| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark Wahlgren Summers. Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 352. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50.

For those appalled by the workings of the American electoral process in recent years, Mark Wahlgren Summers offers a tough-love response: what did you expect? With acerbic wit and an incomparable grasp of period detail, Summers paints a picture of U.S. democracy, late-nineteenth-century style, that would hardly pass muster in Iraq or Mexico today. As he pithily notes, "The system was not run for the people, and not, in the largest sense, by them, even when they voted in record numbers. It was a system of the politicians, created by the politicians and for the politicians, and generally speaking for the politicians in the two main parties" (p. 17). That Summers lays the root of Gilded Age "misrepresentation" at the doorstep of a winner-take-all electoral system and consequently fierce two-party partisanship, moreover, implicitly offers a continuing indictment of the system that prevails today.

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