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Farewell to the “Party Period”: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America

Part of: JPH 30th Anniversary Most Cited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Richard R. John
Richard R. John
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Chicago
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Historians of the United States have long contended that the study of governmental institutions, including the history of public policy, is no longer central to the teaching and writing of American history. Some lament this development; others hail it as a sign that other worthy topics are finally getting the attention they deserve. Yet is it true? The recent outpouring of scholarship on the relationship between the state and the market, or what an earlier generation would have called political economy, raises questions about this venerable conceit. Indeed, if one were to pick a single word to characterize the state of the field in the history of American political economy, it might well be “robust.”

Type
Roundtable: State-of-the-Field: American Political History
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 117 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2004

References

Notes

1. The marginal status of political history was touched on in several influential literature surveys published in the 1970s and 1980s. These included De Santis, Vincent P., “The Political Life of the Gilded Age: A Review of the Recent Literature,” History Teacher 9 (11 1975): 73–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, “Social History and Historical Sociology: Contrasts and Complementarities,” Social Science History 11 (Spring 1987): 17–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Leuchtenberg, William E., “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” Journal of American History 73 (12 1986): 585–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent, more optimistic assessment, see Balogh, Brian, “The State of the State Among Historians,” Social Science History 27 (Fall 2003): 455–464CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Maier, Pauline et al. , Inventing America: A History of the United States (New York, 2003), xxiGoogle Scholar.

3. For a more extended discussion of the courts-and-parties school, with a focus on the decades preceding the rise of the mass party, see John, Richard R., “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 347–380CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the relationship between the rise of the mass party and the early national state, see John, , “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Jacobs, Meg, Novak, William, and Zelizer, Julian E. (Princeton, 2003), 50–84Google Scholar.

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10. Larson, John Lauritz, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2001), 224Google Scholar; Gienapp, William E., “The Myth of Class in Jacksonian America,” Journal of Policy History 6, no. 2 (1994): 232–259CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Bensel, Political Economy, 526.

12. Ibid., 178, 181.

13. Ibid., 291.

14. Holt, Michael F., “Change and Continuity in the Party Period: The Substance and Structure of American Politics, 1835–1885,” in Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775–2000, ed. Shafer, Byron E. and Badger, Anthony J. (Lawrence, Kan., 2001), 106Google Scholar. Holt used the phrase “plasticity” to refer to the malleability of the existing political parties.

15. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation, xiii. See also idem, “Patents, Engineering Professionals, and the Pipelines of Innovation: The Internalization of Technical Discovery by Nineteenth-Century American Railroads,” in Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries, ed. Naomi Lamoreaux, Daniel Raff, and Peter Temin (Chicago, 1999), 61–101.

16. Sylla, “Experimental Federalism”; Larson, Internal Improvement; Jensen, Laura, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar; John, Richard R., Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)Google Scholar.

17. Among the many critiques of Beard's “Second American Revolution” thesis were Coben, Stanley, “Northeastern Business and Radical Reconstruction: A Re-examination,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (06 1959): 67–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kolchin, Peter, “The Business Press and Reconstruction, 1865–1868,” Journal of Southern History 33 (05 1967): 183–196CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For its revival, see McPherson, James M., Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York, 1991)Google Scholar, and Hahn, Steven, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95 (02 1990): 75–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar.

19. McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy; Silbey, American Political Nation. See also Silbey, , “The State and Practice of American Political History at the Millennium: The Nineteenth Century as Test Case,” Journal of Policy History 11, no. 1 (1999): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a penetrating critique of Silbey's assumptions about nineteenth-century American political history, see Neely, Mark E. Jr., The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 187–188Google Scholar, and Holt, “Change and Continuity,” 96–99, 106, 110. For a more skeptical analysis of the mass parties, see Altschuler, Glenn C. and Blumin, Stuart M., Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar.

20. Farnham, Wallace D., “‘The Weakened Spring of Government’: A Study in Nineteenth-Century American History,” Journal of American History 68 (04 1963): 662–680CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Farnham is sometimes glossed as positing that the nineteenth-century American state was irrelevant. In fact, he hypothesized that its weakness might well be the “central fact” in the history of the United States in the nineteenth century (680). Political corruption and the predatory business behavior associated with the “robber barons,” Farnham concluded, were both “creations” of an “ungoverned people” (679). To document the relationship of public policy to social change, Farnham urged historians to undertake the “minute-by-minute investigations” of the origins and operation of every branch of the government (679). For a distinct, yet related approach to the complex relationship of politics and entrepreneurship in the Gilded Age, see White, Richard, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (06 2003): 19–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Bensel, Political Economy, 526.

22. Katznelson, Ira, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Katzlenson, Ira and Shefter, Martin (Princeton, 2002), 89.Google Scholar