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Rejoinder to “Comments” by Philip Converse and Jerrold Rusk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Walter Dean Burnham
Walter Dean Burnham
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Extract

Professors Converse and Rusk have replied to my present paper in two different ways: the former by a short, sharp rejoinder and the latter by a longer and more diffuse article. For space reasons alone, my commentary on their remarks must be concise; and while there is much which I should like to discuss further, there comes a time when the case must be sent to the jury.

It is best, I think, to confine most of my comments on Philip Converse's Note to the last half of it. We begin with The American Voter and the SRC “paradigm” as I see them. Having also reread this book, I will go even further in my praise of it than Converse has. It is not only a meticulous piece of scholarship; it is also truly a classic, a seminal work which justly gives permanent professional honor to those who wrote it. A seminal work is one which not only contributes to knowledge but permanently reorganizes the shape of a scholarly field. This can be done only by providing a conceptual framework for the myriad nonseminal but essential scholarly activities which take place in that field thereafter. As a meticulous piece of work, The American Voter was indeed qualified and judicious in its statements and generalizations. It also had at least as much sensitivity to the time dimension as could be expected for 1960.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , September 1974 , pp. 1050 - 1057
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1974

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References

1 For a variety of reasons, one should beware of making too much of this decline. Certainly from a comparative point of view, the United States a century ago was conspicuous for its general literacy rate, and also for the extent and depth of interest among all classes of the (white) population in written communications. See Martin, Edgar W., The Standard of Living in 1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 295–342, 393–404Google Scholar. Moreover, one should take Professor Rusk's comment about a 20 per cent illiteracy rate in 1870 with a grain of salt. In the ex-Confederate states, the rate of those males 21 and over who could not write to the whole age cohort was indeed 46.5 per cent. But then we have two intervening legal-structural variables which explain most of this: the institution of black slavery and—subordinate to this—the prohibition which existed in many Southern states against teaching slaves to read or write. For the whole of the Free States, the proportion of adult males not able to write was 7.1 per cent, falling as low as 3.7 per cent in New Hampshire and 3.9 per cent in Maine. Literacy was extremely widely spread in the nineteenth-century white electorate, and seems to have been actively pursued, and noted by European visitors to these shores. For the time, this social indicator reveals, as do many others, an extremely high level of socioeconomic development.

2 The reader is referred to a review of several recent quantitative-history studies by me, “Quantitative History: Beyond the Correlation Coefficient,” Historical Methods Newsletter, Vol. 4, pp. 62–66 (1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a more detailed discussion.

3 The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909)Google Scholar.

4 Lenin, V. I., “Vybory v Uchredital'noe sobranie i diktatura proletariata,” (“Elections to the Constituent Assembly and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”), Dec. 16, 1919Google Scholar. Fifth Russian edition of Collected Works (Sochineniye), Vol. 40, 1–24 (Moscow, 1958–1965)Google Scholar.

5 For an extremely suggestive, probably parallel case, see Plumb, J. H., The Origins of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and cf. Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar.

6 (New York: Knopf, 1949).

7 The decay in presidential participation from 1960 through 1972 is one of the most significant aspects of recent American electoral politics. It cannot in any way be viewed as primarily due to the addition of the 18–20 age cohort to the electorate. It is easy enough to demonstrate that if as few as 35 per cent of this cohort voted in 1972, turnout in previously enfranchised age cohorts could not have been higher than 57.4 per cent. The range of turnout in 1972 among previously enfranchised age cohorts lay almost certainly between 56.5 per cent and 57.4 per cent. Moreover, if one excludes the eleven ex-Confederate states from analysis, turnout plunged in 1972 to levels very little above their all-time lows of 1920 and 1924. After more than fifty years of women's suffrage, it is highly unlikely that women can be blamed very much for this result.

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