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:Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics

2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.110.5.1546

1937-5239

Leon Fink,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

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. Although regularly feeding at the trough of big business, Summers's Gilded Age politicos were not the weak supplicants of the period's economic titans that historians like Richard Hofstadter made them out to be. Rather, party leaders themselves exercised a considerable degree of both artifice and autonomy in securing or safeguarding political power. Summers offers a particularly compelling portrait of party control over the nitty gritty of electioneering: bankrolling party newspapers, mobilizing campaign clubs, printing and distributing ballots, buying votes (including the bloc of “resurrectionists” [p. 111] who regularly came back from the dead on election day), generally spreading fear of one's opponent, and (especially but not only) in the South resorting to mob violence to influence electoral turnout and outcomes. At the national level, to be sure, Democrats manipulated the system by disfranchising black voters; but Republicans made up for such chicanery by prematurely admitting (and thus gaining Congressional representation from) states like Nevada, Idaho, and Wyoming. Against the resources of the dominant parties, the third parties who regularly dogged them—and regularly siphoned off sizeable protest votes during off-year elections—had, according to Summers, no chance to prevail. As he would conclude about the Greenback Party of the 1880s, “Absolute power may indeed corrupt. But the absolute lack of power corrodes” (p. 207). In this reckoning, party leaders, ultimately beholden to an electoral majority and nothing more, might even trump robber barons: the railroads, as Summers convincingly documents, ultimately looked to legislatures more than the courts for protection.