Book Review

Canada and the United States

The good news for historians of modern U.S. politics is that political history is not dead. The bad news is that some of the best work in this field is being done in departments of political science and sociology. Graduate-level courses in U.S. political history since 1865 regularly include the work of political scientists like Stephen Skowronek and political sociologists like Theda Skocpol. Along with a handful of other social scientists, these scholars have elucidated powerful yet supple frameworks that increasingly draw on archival-based research. Loosely defined as the American Political Development (APD) school, its quest for generalization amid the messy details of history has eclipsed older functionalist models in the social sciences and an approach labeled the "organizational synthesis" in history.	1
Elisabeth S. Clemens has distilled many of the lessons embodied in the APD literature and added a few of her own in this brilliant monograph. The book is a detailed history of the Progressive politics of labor, agriculture, and gender in three states: California, Wisconsin, and Washington. Roughly half of the book is devoted to case studies. The variation between states and the structural explanation that Clemens offers for it substantiates the claim that states served as laboratories for political experimentation. It is only in her concluding chapters that Clemens extrapolates the patterns discerned in the case studies to national politics. Careful to distinguish the difference between state level and national policy making—particularly the role played by the federal judiciary—Clemens's generalizations are illuminating.	2
Like much of the APD literature, the level of detail that supports the argument can occasionally overwhelm the reader. Nevertheless, the benefits of Clemens's painstaking approach are well worth the struggle. The first two chapters make it clear that the stakes are high: Clemens presents a theoretical framework that explains how the polity adapts to demands that are not fulfilled through two-party system politics. More specifically, she asks how some of the issues that partisan politics repeatedly ignored—like the right of women to vote, or the right of employees to fair working conditions, or the right by farmers to the kind of state support that other businesses enjoyed—made their way onto policy agendas in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The answer, Clemens argues, is through a two-stage process of destabilization aimed at the old system and the "crystallization" of a new kind of politics—interest group politics.	3
Treating this story as a highly contingent drama, dependent on the agency of nonelites, and explaining how the repertoire of available modes of organizing varied from state to state, Clemens brings the people back in. To be sure, this was the major contribution of the "new" social history. What distinguishes Clemens's account is her determination to follow the story even though the Cross of Gold remains intact, the strikes eventually end, and women gain the right to vote. In fact, Clemens shows how the history of more radical actions on the part of producers and women yielded innovations that would later shape mechanisms of direct democracy, like the primary, referendum, and recall. Most surprisingly, even interest group politics is shaped by these destabilizing developments.	. . .