The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History

Chapter 1

THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT

NEW DIRECTIONS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY

MEG JACOBS AND JULIAN E. ZELIZER

WE ARE NOW in a moment when American political history is flourishing. The contributors in this volume, who are all part of this exciting revitalization of the field, focus on two central questions. The first concerns the relationship of citizens to the government in a context where suspicion of a powerful state has been the overriding theme of American political culture. The second addresses the continually evolving mechanisms of democratic participation. As this volume shows, democracy in America has come alive in political contests over these two issues. Most modern democratic polities have confronted the need to legitimate the exercise of political authority, but that fact poses particular problems in the United States, where a fear of centralized power has left a distinctive mark on American political culture and institutional arrangements. From the beginning, Americans have fought protracted struggles over the exercise of strong central state authority. Given the institutional and cultural manifestations of antistatism, constructing a strong federal government was never easy. At the same time, the basic questions of who would be granted representation and how remained up for grabs. Despite the fact that America is the oldest democracy in the world, the means and extent of participation have never been settled. Although the founders articulated clear ideas about what representative government should be, the forms political power would take were constantly contested and transformed. The mechanisms linking enfranchised citizens to political leaders and the right to representation remained fluid. In essays that go from the founding through the late twentieth century, the authors offer a fresh historical examination of the political problems posed by democratic government and their complex resolutions.

Antistatism has operated as a powerful force in the history of American democracy. Having a long Anglo-American tradition, antistatism became concrete and institutionalized in the United States in battles over slavery, the rise of industrialized capitalism, and the centralizing and standardizing impulses of the Progressive-New Deal moment. As these essays explore, its multiple manifestations include the endurance of fragmented and locally based political institutions, a devotion to rigid constitutionalism, a reliance on political patronage over bureaucratic administration, the fear of interest groups corrupting politicians, a hostility to federal taxation, and more. Antistatism derives its strength in part because it has taken on so many different forms. Yet this book is not a tale about how a multifaceted antistatism prevented the growth of the federal government in America. Rather, many of the authors show how antistatism shaped the structure of the federal government in particular ways. The result was not simply a state that was weak by European standards, although this was one effect in many areas of public life, but a state that commanded significant political strength in numerous policy domains and one that substantially influenced American life. Furthermore, the authors suggest that the American state did not develop in a linear fashion. This is not a story of a nation that starts with no federal government and ends the twentieth century with a strong federal government. Rather, the pattern of state growth in America was one of fits and starts.

The authors also explore the changing meaning and mechanisms of representative government. The essays consider the relationship of political elites to the voting public, the political and voluntary institutions through which Americans gained their political standing, and mediating institutions that connected citizens to elected officials. Voluntary associations, political parties, interest groups, and other institutionalized forms of political representation have helped government actors enlarge the government that antistatism kept small. Throughout, fundamental questions of citizenship have served as an animating force of American democracy.

By exploring how struggles over the role of the central state and the character of representative democracy shaped public life, the work in this volume reveals a revitalization of American political history well under way with exciting possibilities for the future. The essays examine pivotal moments and manifestations of the challenge to translate democratic preferences into public policy. In tackling central questions about the American democratic experiment, the contributors all strive to integrate institutions, culture, and society into fresh accounts of the nation's political past, starting with the founding. As historians, we focus on specific times and places and ground our analysis in narratives. Influenced by two new approaches to political history that have arisen since the 1960s--the new institutionalism as well as social and cultural political history (which we label sociocultural political history)--we take seriously the interplay between specific contingent factors and large structural forces. Integrating an institutional analysis with the study of social groups, we document the precise and changing relationships between state and society that have profoundly influenced democratic politics for over two hundred years.

RECONCEIVING AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY

In the last three decades, scholars working across disciplinary boundaries and subfields have developed exciting new approaches to studying America's public life, polity, and the exercise of political power.1 Despite the professional decline of political history since the 1960s,2 warnings about the intellectual death of the field were, in retrospect, greatly exaggerated. Historians, along with colleagues in political science, economics, and sociology, fundamentally reconceptualized American political history. This section focuses on the emergence of two important methodological approaches to political history--the new institutionalism (which is composed of the subfields of the organizational synthesis, policy history, and American Political Development) and sociocultural political history--to understand the value of each and the opportunities created by bringing them together.

In the turbulent 1960s, a generation of scholars developed a stinging critique of political history as it had been practiced. Amid struggles over civil rights and Vietnam, the New Left criticized the liberal view of American history, which saw little of the social conflict that beset European nations. The liberal view--a depiction of a shared ideological consensus that revolved around individualism and property rights--left little room to account for ongoing battles over race relations and social class. Political historians, the new generation said, had falsely presented a handful of political elites, particularly presidents, as embodiments of a progressive national experience. Moreover, the cycle of the presidential synthesis, in the minds of these critics, did not accurately capture the evolution of politics.3 Younger historians, who came of age in an era when college students railed against President Lyndon Johnson and his fellow Democratic leaders, also doubted an older generation of progressive historians who believed that the expansion of the federal government had stemmed from a desire to serve "the people," resulting in their triumph over vested interests. They were convinced by a group of maverick historians in this decade who said that liberalism had been an ideology that serviced big corporations, which dominated twentieth-century government despite its democratic rhetoric.4 Those critiques led to two seemingly divergent responses. Within the historical discipline, a social and cultural history revolution took place that pushed scholars to broaden their canvas to emphasize the study of American history from the "bottom up" and at the local level, turning to questions such as class formation, gender relations, and cultural consciousness. At the same time, other scholars, in history and in political science, also broadened their inquiries, but rather than studying social groups, they looked at how institutional forces shaped and limited political development and public policy evolution.

Reacting against the liberal, president-centered history of midcentury, new institutionalists shifted their focus to the structure of American government and its impact on public policy.5 Much of the scholarship started with the "organizational synthesis" in the 1960s and 1970s, an analysis that saw the emergence of large-scale national institutions, including the corporation, professions, and administrative state between 1880 and 1920 as the most significant development in modern American history. Seeking to understand American politics, scholars such as Samuel Hays, Ellis Hawley, Morton Keller, Robert Wiebe, Barry Karl, and Louis Galambos were more interested in the history of bureaucracies, commissions, and expert staffs than in presidents or cycles of reform.6 For them, the central dividing line in American politics was not liberalism versus conservatism but, rather, what they saw as nineteenth-century localism and parochialism versus twentieth-century nationalization and efficiency. Consciously downplaying the differences between presidential administrations and personalities, their work emphasized the long-term structural shifts that shaped conditions within which all political actors operated. For instance, the organizational synthesis showed how much of the New Deal reflected policies and institutions that had been created well before the 1930s. Their research was rooted in the functionalist outlook that took its inspiration from Parsonian sociology and prevailed in the social sciences at the time.7

The organizational synthesis inspired policy historians to analyze contemporary political debates and to break free from president-centered narratives. Policy historians opened up the arena of politics to include the unwieldy world of policy experts, think tanks, lobbyists, academics, bureaucrats, staffers, and congressional committees that shaped the workings of government in Washington and state capitals. They were joined by those working in the new field of public history, whose earliest practitioners were deeply committed to tackling policy problems (in the 1980s and 1990s, the field would reorient itself around museums, historical tourist attractions, and computer technology). Based on a course that they taught at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May published a widely popular book, used to teach policy and public administration students, that outlined the practical uses of historical analysis to policy makers.8 Although policy historians never formed an association, through their journal, monographs, and conferences they created an innovative interpretation of political history that incorporated a broad range of actors.9 In 1989, Donald Critchlow and Peri Arnold launched the Journal of Policy History as the main forum for this scholarship.