The Primacy of Party Reasserted

Abstract

Two years ago Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin disputed idea that Americans between 1840 and 1860 were preoccupied by or actively engaged in partisan political activity.' Now, in separate essays, Ronald P. Formisano and Mark VossHubbard question continued validity and utility of related notion, most closely associated with Richard L. McCormick and Joel H. Silbey, that from approximately 1835 to 1900, so-called party period of American political history, political parties, especially major parties, dominated political life by inculcating voters and officeholders with partisan values, expectations, and habits.2 McCormick and Silbey characterized this period in similar ways because both sought less to account for political changes within that period than to contrast it as a whole with earlier and, especially, later political eras. Nonetheless, there were important distinctions in their accounts. The most relevant to present critiques concerns making or governance. Echoing his important study of roll-call voting in Congress between 1841 and 1852, The Shrine of Party, Silbey insisted that policy making within legislative chambers . . . was essentially and always partisan, and by this, clearly, Silbey encompassed more than economic policy.3 In contrast, McCormick, since his days as a graduate student at Yale University, had been interested in connection between popular voting and making. Thus in 1979 essay in which he coined phrase the party period, McCormick also alleged that distributive making was dominant form of governance during that era. He credited it with allowing, indeed strengthening, hold that political parties exercised over public life of era. In twentieth century, in contrast, shift from