| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics. By Mark Wahlgren Summers. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xvi, 352 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2862-9. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-8078-5537-5.)

For many years now one of the most striking anomalies in the nineteenth century historical literature has been the yawning chasm between thick descriptions of electoral competition and the making of public policy in formal political institutions. Voters, candidates, and party organizations made political campaigns into carnivals in which an election was celebrated in much the same way as a horse race. Turnout was high, the polls were crowded, and most voters did not pay much attention to the issues carefully laid out in party platforms. Instead, they cheered on their party and its candidates with the same kind of unself-conscious abandon as modern fans rooting for professional sports teams. However, unlike sports teams, victorious party organizations took up the construction of state and national public policy during the off season. When public attention moved on to other matters, the winning candidates almost surreptitiously took up their official duties as legislators and executives. And, in the execution of those duties, elected officials were subjected to intense scrutiny by interests whose primary (and almost sole) concern was the same issues upon which those candidates had entered the hustings. While this chasm between elections as public spectacle and policy making as calculated interest was wide throughout the nineteenth century, it was never wider than during the Gilded Age.

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