America at the Ballot Box: Elections and Political History

352 Pages·2015·4.311 MB·English

by  Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer (eds.)

America at the Ballot Box
POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA
Series Editors
Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore,
Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze po liti cal and
social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to
the present, including ideas about the ways people have
sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the
language and institutions of politics at all levels— local,
national, and transnational. The series is motivated by
a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S.
history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social
movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and
on intellectual history and pop u lar culture.
AMERICA
AT THE
BALLOT BOX
Elections and Po liti cal History
Edited by
Gareth Davies
and
Julian E. Zelizer
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America
on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Cataloging- in- Publication record is available from the
Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-4719-0
To the pioneers of the fields of Policy
History and American Political Development
who inspired our generation of political historians
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer 1
1. Th e Devolution of 1800: Jeff erson’s Election
and the Birth of American Government
Jeff rey L. Pasley 13
2. Th e Bombshell of 1844
Sean Wilentz 36
3. Beyond the Realignment Synthesis: Th e 1860
Election Reconsidered
Adam I. P. Smith 59
4. Markets, Morality, and the Media: Th e Election of 1884
and the Iconography of Progressivism
Richard R. John 75
5. Anglophobia in Nineteenth- Century Elections,
Politics, and Diplomacy
Jay Sexton 98
6. Th e War and Peace Election of 1916
Elizabeth Sanders 118
7. Farewell to the “Smoke- Filled Room”: Parties,
Interests, Public Relations, and the Election of 1924
Bruce J. Schulman 139
viii Contents
8. Th e New Deal in 1940: Embattled or Entrenched?
Gareth Davies 153
9. “Why Don’t You Just Get an Actor?”:
Th e Advent of Tele vi sion in the 1952 Campaign
Kevin M. Kruse 167
10. Giving Liberalism a Window: Th e 1964 Election
Julian E. Zelizer 184
11. Th e 1980 Election: Victory Without Success
Meg Jacobs 196
12. Beyond the Water’s Edge: Foreign Policy
and Electoral Politics
Andrew Preston 219
13. From Corn to Caviar: Th e Evolution of Presidential
Election Communications, 1960–2000
Brian Balogh 238 P B SSeecc
Notes 265
List of Contributors 319
Index 323
Ac know ledg ments 343
Introduction
Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer
Mark Twain once quipped that “if we would learn what the human race re-
ally is at bottom, we need only observe it in election time.” “If voting made
any diff erence,” he wrote elsewhere, “they wouldn’t let us do it.”1 Such sar-
donic refl ections aside, elections are, and have always been, the lifeblood of
American democracy, embodying the bedrock assumption of American po-
liti cal culture that legitimate rule derives from the consent of the governed.
Sometimes, when diff erences between candidates have been modest or dur-
ing uncommonly quiet times, elections have been notable primarily for exu-
berant po liti cal theater and overheated invective. Other contests, though, have
featured passionate debate about the character and destiny of the Republic.
Either way, by the 1820s presidential elections had become a mass- participation
aff air; at a time when British elections, if oft en raucous and fi ercely contested,
were fi rmly an elite sport, the United States was already a mass polity, and
nothing distinguished it more dramatically from the Old World than its ap-
proach to elections.2 Early on in his 1842 American tour, steaming out of Bos-
ton, Charles Dickens remarked that “politics are much discussed” on an
American train, that “party feeling runs very high,” and that “directly the
acrimony of one election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins, which
is an unspeakable comfort to all strong politicians and lovers of their coun-
try; that is to say, to ninety- nine men and boys out of every ninety- nine and
a quarter.”3
Th e early centrality of elections to American politics— their pervasiveness—
was also a function of a less obvious singularity, namely, their metronomic
regularity (quadrennial for the presidency, biennial for the House of Repre-
sentatives, similarly fi xed in the case of state contests). Presidents and legis-
lators alike have had to keep a constant eye on the electorate for fear of losing
offi ce, and it is not just in recent years that reelection has loomed as an early