V. O. Key’s proposition that one-party politics in the American states has been destructive of both the dominant and minor parties in such systems fits California’s political experience very nicely. From 1893 to 1932 California Republicans captured almost all statewide offices and they maintained huge legislative majorities. Furthermore, both parties entered the 1930’s with little institutionalized capacity for performing the basic nominating and campaigning functions. It appears, therefore, that the notorious weakness of political parties in California could be accounted for in terms of Key’s theories of the debilitating impact of one-party politics. Understandably, however, this line of speculation raises questions in the minds of those students of California politics who are aware of the several studies that particularly credit crossfiling for the weakness of California parties at mid-century. Consequently, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate the relationship between intensity of interparty competition and crossfiling in California politics during the first half of this century. In establishing this relationship, this study first shows that crossfiling did not become a general practice until after the end of California’s one-party era (1893-1932). The analysis then goes on to demonstrate that, during the one-party 1920’s, crossfiling occurred more often in the relatively competitive areas of the state than in the most profoundly one-party areas. Finally, a deviant case analysis develops the correspondence between the incidence of successful crossfiling (winning both parties’ primaries) and the relative competitiveness of types of offices.

During the twenty year period of 1945 through 1965 perhaps the most dramatic example of presumed presidential opinion leadership is President Truman’s speech proclaiming what came to be called the Truman Doctrine. Delivered to Congress and broadcast across the nation on radio, the speech has been widely acknowledged as establishing the temper of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Historians whether sympathetic or critical of the Truman administration agree that this speech more than any other single event marks the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, its implications for the future did not require hindsight available only to historians. Immediately, contemporaries in Washington and abroad grasped that President Truman was advocating a fundamental change in the U.S. responsibility and posture toward the world.

In recent years, the gap between the traditional study of history and the concerns of modern social science has been bridged by a number of interdisciplinary minded scholars who have sought to undertake a more rigorous and theoretically relevant examination of the basic structural components of societies as they have changed over time. I Within this emergent field of socio-historical inquiry, it is possible to locate a growing body of quantitatively oriented research designed to relate various forms of social dissent and political unrest to the conditions and dislocations engendered by the processes of urban-industrial development. In particular, patterns in various types of social and political pathologies (e.g., crime, social disorganization, popular disturbances, etc.) have come to represent important foci for quantitative historical research, especially in the industrializing contexts of 19th-century Europe, where ample documentation of a statistical nature concerning many of these phenomena has existed for well over a century and a half.

The frequent association of memorable political leaders with formative political events is the source of the classic dispute over whether great men make great events or whether the events are themselves the conditions of great leadership. The long controversy over the role of leaders in history has often fastened on periods of fundamental political change—the creation of new states, major wars, changes of regime. Washington, Bolivar, Cavour, and Nehru are studied as fathers of their countries, Lincoln and Churchill as great war leaders, Lenin and Mao as architects of major revolutions, Ataturk and DeGaulle as founders of new regimes.

We are generally aware that such men, regardless of their personal distinctions, might well have escaped the notice of historians, had they lived in normal times; indeed each passed substantial periods of his life as a minor politician, local military commander, occasional writer, or unheeded prophet. We are also aware that the place of such men in history is the product of the interpretation—and reinterpretation—of succeeding generations of historians. On the other hand, we know relatively little about how these men were viewed by their leading contemporaries, less about the attitudes toward them of the general publics of their time, and almost nothing about the development of public attitudes toward them during their lifetime. Only with respect to the political leaders of our own time do we begin to have data which permits us to investigate the development of public perceptions of great leaders. In this way we can fill the gap in our knowledge of the complex and reciprocal relationship between historic political leaders and the members of their political communities who, in following them, gave them the possibility of shaping history.

The principal question we now face as a discipline may well be, “Can history recapture its romantic past?” The roots of that tradition are well known, extending back to Bancroft, Motley and Parkman, who came to the practice of history principally as men of letters. Avid readers of Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, these first American historians saw in their craft the obligation not to analyze history, but to recreate it, thus forging what Richard Hofstadter called their “imaginative relation with the past.…What they worked for was experience not philosophy… the moral drama of history was told in pictorial terms. The effort at historical discipline… rested upon the insatiable quest for the right, the relevant detail.…The technical… side of the work of these men came primarily to this: facts were valued not so much as ‘evidence,’ as proofs in some analytic scheme, but as veracious details for the recreation of some experience.”