Read, James H.

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College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University: DigitalCommons@CSB/SJU

College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University DigitalCommons@CSB/SJU Political Science Faculty Publications Political Science Winter 2017 review of Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed byDaniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith James H. Read College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University, jread@csbsju.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/polsci_pubs  Part of the American Politics Commons Recommended Citation Read, James H., "review of Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed byDaniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith" (2017). Political Science Faculty Publications. 57. https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/polsci_pubs/57 © 2017by American Political Thought. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/689817 as well as its content. The emergence of the cultural/linguistic nation traced inMattes’s account may have actually undermined the idea of a common intellec-tual homeland—it may be that the common intellectual space contained theseeds of its own downfall and that this period represents the end, not the apex,of that space. Further exploration of this could have located the book as a sem-inal intervention on the transatlantic intellectual space. Nevertheless, the bookholds much of interest for scholars of conservatism, the nation, democracy, andthe early republic. It offers vital contextualization of political thought in the earlyrepublic and the development of American democracy. For scholars of the lat-ter areas it is an important text that will have to be taken account of.Simon Gilhooley, Bard CollegeDaniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith, eds. Practicing Democracy: PopularPolitics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War. Char-lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. 296. $49.50.The United States Constitution was drafted by men who feared and distrustedpolitical parties. Yet in the 1790s these same framers took the lead in creatingnational parties, which in turn became engines of democratization—a devel-opment about which those framers were ambivalent. By the 1840s the Dem-ocratic and Whig Parties enjoyed a broad national following among ordinaryvoters. Martin van Buren, among others, praised parties as forces for sectionalconcord in a nation otherwise divided over slavery and other regional interests.Yet by the late 1850s American voters, disgusted with the political establish-ment, had killed theWhig Party, fatally divided the Democratic Party, and votedin large numbers for temperance, nativist, antislavery, and proslavery candidates.And then the war came.Like the early Americans they study, the editors and contributors to Prac-ticing Democracy appear ambivalent about political parties. The essays in thevolume are diverse in theme and intellectual approach. What unites them iscommon opposition to what the editors label the “oft-repeated narrative,” rep-resented, among others, by Arthur Schlesinger, Walter Dean Burnham, and JoelSilbey, according to which party competition expands democracy by expandingelectoral participation—that, in short, “party virtually equals democracy” (2, 8).The contributors to the volume do not dispute that organized party compe-tition increased voter turnout. But they challenge in various ways the notionthat expanded turnout among legally eligible voters is a good indicator of the156 • American Political Thought • Winter 2017This content downloaded from 152.065.133.106 on April 28, 2017 09:41:21 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).degree to which the American polity was democratic. What matters most, ac-cording to Johann N. Neem, is “the actual capabilities of ordinary citizens toaffect outcomes. . . . The more able citizens are to influence outcomes, the moredemocratic the society” (247–48).In this respect, organized party competition enhanced democracy in someways and suppressed it in others. During the Jacksonian era, the two major par-ties expanded electoral participation by means of “powerful, regimented parti-san organizations” that “developed sophisticated means to silence dissent withintheir ranks” (65). Rule by party wire-pullers does little to empower ordinarycitizens. But the parties’ capacity to control voters was not unlimited. The cre-ation and ultimate survival of the Democratic and Whig Parties depended ontheir remaining responsive to issues voters genuinely cared about. In buildingan Illinois Whig Party in the 1830s, for instance, Abraham Lincoln could notcount on strong party attachments but instead emphasized farmers’ access tocredit, “an eminently practical yet profoundly important concern” (154). Whenthe major parties suppressed issues of urgent concern to millions of voters, asthey did after the Compromise of 1850, voters abandoned the parties.Contributors to the volume also emphasize the degree to which Americanswho did not possess voting rights, and who therefore had to pressure politicalparties from the outside, were often able to shape political outcomes (63–64,232–33, 251–61). The most dramatic example is the enormous impact of Har-riet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published in installmentsin 1851–52 and soon became the best-selling book in American history. John L.Brooke observes that political historians have often argued that “the northernpublic was apathetic about slavery in the years immediately following the Com-promise of 1850” (73), only to be aroused from their slumber in 1854 by theshock of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. Brooke argues that the Kansas–NebraskaAct triggered a political earthquake only because “the northern public hadbeen prepared for this moment by a series of events and experiences that falloutside the purview of routine politics” (79). The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—a central theme of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—transformed slavery into “a direct andpalpable experience for northern whites” and gave rise to an enormous senti-mental literature sympathetic to the plight of slaves (81–86).In emphasizing the impact of cultural transformations originating outsidethe established parties, the contributors to the volume wisely do not minimizethe importance of political parties and electoral politics. Instead, Neem ob-serves, “parties offered activists a model of how to move from reform into pol-itics. . . . The best evidence we have that the reformers were effective is that thepolitical system did respond” (261–62). Moreover, Neem acknowledges, “with-out parties, the will of the people would be too diffuse to gain clear expression,and voters would be rendered powerless” (264). In this respect the contribu-Book Reviews • 157This content downloaded from 152.065.133.106 on April 28, 2017 09:41:21 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).tors to the volume agreewith the “oft-repeated narrative” about the connectionbetween parties and democracy.Nor does the volume present cultural interventions into politics in a univer-sally positive light. Tyler Ambinder’s chapter on “Immigrants and Popular Pol-itics in Pre–Civil War New York” reminds one of Martin Scorsese’s film Gangsof New York. Irish immigrants effectively controlled New York City politics by,among other tactics, joining volunteer fire companies, one of whose duties wasto put out political fires by packing political meetings and polling places andforcibly ejecting dissenters (201–4).The contributors to the volume challenge not only the substance of the parties-entail-democracy thesis but also the chronology of that narrative. Simplifyingsomewhat, the received narrative (which the authors here associate with ArthurSchlesinger) is that politics during the founding era was a gentleman’s occu-pation, infused with some popular ferment during the 1790s, then sinking intolow-participation torpor by 1820. But beginning in 1828, the story goes, AndrewJackson appealed to the common man, attacked the national bank, polarizedthe electorate, spawned mass political parties, and ushered in the age of (whitemale) egalitarian democracy.The volume acknowledges that in many states popular apathy reigned in theearly 1820s after the disappearance of party competition; in Richmond, Virginia,the state capital, only 17 votes were cast in the 1820 presidential election, andnationwide only about 10% of eligible voters turned out. But in 1824 in Illinois,where party competition was likewise absent, 83% of the electorate turned outfor a referendum in which a proposal to make Illinois a slave state was decisivelydefeated. Thus, critically important issues could turn out voters with or with-out organized parties (130–38). In Virginia voter turnout was higher in the late1790s, during the contest over the Alien and Sedition Acts, than it ever becameduring the Jacksonian era (106). Though organized two-party competition andextensive popular mobilization did not become a national phenomenon beforethe late 1830s, in some places it appeared much earlier (46–47).This excellent volume does includes some occasional false notes. DouglasBradburn speaks inaccurately of James Madison’s “desire to organize a ma-jority faction in opposition to Hamilton” (32). Madison did not view himselfas organizing a faction, even if his critics charged him with doing so. Madi-son distinguished between just and unjust majorities; he called only the lattera faction. Alexander Hamilton, reflecting on the weaknesses of the Constitu-tion, referred to his efforts to prop up a “frail andworthless fabric” (AlexanderHamilton to Gouverneur Morris, February 1802, in The Papers of AlexanderHamilton, ed. Harold Syrett [New York: Columbia University Press, 1977],25:544); he did not call the Constitution a “frail and worthless document,”as incorrectly quoted here (29).158 • American Political Thought • Winter 2017This content downloaded from 152.065.133.106 on April 28, 2017 09:41:21 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).But the volume as a whole is well written, richly detailed, interesting to read,and more thematically coherent than most edited volumes. The authors andeditors never lose focus on the following questions: Why should we care whetherparties are strong or weak, or whether electoral participation rises or falls? Howare such indicators connected with the capacity of ordinary citizens to shapepolitical life? Do political parties bind a nation together or deepen its divides?Those are key questions for understanding antebellum American political his-tory. They remain important questions today.James H. Read, College of St. Benedict and St. John’s UniversityGary Gerstle. Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Govern-ment, from the Founding to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 2015. Pp 492. $35.00.Gary Gerstle’s compelling new book is about political improvisation. It tellsthe story of how the United States managed to extend its “laws, institutions,and sovereignty across a vast continent” even though unable to rely on “a largecentralized state” (345). The small government grew, we learn, by way of sub-tle forms of creative and imaginative politics.Gerstle’s journey begins with the federation of the late 1780s, when the re-public embraced a liberal Constitution and instituted a central power, but oneso “internally fragmented among three different branches of government” as toguarantee that “no single person, clique, or agency in the central state would everbe able to accumulate the sort of control” gathered by George III in Britain (21).American liberalismwas, after all, no simple copy of its European counterpart.Even before the Revolution broke out, Gerstle argues, Americans had grad-ually come to ground ‘membership’ in their polity on residence and free willrather than on birth or descent in order to construct the “notion of a republicby consent” (30–32). This was new enough. But Americans were also filled withnostalgia for a republican ideal on the model of ancient Rome and had enjoyeda long history of local autonomy, which convinced them that the republicanmodel could be successfully practiced. Indeed, since the earliest colonial days,local assemblies had acted as sovereign entities informally exercising the royalprerogative, which implied “the due regulation and domestic order” of theirstates (59–60). And so the quasi-sovereign attributes of the former colonies cre-ated a suitable environment for the pursuit of the republican dream of a polityempowered to ensure the ‘common good’.Book Reviews • 159This content downloaded from 152.065.133.106 on April 28, 2017 09:41:21 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).

review of \u3ci\u3ePracticing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War\u3c/i\u3e ed byDaniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith

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review of \u3ci\u3ePracticing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War\u3c/i\u3e ed byDaniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith

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