Study of the popular response to the political parties and candidates of nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States history has made significant progress since the 1950s. Samuel Lubell in The Future of American Politics was certainly one of the first to show historians that much understanding about the voting behavior of past generations could be gleaned from an imaginative examination of county and precinct election data. Lee Benson, in his now classic essay on “Research Methods in American Political Historiography,” persuasively demonstrated to many that systematic analysis of quantitative data could improve the accuracy and quality of generalizations about past voting practices. Benson’s subsequent study of early nineteenth-century New York politics, The Concept ofJacksonian Democracy, which quickly became a model of excellence in research design and methods, concluded, among other things, that “socioeconomic cleavages” were less important in explaining how New Yorkers voted after about 1820 than were “ethnic and religious” factors. At least in part inspired by Benson’s findings in New York, other historians pursued the study of the relationship between voting behavior and ethnocultural and religious factors by examining, for example, political behavior in Michigan during the Jacksonian era, the Midwest and Northeast during the 1890s, and Chicago in the early twentieth century. While the emphasis upon the importance of ethnocultural and religious factors in voting has engendered some criticism and dissent, it seems fair to conclude that this approach to the study of the voting process has produced significant work that has substantially influenced interpretations of American political history.

The purpose of this article is to add critical expansion and empirical correction to the thinking about critical elections in American history in general and the New Deal realignment in particular. There will be first a discussion of critical realignment theory, in which some of its ambiguities with regard to the relationship of voting turnout to realignment will be explored. Next, some propositions derived from this literature will be tested in an effort to correct the theory and eliminate the ambiguities. Aggregate data from presidential and congressional elections, 1912-1940, in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the city of Pittsburgh, will be employed in this effort.

In general, it will be argued that, when fluctuations in turnout are taken into account, the electoral changes preceding 1940 are at least as correctly described by the term “mobilization” as by the term “realignment.” Finally, some observations will be offered on the future of critical election theory.

Americans struggled with paranoia in the early 1950s. Many believed the most extravagant charges about the presence of Communists in the United States. Others had no firm convictions about the threat of Communism but tolerated an unrestricted search for disloyal citizens. To a later generation, there seems to have been little connection between the degree of danger and the public’s alarm.

A recent attempt to explain this national paranoia holds the Truman administration responsible for creating an unreasoning anti-Communist mentality. According to Athan Theoharis and Richard Freeland, members of the Truman administration exaggerated the dangers of international and domestic Communism. The public heard that the United States was “imminently threatened by a massive ideologically based assault upon everything Americans valued.” The administration’s excessively moralistic rhetoric portrayed the Soviet Union as the “Anti-Christ.” This strident anti-Communism created a public mood that Joseph McCarthy and others exploited for their political advantage. Thus, one of McCarthy’s major victims—the Truman administration—created the preconditions for McCarthyism.

Some eight or nine years ago, David Nixon—a political scientist from Penn State University—was struck by the open dumping of industrial wastes into Pittsburgh’s rivers. Research on the topic indicated that under terms of the River and Harbor Refuse Act of 1899, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintained responsibility for issuing permits to private concerns for the discharge of wastes into the nation’s waterways. The Act had also been successfully employed by the Justice Department in prosecuting a handful of past offenders. When the Corps’ district office in Pittsburgh denied any knowledge about such permits, David and a biologist friend began taking water samples from the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. Subsequent chemical analyses of more than 400 samples verified the polluted condition of the stream caused by certain industrial sources. Upon taking his evidence to the district U.S. Attorney’s office, David Nixon persuaded Richard Thornburgh to file charges which were upheld by the federal district court in 1971—although final resolution would not come until years later. The suit eventually involved the Pennsylvania Chemical Corporation, U.S. Steel, Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, and Jones & Laughlin Steel, but David Nixon’s goal was to induce the government to enforce clear violations of existing law. In that regard, President Richard Nixon revived enforcement of the 1899 Refuse Act by Executive Order in December, 1971, and the “permit program” became the basis of enforcement for compliance with the Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. For more than 20 years prior to 1971, federal efforts to abate water pollution struggled to find some means to enforce compliance and in the process expended well over a billion dollars, without any apparent knowledge of the 1899 law.

Projecting economic variables is a difficult art but one which statesmen practice with relish. In parliamentary democracies it is a rare candidate who does not forecast that under his tenure the pots of the electors will be graced with chickens. A more sober, careful kind of forecasting is required in conducing foreign affairs. Sound judgments about tariffs, subsidies, military and naval force levels, and even alliances depend upon prior analysis of the effects of each such policy over some specified length of run. Although one suspects that some kind of forecasting was always a part of statecraft, industrialization in Western Europe necessitated a change in the time frame of the predictions of statesmen. As the pace of economic change quickened, the rate at which the economic and military potential of states might change also accelerated. For many Englishmen observing the growth of the German economy during the 1890s, learning this lesson produced more than a little anxiety. So great was the attention which the British gave to German economic growth that predictions of Germany’s overtaking of Britain came to be a staple item of British politics in the two decades before World War One. Should these predictions have been taken seriously by contemporaries? The best answer is that given by the outcome of the pre-1914 Anglo-German rivalry: Germany did not overtake Britain in that era. Because war intervened, we cannot know the outcome of continued peaceful economic rivalry, but by using a relatively new statistical method we can chart the course this rivalry may well have followed had the peace been kept in 1914. Our projections suggest a sequence of events that never occurred but may nonetheless be used as a guide in evaluating the views and expectations of contemporaries.

In his recent essay in this journal on my writings on the “egalitarian myth,” Robert E. Gallman is kind enough to express admiration for “the scope of Pessen’s empirical undertaking, the skill and ingenuity with which he carried it out, his learning, and his grasp of his materials.” If praise from any source is sweet, praise from so admired a scholar as Professor Gallman is doubly sweet. Yet, “one may doubt,” he continues, that I have “in fact dealt a death blow to the egalitarian hypothesis.” Criticism, while not nearly so pleasing, alas, is to be expected, particularly for work such as mine that challenges a most influential, durable, and still popular thesis and challenges it on the basis of admittedly partial data. Scholarly disagreement on important issues is of course inevitable. For, as Peter M. Blau and Otis D. Duncan have observed, even collaborators in a joint study will interpret their data differently. I have taken pen in hand and availed myself of the opportunity graciously afforded me by a managing editor of Social Science History to publish my “observations on Gallman’s essay,” not because that essay criticizes my work but because a number of its references to my work are misleading and inaccurate.