ROBERT MASON. The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan.

Abstract

Robert Mason's new book is an important contribution to a burgeoning literature on the modern history of the Republican Party. Like Michael Bowen, Vincent Cannato, Donald Critchlow, Geoffrey Kabaservice, and Timothy Thurber, Mason is especially interested in the tension between strongly conservative Republicans and more moderately conservative ones, and how that rift complicated the GOP's efforts to recover after the economic and electoral disasters of the Hoover presidency. There are, of course, different ways of going about analyzing those issues. Bowen focused on the competition between the Dewey and Taft forces from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, Cannato on travails of liberal Republicanism as exemplified by John V. Lindsay, Critchlow and Kabaservice on the rise of the New Right, and Thurber on splits within the GOP over the civil rights issue. Mason breaks new ground by covering a longer time period (from the late 1920s through the late 1980s) and by focusing on the GOP as a national political organization. Mason's analysis is strengthened by his sophisticated understanding that the national GOP was in fact a very decentralized organization, more a collection of state parties and other party-related entities than a truly unified institution.