The Cultural Pattern of American Politics: The First Century (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS The Cultural Pattern ofAmerican Politics: The FirstCentury. By Robert Kelley. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. Pp. xiv, 368. $15.00.) Near the close of his new book, Robert Kelley tells usthat his purpose was "to examine the first century of American politics from the perspective" of what he calls "cultural history in order to see if the familiar story takes on a different aspect from this vantage point." He believes that "by shifting the angle of vision" to "ethnicity, religion, group relationships, myths, and images, lifestyles and ideology, we get a different picture of the American past" (p. 265). Indeed we do. The question historians and general readers will ask is not whether Kelley's book offers a new interpretation of the political history of the period he covers—roughly from the American Revolution through Reconstruction —but whether he presents his interpretation effectively, interestingly, persuasively. The answer, I fear, is negative. While this reviewer is unenthusiastic about the interpretation of American political history that has been offered by Lee Benson, Ronald Formisano, William Shade, Paul KIeppner, Richard Jensen, and die other exemplars of the ethnocultural approach on which Kelley so heavily depends, he also has no doubt tiiat a powerful and intellectually exciting book synthesizing their viewpoint can be written. The Cultural Pattern of American Politics unfortunately is not that book. Kelley is not bashful about the claims he makes for the new approach. Modern historians sensitive to the "cultural dimension" of American politics have given "depth, richness, and realism to a scene that," according to him, "was formerly flat and one-dimensional." As aresult of their work, "our traditional view of . . . American political parties has been rendered obsolete in practically all of its aspects." "The discovery of cultural politics . . . provides historians with a mode of explanation that is true to life in its real nature" (Pp. vi, vii, 13). Near the end of Part One he actually says that "within these opening chapters, much that is novel and complex has been presented" (p. 94) . Kelley would have been better advised to claim less and demonstrate more. For, as it is, the many deficiencies in his book only accentuate the gap between its promise and its performance. Kelley, who has recently written a comprehensive survey text of American history, has read widely in the modern secondary literature. But he has read very selectively and not widely or deeply enough to 279 280CIVIL WAR HISTORY prevent him from offering numerous generalizations and statements that are almost embarrassingly questionable, where they are not downright wrong. To speak, as does he, of a "malignity of affluence" in America after the Revolution is to betray ignorance of the findings to the contrary of James Henretta, Allan Kulikoff, James Lemon, Gary Nash, Alice H. Jones, and Richard J. Morriss, among others. Kelley's farm-loving Jefferson shows little resemblance to the enthusiastic sybarite portrayed by Dumas Malone. Kelley is in error on when the Whig party appeared or what happened to "federal moneys" after Jackson's veto of the bill rechartering the second Bank of the United States. On the bank war he appears to have relied on Peter Temin's glancing treatment rather than on Govan's, Catterall's, and Walter B. Smith's massive studies. (Kelley's bibliography, incidentally, credits Temin with the authorship in 1969 of a book with the strange title, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, andPolitics.) His discussion of die Southern Whigs is uncontaminated by die important disclosures on precisely that theme by Grady McWhiney, John V. Mering, or Thomas B. Alexander and his students, as his treatment of the Irish and German communities appears oblivious to the recent work done by Jay Dolan and Kathleen Conzen and earlier work by Handlin and Robert Ernst. Were Kelley more familiar with the relevant literature, whether by Rohrbough, L. D. White, Crenson, or Aronson on the civil service and corruption, the writings of contemporary wealthy bankers who adored the allegedly radical William M. Gouge's plans for free banking, or the recent publications by Soltow, Gavin Wright, Randolph Campbell, Richard Lowe, Robert Doherty, Craig Buettinger, and others on what Kelley describes as the midnineteenth -century possibility of "ever more abundance...