The "Third Party Tradition"
Reconsidered: Third Parties and American Public Life, 1830-1900

Mark Voss-Hubbard

Inspiration for this essay derives from John D. Hicks's Mississippi Valley Historical Association presidential address delivered over sixty years ago. "The Third Party Tradition in American Politics" capped a generation of Progressive scholarship on nineteenth-century third parties. Today historians will recognize Hicks's broader subject as the "party period," the era, from the 1830s to 1900, that began with the formation of a stable two-party system and that was marked by high levels of voter participation and voter loyalty to one of the major parties. In contrast to modern scholars, however, Hicks cast nineteenth-century politics as wide open to third party heterodoxy. The ground Hicks covered is by now well mapped—he pointed to the abolition of slavery; the regulation of railroads, trusts, and monopolies; the Australian ballot; the direct election of senators; and the national nominating convention—and he attributed their origin to one or another nineteenth-century third party. In surveying the field Hicks thus offered a formulation that has lately fallen out of favor among political historians. Third party movements, he contended, "have played perhaps quite as important a role as either of the major parties in making the nation what it is today."1	1
Hicks's striking conclusion was overstated. Yet his core idea—that a third party tradition was central to American political history—was well established in his own work on Populism and in the literature on third parties available to him. To Hicks and others of his generation, third party movements were important subjects of inquiry because they represented Americans' frequent dissatisfaction with the major parties and the government—both state and national—that those parties almost always controlled.2 Hicks thus implied that a defining characteristic of the nation's populist, third party tradition, popular anger at the two-party regime, was a vital and recurrent theme of the party period.	2
That older theoretical insight cries out for reconsideration. The idea of a party period is the most noteworthy achievement of modern research into nineteenth-century political history. Party and partisanship are the pivotal categories of analysis in a large corpus of scholarship on nineteenth-century voting behavior, party alignments, political culture, and public policy making.3 As both an organizing and an interpretive device, the party period is still the field's most powerful concept. Nonetheless, the concept may have exhausted its welcome—a few scholars have voiced strong doubts about its explanatory range, and a growing number no longer rely on political history's traditional categories of analysis—elections, governmental policy making, parties, and extrapartisan pressure groups—to theorize "the political."4	3
A principal weakness of the party period concept is that phenomena that lay outside "party" are often subsumed into it or made idiosyncratic by definition. Thus one respected historian proclaimed recently that "nonconformist political movements played little role electorally or in policy making in a culture textured by the partisan imperative." Building from a similar premise, others have argued that parallels in organization and campaign style between nineteenth-century third parties and their major party counterparts indicate that the era's "partisan imperative" gripped third parties too. In this rendering, the third party rank and file, "habituated" to nineteenth-century partisan political culture, adopted a politics "based firmly on the tradition of spectacular partisanship." The conclusion has become incantatory: Populist third party movements were merely smaller and inconsequential manifestations of the party period.5	. . .