Seward Was an Upstate Lawyer

Dan Allosso

I was looking through the materials I photographed on my last trip to the American Antiquarian Society. This trip was mostly about acquiring background on the places where the people I’m researching lived. Although there are a LOT of old newspapers now available online, as Heather has recently pointed out, there are many that are not yet. The American Antiquarian Society has a huge collection of early papers, as well as broadsheets, political pamphlets, and books.

I photographed a lot of material, which is my strategy when I go to archives like this. Whenever digital photography is allowed, I focus on locating and recording as much in the archives as I possibly can in the time I have. There’s never enough time, but this strategy allows me to go home with more material than I’d ever be able to read, sitting at the desk in the archive. It amazes me that just a decade or so ago, people had to sit in these places for months and months—and then in many cases they still only managed to scratch the surface of what was available.

That’s not to say that past researchers haven’t done fabulously, getting to the meat of an issue and finding the relevant material. But I suspect it limited the time they had to look around the information they were seeking, to see, for example, what else might have been on people’s minds on the particular day a specific newspaper article they were looking for was printed. Not to mention, what might have been in the advertisements on the edge of the page.

For example, I was looking at a table of New York Bank Note discounts, in the Lyons NY Countryman for Tuesday, March 2nd 1830. The table was in the fifth column of page four. After I photographed it, I noticed there was a notice about the sale of a defaulted property in Lyons at the top of column six. So I shot a quick photo of it and moved on. It wasn’t until I reviewed my photos at home, that I read it through and found that, in addition to being an interesting example of a notice, complete with a detailed property description and a little more background information to add to my knowledge of people in Lyons, the final line answers an unresolved question from my earlier research.

As I was putting together all the legends that surround my subjects in upstate NY, I ran into a story that claimed they had spent a lot of time trying to build a ship canal around Niagara Falls. There were obviously good precedents to support the idea of an additional “internal improvement” in upstate New York. But it would take government money to build it, so they needed a patron. There was a brief mention of a long, late-1850s carriage-ride one of my subjects had with New York Senator and former Governor William Henry Seward, during which my guy bent Seward’s ear about the project and received the response that it would never happen until there was a change in administration. Which he took to be Seward’s way of saying “when I become President.”

I liked this story, and had always planned on using it. But the accidental newspaper discovery makes it much more plausible. The 1830 lawyer handling the default sale in Lyons, whose name appears at the bottom of the advertisement was none other than “Wm. H. Seward, Att’y.” A reminder that my guys, even though they were merely upstate businessmen, had a completely credible connection with the man who went on to become a key member of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals.” Too often we forget that many of the “great men” who stride through the big histories, started somewhere as regular people. Unexpected material from the archives can not only provide background for a narrative, but from time to time, it can provide unexpected clues about meaning and context.

What on Earth was a “Bourbon Democrat?”

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, I went over the importance of the Paris Commune in American politics in the 1870s with a group of teachers. As we examined James S. Pike’s 1874 The Prostrate State, written by a man consumed with concern over the Commune, one of them noticed Pike’s reference to “the Southern Bourbon.” With France firmly in mind, he asked if Pike had been referring to the French aristocracy when he used that term.

I’ve studied nineteenth-century American politics for almost thirty years, and have written extensively on the importance of the Paris Commune to American political thought, but this had never occurred to me. To the degree I even thought about it, I honestly thought the Bourbon Democrats were dubbed that because they drank bourbon.

So as soon as I got home, I set out to track down where, exactly, the name “Bourbon Democrat” came from. That search yielded an answer—of sorts—and it also revealed just how much work historians can now do on the internet.

Most general histories on-line and scholarly articles (available on JSTOR), where I started, examined the Bourbon Democrats themselves rather than their name, and dated their importance from 1875 or 1876 to the turn of the century. They noted that the Bourbons were straight-out, old-fashioned Southern Democrats who stood against black rights.

But Pike used the term in his book in 1874. Where did he get it?

To find out, I started where I almost always start a nineteenth-century search: with the New York Times (available at the Historical New York Times). That turned up surprising little from this continent. There were a large number of stories from the very beginning of the newspaper’s publication in 1851, though, referring to the Bourbons of France and Spain. Obviously, “Bourbon” was a term with which Americans would have been very comfortable, and which they would have associated with the European aristocrats. (There were also a few advertisements for bourbon whiskey).

The first time I found a reference to “Bourbon Democrats” in the New York Times was in 1872. It was in an article that looked to the upcoming presidential election and attacked the Democrats by arguing that the “Bourbon Democrats” were the same men who had in 1864 been strong advocates of peace with the South and a return to pre-war conditions. They were essentially unchanged, still firm Confederates. (New York Times, May 8. 1872, p. 4.)

From the New York Times I went to the Chicago Tribune, where I found the term “bourbons” used in an editorial in May 1872. There, though, the term was used for extremists on both sides. The editorial complained about how “bourbons” in both parties were hurting the nation. (Chicago Tribune, May 31, 1872, p. 4).

So far I had discovered that, in the same month, the New York Times had used the term as if its meaning were established and the Chicago Tribune had used it as if its meaning were still malleable. Clearly, it had emerged shortly before May 1872.

My next stop was the New York Daily Tribune. Its editor, Horace Greeley, was a political animal and could even have invented the term, I figured. The New York Daily Tribune is on that incredible Library of Congress website, Chronicling America. On March 5, 1872, Greeley published the first salvo in James Pike’s attack on Republican Reconstruction policies in the South. In this article, titled “A State in Ruins,” Pike referred to South Carolina’s antebellum leaders as an “aristocracy,” before going on to argue that those leaders were now being trodden underfoot by black upstarts. This was the same part of his argument that used the term “Southern Bourbons” in his book—the one the teacher identified. This put aristocracy and “Bourbons” together.

Was there an earlier reference to “Bourbons” that might clarify why Pike used the term?

Perhaps. In May 1871, an editorial in the New York Daily Tribune identified as Bourbon Democrats a faction of the Democratic Party in Bourbon County, Kentucky. According to the editorial, the faction was made up of ex-Rebels who had not fought in the war, and who still spouted extremism. They refused to recognize the 14th or the 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and abhorred black voting. Gaye Keller Bland, in The Kentucky Encyclopedia—where I went next—had a slightly different take on this group, saying they took their name not from Bourbon County (although they were centered there) but from the House of Bourbon that “held to royal tradition after the French Revolution.” Bourbon County, though, according to the article above Bland’s in the encyclopedia, was named for the French royal family.

So was it a county political faction or the French Bourbons who prompted the name Bourbon Democrat? A final newspaper article might provide the answer. On September 20, 1871, the Louisiana Democrat (also at Chronicling America) stood firm against the Democrats who wanted to accept the Reconstruction amendments and move forward. It made the term a symbol of the entire Old South when it said “. . . we believe that when the old Bourbon banner, torn, tattered and fragrant with the blood of a hundred thousand heroes, kisses the sunlight again, victory will nestle in its folds.” (Louisiana Democrat, September 20, 1871, p. 3)

So my best guess is that the term began by identifying a Democratic faction in Kentucky, but quickly got picked up as a reference to the French royal family that stood against the French Revolution. In 1871, Southern Democrats described themselves as the bastions of old tradition and culture, standing in the storm of socialism unleashed by the dregs of society. It only made sense to pick up the limited Kentucky name and use it more widely to describe those who held to the Old South as Bourbons. This was precisely the sentiment of Pike’s The Prostrate State.

So, in answer to that teacher’s question: while Pike’s work in general referenced the Paris Commune, in The Prostrate State he used the term “Bourbons” to invoke those who stood against the French Revolution. (Of course, the two French events tended to run together in Americans’ minds.) Two things are even more certain: that many of the Bourbon Democrats drank bourbon was clearly incidental, and that you can do more research now from home than you could do even a few years ago in most libraries.

Numbers

Chris Beneke

And the LORD hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their cities. (Numbers 21:3)

Estimating mass deaths requires an accounting in which the sums are always grievous. For the twentieth century, the numbers are so terribly large that the researcher could be tempted to discount the meaning, and the value, of each one. For those who study other times, the scale of the twentieth century’s killing is both humbling and edifying . In the early hours of April 19, 1775, eight provincials were killed on Lexington Green; in the spring and early summer of 1994, eight hundred thousand Tutsis were killed in Rwanda. We’re certain about the number killed in Lexington on that morning. We’ll probably never know how many Rwandans were killed in those grim months. The lives lost in the former were no more dear than the lives lost in the latter. But proximity, collective memory, and relative connection to transformative events can easily obscure that moral truth. As Yale Historian Timothy Snyder puts it:

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives.

Snyder’s essay in the latest New York Review of Books (“Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?”) focuses on death tolls but also addresses moral culpability. In some cases, as when the Nazis gassed Jews or the Stalinists shot dissidents, the evil and its sources are transparent. On this ledger, the Germans were directly responsible for the death of 11 to 12 million noncombatants (depending on the measure), and the Soviets 6 to 9 million. But these figures do not include the millions who died on the battlefield, nor the millions who starved as a result of invasion, collectivization, and murderous indifference. Snyder’s striking point here and in the bestselling book from which the essay is derived is that the “most fundamental proximity of the [Hitler and Stalin] regimes … is not ideological but geographical.” In the great mass of land between Berlin and Moscow, where colossal armies clashed in both World War I and II “we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility.” Killing there was multiplicative, rather than merely additive.

Moving from west to east, Roderick MacFarquhar’s review of Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (NYRB, Feb. 10) presents some chilling tallies as well. According to Dikötter, the longstanding estimate of 30 million deaths attributed to China’s Great Leap Forward needs to be revised upward to “a minimum of 45 million.” These deaths resulted primarily from food shortages, rather that secret police forces, mobs, machine guns, or forced labor camps. At the same time, MacFarquhar observes, the “exploitation of the peasantry during the GLF and into the famine was so unprecedently excessive that provinces were left with virtually no food for the people who had produced it.” As with the terror unleashed by the Nazis and the Stalinists, the relative degree of culpability may be in dispute, but the fact of incalculable loss is not.

Middle East History Roundup

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Ishaan Tharoor, "A History of Middle East Mercenaries," Time, February 23, 2011
. . . . Foreign warriors were valued by monarchs wary of their own restive populations and the rivalries and jealousies of local nobles. The great empires of the Middle East all boasted a rank of soldiers drawn (or abducted) from abroad. The Ottomans had the janissaries, mostly young Christians from the Caucasus and the Balkans, who converted to Islam and were reared from an early age to be the Sultan's elite household troops, often forming a powerful political class of their own in various parts of the empire. Elsewhere, the Mamluks, slave warriors from Africa to Central Asia forced into service by Arab potentates, managed to rule a large stretch of the modern Middle East from Egypt to Syria for some 300 years, repulsing the invasions of European crusaders as well as the Mongol hordes.>>>

John Melloy, "Middle East Mirrors Great Inflation Revolutions Since 1200 AD," CNBC, February 23, 2011
Inflation has led to political revolutions since Medieval times and we may be witnessing the fifth such great revolution in history unfolding in the Middle East and in our own country right now, said Dr. Ed Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist of Yardeni Research.

Yardeni cites the work of historian David Hackett Fischer, who described civilization’s first four major inflation cycles in his 1999 work The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History.>>>

"Different Meanings Of Democracy For West, Middle East," NPR, February 5, 2011
The chants, chaos and cries from the streets of Cairo and other cities in Egypt this week revive questions for historians and political scientists that politicians have to answer with practical policies. Host Scott Simon speaks with Dr. J. Rufus Fears, a historian and Classics scholar at the University of Oklahoma, about western concepts of democracy and the events now sweeping Egypt and the Middle East.>>>

Robert Darnton, "1789—2011?" NYRB blog, February 22, 2011
The question has come to haunt every article and broadcast from Egypt, Tunisia and other countries in the region whose people have revolted: what constitutes a revolution? In the 1970s, we used to chase that question in courses on comparative revolutions; and looking back on my ancient lecture notes, I can’t help but imagine a trajectory: England, 1640; France, 1789; Russia, 1917 … and Egypt, 2011?>>>

Ibrahim Al-Marashi, "The Arab World's Leadership Deficit," History and Policy (February 2011)
The Arabs have few victories to claim, going back a millennium, all the way to 1187 to celebrate a leader, Salah al-Din and his victory in Jerusalem during the Crusades. What remains after that date are only a few de facto victories. Victories defined in terms of survival. In 1956, when the Egyptian President Jamal Abdul Nasser lost a war against Britain, France and Israel, the Arabs claimed it a victory because he stood up to the 'West'. Even then, the highly popular Egyptian leader was feared among the elites in Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. When Saddam Hussein was soundly defeated by Coalition forces in the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi leader claimed it a victory because he stood up to the 'West' and survived.>>>

Abraham Lincoln's Bank War, or Whigs Leaping out of Windows

Randall Stephens

Everyone now knows the story of how Wisconsin state senators stopped the wheels of government, for a moment at least, by getting out of the state. Over at the the Chicago Tribune Eric Zorn points out another such instance ("As a State Legislator, Lincoln Tried to Play the 'Run Away' Game, too," Chicago Tribune blog, Feb 21, 2011). In 1840 Lincoln and the Illinois Whigs tried the same exit strategy against the then-dominant Democrats. (Zorn quotes from Gerald J. Prokopowicz's book on the topic.) The Whigs hoped to build canals and railroads throughout the state. And then the Panic of 1837 set in. The Democrats and the Whigs squared off on the matter of the Illinois State Bank. What transpired played out some of the national themes of the Jacksonian era.

A bit more on it from Alexander Davidson and Bernard Stuvé, A Complete History of Illinois from 1673 to 1873 (Springfield, 1874), 423.

Parties in Illinois became almost divided upon the subject of the banks. Nearly all the leading democrats opposed them and the acts legalizing their suspensions, although they were authorized and their capital stocks were increased irrespective of party. The whigs were called bank-vassals and rag-ocracy, and charged to be bought and owned by British gold. The bank officers were sarcastically denominated rag-barons; and the money was called rags and printed lies. The whigs retorted that the democrats were disloyal, and destructive of their own government; that the banks were the institution of the State, and to make war upon the currency was to oppose its commerce and impede its growth and development. Although parties were in a measure divided upon the banks, with the democrats largely in the majority, this was not without benefit to those institutions. It gave them unswerving friends. Besides, the merchants and business men of that day were, with rare exceptions, whigs, who gave currency or not to the money as they pleased. Partisan zeal led them to profess that the banks were not only solvent, but that they were unduly pursued, and that the opposition to them was nothing but absurd party cry.

When the suspensions of the banks was legalized again in 1839, it was to extend until the end of the next general or special session of the general assembly. The legislature for 1840-41 was convened two weeks before the commencement of the regular session to provide means to pay the interest on the public debt, due on the first of January following. . . . The democrats now, however, thought that their time of triumph had arrived. It was by them contended, that that portion of the session preceding the time fixed for the regular session to begin, constituted a special session, and if the suspension was not further extended, the banks would be compelled to resume specie payment on the day the regular session should begin or forfeit their charters and stop business. Upon the other hand, it was contended that the whole constituted but one session. Much party animosity was, besides, manifested at this session. The fate of the banks seemed to hang upon the motion pending to adjourn the first part of the session nine die. It was perceived that the motion would prevail. To defeat it in the House, the whigs now essayed to break the quorum. But the doors were closed, a call of the House ordered, and the sergeant at arms sent in quest of the absentees. The whigs, being thus cut off from the usual avenues of retreat, bounded pell mell out of the windows, but without avail—enough were held in durance to make a quorum, and the sine die adjournment was carried.

Ronald Reagan vs College Students, 1967

Randall Stephens

"NEW HAVEN, Dec. 4 [1967]--Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, who said he had never taught anything before except swimming and Sunday school, sat on a desk at Yale University today and conducted a class in American history." So reported the New York Times on the Gipper's visit to the ivy, where he was met with student protests and plenty of probing questions (December 6, 1967).

"Should homosexuals be barred from holding public office?" a senior from LA asked. The governor was surprised by the question. Rumors had been swirling that his administration had fired two staff members after their sexual preferences came to light. "It's a tragic

illness," said Reagan, after a pause. And, yes, he did think that homosexuality should remain illegal. Some students earlier had demanded that the school rescind its invitation to Reagan. The governor, who visited Yale as a Chubb fellow, gave his $500 honorarium to charity.

The confrontation between the 56-year-old governor and Yale students in 1967 speaks to the culture wars that roiled the decade and continue to reverberate to this day. In the video embedded here the students, with haircuts that make them look like clones of Rob from My Three Sons, square off with Reagan on poverty, race, and Vietnam.

The commemoration of the one-hundredth birthday of the 40th president brought with it the usual fanfare of radio specials, documentaries, guest editorials, and the like. The new HBO doc
Reagan, like PBS's American experience bio, spans the actor-turned-politician's career. (Watch the latter in full here.)

Lost in the telling, sometimes, is the scrappy, intensely ideological cold and cultural warrior from the 1960s and early 1970s. To correct that a bit, see the governor go at it with the somewhat nervous Yalies. Or, observe him lashing out against that "mess in Berkeley." (A clip from the HBO doc showing the governor dress down Berkeley administrators shows that pretty well.) The public memory version--rosy-cheeked, avuncular, sunny--overshadows that more fiery aspect of his personality and politics.

Americans remember their leaders as they choose. (The myths and legends are as stubborn as a Missouri mule.) But it is good to remind ourselves that the politicians and public figures we revere and/or study are rarely as one-dimensional as we'd sometimes think they are.

January 2011 Issue of Historically Speaking Online

Randall Stephens

Browse the January issue of Historically Speaking on Project Muse from your college or university computer. Leo Ribuffo's lead essay in the issue gives "Twenty Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right Is Trendy." A little bit from that:

There is a boom in the study of the Right, broadly conceived. Subtitles of books that not so long ago would have ended with “and the persistence of capitalist hegemony” or “and the pervasiveness of status anxiety” now end with “and the rise of conservatism.”

This is the second such boom since World War II. The first discovery of American conservatism involved many of our favorite straw-man targets, including Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Typically those scholars involved in the first discovery of the Right traced the story back at least to the Constitution. Typically, too, they paid close attention to government, economics, nationalism, foreign policy, and war at the expense of race and gender. Despite their mistakes, the best of these self-consciously centrist historians and social scientists were very smart and worthy of serious engagement.

Moreover, the intellectual cohort of the first discoverers extended beyond the “vital center” (in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s famous phrase) to include the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills and sometime conservative political scientist Clinton Rossiter. Most important were the rival grand narratives of American history offered by William Appleman Williams in The Contours of American History (1961) and Schlesinger everywhere. When I make this point to newly minted experts involved in the second discovery of the Right, the usual response, accompanied by a blank look, is something like: “I don’t know what you mean. I’m writing a thick description of fifty Birchers in Binghamton.”

The first discovery of the Right petered out during the High Sixties. There was nonetheless an in-between cohort of about forty historians, most now in our sixties, who did terrific work. Names will be provided on request—except for one scholar who deserves to be singled out for praise: George Nash. . . .

Hofstadter’s catch phrase “paranoid style” should be buried in a deep hole with nuclear waste. When coined in the mid-1960s this phrase encapsulated a comprehensive social-psychological theory of politics in which rational people defended—as they always should defend—the sensible center against status-anxious outsiders and temperamental oddballs on the right and left “extremes.” The conceptual validity of this politically self-serving formula has been debunked countless times, not least because it was glibly used to discredit radical critics of the Cold War and accompanying hot wars. But to Hofstadter’s credit, “paranoid style” was part of his creative effort to use psychology to interpret political behavior. Nowadays “paranoid style” has sunk to the level of a pure and simple epithet employed whenever radicals, liberals, and progressives panic.>>>

Historically Speaking (January 2011)

Twenty Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right Is Trendy
Leo P. Ribuffo

What Makes Civilization?: An Interview with David Wengrow
Donald A. Yerxa

Questioning the Assumptions of Academic History: A Forum

From Histories to Traditions: A New Paradigm of Pluralism in the Study of the Past
Christopher Shannon

Response to Christopher Shannon
Daniel Wickberg

Liberal History and Historical Style After Virtue
Mark Weiner

Comment on Christopher Shannon
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

From Histories to Traditions: A Response
Christopher Shannon

The Golden Age of the 'Abbasid Empire
Muslim City Life during the Era of the Great Caliphs
Amira Bennison

An Interview with Amira Bennison
Donald A. Yerxa

For a Classroom Craving Certainties, a Theory of Importance
Ralph Menning

China, the West, and Pearl Buck: An Interview with Hilary Spurling
Randall J. Stephens

Deconstructing the Discourses of Roman Imperialism
David J. Mattingly

Is Mahan Dead?
John T. Kuehn

Religion and the Founding of the United States: An Interview with Thomas Kidd
Randall J. Stephens

Antecedents of Neoconservative Foreign Policy
Paul Gottfried

Poltical Assassination and Motivation

Randall Stephens

On November 23, 1963 the New York Times announced "Leftist Accused: Figure in a Pro-Castro Group is Charged--Policeman Slain." Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Bureau, Dallas Police Department, linked Lee Harvey Oswald to the left-wing "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Such connections proved more complicated than originally imagined. Oswald lied and was, by any account, a shiftless loser. Journalists and commentators grasped for a motive in the chaotic hours and days after President Kennedy's assassination. Texas, and Dallas in particular, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy feeling and theories of a right-wing plot circulated widely. (Replace Texas then with Arizona now and some striking similarities in public discussion are apparent. Tea Partiers and John Birchers . . . anti-immigration and anti-communism . . .)

There was, in fact, enough hard-right political terrorism in the South to make such views seem credible enough. The Klan harassed and threatened civil rights workers and dynamited churches and schools. Pundits called Birmingham "Bombingham." In rare cases, gunmen assassinated black leaders and activists. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 created a political firestorm and produced innumerable theories as Kennedy's murder had less than five years before. After King's death in Memphis riots erupted across the country's cities and conspiracy theories of Klan involvement and a government assassin gripped the imagination of Americans roiled by the events of a turbulent year. Writing in Life magazine in June 1968 Paul O'Neil observed, "No real criminal organization conspired with [James Earl] Ray," King's alleged killer. Ray was, in O'Neil's words, like Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, prone to bizarre fantasies and unreal self conceptions.

Medical professionals, journalists, and the general public have often questioned an assassin's sanity. And the current debate over the political motivations of Gabrielle Giffords' mentally unstable shooter parallel related events in history.

Was Leon Czolgosz, who shot and killed President McKinley nearly 110 years ago, insane? The American establishment, observes Eric Rauchway in Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), could not "admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate" (x).

What of America's most infamous assassin? "One is naturally tempted to ask whether John Wilkes Booth, son of the 'Mad Tragedian,' might have been found insane under existing laws," writes Michael W. Kauffman in American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2005), 353. Wilkes's brother thought madness ran through the male portion of the family. But, in this case, notions of melancholy and madness were closely linked. And diagnosing someone from the the remove of nearly 150 years would certainly be difficult.

Historians often ask why people do the things they do. Is it trickier to answer that question about current figures than about those from ages past? Figuring out the motivations of men and women from long ago, like judging why an unstable young Arizona man went on a shooting spree, can be a tough game. David Hackett Fischer explored motivation in his controversial, argumentative Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970):

Historians have often used motivational explanations in their work. Almost always, they have used them badly. Problems of motive in academic historiography tend to be hopelessly mired in a sort of simple-minded moralizing which is equally objectionable from an ethical and an empirical point of view. Lord Rosebery once remarked that what the English people really wished to know about Napoleon was whether he was a good man. The same purpose often prevails among professional scholars who are unable to distinguish motivational psychology from moral philosophy, and even unwilling to admit that there can be a distinction at all. Moreover, many scholars tend to find flat, monistic answers to complex motivational problems, which further falsifies their interpretations (187).

But that won't keep Americans from wondering, speculating, and trying to make some sense out of seemingly senseless acts of violence, past or present.

Look Back in Anger: The 1960s and Evangelical Conservatives

Randall Stephens

The rightward turn of voters in the 2010 elections and the traction that conservative candidates have gained has a variety causes. Certainly, a number of Americans are unhappy with health care reform, unemployment, and a president that they feel is far too liberal. But one group, white conservative Christians, is particularly up in arms.

The Pew Research Center reports that "Two of the largest religious groups in the electorate followed the same basic voting patterns in the 2010 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives as they have in prior elections: white Protestants voted overwhelmingly Republican and religiously unaffiliated voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Democrats. . . . However, among all white voters who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians -- a group that includes Catholics and members of other faiths in addition to Protestants -- 78% voted Republican in 2010, compared with 70% in the last midterm election."

At least since the 1960s, many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have felt besieged by new currents in the larger American culture. The upheaval of the swinging sixties shocked and frightened believers. Evangelicals and fundamentalists were horrified by campus riots, the counter culture, and what they saw as the excesses of the liberal political establishment. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Christianity Today, the chief magazine of American evangelicalism, published article after article on the terrors of the Left and the end of Christian civilization. Their world, so it seemed, was crumbling around them. (See Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt and Dan Williams recent God's Own Party for excellent insight into these and earlier developments.) The 1970s bestselling work of nonfiction, Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth, wove an evangelical end-times drama out of the explosive issues of the age. (Though Jesus People wore beads and Roman sandals and grew their hair "all long and shaggy," as Merle Haggard put it, they were in step with the apocalyptic temper of the times and drank in the anti-60s brew of the day.)

James Dobson, one of the most influential evangelical leaders of the modern era, described this anti-1960s view bluntly in 2008. Much of the wickedness of modern society, Dobson thundered, could be traced to that era of moral decline. The so-called Summer of Love in 1967 unleashed a whirlwind of hedonism and vice, he said. In his multi-million selling parenting manual, Dare to Discipline (1970), Dobson wrote: "In a day of widespread drug usage, immorality, civil disobedience, vandalism, and violence, we must not depend on hope and luck to fashion the critical attitudes we value in our children. That unstructured technique was applied during the childhood of the generation which is now in college, and the outcome has been quite discouraging. Permissiveness has not just been a failure; it’s been a disaster!"

Long after the bong smoke and tear gas have cleared, conservative American Christians--some in the Tea Party and many more who are happy enough with the Republican Party--continue to register post-60s fears. A number want to reclaim their America from secularists and godless liberals. They fear that an overpowering government wants to curtail their rights to raise their children as they see fit. They worry that their freedom to express their religious beliefs in the public sphere continues to come under attack. In other words, many are uncomfortable with a post-60s pluralism that has reshaped the nation and with a secular notion of the public good.

Such concerns are not lost on savvy politicians. Christine O'Donnell, Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Ken Buck, and a host of others are intimately aware of constituents' fears. When such candidates lash out at secular experts and laud commonsense Christianity, they know perfectly well that they are tapping into a powerful counter ideology, one that has been decades in the making.

Party Like It's . . . A Political Party

Randall Stephens

Third party politics has long altered the American political landscape. Some of those included, along with periods of most activity:

Anti-Masonic Party (1820s and 1830s)

Liberty Party (1840s)

Free-Soil Party (1840s and 1850s)

Know-Nothing/Nativist Party (1840s-1860)

Greenback Party (1870s)

Prohibition Party (1880s-1890s)

People’s Party (1890s-1900s)

Socialist Party (1900s-19-teens)

Progressive Party (three separate movements: 19-teens, 1920s, 1940s)

Dixiecrats (1948)

For details on each, see this handy Encyclopedia Britannica site. Will the Tea Party change party politics in America? Will it be a factor in the coming years?

Related links: "Third parties leave a mark: A timeline of third party showings," Christian Science Monitor, 28 October 2010.

Bad Company

Heather Cox Richardson

Like Randall, I’ve been keeping bad company lately.

My unsavory companion has been South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond, a leading figure before the American Civil War, who served as a US Senator from 1857 to 1860. Hammond was one of the South’s wealthiest planters, owner of hundreds of slaves, a member of the South’s elite. He was also arrogant, clueless, and a sexual predator.

On March 4, 1858, Hammond stood up in the Senate and delivered a speech that most people know for its famous line: "Cotton is king."

Historians tend to point to this speech for its misguided conviction that, if the tensions between the sections came to war, the South would win handily. In his speech, Hammond pointed out that the South encompassed 850,000 square miles—more territory than Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain—with a population more than four times what the colonies had had when they successfully revolted against England. The South had fine soil and good harbors, and it grew the crop on which industrial societies depended: cotton. If the South withheld its cotton from market for a year, entire countries would fall to their knees, Hammond declared. Cotton was king, indeed, according to Hammond.

As notable as this speech was for its assertion of Southern power, it was even more astonishing for its view of human society. It was here that Senator Hammond outlined what Abraham Lincoln later called the "mudsill" version of life. According to Hammond, all societies were made up of two classes. On the bottom were the "mudsills": drudges who were lazy, stupid, loyal, and happy with their lot. On this class rested civilization: the wealthy, educated, cultured men who advanced society—men like Hammond. This class should always lead society, for only its members knew what was best for a nation. If the mudsills ever got power, they would demand wealth redistribution, and human progress would halt.

This was, of course, the same era that saw extraordinary upward mobility in the United States. Immigrants were pouring into the North, beginning their climb to economic security or even prosperity. Young men and women were moving west, pushing Indians out of the way to improve their own lot, as well. At a time when wage workers were actually moving upward at an extraordinary rate, Hammond dismissed them as dimwits, condemned to drudgery to support the lifestyle of people like him.

Hammond’s vision was troubling enough, but his arrogant elitism was worse. When Hammond spoke, the nation was convulsed over a civil war in Kansas. Events there were very complicated, but by 1858 it was clear to everyone that the machinations of a pro-slavery legislature had enabled a rigged convention to draft a state constitution that the vast majority of settlers in Kansas loathed. This presented a legal conundrum, but while different sides argued, people died, in particularly brutal ways. Kansas was the issue of the day, and had been for almost four years.

What did sitting Senator Hammond, one of those to whom society should be trusted, say about this horror?

"The whole history of Kansas is a disgusting one, from the beginning to the end. I have avoided reading it as much as I could. Had I been a Senator before, I should have felt it my duty, perhaps, to have done so; but not expecting to be one, I am ignorant, fortunately, in a great measure, of details; and I was glad to hear [Senator Stephen Douglas's speech], since it excuses me from the duty of examining them."*

Why should he have bothered to learn anything about the major issue of the day? He already knew how a successful society should work. He didn’t have to bother about facts.

History, Politics, and the Art of Compromise

Heather Cox Richardson

On Saturday, September 19, the New York Times published an article titled: “Hey, Political Zealots; Listen to a Conversation from 1963.” It reveals the contents of a conversation between President Kennedy and Everett Dirksen, a senator from Illinois, captured on a tape that has recently been released by the JFK Library in Boston. In the recording, the president and Dirksen—and others, including Robert S. McNamara—are discussing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Dirksen, a Republican, counsels Kennedy, a Democrat, on how to sell the treaty to anxious Republican senators, even offering language that would allay those anxieties. Kennedy thanks Dirksen, adopts his suggestions, and the treaty passed.

The article was about the conversation, but its point was to emphasize to today’s political partisans the value of political compromise in achieving important national goals.

The article is of interest to historians because it underscores an approaching sea change in national politics. A political historian watching closely can see a quiet swell of Burkean conservatism in American political language. It is an ideological shift that has enormous implications for the Republican Party and for the nation.

It also has important implications for historians.

As pundits on the right have become increasingly shrill and doctrinaire, more traditional conservatives have begun to push back against Republican Party leaders. Conservative thinkers are increasingly distinguishing between the movement conservatism that endorsed the Republican Party and actual conservative beliefs. In The Death of Conservatism (2009), Sam Tanenhaus explores how the pursuit of political dominance made movement conservatives in the Republican Party abandon their advocacy of the small government and fiscal austerity so important to traditional conservatism. More important, though, he emphasizes that they had abandoned true conservatism, since traditional conservative governance works through compromise to embrace changes demanded by the community.

Tanenhaus was excoriated by right-wing pundits for his observations, but they did not disappear. On his popular blog at The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan hammers daily on extremism both right and left, and calls for political compromise to achieve national ends. As the New York Times piece about Dirksen and Kennedy indicates, such a call is also beginning to crop up more and more often in national newspapers.

And this emphasis on debate and political compromise has begun to show up in the writings of historians. Two new biographies of Henry Clay celebrate him as “The Great Compromiser” and denigrate the shrill partisans who tore his compromises to shreds and brought on a devastating war with their hyperbole and violence.

The growing momentum behind this language change suggests a political realignment, to be sure, but it also suggests that tomorrow’s historians are going to weigh the past with a different scale than their recent predecessors did.

James Cobb on "The Necessary South" in Historically Speaking

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In the Latest issue of Historically Speaking, James Cobb writes about the role the South has played on the national political stage. Read his essay on the what pundits, historians, and others have made of the South. Here's an excerpt:

James Cobb, "The Necessary South," Historically Speaking (September 2010)

Since the earliest days of the republic the South has served primarily as what Jack P. Greene called “a negative example of what America had to overcome before it could finally realize its true self.” The struggle to transcend this burdensome regional anomaly would play out over the better part of two centuries, but by the time it appeared finally to have run its course, some were beginning to complain that, in the end, it was the South that had actually overcome, and, in the process, prevented the nation from becoming all that it could be. Even before 30 million Americans outside the South chose a bona fide representative of a racially transformed and economically vibrant Dixie to lead the country out of its post-Watergate funk in 1976, liberals were bemoaning the ominous “rise of the Southern Rim” and the insidiously conservatizing effects of the “Southernization of America.” That such rhetoric is still in vogue more than a generation later suggests that not all of the resistance to integrating the South into national life has originated in the South itself. For all the evidence that a once-recalcitrant Dixie is, for better or worse, now one with the rest of the country, many outside the region and even a few within it still cling to a static vision of a defiantly unchanged, indisputably inferior South, which, in turn, provides the negative counterpoint necessary to sustain their equally rigid and decidedly idealized vision of America’s “true self.”

Pointing to critical changes in the South, a veritable slew of pundits had suggested that the perceived differences between region and nation were disappearing long before John Egerton referred in 1973 to the “Americanization of Dixie.” On the other hand, Egerton was one of the first to argue that the South’s loss of distinctiveness had actually been accelerated by the concomitant “Southernization of America,” observing that “the North, for its part, seems more overtly racist than it had been; shorn of its pretensions of moral innocence, it is exhibiting many of the attitudes that once were thought to be the exclusive possession of white Southerners.”

Egerton used “Southernization” merely as a figurative description of what he saw happening in the 1970s, but a host of liberal commentators quickly seized on the term as a literal explanation, in which a sudden, aggressive, nationwide contagion of southern white values became primarily responsible for America’s pronounced tilt to the right during the last quarter of the 20th century. “Southernization,” wrote George Packer, “was an attitude that spread north—suspicion of government, antielitism, racial resentment, a highly personal religiosity.”

Catering to white Southerners’ resentment of Democratic support for civil rights advances, Barry Goldwater had carried five southern states in 1964, and by 1966 Richard Nixon was already assuring Pat Buchanan that the GOP’s future lay “right here in the South.” Yet in the “Southernization” version of events it was not until George Wallace, the presumed embodiment of the southern white mentality, had expertly manipulated the race issue in 1968 that the Republican Party was seduced into its infamous, racially coded “southern strategy.” This strategy, in turn, succeeded in forging southern white racial antagonism (not unlike the violent sentiments on shocking public display at the time in Chicago or Detroit or Boston) into such a sizable and solid core of Republican support in the South that the GOP was able to win the presidency four out of five times between 1972 and 1988. To be sure, the virtual certainty of strong support from southern whites allowed Republican candidates to concentrate their resources elsewhere. Still, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan claimed at least 90% of the remaining electoral votes nationally in 1972, 1980, and 1984, and George H.W. Bush drew nearly 75% in 1988, meaning that all of them ran nearly as well outside the South as within it, and thus not a single southern vote had been essential to any of their victories. >>>

The Roots of Contemporary American Political and Religious Conflict

Randall Stephens

Last year I used Rick Perlstein’s lively, entertaining, and insightful Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America for a course I teach on America in the 1960s. The students loved it. Perlstein’s dramatic narrative pulled us in.

At the outset Perlstein observes that by 1972 a sharp division existed between "'people who identified with what Richard Nixon stood for' and 'people who despised what Richard Nixon stood for' . . . Richard Nixon, now, is long dead. But these sides have hardly changed. We now call them 'red' or 'blue' America, and whether one or the other wins the temporary allegiances of 50 percent plus one of the electorate--or 40 percent of the electorate, or 60 percent of the electorate--has been the narrative of every election since." The book is compelling on a number of levels. Yet it lacks an appreciation for ways that America had been deeply divided in other eras.

Is the culture war that feeds our current political debates all that new? Hasn't America been split between warring factions for eons? Enter Barry Hankins. His new book Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties, and Today's Culture Wars, spans over that rowdy decade and offers insight into ongoing political and religious conflicts.

The era from the 1930s to the 1980s, an era of relative religious stability, Hankins suggests, may have been the aberration. The pitched battles over immigration, alcohol, Darwinian evolution, obscenity laws, and public morality that riled Americans in the 20s "were a prologue to our own age," says Hankins. Like our era that period was "a time when religion was culturally central, participating fully in politics, media, stardom, social life, and scandal." Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, Daddy Grace, and Father Divine elbowed Charlie Chaplin, Al Joslon, and Clara Bow for newspaper headline space.

Hankins leads off with Warren Harding’s moral failings, "more repulsive than evil" in the words of a biographer. "There is a sense in which Harding’s story is the story of America during the Roaring Twenties," he remarks. The baptist president's religious life was thin, to put it mildly. His administration’s contempt for law, its moral degeneration, and the scandal that swirled around it defined the nation as well. Hankins similar treatment of moral crusades, scandalous religious leaders, and heated contests between liberals and conservatives has a contemporary ring to it.

History written through the eyes of the present, I’ve noticed, draws students in to the debates. Hankins does this well throughout Jesus and Gin. Hence, he notes that Edward J. Larson’s account of the Scopes Trial, "Summer for the Gods could not have been written between 1930 and 1980 for in that period the Scopes legend was taken for granted." In many ways the book is a comparative history that moves with ease between the Christian Right of the Reagan years and the late-Victorian moralizers of the 20s. (Though Hankins does note that there is no simple liberal-conservative split in the age of flappers and speakeasies.)

Hankins fittingly ends his with a rumination on "How the Roaring Twenties Set the Stage for the Culture Wars of Our Own Time." The major struggles of our era have roots that go back decades.

Like Perlstein’s sweeping history, Hankin’s book draws attention to the deeper political and religious clashes that shape current debates.

Uses of the Past

Randall Stephens

Historians, pundits, and activists are commenting on the Saturday Tea Party rally, called "Restoring Honor," at the Lincoln Memorial. The event--on the anniversary of MLK's 1963 march--brings up some important questions about the legacy and purposes of the past. Here are some of the comments, reflections on the 8/28 gathering:

Kate Zernike, "Where Dr. King Stood, Tea Party Claims His Mantle," New York Times, August 28, 2010.
WASHINGTON — It seems the ultimate thumb in the eye: that Glenn Beck would summon the Tea Party faithful to a rally on the anniversary of the March on Washington, and address them from the very place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech 47 years ago. After all, the Tea Party and its critics have been facing off for months over accusations of racism. >>>

Eugene Robinson, "Even Beck Can't Mar King's Legacy," Washington Post, August 27, 2010.
The majestic grounds of the Lincoln Memorial belong to all Americans -- even to egomaniacal talk-show hosts who profit handsomely from stoking fear, resentment and anger. So let me state clearly that Glenn Beck has every right to hold his absurdly titled "Restoring Honor" rally on Saturday. >>>

Martin Luther King III, "Still Striving for MLK's Dream in the 21st Century," Washington Post, August 25, 2010.
Forty-seven years ago this weekend, on a sweltering August day often remembered simply as the March on Washington, my father delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. A memorial to him is being erected at the Tidal Basin, not far from where he shared his vision of a nation united in justice, equality and brotherhood. >>>

Robert Costa, "Armey: Glenn Beck’s ‘Serious, Scholarly Work,’" National Review, August 28, 2010.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R., Texas) spoke with National Review Online on Friday at FreedomWork’s “Take Back America” conference in Washington. The evening rally, which was attended by thousands of conservative activists, was a precursor of sorts to Saturday’s “Restoring Honor” event at the Lincoln Memorial. Armey calls “Restoring Honor,” which will be hosted by Glenn Beck of Fox News, an “important moment for America.” >>>

"Beck rally Saturday at Lincoln Memorial on anniversary of King's 'I Have a Dream' speech," The Guardian (Canada), August 28, 2010.
. . . . Beck, a Fox News personality and a conservative favourite, insists it's just a coincidence that his "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is overlapping with the 47th anniversary of King's speech. Potential 2012 presidential candidate Sarah Palin is expected to attend along with some 100,000 people. >>>

Philip Elliott, "Glenn Beck Lincoln Memorial rally draws criticism," Christian Science Monitor, August 26, 2010.
. . . . Beck, a popular figure among tea party activists and a polarizing Fox News Channel personality, has said it is merely a coincidence that the event is taking place on the 47th anniversary of King's plea for racial equality. Beck has called President Barack Obama a racist. >>>

Julie Ingersoll, "Beck’s 'Dream'—Our Nightmare," Religion Dispatches, August 25, 2010.
David Barton, Glenn Beck’s favorite history “professor,” is the creator and purveyor of a revisionist history of race in America that is rapidly gaining traction in conservative and Tea Party circles. That history, drawn in part from the writings of Christian Reconstructionists, recasts modern-day Republicans as the racially inclusive party, and modern-day Democrats as the racists supportive of slavery and post-Emancipation racist policies. >>>

History for the Public, or, Does the Center Hold?

Randall Stephens

NYU professor of history Thomas Bender's engaging on-line essay, "Historians in Public," at the SSRC has been making the rounds. He notes the worries of historians and social scientists, who think "that academic intellect has turned inward, cutting itself off from a role in public life."

Says Bender: "In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole. Bookstores organized American history by these identity-driven markets, often with no place for general histories. The challenge not taken up was how to narrate a whole made up of diverse and unequal parts. . . . Historians must bring the state back into relation to society, and along the way they need to rediscover the public. It will be, however, very different from [w]hat the early AHA . . . had in mind. And historians must make themselves a part of that public."

Unlike earlier calls for a unified history, this doesn't sound like a canon shot on the battlefield of the culture war. Though Bender's recommendations do bare some resemblance to those the late Arthur Schlesinger made in his 1991/1998 The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Schlesinger's polemic makes what Bender writes look almost tame, though. And, of course, Schlesinger was writing about the nature and function of American identity.

Here's Schlesinger: "[P]ressed too far, the cult of ethnicity has had bad consequences too. The new ethnic gospel rejects the unifying vision of individuals from all nations melted into a new race. Its underlying philosophy is that America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups, that ethnicity is the defining experience for Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and indelible, and that division into ethnic communities establishes the basic structure of American society and the basic meaning of American history." (Disuniting of America, 20-21.)

A Crosspost on Presidential Speeches on Energy from the Miller Center of Public Affairs

Lauren Dunsmore
University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs

President Obama addressed the nation yesterday about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He also talked about reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels, a theme in many presidential remarks.

In a 1977 speech on energy, Carter says we will have to drill more offshore wells if we don't conserve.

Ford had similar remarks on May 27, 1975. Check out this clip in which he says Congress has done little or nothing to decrease America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Click here to see how past presidents—from JFK to Reagan—addressed domestic crises during their administrations.

Contingency

Heather Cox Richardson

Two of the speakers I heard at The History Society’s conference last weekend got me thinking about the importance of contingency in historical events. Michael Barone of the American Enterprise Institute argued that the pattern of American politics since the early twentieth century had been determined by two central pivot constituencies. George Washington University’s Leo Ribuffo disagreed. He pointed instead to the unexpected quirks that had shifted key elections. Ribuffo’s funny look at the oddities of history poked a hole in the idea that there was any such thing as the sort of clear pattern Barone found in the political history of the past century.

I might have passed over this disagreement except that the previous day, in a session devoted to a review of his work, William Freehling—one of our leading scholars of the antebellum American South—had also mentioned contingency. He explained that his work on the rise of secession had made him come to see history as a series of themes flowing through time, altered at an immediate level by contingency. For proof of his theory, he challenged the audience to think of events in their own lives that had been determined by something accidental. And who can’t?

Two references to chance in two days made me wonder: What is the role of contingency in historical change? Professors Freehling and Ribuffo are undoubtedly correct. Our lives are not predetermined by impersonal societal forces. Chance matters. But historians study the past to figure out what creates change in human society, and Barone’s identification of a pattern that gave certain constituencies control over political elections also had great merit. How do these two seemingly contradictory factors work together?

As I thought about it, I came to lean toward Freehling’s vision of contingency, with an important adjustment. I do believe that societal change is driven by larger forces (my personal favorite is ideas) and that there are unexpected accidents that affect change in quirky ways. But—and this is an important but—I think that the larger forces in play limit which accidents turn out to be important, change the terms of those accidents, and ultimately define their significance. That is, a chance meeting might enable two scientists to develop an energy technology that goes on to change the world, but that chance meeting can only happen in certain kinds of societies, the nature of the meeting is determined by the society, and the results of the meeting can only matter in a society that recognizes the importance of their sort of work. That same chance meeting of two brilliant innovators in a society convulsed by civil war might mean they pass each other unnoticed as they struggle to get their families to safety. If they do speak, they might work together not on energy technology, but on a new wagon box spring or artillery carriage . . . or they might kill each other. And the result of their collaboration or collision might either fall forgotten in a society that has no current use for it, or it might revolutionize society in ways that have nothing to do with energy. In this scenario the same two great minds meet—a contingency—but the significance of that meeting depends largely on the trends of the larger society in which they live.

Or so I think at this particular (contingent?) moment.

Larger Pictures

Heather Cox Richardson

The Saturday night plenary session of the Historical Society conference got me wondering about the larger contours of history. The main speaker was Michael Barone currently of the American Enterprise Institute, who delivered a presentation on “The Enduring Character of America's Political Parties in Times of Continual Change.” Leo Ribuffo of George Washington University and Sean Wilentz of Princeton commented. (Listen to full lecture and comments here.)

Barone revealed his past career as a pollster (he was a vice president at the polling firm of Peter D. Hart Research Associates from 1974 to 1981). He outlined the percentages of the vote for each party in elections spanning the twentieth century to point out that elections were decided by quite small margins. To win, parties had to mobilize pivotal constituencies: quite small populations that determined the electoral votes of large states or regions to swing elections one way or another.

Ribuffo responded to this analysis by pointing out that Barone’s numbers imposed an order on electoral politics that simply wasn’t there. Elections were often decided by quirky contingencies that no one could have foreseen.

Wilentz also poked holes in Barone’s analysis. He pointed out that Barone had utterly neglected a discussion of the role of class in determining voting patterns. Any analysis of American politics without that element included was simply missing the point, he suggested.

And listening to these three distinguished scholars, I couldn’t shut up the voice in my own head whispering that the role of ideas in politics was absent from this particular discussion. Surely the parties stand for something, and people vote according to their beliefs about what the parties will do in office.

Each of these arguments has merit, and is probably, at some level, right. So how can they be reconciled to produce a definitive account of American political history? Or is it the nature of deep historical research to produce a number of accounts from which individuals pick as most important the ones that resonate most closely with their own unique experience?

This is a different question than that of the postmodernists, who ultimately argued that there was no such thing as “truth” or “history” because each perspective was different and equally valuable. The question of reconciling the different perspectives of cliometrics, contingency, class, ideology, and so on, is fundamentally a question of what constitutes good history.

Forced to think this one through, I would throw my weight behind the idea that all of these different factors matter in general, but that individual ones take the lead in different eras. They also might matter in every era, but answer different questions. For me, though, the question Barone, Ribuffo, and Wilentz raised remains an open one.

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 3: Plenary Session on America's Enduring Two-Party System

Randall Stephens

The Historical Society's 2010 conference came to a close at George Washington University with a final plenary session on Saturday night dealing with the nature of America's two-party system. (Listen to the audio file embedded below. It will take a moment to load. The quality is not the greatest, but the words can be made out OK.) Heather Cox Richardson (University of Massachusetts Amherst) introduced Michael Barone (American Enterprise Institute), who spoke on “The Enduring Character of America’s Political Parties in Times of Continual Change.” These two parties, ancient in the world of modern politics, have long diverged sharply, said Barone. Some deeply consistent themes have defined the Democratic and Republican parties since the mid-19th century. The two distinct parties represent very different constituencies and have, since the 19th-century, upheld rather distinct political ideas. For instance, Barone described the outsider aspect of the Democratic Party, which tended to represent immigrants, saloon keepers, and many on the margins. The party of Roosevelt, populated by interest groups and factions, Barone remarked, lacked the cohesion of the Republican Party.



Commenters Sean Wilentz (Princeton University) and Leo Ribuffo (George Washington University) both praised Barone's extensive knowledge of political history, but each had serious critiques of Barone's key arguments. Ribuffo thought Barone overemphasized the differences between the parties. The two parties were, argued Ribuffo, less like a donkey and an elephant and more like kissing cousins, even incestuous cousins at times. Wilentz argued that Barone had not paid appropriate attention to class. Wilentz and Ribuffo also questioned Barone's insider-outsider thesis. The white democracy of the South hardly fit that pattern. At other points the commenters took issue with the continuities Barone saw.

The lively discussion was a fitting end to an intellectually engaging, vibrant conference that gave attendees much to ponder about the state of the profession and the future of historical inquiry.