The Primacy of Party Reasserted

Michael F. Holt

Two years ago Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin disputed the idea that Americans between 1840 and 1860 were preoccupied by or actively engaged in partisan political activity.1 Now, in separate essays, Ronald P. Formisano and Mark Voss-Hubbard question the continued validity and utility of the related notion, most closely associated with Richard L. McCormick and Joel H. Silbey, that from approximately 1835 to 1900, the so-called party period of American political history, political parties, especially major parties, dominated political life by inculcating voters and officeholders with partisan values, expectations, and habits.2	1
McCormick and Silbey characterized this period in similar ways because both sought less to account for political changes within that period than to contrast it as a whole with earlier and, especially, later political eras. Nonetheless, there were important distinctions in their accounts. The most relevant to the present critiques concerns policy making or governance. Echoing his important study of roll-call voting in Congress between 1841 and 1852, The Shrine of Party, Silbey insisted that "policy making within legislative chambers . . . was essentially and always partisan," and by this, clearly, Silbey encompassed more than economic policy.3 In contrast, McCormick, since his days as a graduate student at Yale University, had been interested in the connection between popular voting and policy making. Thus in the 1979 essay in which he coined the phrase "the party period," McCormick also alleged that distributive policy making was the dominant form of governance during that era. He credited it with allowing, indeed strengthening, the hold that political parties exercised over the public life of the era. In the twentieth century, in contrast, the shift from promotional to regulatory and redistributive economic policies fractured parties rather than holding them together. Although I have always regarded McCormick's stress on distributive governance as problematic, other historians have embraced it. Thus it forms a linchpin of Voss-Hubbard's analysis and a chief target for Formisano's.	2
Both Formisano and Voss-Hubbard insist that the fealty major parties supposedly evoked from Americans and the control they supposedly exercised over governance and public life have been exaggerated. Voss-Hubbard cites the frequency of third party eruptions as evidence of "traditions of popular antipathy toward the regime." He correctly credits third parties with helping generate the nineteenth century's historically high rates of voter turnout by forcing major parties to shore up their supporters' allegiance and bring them to the polls, lest minor parties siphon off their votes, and with expanding the agenda of governance by pushing policy demands that major parties ignored. More central to his argument, however, is his assertion that such parties illustrated an endemic popular preference for nonpartisan governance learned, he asserts, at the local level. Similarly, Formisano stresses the apparently pervasive record of multiparty, nonpartisan, and antiparty elections and governance in localities as an "anomaly" that restricts the explanatory power of the party period paradigm. Citing women's frequent participation in nineteenth-century public life in nonpartisan and antiparty ways as additional evidence that the party period concept should be amended, if not ended, he concludes his essay by endorsing Jean Harvey Baker's call for "a broader perspective . . . of civic life" in which "parties and high politics are only one expression of a rich, diverse arena."4	. . .