The triumph and its limits

The state of courts and parties emerged triumphant from the politics of Reconstruction. As the extraordinary institutional machinery of the Civil War was swept aside, American government resumed its normal mode of operations. This was not a retreat to antebellum solutions to the problems of governing in America but a further development of those solutions. The late nineteenth century saw the clearest articulation of the early American state as a distinctive organization. At the same time, however, major changes in the society and the economy cast serious doubt on the relevance of that organization.

The demise of the Radical Republican crusade and the resurgence of the Democrats in 1874 ushered in an extended period of intense electoral competition in American politics. The major parties organized the electorate into two highly mobilized and evenly divided political armies contending for the spoils of the federal government. Between 1874 and 1896, national campaigns were fought to virtual dead-heat conclusions, and the parties divided control of the national government in all but three separate two-year intervals. The nature of electoral competition in these years further extended the hegemony of party concerns over governmental operations. More than ever before, the calculations of those in power were wedded to the imperatives of maintaining efficiency in state and local political machines and of forging a national coalition from these machines for presidential elections.

The full flowering of the American party state in this period of radical environmental change strained relations between state and society. Parties continued to operate the national government for the broad dispersion of particularistic benefits downward to the localities at a time in which social interactions and economic conflicts were becoming increasingly national in scope.