Richard L. McCormick

The Party Period and Public Policy: An Exploratory Hypothesis

When historians in any field simultaneously become uncertain about the relationships among the most important classes of events they study and have fundamental disagreements about periodization, their field may be said to be experiencing a crisis. Such is the condition of American political history. Voting and elections, on the one hand, and government policies, on the other, provide the substance of political history, yet today scholars are wondering how, if at all, these bedrock phenomena affected one another in the American past. Their uncertainty contributes to the second problem, the lack of consensus on a periodizing framework. While the presidential synthesis no longer commands wide support among political historians, they are divided on the leading alternative that has been proposed-the concept of successive party systems separated by periodic critical elections. The two problems are related because without a theory that connects voting and policy, a periodizing scheme based on successive electoral alignments covers, at best, only half the subject matter of political history. Until twenty years ago, something like a responsible-party-government model implicitly guided most historical study of elections and policy-making. Party leaders were depicted as voicing support for government programs and receiving votes on that basis. Once in office, it was assumed, they tried to enact the promised policies. The presidential synthesis lent support to such an approach by suggesting the correspondence between a presidents election and the programs of his administration. Thomas C. Cochran challenged the presidential synthesis in 1948,1 but not until the 1960s did scholars question the assumption that party programs linked voters and policies or offer an alternative periodizing formulation. Taking numerous different approaches, researchers within the past two decades have cast doubt on whether policy divisions led to party formation,

ANTI-CORRUPTION IN AMERICAN HISTORY

What will it take to get Americans to do something about political corruption? I mean the deep corruption of politics and policy now caused by massive campaign contributions, by lobbyists who bundle those contributions for political candidates and then influence the policy decisions of elected officials, by the revolving door between public office and lucrative private employment, and—through all these instruments and more—by the influence of wealthy individuals and interests over the agencies and institutions of government. Some people say this is just American politics as usual: money is inevitable in public life, and anyway its all perfectly legal. Sadly, those who say this are, at this moment, winning the argument. Writing for the Supreme Court majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), Justice Anthony Kennedy opined, “It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.” Cementing the case, says the Court, is the First Amendment, which protects political speech and political dollars.

Walter Dean Burnham and “The System of 1896”

Anyone who has tried to teach undergraduates about the election of 1896 should instinctively appreciate Walter Dean Burnham’s enormous contribution in making sense of that election and its aftermath. Waged between two rather uninteresting men over issues that defy easy understanding, the presidential contest of 1896 hardly stacks up with those of 1860 and 1932 as “critical” in the casual sense of the term. Perhaps if William Jennings Bryan had defeated William McKinley, or, better still, if the glamorous Theodore Roosevelt had been the victorious Republican candidate, or, best of all, if Roosevelt had won and immediately started a major war, the election of 1896 would more readily appear to have been the transforming event that modern scholars contend it was. But, alas, McKinley won, waited over a year before reluctantly waging even a minor war, and proved unwilling to make any significant departures in domestic policy. Compared to the election of Abraham Lincoln or that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the contest of 1896 appears trivial. Who can blame undergraduates for yawning over the “Battle of the Standards”?