixed together into the cause of republican liberty at the hands of the Enlightenment liberal reformers negotiating in the courts of the monarchs. (Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994], pp. 105–47; Jacques Droz, Europe Between Revolutions, 1815–1848, trans. Robert Baldick [New York: Harper & Row, 1967], pp. 62–96; Peter N. Stearns, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe [New York: W. W. Norton, 1974], pp. 46–50.)
10. Sperber, European Revolutions, pp. 148–53.
11. Jose Harris, “The French Revolution to Fin de Siecle: Political Thought in Retrospect and Prospect, 1800–1914,” in Jones and Claeys, Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political Thought, pp. 893–933.
12. Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.152–64, 176–84.
13. MacGregor Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33, vol. 1 of Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 232–406.
14. Paul E. Gottfried, Fascism: The Career of a Concept (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), pp. 24–25.
15. Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 15.
16. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 49–51; Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pp. 11–12.
17. For a survey of some of the academic attempts to define the left and right, see Cochrane, Left and Right, pp. 14–21.
18. Alan S. Gerber et al., “Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships across Issue Domains and Political Contexts,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 1 (February 2010): 111–33; Alan S. Gerber et al., “The Big Five Personality Traits in the Political Arena,” Annual Review of Political Science 14 (2011): 265–87; Gian Vittorio Caprara, Claudio Barbaranelli, and Philip G. Zimbardo, “Personality Profiles and Political Parties,” Political Psychology 20, no. 1 (March 1999): 175–97.
19. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage, 2012), pp. 153–79.
20. Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio is the only thinker who has come close to determining a value separating political left from right that has gained any acceptance, proposing that what separates the two is one's view on equality. (Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan Cameron [Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996]. See also Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas [London: Verso, 2005], pp. 129–39.)
Equality alone, however, neither explains the actual policies left and right parties actually embrace, nor is it anything more than the recognition that the nineteenth-century “left” represented republicanism while the ideology of the modern “left” in part seeks to benefit the least well off.
CHAPTER 7: THE AMERICAN IDEAL OF LIBERTY
1. The Whigs, moreover, continued to campaign on liberty, attacking the Democrats as executive tyrants long after Jackson was gone. (Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], pp. 109–10.)
The party defined itself around the “belief that the fundamental purpose of the Revolutionary experiment in republican self-government was to protect personal and popular (or public) liberty from concentrations of arbitrary and tyrannical power that would lead inevitably to the people's figurative ‘enslavement’ unless actively resisted.” (Ibid., p. 952.)
2. John Henry, “Science and the Coming of Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment World, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick et al. (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 10–11, 22–25; Paolo Casini, “Newton's ‘Principia’ and the Philosophers of the Enlightenment,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 42, no. 1 (January 1988): 35–52; Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 100.
3. Louis Dupre, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 19–44.
4. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom, vol. 2 of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), pp. 27–45.
5. Ibid., pp. 140–50 (scientific method), pp. 344–68 (economics), pp. 396–405 (social tolerance), pp. 448–96 (republicanism).
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 72–74, 149–57; Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 170; Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 455–57, 641–47, 897–933.
7. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, pp. 443–79; James MacGregor Burns, Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013), pp. 68–89.
8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 239. As Tocqueville said of it, “Have men changed in character by being united? Have they become more patient before obstacles by becoming stronger? As for me, I cannot believe it; and I shall never grant to several the power of doing everything that I refuse to a single one of those like me.” (Ibid.) Others, including John Adams and Edmund Burke, had used similar words to describe this concern before Tocqueville, but since Tocqueville's book spread the idea he usually gets credit for coining the phrase.
9. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 33.
10. In the fight to ratify the Constitution, Madison told Jefferson it was his fear that no majority driven by a “common passion” would ever be able to refrain from crushing the minority. (Michael Signer, Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origin of the Least Likely Founding Father [New York: Public Affairs, 2015], p. 197.)
11. James Madison, “Speeches in the Virginia Assembly, July 20, 1788,” in The Writings of James Madison: Comprising His Public Papers and His Private Correspondence, Including Numerous Letters and Documents Now For the First Time Printed, vol. 5, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), p. 126.
12. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 26.
13. John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, and Utilitarianism (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 11.
14. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 48–53, 297.
15. Tara Smith, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 7; Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 147–48.
16. Lanny Ebenstein, Chicagonomics: The Evolution of Chicago Free Market Economics (New York: St. Martin's, 2015), pp. 108–29; Bruce Caldwell, “The Chicago School, Hayek, and Neoliberalism,” in Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America's Most Powerful Economics Program, ed. Robert Van Horn, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas Stapleford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 301–34.
17. Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 85–86.
18. Richard Pomfret, The Age of Equality: The Twentieth Century in Economic Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2001), pp. 185–86; Richard H. K. Vietor, “Government Regulation of Business,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2000), 996–1011.
19. Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 214–26.
20. S. G. Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, “Agriculture,” in The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945, ed. R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 113.
21. Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), pp. 58–61; Ian G. Cook and Geoffrey Murray, China's Third Revolution: Tensions in the Transition towards a Post-Communist China (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2001), p. 55.
22. Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), pp. 245–84; Pomfret, Age of Equality, pp. 131–50.
23. Al From, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 50–84.
24. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2008).
25. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), ch. 13.
26. James Madison, “Federalist No. 51,” in The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 349.
27. Max Weber, Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification, ed. and trans. Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 136.
CHAPTER 8: THE PROGRESSIVE PLAN
1. James Harding, Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Spin Into a Global Business (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 97.
2. These Second Awakening reformers, mainly Whigs, built public schools, funded mental hospitals, and sought to make prisons places of redemption as well as punishment, all as part of a mission to spread moral redemption. (Daniel Walker Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979], pp. 36–37.)
3. Paul W. Glad, The Trumpet Soundeth: William Jennings Bryan and His Democracy, 1896–1912 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 6.
4. James H. Moorehead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 11–12.
5. The pre–Civil War tradition of moral reform in America “emphasized the purgation of individual's sins as the key to transforming society.” (Stanley P. Caine, “The Origins of Progressivism,” in The Progressive Era, ed. Lewis L. Gould [Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1974], p. 20.)
6. Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, pp. 28–29.
7. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom, vol. 2 of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), pp. 319–23; Lynn McDonald, The Early Origins of the Social Sciences (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), pp. 145–46.
8. McDonald, Early Origins of the Social Sciences, pp. 295–300.
9. George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), pp. 19–25.
10. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 165–67.
11. Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 25–30.
12. Ibid., p. 51.
13. “Progressivism was inspired by two bodies of belief and knowledge– evangelical Protestantism and the natural and social sciences.” (Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism [Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1983], p. 22; Caine, “Origins of Progressivism,” pp. 16–17.)
14. “While Progressivism would have been impossible without the impetus given by certain social grievances, it was not nearly so much the movement of any social class or group as it was a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very specified self-reformation.” (Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 5.)
15. Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 88–89.
16. Ibid., pp. 86–88.
17. Ibid., p. 85.
18. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), pp. 66–68; 84, 100–101; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933, vol. 1 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 23.
19. Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 94–95, 98–99.
20. R. Laurence Moore, “Directions of Thought,” in Gould, Progressive Era, p. 48.
21. Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, p. 18.
22. Caine, “Origins of Progressivism,” p. 14; Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 262–68; Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, pp. 23–24.
23. George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 76–121.
24. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 185–96; Ida Tarbell, “The History of the Standard Oil Company: The Oil War of 1872,” in The Muckrakers: The Era in Journalism That Moved America to Reform, The Most Significant Magazine Articles of 1902–1912, ed. Arthur Weinberg and Lila Weinberg (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), pp. 22–39; see also Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit : Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).
25. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 82–96.
26. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Movement, 1900–1915 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), pp. 7–8; Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), pp. 188–207; Herbert A. Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909; Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1965).
27. Hofstadter, Progressive Movement, pp. 8–9; Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1991).
28. Thomas K. McCraw, “The Progressive Legacy,” in Gould, Progressive Era, pp. 181–82.
29. Benjamin Parke DeWitt, The Progressive Movement: A Non-Partisan, Comprehensive Discussion of Current Tendencies in American Politics (1915; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), pp. 162–72.
30. Ibid., 244–73.
31. Ibid., pp. 113–61; Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 225–54.
32. DeWitt, Progressive Movement, pp. 189–243; Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 254–69.
33. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 265–66.
34. Theodore Roosevelt, “Theodore Roosevelt on Conservation, December 3, 1907,” in Hofstadter, Progressive Movement, pp. 69–72; James Penick Jr., “The Progressives and the Environment: Three Themes from the First Conservation Movement,” in Gould, Progressive Era, pp. 115–31.
35. DeWitt, Progressive Movement, pp. 319–40.
36. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, pp. 79–81, 102–103.
37. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 184.
38. Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971), p. 357.
39. Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, p. 102.
40. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 12.
41. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 179–83; Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 121–62.
42. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 183.
CHAPTER 9: THE VIRTUE OF A REPUBLIC
1. James McHenry, “Papers of Dr. James McHenry on the Federal Convention of 1787,” Philadelphia, May 14, 1787, available at Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/mchenry.asp.
2. Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 156–66.
3. Ibid., pp. 22–24.
4. Ibid., p. 36.
5. Plato, The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 268–74.
6. Ibid., pp. 252–54.
7. Ibid., pp. 274–84.
8. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 7–8.
9. The Democratic-Republican lionization of yeoman farmers was based in the idea that small landowners with sufficient property, but without aristocratic pretensions, were sufficiently independent, free, and uncorrupted, to embody the virtues a republic specifically required. (Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 45–46.)
10. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 65–70.
11. Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin, 2011), pp. 321–34.
12. Ibid., pp. 325–27.
13. James Madison, “Speeches in the Virginia Assembly, July 20, 1788,” in The Writings of James Madison: Comprising His Public Papers and His Private Correspondence, Including Numerous Letters and Documents Now for the First Time Printed, vol. 5 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), p. 223.
14. James Madison, “Federalist No. 51,” in The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 349. See also James Madison, “Federalist No. 55,” in Cooke, Federalist, p. 378. “Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities [of virtue] in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”
15. David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Subtle and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), pp. 27–28; Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 27–44.
16. Bromwich, Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, pp. 30, 110–14; Bourke, Empire and Revolution, pp. 229–33.
17. Leslie Mitchell, The Whig World, 1760–1837 (London: Hambledon, 2005), pp. 7–8. Whigs were not, however, radicals. They centered their beliefs around the importance of property, believing those with property had a special duty to restrain the monarch for the benefit of the people in defense of traditional liberty. (Ibid., pp. 135–74.) From the perspective of today's egalitarian left, the British Whigs in many ways look quite conservative.
18. It is of course difficult to classify either the Whigs or their opponents of the era, the Tories, the way we do coherent modern parties. They were poorly organized in a modern political sense and contained contradictory impulses and people. By Burke's time, moreover, Whigs had been in power for so long, working hand in hand with the Crown, that they had in practice lost much of their historic opposition to royal authority. Nonetheless, classic ideals remained those with which one would classify oneself as either a Tory or Whig. (Frank O'Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975], pp. 13–21.)
19. Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with America,” pp. 120–21, 136; Burke, “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol,” pp. 293–95, 299–300.
20. Edmund Burke, “Speech on American Taxation,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 2, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 406–63; Edmund Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with America,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 3, ed. W. M. Elofson and John A. Woods (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 102–69; Edmund Burke, “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol,” in Elofson and Woods, Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 3, pp. 288–330.
21. Bromwich, Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, pp. 252–60; Bourke, Empire and Revolution, pp. 298–99, 500–506.
22. Bourke, Empire and Revolution, p. 679.
23. Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 8, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 53–293.
24. Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmond Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 412–14; Thomas Paine, “Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution,” in Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Ian Shapiro and Jane E. Calvert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 172–261; Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Men,” in A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 5–64.
25. Bourke, Empire and Revolution, pp. 741–819.
26. Ibid., pp. 763–68.
27. “Liberty” to Burke “is inseparable from order, from virtue, from morals, and from religion” and is “neither hypocritically nor fanatically followed.” (Edmund Burke “Letter to a Noble Lord,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 9, ed. Paul Langford [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], p. 153.) As Burke wrote at the time of the American Revolution, “For liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened. It is not only a private blessing of the first order, but the vital spring and energy of the state itself, which has just so much life and vigour as there is liberty in it. But whether liberty be advantageous or not (for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle) none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be frequently bought by some indulgence and toleration at least to liberty.” (Burke, “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol,” p. 318.)
28. “A particular order or things may be altered; order itself cannot lose value.” (Burke, “Letter to a Noble Lord,” p. 161.)
29. Edmund Burke “An Appeal From the New to the Old Whigs,” in Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France and Other Writings, ed. Jesse Norman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), p. 728.
30. Burke called these a “system of manners.” “The law touches us here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex and sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.” (Edmund Burke, “First Letter on a Regicide King,” in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 9, p. 242.)
31. Ibid., p. 729.
32. Ibid., pp. 694–97.
33. Burke, “Letter to a Noble Lord,” p. 156.
34. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Road to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pp. 91–92.
35. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3.
36. Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 199–204. These Know-Nothing fears of energized Protestants, of course, clearly overlapped with the Second Great Awakening.
37. Ibid., pp. 18–20.
38. “For the religious crusaders who led the temperance, peace, antislavery, missionary, and other benevolent societies, it was not enough to win individual souls to Christ; society as a whole must respond to His call.” (Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979], p. 9.)
39. Ibid., pp. 17–22.
40. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, pp. 6–14.
41. Ibid., pp. 134–39; A major argument within the early Republican Party was that the “Slave Power” was a direct threat to America's republican traditions and liberty. (Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, p. 844.)
42. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1995), pp. 12–64.
43. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 68–69.
CHAPTER 10: THE FURY OF POPULISM
1. Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, “Explaining the Emergence of Populism in Europe and the Americas,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: A Global Perspective, ed. Carlos de la Torre (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), p. 189; Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2000), pp. 3–4; Damir Skenderovic, “Populism: A History of the Concept,” in Political Populism: A Handbook, ed. Reinhard C. Heinisch, Christina Holtz-Bacha, and Oscar Mazzoleni (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2017), p. 51.
2. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), p. 1; see also Margaret Canovan, Populism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 1; Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 1.
3. Ben Stanley, “The Thin Ideology of Populism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 13, no. 1 (February 2008): 106; Cas Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 4 (2004): 544.
4. Reinhard Heinisch and Oscar Mazzoleni, “Analysing and Explaining Populism Bringing Frame, Actor, and Context Back In,” in Political Populism, p. 105.
5. Mudde, “Populist Zeitgeist,” p. 543; Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 23; Stanley, “Thin Ideology of Populism,” p. 101.
6. Populism in this way makes a moral claim of representation, although one that cannot be disproved. Any outcome other than victory for the populist is considered evidence of corruption and thus illegitimate. (Müller, What Is Populism? pp. 29, 38–40.)
7. Carlos de la Torre, “Introduction: Power to the People? Populism, Insurrections, Democratization,” in Promise and Perils of Populism, p. 8.
8. Ibid.
9. Margaret Canovan, The People (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 88–90; Müller, What Is Populism? pp. 101–103.
10. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 41.
11. Jackson believed in “the primacy of the will of the people over the whim of the powerful.” (Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House [New York: Random House, 2008], p. 46.)
12. Ibid., p. 52; Democrat saw banks and corporations as “privileged monsters,” paper money as a “cheat and a fraud,” and debt as “inducements to self-enslavement.” (Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], p. 685.)
13. This concern is sometimes expressed as “What's the Matter with Kansas?,” a phrase taken from the title of Thomas Frank's 2004 book, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004) exploring the slipping away of the traditional Democratic Party populist base. The title is itself was taken from the title of a popular editorial at the time of the Bryan campaign, targeting the Populist Movement in the populist hotbed of Kansas.
14. This national shift from a pragmatic to a moralistic politics during the Fourth Great Awakening, and the new divisions it opened inside the Democratic Party coalition, is discussed in great detail in chapter 14.
15. In fact, the urban immigrant machines were usually at odds with the progressive reformers seeking to benefit their constituents. (Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974], pp. 181–84.)
16. For a good discussion of the difference between the American populist and progressive tradition see Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 4–5; see also Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933, vol. 1 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 18.
CHAPTER 11: THE CHOICE: COLLAPSE OR RENEWAL
1. The correct quote is in fact: “It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.” (Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, volume 2, ed. Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013], pp. 370–72.) Most appropriately, the quote came from an essay in which Twain worries about the inevitable collapse of the American republic into a tyranny due to corruption and the decline of republican virtue in its people. “For twenty-five or thirty years I have squandered a deal of my time—too much of it perhaps—in trying to guess what is going to be the process which will turn our republic into a monarchy, and how far off that event might be.” (Ibid., p. 371.) The more popular ascribed quote, unfortunately for a fine writer like Twain, caught on because it sounded better.
CHAPTER 12: THE LAST HURRAH OF THE FIFTH PARTY SYSTEM
1. Some fierce opponents of Roosevelt and his New Deal refused to even use his name, calling him simply “that man” or “he.” (William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 [New York: Harper and Row, 1963], p. 176.)
2. Michael Bowen, The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p. 23.
3. Ibid., pp. 56–57.
4. Ibid., p. 23.
5. Ibid., p. 67.
6. “Dewey Defeats Truman,” Chicago Tribune, November 3, 1948, p. 1.
7. Ibid., pp. 76–77, 82–83.
8. Ibid., p. 113. Eisenhower was particularly taken with the argument that he should run to save the Republican Party as a political entity, believing the collapse of one of America's major national parties would be a traumatic disaster for the nation. (Stephen A. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President Elect, 1890–1952 [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983], p. 516.)
9. Ambrose, Eisenhower, p. 535.
10. Ibid., pp. 540–41.
11. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
12. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, 71 Stat. 634 (1957).
13. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking 1950), p. ix.
14. William F. Buckley Jr., “Reflections on Election Eve,” National Review, November. 3, 1956.
15. William F. Buckley Jr., “Mission Statement,” National Review, November 19, 1955.
16. William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951).
17. Linda Bridges and John Coyne, Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), pp. 22–23.
18. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
19. William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right (New York: William Morrow, 1984), pp. 43–53; George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 145–48.
20. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, pp. 148–49.
21. Chambers in 1948 testified in front of the House Un-American Affairs Committee that Hiss, a State Department employee and well-liked member of the American establishment, was known to him from his Communist activism as a Soviet spy.
22. Rusher, Rise of the Right, p. 82; Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, p. 155; Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 13–26.
23. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, pp. 156–58.
24. Whittaker Chambers, “Big Sister Is Watching You,” National Review, December 27, 1957.
25. Buckley, “Mission Statement.”
26. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, p. 140; see also Bridges and Coyne, Strictly Right, p. 26. “Schools of thought that would soon be part of that movement existed here and there, but they seldom worked in concert with one another.”
27. Bridges and Coyne, Strictly Right, pp. 56–57; Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 148.
28. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, pp. 174–78.
29. Frank S. Meyer, “Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism,” in What Is Conservatism? ed. Frank S. Meyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), pp. 8–9.
30. Frank S. Meyer, “Why Freedom,” National Review, September 25, 1962.
31. “National Review in its first years was dominated by the conviction that its preeminent intellectual enemy—and they insisted it was an enemy—was liberalism.” (Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, p. 149.) Buckley's conservatives even vigorously opposed a popular Republican president like Eisenhower because, although he claimed to represent them on policy, he had made peace with the ideas they believed it urgent to fight. (Ibid., pp. 254–55.)
32. Bridges and Coyne, Strictly Right, p. 82.
33. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, p. 207.
34. Rusher, Rise of the Right, pp. 135–59; Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 126–29.
35. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, pp. 290–91.
36. J. William Middendorf II, A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater's Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement (New York: Basic Books, 2006), pp. 51–52.
37. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President: 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1965), pp. 262–65.
38. Lewis Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 357.
39. Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 203–204.
40. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President: 1964 (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1965), 228.
41. Ibid., pp. 309–11.
42. Ibid., pp. 317–19.
43. Ibid., pp. 311–16.
44. Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 170–78 (on Johnson's coordinated—and often dirty and unfair—tactics to discredit Goldwater in the media).
45. Ibid., p. 345.
46. Ibid., p. 339.
47. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, pp. 328–34; Lloyd Grove, “Barry Goldwater's Left Turn,” Washington Post, July 28, 1994, p. C01.
48. Timothy N. Thurber, Republicans and Race: The GOP's Frayed Relationships with African Americans, 1945–1974 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), p. 123; Middendorf, Glorious Disaster, p. 106.
49. John W. Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr., Pure Goldwater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 157–59.
50. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, pp. 196–97.
51. Robert K. Vischer, Conscience and the Common Good: Reclaiming the Space Between Person and State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 127.
52. Critchlow, Conservative Ascendancy, p. 72.
53. Schoenwald, Time for Choosing, p. 148; Thurber, Republicans and Race, pp. 196–203. He did, however, sometimes speak on issues like education, busing, and disorder that had racial implications.
54. Thurber, Republicans and Race, pp. 196–203; Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, pp. 197–98.
55. This included, among other things, Johnson at the 1964 Democratic Convention conclusively siding with the all-white segregationist Mississippi Democratic Party delegation, which had barred African Americans, over the integrated slate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—actively employing the tools of the federal government to thwart civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, all to appease segregationist Democrats to keep them loyal to him and his party. (Dallek, Flawed Giant, pp.162–63.)
56. Goldwater's campaign advisors were aware that racial backlash was helping their campaign whether they did anything to encourage it or not. They believed it was far too dangerous to touch the issue directly, and that they could only stand back and watch as it played out. (Thurber, Republicans and Race, pp. 183–84.)
57. Mark Hamilton Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 88–95.
58. Schoenwald, Time for Choosing, pp. 221–50; James Pierson, Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America's Postwar Political Order (New York: Encounter Books, 2015), pp. 175–93.
59. John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 53–74, 71–72; Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 91–93; Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 108–109; see also Young Americans for Freedom, “The Sharon Statement,” in America in the Sixties—Right, Left, and Center: A Documentary History, ed. Peter B. Levy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 46–47.
60. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, p. 292.
61. With success, the conservative revolutionaries also began drawing more careful lines about what counted as respectable conservatism, with Buckley famously condemning the powerful John Birch Society for its paranoid conspiracy theories and extremism in order to excise it from his movement. (Ibid., pp. 293–94.)
62. Ronald Reagan, “Televised Address: A Time for Choosing,” in Levy, America in the Sixties, pp. 117–23.
63. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: Harper, 2008), p. 132.
64. Steven F. Hayward, The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980, vol. 1 of The Age of Reagan (New York: Forum, 2001), pp. ix–x.
65. Ibid., pp. x–xi.
66. Ibid., p. 102.
67. Rusher, Rise of the Right, pp. 195–202; Iwan Morgan, Reagan: American Icon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), pp. 113–14.
68. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, pp. 133–34.
69. Craig Shirley, Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All (Nashville: Nelson Current, 2005), pp. 297–331; Hayward, Fall of the Old Liberal Order, pp. 447–84.
70. Hayward, Fall of the Old Liberal Order, pp. 625–27.
71. Ibid., pp. 684–85; Richard H. K. Vietor, “Government Regulation of Business,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley E. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 995–97.
72. Hayward, Fall of the Old Liberal Order, pp. 572–74.
73. W. Elliot Brownlee, “The Public Sector,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, pp. 1054–55.
74. Hayward, Fall of the Old Liberal Order, pp. 572–74.
75. Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), pp. 327–30; Hayward, Fall of the Old Liberal Order, pp. 576–78.
76. Steven F. Hayward, The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989, vol. 2 of The Age of Reagan (New York: Crown Forum, 2009), pp. 14–16, 27–29.
77. Hayward, Fall of the Old Liberal Order, pp. 685–94.
78. John Ehrman, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 73–74; Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, pp. 22–23; Wilentz, Age of Reagan, pp. 125–26.
79. Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, pp. 31–33.
80. Ibid., pp. 59–72.
81. Ibid., pp. 97–109.
82. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, pp. 127–28; Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, p. 51.
83. Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, pp. 47–48.
84. William E. Pemberton, Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 102–104; Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, pp. 155–66.
85. Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, pp. 470–78.
86. Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, pp. 150–56; Wilentz, Age of Reagan, p. 141.
87. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, p. 140; Ronnie Dugger, On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), pp. 148–75.
88. Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, pp. 169–74; Wilentz, Age of Reagan, p. 143.
89. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, p. 144.
90. Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, pp. 376–80.
91. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981,” in Debating the Reagan Presidency, by John Ehrman and Michael W. Flamm (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), p. 82.
92. Ibid., p. 82; William A. Niskanen, Reaganomics: An Insider's Account of the Policies and the People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 115–33.
93. Hayward, Conservative Counterrevolution, pp. 61–63.
94. Ibid., pp. 182–91.
95. H. W. Brands, Reagan: The Life (New York: Anchor Books, 2015), p. 254.
96. Ehrman, Eighties, pp. 206–207. “In 1980, no one knew whether conservatives could govern the country—they were small in number, and had little experience on the national stage or in managing large governmental institutions. Reagan proved conclusively that conservatives could govern effectively.”
97. William F. Buckley Jr., The Reagan I Knew (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
98. Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Random House, 2015), pp. 296–98; Herbert S. Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New York: Scribner, 1997), pp. 339–41, 348–50, 359–60; Critchlow, Conservative Ascendancy, p. 222.
99. Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, Wake Us When It's Over: Presidential Politics of 1984 (New York: Macmillan, 1985), p. 14; see also Ehrman, Eighties, pp. 87–88.
100. George F. Will, “The Cheerful Malcontent,” Washington Post, May 31, 1998, p. C07.
101. Al From, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 49–65; Michael Nelson, “Redividing Government: National Elections in the Clinton Years and Beyond,” in 42: Inside the Presidency of Bill Clinton, ed. Michael Nelson, Barbara A. Perry, and Russell L. Riley (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), pp. 29–30.
102. Steven M. Gillon, The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 101–102; Wilentz, Age of Reagan, p. 365.
103. Gillon, Pact, p. 144.
104. Nigel Hamilton, Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), pp. 56–66, 300–304; Wilentz, Age of Reagan, pp. 332–34.
105. Wilentz, Age of Reagan, pp. 329–30.
106. Nicol Rae, Conservative Reformers: The Republican Freshmen and the Lessons of the 104th Congress (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 33–44; Gillon, Pact, pp. 123–28.
107. Newt Gingrich, Richard K. Armey, Ed Gillespie, and Bob Schellhas, Contract With America: The Bold Plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Dick Armey and the House Republicans to Change the Nation (New York: Times Books, 1994), pp. 3–22.
108. James G. Gimpel, Legislating the Revolution: The Contract with America in Its First 100 Days (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), pp. 1–30; Wilentz, Age of Reagan, pp. 349–50.
109. Gimpel, Legislating the Revolution, pp. 42–114; Elizabeth Drew, Showdown: The Struggle between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 93–112; Critchlow, Conservative Ascendancy, p. 248; Rae, Conservative Reformers, pp. 74–81.
110. Gillon, Pact, pp. 177–79.
111. Ibid., pp. 147–72, 200–203.
112. Hamilton, Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency, pp. 574–75; Wilentz, Age of Reagan, p. 364.
113. Gillon, Pact, pp. 140–41; Time, December 25, 1995.
114. Gillon, Pact, pp. 223–72; Wilentz, Age of Reagan, pp. 382–400.
115. Gillon, Pact, pp. 256–58.
116. “The country was experiencing such widespread corruption [during the Era of Good Feelings] that it worried many men for the safety of American institutions.” (Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 [New York: Harper and Row, 1981], p. 13.)
117. As some commentators said at the time, “These party names of Whig and Democrat now mean nothing and point to nothing.” The parties had become solely “a means of political intrigue and an avenue for the attainment of office,” and politics had become merely “a scramble for the spoils and a fight about Men rather than measures.” (Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], p. 772.)
118. “For a generation after the Civil War, a time of great economic exploitation and waste, grave social corruption and ugliness, the dominant note in American political life was complacency.” (Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR [New York: Knopf 1974], p. 60.)
119. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933, vol. 1 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 147–52.
120. James T. Patterson, “Transformative Economic Policies: Tax Cutting, Stimuli, and Bailouts,” in The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 114–38; Nelson Lichtenstein, “Ideology and Interest on the Social Policy Home Front,” in Zelizer, Presidency of George W. Bush, pp. 183–93; Kevin M. Krause, “Compassionate Conservatism: Religion in the Age of George W. Bush,” in Zelizer, Presidency of George W. Bush, pp. 227–51; Jean Edward Smith, Bush (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), pp. 162–63, 390–92.
121. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Pub. L. No. 111–148, 124 Stat. 119–1025 (2010).
CHAPTER 13: THE PENDULUM OF GREAT AWAKENINGS
1. Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 32–43.
2. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 160–61.
3. Edwards went on to play a major role in the Awakening, becoming among its most important theologian. (William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], p. 71; Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, pp. 59–94.)
4. “The separate and sporadic stirrings of religion fostered by Edwards, Frelinghuysen, the Tennent brothers, and their respective followers were finally consolidated into the Great Awakening when George Whitefield came from England to tour the Middle Colonies and New England in 1739 and 1740.” (Cedric Cowing, The Great Awakenings and the American Revolution: Colonial Thought in the 18th Century [Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971], p. 59.)
5. Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America's Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 24–28.
6. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” pp. 93–94.
7. Kidd, George Whitefield, pp. 36–45.
8. Ibid., pp. 45–47.
9. Cowing, Great Awakenings and the American Revolution, p. 59.
10. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” pp. 95–98; Kidd, George Whitefield, p. 65.
11. Kidd, George Whitefield, pp. 67–68.
12. Ibid., pp. 65, 67.
13. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” pp. 105–107; Kidd, George Whitefield, p. 68.
14. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, pp. 40–49; Kidd, George Whitefield, pp. 62–63.
15. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” p. 112.
16. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 87–88; see also Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” p. 120.
17. Franklin, Autobiography, pp. 87–88.
18. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, p. 61.
19. Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 125.
20. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” pp. 185–88; Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, p. 151.
21. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, pp. 139–44, 157–58.
22. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, pp. 119–125.
23. Ibid., pp. 157–58.
24. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, pp. 450–53; Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), pp. 76–95, 115–46; Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, pp. 210–11; Bryan LeBeau, Religion in America to 1865 (New York: New York University Press 2000), pp. 58–63.-
25. Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, pp. 360–400, 512–17; Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, p. 186; Frank Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 214–25; J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 310.
26. Kidd, God of Liberty, pp. 97–114; McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, pp. 96–97.
27. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 364–366. “The churches reached a lower ebb of vitality during the two decades after the end of hostilities than at any other time in the country's religious history.” (Ibid., p. 365.)
28. “A colonial people almost congenitally exercised with religious questions—and possibly exhausted by or in reaction against the Great Awakening—became preoccupied for forty years chiefly with the problems of politics.” (Ibid., p. 365.)
29. Ibid., pp. 429–54; Keith J. Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), pp. 6–13; LeBeau, Religion in America to 1865, pp. 92–95.
30. It's hardly an accident so many critical events of religious history and activism, from the founding of the LDS church to the Seneca Falls Convention, took place at this time in the religious and cultural hotbed of western New York state.
31. Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (New York: Octagon Books, 1981), pp. 185–207.
32. Paul W. Glad, The Trumpet Soundeth: William Jennings Bryan and His Democracy, 1896–1912 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 5.
33. Cross, Burned-Over District, pp. 40–2; Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 2.
Revivalism “wiped out theological obstacles to interdenominational cooperation.” (Glad, Trumpet Soundeth, pp. 5–6.)
34. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 491–509; see also Cross, Burned-Over District, pp. 30–32 (on Shakers), pp. 138–50 (on LDS), pp. 287–90 (Adventists), pp. 333–40 (Oneida Community); LeBeau, Religion in America to 1865, pp. 118–27.
35. Glad, Trumpet Soundeth, p. 7.
36. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 388–402; Cross, Burned-Over District, pp, 43–44.
37. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 597–614.
38. LeBeau, Religion in America to 1865, 109–13; Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 488–90.
39. John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 20–21; Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, p. 3. The First Great Awakening did have some millennial impulses as well, and can be said to have planted the seeds of millennialism in American Protestantism that bloomed during later awakenings. (Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, pp. 59–66.)
40. Ben Wright and Zachary W. Dresser, introduction to Apocalypse and the Millennium: In the American Civil War Era, ed. Ben Wright and Zachary W. Dresser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), pp. 2–4; Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, p. 3. For the importance of the millennial concept of the Kingdom of God in American history, see also H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1937), pp. 135–98.
41. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, p. 22.
42. Cross, Burned-Over District, pp. 233–37; LeBeau, Religion in America to 1865, pp. 116–17.
43. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, pp. 6–14.
44. Ibid., pp. 134–39.
45. Cross, Burned-Over District, pp. 151–69; LeBeau, Religion in America to 1865, pp. 163–76.
46. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Brunswick ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893).
47. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, pp. 137–38.
48. Ibid., pp. 19–150. The Free Soil Party “function[ed] as a religious crusade as much as a conventional political party.” (Ibid., p. 150.) Its first political convention functioned almost as a revival meeting with early morning gatherings for prayer and the singing of religious hymns. (Ibid., p. 151.)
49. Ibid., pp. 1, 4.
50. Ibid., pp. 153–57.
51. Cross, Burned-Over District, pp. 84–85, 176–79. “Properly, [women] should dominate a history of enthusiastic movements, for their influence was paramount.” (Ibid., p. 84; Mary P. Ryan, “A Women's Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica, New York, 1800–1840,” American Quarterly 50, no. 3 [1978]: 602–23.)
52. Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 52–54; Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women's Rights and the American Political Traditions (New York: New York University Press), pp. 85–88.
Temperance was also from the start a movement highly tied up with anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant sentiment. (William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 45.)
53. Almost all the major and minor figures of the early women's suffrage movement came out of the abolition and temperance movement and Second Great Awakening. As Whitney Cross wrote in his definitive book on the Burned-Over District, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Susan B. Anthony, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the Grimke sisters, and others soon to lead the women's rights movement served apprenticeship in the reforms which flourished in western New York.” (Cross, Burned-Over District, p. 237; see also Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979], pp. 160–61.)
Stanton, however, famously came to aggressively reject the religious traditions she rose up from, and was always ambivalent about, if not hostile toward, significant portions of revivalist religious teachings. (Davis, Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, pp. 5–7.)
54. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 31–34.
55. Garrison's faction was most supportive of full equality for women, with Garrison openly declaring he wanted women to have the vote. (W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press], p. 137.)
56. McMillen, Seneca Falls, p. 71.
57. Cross, Burned-Over District, p. 237.
58. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, p. 17.
59. “From its first lines proclaiming ‘the glory of the coming of the Lord’ to its final verse assuring that ‘He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,’ ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ trumpets the millennial faith that echoed in the hearts of men and women, North and South, during an era of apocalyptic turmoil.” (Wright and Dresser, introduction, Apocalypse and the Millennium, p. 1.)
60. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 733–34.
61. Ibid., pp. 743–46; Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 33.
62. Ibid., pp. 785–87.
63. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (Louisville: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1991).
64. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 785–87, 800–802.
65. George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), pp. 85–86.
66. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 805–814; McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, p. 153.
67. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 807–12; 1020–26; 1037–47.
68. Glad, Trumpet Soundeth, pp. 15–20.
69. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, pp. 145–50; Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 747–48.
70. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 815–16.
71. Ibid., pp. 909–10.
72. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, pp. 7–10.
73. Ibid., p. 2.
74. For example, see McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, p. 1.
CHAPTER 14: THE FOURTH GREAT AWAKENING AND THE 1960s
1. John Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction, 1945–1960 (Edinburgh, UK: Keele University Press, 1997), p. 85.
2. Richard M. Abrams, America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 28–30.
3. Steven F. Hayward, The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980, vol. 1 of The Age of Reagan (New York: Forum, 2001), pp. 8–11 (regarding America's peace, prosperity, and stability until 1964).
4. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Commencement Address—The Great Society,” in America in the Sixties—Right, Left, and Center: A Documentary History, ed. Peter B. Levy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 106–109.
5. Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), pp. 165–66; Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 80–84.
6. Goldman, Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, pp. 138–42.
7. Ibid., pp. 164.
8. Dallek, Flawed Giant, pp. 60, 71–74, 111.
9. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, vol. 3 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), pp. 365–66, 475–85, 495–99, 599.
10. Ibid., pp. 942–89; Timothy N. Thurber, Republicans and Race: The GOP's Frayed Relationships with African Americans, 1945–1974 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), pp. 104–108.
11. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 148.
12. Caro, Master of the Senate, pp. 985–88.
13. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 930–31; see also Hayward, Fall of the Old Liberal Order, p. 23 (on Kennedy ambivalence on civil rights).
14. Kearns, Lyndon Johnson, p. 191; Dallek, Flawed Giant, p. 114. As Johnson explained to Kearns, “I knew that if I didn't get out in front of the issue, they [the liberals] would get me. They'd throw up my background against me, they'd use it to prove that I was incapable of bringing unity to the land I loved so much…I couldn't let that happen.” (Kearns, Lyndon Johnson, p. 191.)
15. Dallek, Flawed Giant, p. 118.
16. Ibid., pp. 118–21; Thurber, Republicans and Race, pp. 153–70 (on Republican support for 1964 Civil Rights Act). Republican support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act was substantial and essential to the bill's passage. While not every Republican supported the bill, the support of the party as a whole and its leadership in particular were necessary to overcome the considerable legislative power of the Southern segregationist Democrats. Republican objections to government intervention in private actions, however, played a role in limiting the bill's scope in its prohibitions of discrimination by private business owners.
17. Dallek, Flawed Giant, pp. 189–211, 226–31, 311–22, 329–34.
18. For perhaps the best balanced discussion of Lyndon Johnson's continuing and horrific personal racism see Caro, Master of the Senate, pp. 712–39.
19. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President: 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), pp. 80–85, 111–45.
20. Robert A. Caro, Means of Ascent, vol. 2 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 80–118, 301–50; Dallek, Flawed Giant, pp. 38–41.
21. Caro, Master of the Senate, pp. 1018–20.
22. Dallek, Flawed Giant, pp. 124, 185–89; Caro, Master of the Senate, pp. 653–54.
23. Goldman, Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, p. 166.
24. Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 32.
25. Ibid., pp. 1–27.
26. Mark Hamilton Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 198–99.
27. Ibid., pp. 334–38.
28. Gary Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), pp. 322–24 (portrait of the manners and style of the New Left activists at the 1968 convention, from the scraggy beards to the long hairstyles and loose clothes).
29. Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, pp. 93–95, 173.
30. Ibid., pp. 89–92.
31. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, pp. 1050–54.
32. Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, p. 267.
33. Ibid., p. 261.
34. Ibid., p. 268; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 243.
35. Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 201–205.
36. Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, p. 172.
37. Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 240–54.
38. Ibid., pp. 218–33.
39. Ibid., pp. 272–82.
40. Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, pp. 124–30, 135–52; Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 283–87, 304–14.
41. James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 191–94.
42. As historian Terry Anderson put it: “The counterculture believed that the nation had become a Steppenwolf, a berserk monster, a cruel society that made war on peasants abroad and at home beat up on minorities, dissidents, students, and hippies. America the Beautiful was no more; it had been replaced by Amerika the Death Culture.” (Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, p. 251.)
43. Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 77–80; Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, pp. 49–62.
44. Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 80–88.
45. “The Port Huron Statement,” in The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left's Founding Manifesto, ed. Richard Flacks and Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 239, 242; White, Making of the President: 1968, pp. 250–51; Wills, Nixon Agonistes, pp. 256–59.
46. Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York Basic Books, 1987), pp. 202–19; Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, pp. 62–66.
47. Tom Hayden, “Crafting the Port Huron Statement: Measuring Its Impact in the 1960s and After,” in Flacks and Lichtenstein, Port Huron Statement, p. 23.
48. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963); Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, pp. 347–48.
49. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 272–82; Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, pp. 311–12.
50. National Organization of Women, “Statement of Purpose,” in Levy, America in the Sixties, pp. 202–204.
51. White, Making of the President: 1968, pp. 28–33.
52. Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 230–39.
53. Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, pp. 152–58; Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 227–30; White, Making of the President: 1968, pp. 237–41.
54. White, Making of the President: 1968, pp. 250–58.
55. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 190–92; Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 344–47.
56. White, Making of the President: 1968, pp. 336–37.
57. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, p. 337.
58. Lytle, America's Uncivil Wars, pp. 257–65; White, Making of the President: 1968, pp. 301–66; Richard Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), pp. 320–21; Wills, Nixon Agonistes, pp. 324–34; Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 291–326.
59. Anderson, Movement and the Sixties, pp. 392–95.
60. The historian Michael Kazin, who identifies strongly with the movement, fittingly said these “young moralists of the 1960s” were acting as “missionaries of a secular persuasion.” (Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995], p. 197.)
61. Hayden, Reunion, p. 505.
62. William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 193–211 (the counterculture's ethics, embrace of Eastern religion, use of psychedelic drugs, and interest in the occult are all suggestive of the usual course and behavior of an awakening).
63. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President: 1960 (New York: Atheneum, 1961), pp. 290–93.
64. Caro, Master of the Senate, pp. 987–88 (1957 Civil Rights Act); Thurber, Republicans and Race, pp. 120–21 (on Nixon's positive relationship with the African American vote in 1960).
65. Richard H. K. Vietor, “Government Regulation of Business,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 995–97.
The downturn moreover quickly got worse over the next few years. Where unemployment was 3.5 percent in 1968, it rose to 5.9 percent by 1971. The Dow dropped from 1,000 in 1966 to 578 in 1974. (John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth [New York: Harper Collins, 2004], p. 383.)
66. White, Making of the President: 1968, pp. 222–26.
67. Dallek, Flawed Giant, pp. 221–26; White, Making of the President: 1968, pp. 232–41. The urban riots so troubled the nation they, more than any other event of the 1960s, significantly shifted the national mood away from further advancing civil rights. They also caused Johnson to abandon any effort to further advance civil rights and to back away from the issue almost entirely. (See Dallek, Flawed Giant, pp. 221–26.)
68. Ibid., p. 38.
69. Ibid., pp. 280–85; William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right (New York: William Morrow, 1984), pp. 196–97.
70. Perlstein, Nixonland, p. 277; Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969), pp. 461–74.
71. Wills, Nixon Agonistes, pp. 264–65; Robert Mason, Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 27.
72. Mason, Richard Nixon, p. 27; Richard Nixon, “A New Alignment for American Unity,” radio address, May 16, 1968, available at the Richard Nixon Foundation, https://www.nixonfoundation.org/artifact/new-alignment-american-unity/.
73. Richard M. Nixon, “Acceptance Speech at the Republican National Convention,” in Levy, America in the Sixties, pp. 245–52.
74. White, Making of the President: 1968, p. 220.
75. Thurber, Republicans and Race, p. 276 (on Nixon), pp. 46, 73–77 (on Eisenhower's success with the African American vote).
76. Richard Scammon and Ben J. Wattenburg, The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970), pp. 180–83.
77. Rowland Evans Jr. and Robert D. Novak, Nixon in the White House: The Frustration of Power (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 323–25; Mason, Richard Nixon, pp. 82–85.
78. Mason, Richard Nixon, pp. 88–90.
79. Patrick J. Buchanan, The New Majority: President Nixon at Mid-Passage (Philadelphia: Girard, 1973), pp. 62–64.
80. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President: 1964 (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 245.
81. Mason, Richard Nixon, p. 48.
82. Ibid., pp. 48–49.
83. Mason, Richard Nixon, pp. 52–54.
84. Thurber, Republicans and Race, p. 127; Wills, Nixon Agonistes, p. 380.
85. Evans and Novak, Nixon in the White House, pp. 141–76.
86. Ibid., p. 136.
87. Thurber, Republicans and Race, p. 133 (on Republican disappointment in 1960); Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority, p. 468 (on no longer needing to win African American support) (“Substantial Negro support is not necessary to national Republican victory in light of the 1968 returns. Obviously, the GOP can build a winning coalition without Negro votes.”).
88. As he told his aide William Safire: “You're not going to solve this race problem for a hundred years. Intermarriage and all that, assimilation, it will happen, but not in our time.” (William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House [New York: Doubleday, 1975], p. 237.)
89. Mason, Richard Nixon, p. 104 (on Nixon's 1970 campaign and race). The most notorious evidence of this sort of cynicism was campaign operative Lee Atwater, who described it this way in an interview: “By 1968 you can't say ‘n*****’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.” (Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” Nation, November 13, 2012.)
90. Wills, Nixon Agonistes, p. 265.
91. For example, see Matthew B. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Joseph A. Aistrup, The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the Deep South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, Race in the Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1963–1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnson, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2006); Alexander P. Lamis, The Two-Party South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
92. Few segregationist Democrats, of course, actually switched to the Republican Party in 1964 or 1968. The most powerful Southern segregationist politicians mostly remained proud Democrats throughout their careers, including Wallace, many into the 1980s. The old Democratic Solid South, for example, had been slowly trending Republican since Eisenhower but didn't become a Republican bastion until the boomers fully replaced older generations in the 1990s—almost thirty years after the awakening began.
93. See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage, 2012), pp. 330–66.
94. Grant Wacker, America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), pp. 37–50; Daniel K. Williams, God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 12–15.
95. Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), pp. 7, 19–21; Williams, God's Own Party, pp. 15–18.
96. Wacker, America's Pastor, pp. 204–47; Williams, God's Own Party, pp. 69, 90–91.
97. Steven P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 29–22, 40–49.
98. Newsweek, October 25, 1976.
99. Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), pp. 271–74; Williams, God's Own Party, pp. 159–94; McGirr, Suburban Warriors, pp. 255–57; Miller, Age of Evangelicalism, pp. 58–59.
100. Miller, Age of Evangelicalism, pp. 53–56; Williams, God's Own Party, pp. 111–20.
101. Williams, God's Own Party, pp. 159–94.
102. Erling Jorstad, Evangelicals in the White House: The Cultural Maturation of Born-Again Christianity, 1960–1981 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1981), pp. 46–47 (noting statistical evidence for a sudden burst of enthusiasm for evangelical Protestantism in the 1970s); see also Miller, Age of Evangelicalism, pp. 9–31; McGirr, Suburban Warriors, pp. 241–42.
103. Miller, Age of Evangelicalism, p. 103.
104. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, pp. 255–57; Miller, Age of Evangelicalism, pp. 102–106.
105. Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011), pp. 180–223; Miller, Age of Evangelicalism, pp. 102–106, 130–35.
106. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, pp. 254–55.
107. Jorstad, Evangelicals in the White House, pp. 50–59.
108. Miller, Age of Evangelicalism, pp. 106–16; Williams, God's Own Party, pp. 235–44.
109. Walter H. Capps, The New Religious Right: Piety, Patriotism, and Politics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 158–84.
CHAPTER 15: THE END OF THE INDUSTRIAL ERA AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY
1. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Of ‘Sons’ and Their ‘Grandsons,’” New York Times, July 7, 1980, p. 15.
2. John Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction, 1945–1960 (Edinburgh, UK: Keele University Press, 1997), p. 7.
3. Richard M. Abrams, America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941–2001 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 28–29.
4. Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 191, p. 61–65; Andrew J. Bacevich, “Life at the Dawn of the American Century,” in Short American Century, pp. 1–14.
5. Killick, United States and European Reconstruction, p. 7.
6. John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), pp. 377–78; Angus Maddison, The World Economy (Paris: OECD Development Centre, 2006), pp. 261–64.
7. Killick, United States and European Reconstruction, p. 85; Abrams, America Transformed, p. 30; Louis Galambos, “The U.S. Corporate Economy in the Twentieth Century,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, pp. 948–57.
8. Maddison, World Economy, pp. 261–64; Taylor Jaworski and Price V. Fishback, “Two World Wars in American Economic History,” in Oxford Handbook of American Economic History, vol. 2, ed. Louis P. Cain, Price V. Fishback, and Paul W. Rhode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 404; Moses Abramovitz and Paul A. David, “American Macroeconomic Growth in the Era of Knowledge-Based Progress: The Long-Run Perspective,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley E. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 70–71.
9. Emily S. Rosenberg, “Consuming the American Century,” in The Short American Century: A Postmortem, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 45–52.
10. Barry Eichengreen, “U.S. Foreign Financial Relations in the Twentieth Century,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3; Gordon, Empire of Wealth, pp. 377–78.
11. Abrams, America Transformed, p. 28.
12. Claudia Goldin, “Labor Markets in the Twentieth Century,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, p. 565.
13. Maddison, World Economy, pp. 132, 261–64; Abramovitz and David, “American Macroeconomic Growth,” pp. 70–71.
14. John DiIulio to Ron Suskind, October 24, 2002, available at Esquire, May 22, 2007, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a2880/diiulio/. The letter served as the primary source of an explosive article Esquire published in its January 2003 issue: Ron Suskind, “Why Are These Men Laughing,” Esquire, January 2003.
15. “War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.” (Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Col. J. J. Graham, vol. 1 [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962], p. 2.) This is why Clausewitz famously said, “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” (Ibid., p. 23.)
16. “Tactics is the theory of the use of military forces in combat. Strategy is the theory of the use of combats for the object of the War.” (Clausewitz, On War, p. 86.)
17. The current consensus is that most voters who label themselves political “independents” are in reality soft and discontented partisans wishing to communicate, by rejecting a party label, their disagreement with their party's positions and public associations. (For example, see Bruce E. Keith et al., The Myth of the Independent Voter [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], pp. 169–77.)
CHAPTER 16: AMERICA UNRAVELING
1. John Kenneth White, “Sound Work in a Tough Environment: Obama's Governing Achievements,” in Debating the Obama Presidency, ed. Steven E. Schier (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), pp. 24–25.
2. Barack Obama, “Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, July 27, 2004, Boston, MA,” in An American Story: The Speeches of Barack Obama, David Olive (Toronto: ECW Press, 2008), p. 103; Barack Obama, “Remarks on Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008, Chicago, IL,” in Olive, American Story, p. 247.
3. Obama, “Remarks on Super Tuesday,” p. 247.
4. Erika Schneider, “The Politics of Tagging: Shepard Fairey's Obama,” in The Iconic Obama, 2007–2009: Essays on Media Representation of the Candidate and New President, ed. Nicholas A. Yanes and Derrais Carter (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), pp. 97–108.
5. James Carviou, “New Media's Impact on Elections: An Interview with Obama Girl Creator Ben Relles,” in Yanes and Carter, Iconic Obama, pp. 189–93.
6. Michael E. Ruane and Aaron C. Davis, “D.C.'s Inauguration Head Count: 1.8 Million,” Washington Post, January 22, 2009; Jonathan Alter, The Promise: President Obama, Year One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), pp. 100–109.
7. Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Surprise Nobel for Obama Stirs Praise and Doubts,” New York Times, October 9, 2009.
8. Stanley A. Renshon, Barack Obama and the Politics of Redemption (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 16–25, 230–58.
9. Christine Trost and Lawrence Rosenthal, “The Rise of the Tea Party,” in Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party, ed. Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 1–16.
10. Jonathan Chait, Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail (New York: Custom House, 2017), pp. 11–163, 184–91.
11. John D. Graham, Obama on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), pp. 66–135; Eric Rauchway, “Neither a Depression nor a New Deal: Bailout, Stimulus, and the Economy” in The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 30–44; Paul Starr, “Achievement Without Credit: The Obama Presidency and Inequality,” in Zelizer, Presidency of Barack Obama, pp. 45–61.
12. Jeremi Suri, “Liberal Internationalism, Law, and the First African American President,” in Zelizer, Presidency of Barack Obama, pp. 195–211.
13. Graham, Obama on the Home Front, pp. 135–205.
14. Ibid., pp. 124–27, 269–305; David Fitzgerald and David Ryan, Obama, US Foreign Policy and the Dilemmas of Intervention (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2014), pp. 92–105.
15. Lahnee J. Chen and Andrew Reeves, “Turning Out the Base or Appealing to the Periphery? An Analysis of County-Level Candidate Appearances in the 2008 Presidential Campaign,” American Politics Research 39, no. 3 (May 2011): 535; Michael Peress, “Securing the Base: Electoral Competition Under Variable Turnout,” Public Choice 148, no. 1–2 (July 2011): 87–89.
16. Chen and Reeves, “Turning Out the Base or the Appealing to the Periphery?” p. 538; Costas Panagopoulos and Peter W. Wielhouwer, “The Ground War 2000–2004: Strategic Targeting in Grassroots Campaigns,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 38, no. 2 (June 2008): 348–50, 359–60; Peress, “Securing the Base,” p. 88; Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015), pp. 1–10; Eitan D. Hersh, Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 13–26.
17. Seth J. Hill, “Changing Votes or Changing Voters? How Candidates and Election Context Swing Voters and Mobilize the Base,” Electoral Studies 48 (August 2017): 142.
18. Hersh, Hacking the Electorate, pp. 13–14, 35–44, 66–76, 151, 169–76; Dennis W. Johnson, Campaigning in the Twenty-First Century: A Whole New Ballgame? (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 79–85; Dennis W. Johnson, Democracy for Hire: A History of American Political Consulting (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 329–33.
19. Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 363–88; Christine Todd Whitman, It's My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America (New York: Penguin, 2005), pp. 10–13.
20. Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000), pp. 253–75; Dylan Loewe, Permanently Blue: How Democrats Can End the Republican Party and Rule the Next Generation (New York: Three Rivers, 2010), p. 171.
21. Claire Suddath, “A Brief History of Blue Dog Democrats,” Time, July 28, 2009, http://content.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1913057,00.html.
22. “Coalition of the ascendant” is a term journalist Ronald Brownstein coined to describe Barack Obama's electoral coalition in the 2008 and 2012 elections. According to Brownstein, it consisted of “young people, minorities, and college-educated whites.” (Ronald Brownstein, “How Obama Won: Marrying Old and New Democratic Coalitions,” Atlantic, November 12, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/how-obama-won-marrying-old-and-new-democratic-coalitions/264884/.) This idea of this “coalition of the ascendant” delivering the Democratic Party future majorities through demographic change became popular in Democratic Party circles, and it continues to have a great hold on Democratic Party thinking.
23. “Millennials in Adulthood: Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends,” Pew Research Center, March 2014, http://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/03/2014-03-07_generations-report-version-for-web.pdf; “Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next,” Pew Research Center, February 2010, http://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/10/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change.pdf; see also “The Generation Gap in American Politics,” Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018, http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/01/the-generation-gap-in-american-politics/; “The Whys and Hows of Generations Research,” Pew Research Center, September 3, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2015/09/09-3-2015-Generations-explainer-release.pdf.
Nor is this simply a factor of age, as other generations were more “conservative” leaning at the same stage of life. (“A Different Look at Generations and Partisanship,” Pew Research Center, April 30, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2015/04/04-30-2015-Party-ID-and-generations-release.pdf.) Research suggests, however, that while millennials indeed do take more liberal positions than older generations as a whole, a portion of the effect isn't due to differences in the attitudes of the cohort, but to their different racial makeup. (Vladimir Enrique Medenica, “Millennials and Race in the 2016 Election,” Journal of Race Ethnicity and Politics 3, no. 1 [March 2018]: 72–73.)
24. “Millennials in Adulthood”; “How Young People View Their Lives, Futures, and Politics: A Portrait of ‘Generation Next,’” Pew Research Center, January 9, 2007, http://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/legacy-pdf/300.pdf; Hannah Fingerhut, “Millennials' Views of News Media, Religious Organizations Grow More Negative,” Pew Research Center, January 4, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/04/millennials-views-of-news-media-religious-organizations-grow-more-negative/.
25. This now commonly accepted view of generational cohorts sharing common characteristics due to their common life experiences is usually credited to Karl Mannheim and his foundational theory of generations, first set out in his 1928 essay “Das Problem der Generationen,” later published in English in 1952 as “The Problem of Generations.” (Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, vol. 5 of Collected Works of Karl Mannheim, ed. Paul Kecskemeti [Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2000], pp. 276–322.)
26. Richard Fry, “Millennials Projected to Overtake Baby Boomers as America's Largest Generation,” Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/01/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers/.
27. Susan B. Glasser, “The Man Who Put Andrew Jackson in Trump's Oval Office,” Politico Magazine, January 22, 2018, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/22/andrew-jackson-donald-trump-216493.
CHAPTER 17: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
1. “The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It,” TreasuryDirect, last updated October 25, 2018, https://treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current.
2. Financial Report of the United States Government (Washington, DC: Secretary of the Treasury, 2017), https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/fsreports/rpt/finrep/fr/17frusg/02142018_FR(Final).pdf.
The treasury reports spending as $4.5 trillion for accounting purposes when including additional accrued costs.
3. Barry Blom et al., The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2018 to 2028 (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, April 2018), https://www.cbo.gov/system/files?file=115th-congress-2017–2018/reports/53651-outlook.pdf.
4. For further discussion of these potential downsides and dangers a debt crisis might create, see for example: Andrew J. Yarrow, Forgive Us Our Debts: The Intergenerational Dangers of Fiscal Irresponsibility (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 70–80.
CHAPTER 18: THE PARTY OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
1. James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1931), p. 404.
2. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 84–85.
3. Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), p. 741.