“It is the rule of our politics that no vexed question is settled except by executive policy,” noted Henry Jones Ford (1851–1925) in his 1898 work describing the state of national politics. “Whatever may be the feeling of Congress towards the President, it cannot avoid an issue which he insists upon making,” Ford wrote as he continued with his discussion of the central role played by the president as the leader of his party (283–84). Even presidents whose congressional party members turned their backs on the leadership of their presidents were needed to provide their parties in Congress with an agenda, as was the case with Presidents John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, and Grover Cleveland. “Although repudiated by the parties which elected them, [they] furnished the issues upon which party action turned,” noted Ford (284). Even though he may have arrived at his views through shaky research means and was often inaccurate in his predictions about the direction of American politics, in the late nineteenth century Ford noted the special energy provided by the presidency to our political system. He anticipated the soonto-come activist presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898) provides a sweeping analysis of the American political system. In this short article, I will focus on Ford's understanding of the American presidency, showing how his thoughts presaged important orientations and foci of future presidential scholars and noting that, as influential as his work proved, he often got the story wrong.

I remember an afternoon graduate seminar in 1958 at Yale when Bob Dahl asked a question: “How would we best go about ‘testing’ the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America?” Two answers were offered. “Survey research can do it all,” many argued. I put my hand up and offered an alternative. We would do well to study American history, the culture of politics, and political sociology, then and now. One does not “test” Tocqueville all at once, and never fully. One continually matches his insights against what one knows and understands about our politics. Dahl accepted both answers and we then went on to other things. I recalled the question when I recently reread Ford.

Ford, along with James Bryce, was one of the first political scientists to attempt an analysis of the central dynamics of American political institutions. In The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), he set a model followed by Arthur Bentley, Arthur Holcombe, Wilfred Binkley, Pendleton Herring, D.W. Brogan, and Clinton Rossiter, all leaders in American political science. The art was to write a perceptive book about U.S. politics that was grounded primarily in historical materials and analyzed the connections among society, politics, and government.

American political scientists in the 1890s were deeply divided on the central question they had chosen to address: Where to place government in the United States in the larger scheme of Western political development. The “idealists,” led by John Burgess of Columbia University, argued that the American Constitution had “perfected the Aryan genius for political civilization” by “emancipating it from the remaining prejudices of European Teutonism.” Late-century America was, in their view, “the cosmopolitan model for political organization in the world” (Burgess 1895, 406). By placing the U.S. in this advanced position, the idealists mounted a strong case against demands for structural reform. Burgess himself thought that the proper American response to the new governmental challenges of the industrial age was more of the same. He urged a strengthening of the separation of powers, a further bolstering of the judicial and executive branches to counter the increasingly radical impulses of the states and Congress.

Henry Jones Ford published The Rise and Growth of American Politics in 1898, and in it he looked back into the eighteenth century to find meaning in the developments of the nineteenth and provide material for his forecasts of the twentieth. So, too, do we look back for meaning in our own era, and use what we find to forecast about things to come. It is worthwhile, then, to reexamine the final section of Ford's work, “Tendencies and Prospects of American Politics,” because doing so helps us to understand the opportunities and pitfalls awaiting political scientists who forecast.

Ford began his prophesying venture with the bold statement that there are no new ideas. In America, he claimed, we seem to be bound by the Whig theory of governance: with us, it is all separation of powers and checks and balances. We tinker with them, and we bind the constitutional fabric ever tighter to prevent abuses of power by vile politicos. “The belief that the Constitution could be tinkered into some sort of mechanical excellence” hampered British thinkers and ours as well (1898, 355). In the late eighteenth century, the British concentrated on institutional reforms, but nothing could help, because men entered politics in order to gain wealth and position.

The cartoon below, which I first saw printed on the cover of PS in March 1994, has unfortunately proved prophetic. Voter turnout has steadily declined from its 1960 peak of 63%, and the presidential election of 1996 was the first in the lifetime of most Americans in which a minority of the voting-age population cast ballots. Turnout dropped in every state between 1992 and 1996.

That only 49% of eligible voters went to the polls in 1996 was especially disappointing for advocates of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). The most dramatic liberalization of voter registration procedures in American history coincided with not only the lowest level of turnout since 1924, but with the largest single four-year decline since 1920. The theory that registration barriers are the chief cause of the gap between turnout rates of the U.S. and other developed democracies suffered a devastating blow, as turnout in North Dakota—where voters aren't even required to register—was a mere 56% of the voting-age population in 1996.

Moreover, the turnout decline was heavily concentrated among “electorally disadvantaged” groups, particularly the young and residentially mobile, the very groups that reform activists expected would be the primary beneficiaries of easier registration. In fact, registration of licensed drivers—the key “motor voter” provision of NVRA—was originally conceived in 1975 by Michigan's then-secretary of state, Richard Austin, as a means of facilitating registration for the young and recent movers.