American Experiment (69 page)

How and why Americans shaped a national party system—how they framed their second, or “people’s,” constitution—is one of the most complex and perplexing developments in American history. The storyteller would surely prefer to recount the wonderful tale of the great men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 and struck off their constitution in one glorious summer than to follow the labyrinthine process by which little-known men built parties in many places over a long period of time. Then, too, historians disagree about the nature of this party building, even though—or perhaps because—exceptionally talented scholars have pursued their historical studies in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian period of party formation. They differ over basic questions of causation—whether the direction and shape that parties took during the first fifty years of the national existence was a product mainly of ideological forces, economic factors, intellectual effort, political calculation, institutional changes, chance, or interplay among some or all of these variables.

In exploring these causes it would be well to keep in mind that no economic development or institutional change or “great idea” in itself directly builds a political party. Transportation improvements, for example, helped make it easier for widely dispersed men to come together in party conventions, but no improved stagecoach or locomotive built parties. Party “as such is a product of human ingenuity and not simply a natural growth,” in William Chambers’ words. “It must be built by the efforts of skilled political craftsmen, including major leaders at the center and hundreds or thousands of lesser leaders in outlying localities, who must at least know that they are devising co-ordinated means to their immediate ends, although they may not be wholly aware of the fact that they are shaping a party in the process.” Those who built parties were
neither the celebrities of the age nor local nobodies; party did not emerge as a result of mass action at the grass roots. Parties were formed by leaders experimenting with new ways of gaining office and power.

The first parties were largely networks of leaders, mostly notables. Born and bred in the old politics of colonial days, the political leaders of the 1790s still operated in a system of deference to established notables, of family “connections” and influence, of limited participation by “average” farmers, workers, and clerks, even less involvement by women, and none at all by black slaves and white paupers. How was it that leaders who embodied and personified the politics of elitism and deference could themselves be instruments for change? The answer lay in sharply growing issue conflicts that raised the political consciousness of millions of Americans. As long as Americans were broadly agreed about national policy, as they were during most of Washington’s presidential years, political competition was muted. Strong sentiments for or against Jefferson and Adams, and the burning issues over relations with the French and the British—issues that evoked powerful feelings and memories and loyalties—acted as catalysts cutting across regional and local attachments. The national Federalist and Republican parties were born out of this kind of conflict, which took on a new intensity with the War of 1812.

During this period Americans had national parties but not a national party system. Presidents, senators, and representatives typically acted and talked like good Federalists or good Republicans. The press was highly partisan. Congressional Republicans, at least, were well organized in their caucus. A few states had developed party organizations. But all this did not make a system: Parties were not generally seen as legitimate. Party leaders in office did not recognize the legitimacy of opposition parties. Party organization in most states was rudimentary. While many activists were highly partisan, settled party conviction and commitment among the electorate were limited to a few places in a few states. One could detect a “party in office,” in short, but only a feeble party organization nationwide, and limited party affiliation among the electorate. And linkages that might make for strong and persisting structures—integrated national-state-local machinery, unified electoral and organizational effort, strong and stable party memberships—were rudimentary or absent.

As dramatic conflict over national issues declined following the War of l812, so did the central role of national party leadership and organization. With the Federalist party almost dead outside New England, and with the Republican party reduced to state and factional in-fighting, Monroe’s presidency was a time of heightened factional dispute but blurred party division. Party was left in the care, sometimes benign and sometimes casual,
of the states. National party unity and organization fell into disarray.

The congressional caucus for nominating Presidents and Vice-Presidents—potentially the most powerful agency of national party power—both fostered and reflected this disarray. The caucus had started as early as 1792, when some Republican congressmen, after taking soundings in the states, met in Philadelphia to choose George Clinton to run against Vice-President John Adams. The Republicans held no caucus in 1796 because Jefferson was the unquestioned choice. Four years later, forty-three senators and representatives meeting at Marache’s boardinghouse again agreed that Jefferson was pre-eminently their man, and formally endorsed Burr for Vice-President. The congressional caucus of 1804 routinely endorsed President Jefferson and substituted Clinton for Burr. In l808, when the Republicans chose Madison overwhelmingly over Monroe, at least the caucus had a decision to make, but in 1812 its re-endorsement of Madison was unanimous. The 1816 caucus was actually a contest, with Monroe besting Crawford in a relatively close vote, but hardly a fifth of the members even showed up at the 1820 caucus. In 1824 the caucus was unable to perform its most essential function of uniting support behind one candidate. The Federalists had had even less success with a congressional caucus.

The reign of “King Caucus” had been brief, its rule weak. It died during the period of consensual, partyless government under Monroe. Only a pervasive conflict could create the conditions of raised political consciousness within which party competition could flourish, and that conflict came with the nomination and election of Adams in 1824, as a result of intense opposition to him, the apparent deal against Jackson, and the growing and divisive influence of Old Hickory first as candidate, then as the tribune of the common man, and finally as the opponent of Biddle.

In what institutional form this rising political conflict and election competition would be expressed became the crucial question in the 1830s. The nation’s politics might have reverted to the “King of the Rock,” “Winner Take All” politics of earlier years—the elitist politics of faction, personal following, closed caucus, the politics of family influence, social class, economic elitism. Profound changes in the foundations of American politics, however, made such a reversion impossible. The egalitarian issues posed, by Jefferson and Jackson had permeated the electorate and immensely raised its political consciousness. The widening of the suffrage in the states, along with other measures of democratization, had expanded the number and broadened the class membership of voters that candidates had to attract. The very feel and aroma of politics had changed, with the new hucksterism and vote cadging, the decline of the gentry and of deference,
the rise of the political professional who made politics his life and his living, the proliferation of patronage jobs, the profusion of small caucuses, conventions, election rallies, political parades and picnics and paraphernalia. All this amounted, in Richard McCormick’s words, to a “hidden revolution” in the political environment.

This hidden revolution was intellectual, too—an upheaval in leaders’ concepts of the role of faction, interest, party. The framers of the “Constitution” abhorred the ideas underlying the second, or people’s, constitution—government by parties—as tending toward faction, turbulence, selfishness. Consciously or not, they wrote a constitution that would pulverize and crush parties. Even in founding the Republican party Jefferson would not recognize the legitimacy of party
opposition.
It took hundreds of men, working at the state and local grass-roots of politics, to repudiate the anti-party doctrine of the Framers, whom they otherwise revered. They built their state and local parties against the prevailing elitist thought of the day.

One man stood out in his conceptualizing of the “party constitution”—Martin Van Buren. The “red fox of Kinderhook” may have been sly and slippery in some of his political machinations, but intellectually he was a hedgehog, in Archilochus’ terms as interpreted by Isaiah Berlin. Van Buren had one big idea, the concept of what party was and could be. Although lacking clear philosophical guidelines, he developed his ideas on a kind of ad hoc, day-to-day basis. In later years he fleshed out his views, just as the Framers did about the Constitution in their retirements, but as early as 1827 Van Buren was arguing that a general convention would be better than the congressional caucus to concentrate the anti-Adams vote. He maintained that a convention would lead to the “substantial reorganization of the Old Republican Party,” substitute “party principles” for “personal preference,” and strengthen Republicanism in New England and the Republican political coalition between North and South.

Ultimately Van Buren developed virtually an ideology of party as the essence of a democracy of liberty and virtue. In a most hedgehog-like fashion, he broadened his party concept in arguing that free competitive parties were essential to the public interest, inseparable from free government, necessary to prevent abuse of private power, and conducive to the moral discipline of institutional loyalty and personal self-restraint. He believed parties must pursue high principle as well as low patronage, must compete vigorously with one another, must generate a clash of platforms as well as personalities. Above all—the highest test of a believer in the second constitution—he not only accepted but welcomed the idea of a continuing, responsible, and legitimated opposition. If earlier the
“fundamental cause for the failure to create a national organization was intellectual,” in James Chase’s words, the critical factor in the later formation of a national party system was also conceptual and intellectual.

The creation of the presidential nominating convention provided the keystone for the party arch. Here again New York and other states had experimented with ways of moving party nominations out of the relatively small and unrepresentative legislative caucuses into conclaves of delegates chosen in state and local meetings. By the mid-1830s state conventions were well established in the central states and in Ohio and Kentucky; conventions for local nominations were widely employed in New England; they were, however, slow to be established in most of the South. After the Anti-Masons experimented with the first presidential nominating convention in 1831, in Baltimore, the Democrats staged their own the next year in the same city for the renomination of President Jackson, and for the nomination—appropriately—of Martin Van Buren for Vice-President. This convention pioneered in adopting the two-thirds rule for nominations, and in agreeing to a non-binding unit rule that allowed a majority of delegates from a state to cast the entire vote of the state. These rules, little considered at the time, would become critical to the Democrats in later years. The Whigs, emerging out of the National Republican party that had held its national convention in 1831, were forced to adopt the presidential convention as a permanent fixture.

So by the late 1830s Americans had a party
system.
National, state, and local parties were linked through a pyramid of local, county, and congressional-district conventions sending delegates to state and national conventions. Party consciousness was high among both party leaders and party followers. Strong cadres of leaders developed at every level. Party competition was intense and strengthened partisan feeling on both sides. The parties were well balanced against each other not only nationally but also in most of the states—a degree of national political unity that would not be seen again for four decades. The linkage within and between parties was almost complete.

On the surface, at least, the two parties looked splendid, with their national conventions topping the pyramids of state, county, and local committees and caucuses and conventions, their sonorous platforms rhetorically thwacking their foes hip and thigh, their national and state leaders skilled in the arts of intra-party negotiation and compromise, their robust local activity full of parades and picnics and speechifying and occasional fisticuffs and barroom brawls. Behind the façade lay certain weaknesses, existing and potential.

It was not wholly clear by the end of the 1830s what the parties were,
what they were for and against. More than ever the Democrats claimed to be the “party of the common man,” despite the fact that it did not engage with the average woman or the blacks or the really poor; nor did these people engage with the Democrats. The Jacksonians had made some effort to appeal to the expanding wage-earning class, especially in Van Buren’s executive order establishing a shorter working day on federal public projects, but the Democracy was still largely an agrarian party. The Whigs, an unstable coalition of old Federalists, Anti-Masons, mercantile and industrial elements, and a congeries of other groupings, found it much easier to denounce Jackson’s executive “usurpation” and Van Buren’s partisanship than to develop a positive program of their own. Both parties had weaknesses at their foundations. Political change and realignment had occurred so quickly during the 1830s that large numbers of Americans were left in a void between or outside the two major parties. State and local parties lacked organization and vigor in a number of areas, especially in the South and parts of the West.

The main weakness of party as the second, or “people’s,” constitution lay in its awkward embrace with the first. The organized two-party system of the late 1830s was potentially strong enough to be a vehicle for popular majority rule. Theoretically a winning majority party takes over the government and rules until at least the next election. But the Constitution was craftily designed to thwart majority rule. Winners of a presidential election could take over the White House but not necessarily the Congress. Representatives were elected out of their own, often independent constituencies; only a third of the senators were even chosen in the same year as the President. The Supreme Court, as John Marshall had demonstrated, lay beyond the reach of transient popular majorities. Even if one party achieved the feat of winning control of the whole federal government, a profusion of states, counties, cities, and towns had their own counterbalancing and conflicting constituencies.