When you shake his hand, do you already know? Before you ask whether she has done anything political, can you guess in which party she would have done it? The political parties, even American political parties, are different. They offer different issue positions, on economic policy, on foreign policy, on social policy. They represent different interests as well, different classes, different regions, different ethnic and racial groups. Yet there is something else about these parties, something quite apart from issues and interests, which makes the direct observer believe that he can tell the Republicans from the Democrats, even when he is at the country club, or at the corner bar.

Discussion of the American Revolution began at the beginning. Contemporaries identified two interactive, though not interlocked, major elements by boasting of the attainment of independence and the founding of a new republic; as Enos Hitchcock insisted in 1788, “A revolution can never be considered as complete till government is firmly established — and without this independency would be a curse instead of a blessing. — These jointly were the great object of the American Revolution.” A third component of the Revolutionary experience was a network of social changes that affected many aspects of American life. Some processes — demographic growth, economic expansion, and western settlement, all of which contributed materially to the context of Revolutionary change — were essentially secular and developmental in effect. Others, such as the emancipation of blacks and women, had barely begun during the Revolutionary era; a few, for example, the disestablishment of religion, were largely complete by the end of the century. Among these many social processes was one that interacted with both other components of the Revolution, was central in function, and had both immediate and long-term effects. Elites were forced to share their power.

By 1800 a critical change had taken place in the fabric of American society. The Revolution had transformed ideological expectations, behaviour patterns and social relationships as well as institutions, and had drastically altered the basis on which social and political authority could be exercised in a manner that transcended the departure of British officials and Loyalist exiles.

When James K. Polk entered the White House in March 1845 all but a small minority of politicians acted and voted in accordance with the stated principles of one of two major parties. These parties were emphatically national in scope; each won support from all sections of the Union. Sixteen years later when it was the turn of Abraham Lincoln to enter the White House the situation was dramatically altered. Seven states from the Deep South had left the Union, four of the Upper South states were soon to follow. As the firing began at Fort Sumter, northerners of all parties rallied to the defence of the Union. A party system genuinely national in scope had been supplanted by sectional conflict that was about to erupt into Civil War.

A key stage in this process occurred when northern Democrats challenged what seemed to be the increasingly evident southern dominance of their party. For many Democrats disillusionment did not come until close to the end of the decade. These Democrats remained within their party and supported Douglas in 1860. They were nevertheless by this time bitter in their denunciations of the South and the resolute defenders of the Union in the aftermath of secession.

Who won the Lincoln–Douglas election of 1858? is a question that has frequently been pondered by historians. This is not surprising, since the campaign of 1858 in Illinois was, in David Potter's words, “perhaps the most famous local political contest in American history.” It made Abraham Lincoln's national reputation, though Lincoln had enjoyed strong support in his run for the Senate in 1855, and had been a respectable midwestern candidate for the Republicans' vice-presidential nomination in 1856. It also confirmed Senator Stephen A. Douglas's differences with the national Democratic Party under President James Buchanan's leadership. The acrimonious division among Illinois' Democrats between Douglasites and Buchanan's followers in 1858 prefigured a wider struggle throughout the northern Democratic Party during the two following years, a struggle which, to some of his party rivals' surprise, Douglas won by a huge margin. Because both men achieved their parties' presidential candidacy in 1860, it is easy to accept the force of Don E. Fehrenbacher's conclusion: “The Lincoln–Douglas campaign of 1858 proved to be a contest without a real loser…. The momentum gathered in their contest for a Senate seat carried both Lincoln and Douglas to the threshold of the White House, but only one could enter.” What is less obvious is how Illinois' electorate responded to the rhetoric so plentifully presented to them and how far the debate over sectional issues subsumed all other political questions in 1858.

Sinclair Lewis's critical reputation could not easily be lower than it is at present. In the discussion that follows I want to suggest that a radical re-evaluation of this reputation, and of Lewis's achievement as a novelist, is necessary; not just because he ought to be read and studied seriously in his own right, but also because in his best fiction he addresses very important issues of narrative technique and of historical and structural analysis. And I believe that without a proper understanding of Lewis's engagement with his material in these areas, most notably in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), the two texts I want to concentrate on here, any account of the re-shaping of American fiction in the years after the First World War must be seriously incomplete.

Lewis has proved to be an extremely easy writer to dismiss from any literary or intellectual canon, and not without good reason. His fictions are direct, accessible, and for the most part actively simple. Like Wells and Bennett in England he is a provincial writer of materialist romances, apparently left behind by Modernism; like Upton Sinclair he is a clumsy and over-productive fictionaliser of obvious social problems; in the 1920s he is a man of middle age writing stories about middle-aged characters for a middle-aged readership in a literary and intellectual climate obsessed and characterized by youth; he is a “wildly inconsistent writer, who in his weakest work unquestionably justifies Schorer's description of him as “one of the worst writers in modern American Literature.” And probably more than any other twentieth-century writer of comparable stature, Lewis has been a victim of literary history-writing. With only the very weak platform of spectacular popular success to support him, he stands as the clearest (and unfortunately also the most vociferous) representative of the American fiction that Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their apologists were careful to be seen to be superseding in the 1920s and 1930s.