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Presidential Elections in the American Political System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

The founders of the American republic did not, by and large, like political parties. Their whole political tradition taught them to identify “faction” and “party” with the irrational and disruptive tendencies in human life, with “passion” and “interest.” Against this they set constitutions, first the British Constitution, then the written American Constitution of 1787 as rational artifices or constructions designed to thwart “the spirit of party and faction.” Yet the very men who left their political testaments against party were also the creators of the first American party system, the heroes whose rites the parties celebrate down to the present.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1971

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References

1 Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthsman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robbins, , “‘Discordant Parties,’ A Study of the Acceptance of Party by Englishmen,” Political Science Quarterly, LXXIII (12, 1958), 505529CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar; Charles, Joseph, The Origins of the American Party System: Three Essays (Williamsburg, 1956)Google Scholar; Cunningham, Noble Jr, The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789–1801 (Chapel Hill, 1957)Google Scholar; Chambers, William Nisbet, Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776–1809 (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; The Federalist Papers, X.

2 Lowi, Theodore J., “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America,” in Chambers, William Nisbet and Burnham, Walter Dean, eds., The American Party System: Stages of Political Development (New York, 1967), p. 275Google Scholar; see also Grodzins, Morton, “American Political Parties and the American System,” Western Political Quarterly, XII (12, 1960), 974998Google Scholar.

3 Bone, Hugh A., Party Committees and National Politics (Seattle, 1958)Google Scholar and Cotter, Cornelius P. and Hennessy, Bernard, Politics without Power: The National Party Committees (New York, 1964)Google Scholar indicate unequivocally the extreme weakness of the modern national committee. For a similar picture of earlier national committees, see the author's forthcoming book, Grand Old Party, Political Structure in the Gilded Age, 1880–1896.

4 Lowi, , “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America,” pp. 274276Google Scholar; Burnham, Walter Dean, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review, LIV (03, 1965), 728CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Chambers, , Political Parties in a New Nation, pp. 4451Google Scholar, defines the latent functions of party. Seymour Martin Lipset has pointed out that Marxist analyses bypassed questions of party structure, but the point seems to apply as well to most interest group and voting behavior approaches. “Introduction” to Ostrogorski, M., Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (2 vols.; Chicago, 1964)Google Scholar, I, xv, footnote 11.

6 The modern study of political parties begins in political science with the publication of Duverger's, MauricePolitical Parties: Their Activity in the Modern State (London, 1954)Google Scholar which first appeared in French in 1951. See Lipset's introduction to Ostrogorski cited in footnote 5.

7 White, Theodore H., The Making of a President, 1964 (New York, 1965), p. 343Google Scholar.

8 McCorraick, Richard P., The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill, 1966), pp. 13, 17Google Scholar; LaPalombara, Joseph and Weiner, Myron, eds., Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 McGormick, , Second American Party System, p. 26Google Scholar.

10 The role of presidential elections in the politics of the 1790's has not yet been studied to measure its impact on the congressional party system which it transformed. See McCormick's, astute comments, Second American Party System, p. 21Google Scholar; Cunningham, , Jeffersonian Republicans, p. 115Google Scholar, suggests that the presidential contest meant a fundamental change in the party structure, but he does not elaborate. One possibility is that the presidential campaigns of the late nineties provided a link with the embryonic state party formations of the 1780's which congressional politics in the early nineties had not — or at least not to the same degree. For evidence of continuities in party structures between the 1780's and 1790's, see Main, Jackson Turner, The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 1763–1788 (Madison, 1967), esp. pp. 238241Google Scholar; Risjord, Norman K., “The Virginia Federalists,” Journal of Southern History, XXXIII (11, 1967), 486517CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, Alfred F., The Democratic-Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763–1797 (Chapel Hill, 1967)Google Scholar.

11 Fischer, David Hackett, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1965), esp. pp. 8790Google Scholar.

12 Cunningham, Noble Jr, The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party Operations, 1801–1809 (Chapel Hill, 1963), pp. 111112Google Scholar.

13 Goodman, Paul, “The First American Party System,” in , Chambers and , Burnham, American Political Systems, pp. 8789Google Scholar.

14 Burnham, , “Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” 728Google Scholar; McCormick, Richard P., “Political Development and the Second Party System,” in , Chambers and , Burnham, American Party Systems, pp. 102114Google Scholar.

15 William Nisbet Chambers, “Party Development and the American Mainstream,” in ibid., pp. 14–16.

16 A solid Southern and Border state vote would have given the Democrats 158 electoral votes to 162 for the Republicans. The actual totals were 80 Democratic and 214 Republican. Burnham, Walter Dean, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892 (Baltimore, 1955), p. 888Google Scholar.

17 For typical Democratic attitudes see Grover Cleveland to L. Q. C. Lamar, May 1, 1892, Papers of Grover Cleveland, Second Series, Library of Congress; Nevins, Allan, Abram S. Hewitt with Some Account of Peter Cooper (New York, 1935), pp. 561563Google Scholar. Grand Old Party was a familiar enough expression in the 1880's to have already been parodied into G.O.P. by the Democrats: Louisville, Courier-Journal, 05 5, 1887Google Scholar, quoted in Craigie, William A. and Hulbert, James R., A Dictionary of American. English on Historical Principles (Chicago, 1940), II, 1148Google Scholar. The phrase “grand old party” was common earlier for the Democrats, but in lower case and not as a specific reference. See the examples, ibid., II, 1163.

18 Official Proceedings of the Republican National Conventions, 1884–1888 (Minneapolis, 1903), p. 4 (1884)Google Scholar. Wording varied slightly from convention to convention, but the above is typical. See Proceedings of the First Three Republican National Conventions of 1856, 1860 and 1864 (Minneapolis, 1893), pp. 14, 83Google Scholar. The Supreme Court in 1932 officially ruled that political conventions are the constituent bodies of the parties for the unit over which they are convened. Nixon v. Condon, 286 US 84–85.

19 Nichols, Roy F., The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948), pp. 270276Google Scholar; Blake, Nelson M., William Mahone of Virginia, Soldier and Political Insurgent (Richmond, 1935), pp. 206212Google Scholar.

20 Chambers, , “Party Development,” pp. 3132Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., pp. 31–32.

22 There had been national conventions of a sort before the Antimasonic party, but they lacked the revival character that national conventions have maintained since. See Fischer, , Revolution of American Conservatism, pp. 8490Google Scholar. On the Antimasonic party, see McCarthy, Charles, “The Antimasonic Party,” in American Historical Association, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1902 (2 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1903), I, 365–574, esp. 398, 540544Google Scholar.

23 Herberg, Will, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, 1955)Google Scholar.

24 Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967), pp. 2–10, 44Google Scholar; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, Second Book, Chapter II, “Of Individualism in Democratic Countries.”

25 For a suggestive account of the weakness before Congress of the nineteenth century's strongest President, see Donald, David, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York, 1961), pp. 187208Google Scholar. See Lowi, , “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America,” pp. 238276Google Scholar for the distinction between constituting a government and governing. See also the same author's Toward Functionalism in Political Science: The Case of Innovation In Party Systems,” American Political Science Review, LVII (09, 1963), 570583Google Scholar.

26 Independent of party, that is, not of the groups being regulated.