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REVIEW ESSAY
"Corrupt and Contented": Where Have All the Politicians Gone? A Survey of Recent Books on Pennsylvania Political History, 1787–1877
| In The Shame of the Cities (1904), Lincoln Steffens, the greatest of the "muckrakers," wrote that Philadelphia politicians were "Corrupt and Contented" and implied that this was true of the entire Pennsylvania state machine. These Republicans, led in their heyday by the bigger-than-life Senator Matt Quay, were so dominant that they even financed their opponents in order to maintain the fiction of a working two-party system. But Steffens focused on local politicians—those who held public office and "pulled the strings." As much as he disliked the situation, he named names and had a certain respect for the political game and the actual functions that these unsavory, but politically savvy, fellows performed for their constituents—such as getting someone's boy out of jail or finding some spare coal for a poor family on a cold winter's night. Today we call that "service" to one's constituents, and congressmen often remain in office for doing similar favors. Lately, Pennsylvania historians have strayed from a concern for politicians and how, in plying their trade, they made government function in the past. Like Steffens, they seem to be bothered that Pennsylvania's is not exactly a story of democracy at work. |
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In 1973, Philip S. Klein and Ari Hoogenboom produced what many considered to be the definitive one-volume history of the state of Pennsylvania.1 Not quite thirty years later, Randall M. Miller and William Pencak edited a new and quite different "History of the Commonwealth."2 The former is in many ways traditional, and the latter is original and certainly avant garde! Together they have served the commonwealth far better than most other state histories.3 They are both readable, and the latter has a wealth of information and covers topic areas that no other state history has ever delved into. Their differences in relation to political history, however, tell less about the authors involved than about the changes in American historians' perceptions during the last forty years. |
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While Klein and Hoogenboom touched on social, economic, and cultural history, the structural backbone of their book was political history.4 In contrast, social history largely drives the narrative of Pennsylvania history in the first four hundred pages of Miller and Pencak's lengthy edited volume. Though the political monographs cited by Klein and Hoogenboom do not appear in the bibliographies at the end of each chapter in Miller and Pencak's work, they inform—at least implicitly—the thinking about the political framework and functions of parties and government. The prevailing political interest in the Miller and Pencak volume, however, remains political culture, political activism outside the voting booth, and the control of the public square by competing religious, ethnic, racial, and other groups; a recounting of electoral behavior is of lesser importance to them. |
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These different perspectives reflect the way in which the focus of professional history in the United States has changed during my lifetime. The trend in the profession has been away from the political narrative toward a broader methodological approach. The following essay is an attempt to examine the various ways in which books written in the last quarter century have portrayed Pennsylvania political history in the century from the movement for a new constitution in the 1780s through the Civil War and the unraveling of Reconstruction in the 1880s.5 It was surely a crucial century in American political life and in the evolving political history of the Keystone State. |
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