Partisan Struggle Research Articles

The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois

Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois. By Gerald Leonard. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. x, 328. Cloth, $45.00.)In Invention of Party Politics, Gerald Leonard reinterprets origins of mass party competition by studying Jacksonian Illinois. Taking up a question posed initially by Richard Hofstadter in Idea of a Party System (1969), Leonard asks how mass parties emerged from antipartisan milieu of early national America. question is an important one. After all, mass parties came to dominate nineteenth-century politics, profoundly shaping history of country; and, as Hofstadter observed, they also facilitated operation of government under and established idea of a legitimate opposition.Leonard's explanation for emergence of parties, however, breaks categorically with Hofstadter. Hofstadter contended that a new class of professional politicians spurred rise of modern partisan politics in 182Os and 183Os. Not tethered to strong convictions or to unbending ideologies, these men organized assiduously and accepted idea of permanently competing with an opposition party. By contrast, Leonard argues that emergence of competing mass parties was an unintended consequence of a constitutional reform movement inaugurated by democratic at local and state level. Believing in existence of what they called the democracy, comprising those Americans who advocated political equality, majority rule, and states' rights, and believing that democracy should be sovereign, partyists responded to threat of neo-Hamiltonian loose constructionists, such as John Quincy Adams, by creating a party of democracy to protect federalism and popular sovereignty (5). According to Leonard, partyists paradoxically clung to sentiment because they did not recognize constitutional legitimacy of an aristocratic party, such as defunct Federalists, and they rejected idea that any party could represent a portion of sovereign democracy. Thus party of democracy-soon to be called Democratic Party-was antiparty party of Constitution (46).Antipartyists, unsurprisingly, objected to this justification for party, which seemed to be a hypocritical and unconstitutional assault on framers' attempt to establish a against parties. But antipartyists soon confronted necessity of organizing a party in order to fend off partyists; hence, they haltingly created Whig Party, and so began organized two-party competition. The origins of mass party competition, Leonard explains, thus lay in a battle not so much about social and economic positions for which Democratic and Whig parties are well known, but in a battle over question of party itself and its relationship to Constitution, neither party ever fully accepting constitutional legitimacy of other (14). With this argument, Leonard challenges not only Hofstadter, but also legion of scholars who have located origins of second Party System in social, cultural, or economic issues.Leonard makes his case by tracing how politicians justified expansion of partisan behavior in Illinois from 1817 to 1840. Although this focus may seem narrow, social and economic history of state is largely irrelevant to his argument because he maintains that Jacksonian politics in Illinois was essentially constitutional. While politicians necessarily addressed substantive policy issues, their central focus was the constitutional implications inherent in handling of each issue (117). Thus, to take one example, Leonard does not interpret campaign of 1840 as a debate over partisan economic policy, but rather as a partisan struggle to control historical interpretation of founding and development of American Constitution (176). …

Drafting Lyndon Johnson: The President's Secret Role in the 1968 Democratic Convention

This article argues that contrary to perceived wisdom, President Lyndon Johnson wanted to be drafted by the 1968 Democratic convention. Johnson and his aides covertly planned all aspects of the convention, from the amount of space allotted to each candidate to the speech that he would give at the convention on his birthday. Although Johnson withdrew from the race in March, he controlled the convention in order to allow himself the opportunity to run again. Ultimately, although his control of the contention enabled him to pass his platform, he was not drafted because neither the old party bosses nor the new forces emerging within the Democratic Party wanted Johnson as their nominee. Bolingbroke: Are you contented to resign the crown? Richard: Ay, no; no, ay: for I must nothing be. Therefore no, no, for I resign to thee. -Richard II 4.1.199-201 Accordingly, I shall not seek-and will not accept-the nomination of my party for another term as your president. When Lyndon Johnson spoke these words on March 31, 1968, he shocked both his friends and enemies by taking himself out of the bitter struggle for the Democratic nomination. Instead, he declared, he would rise above the petty partisan struggles engulfing the country: he would be a man above politics, disinterested in everything except the well-being of the nation. On April 1, the Washington Post editorialized that the president's personal sacrifice in the name of national unity ... entitles him to a very special place in the annals of American history (Califano 1991,270). Johnson could now work to solve the myriad and complex problems facing him without regard to his own political health. The entire nation, so overjoyed at the president's withdrawal statement, could relax. Johnson's career had ended. His decision-one that the whole world had head-was irrevocable. Or so they thought. While Johnson's withdrawal statement might have sounded unequivocal, it was not. Johnson orchestrated a secret plan to control the 1968 Democratic convention in order to keep his options open, including the possibility that the convention might draft him. From the White House, a nominally disinterested Johnson constructed an organization, opened up back channels of communication, manipulated other candidates, and ultimately tried to coordinate every detail of the convention. Johnson wanted to delay making a final decision about whether he would decide to be drafted until after the convention had begun. Despite his final decision not to attend the convention, he orchestrated a grand welcome there. Even though he had withdrawn from the race five months earlier, as the Democrats convened their convention in Chicago, Johnson wanted his party to draft him. Robert Dallek (1998) has recently argued that Johnson toyed with the idea of allowing himself to be drafted for the nomination after Robert Kennedy's death during the primary season. Because Dallek presents little evidence of how Johnson intended to be renominated, the Johnson of Dallek's book comes across as a person engaged merely in wishful thinking. Dallek chronicles Johnson's machinations about whether to reenter the political fray as half-hearted, lackluster, and without great thought. The truth, however, is far different. Johnson was able to respond to the ever-changing political atmosphere of 1968 because he kept his options open until the last possible second. His political apparatus let him reconsider the possibility of entering the presidential race until the Democratic convention itself. The depth of Johnson's plan and his continued ability to control events from behind the scenes show Johnson in a different light. Even in 1968, at the nadir of his presidency, Johnson remained the master politician. Even in defeat, he knew when to press his agenda, how to win battles over policy, and how to give himself the ability to reconsider his decision of March 31. Most startling of all, he did almost all of this work hidden from public view, with the pretense that he was above politics. …

The ‘civic religion’ of the Resistance in post-war Italy

SummaryThe problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.

Incident at Baranivka: German Reprisals and the Soviet Partisan Movement in Ukraine, October‐December 1941

Previous articleNext article No AccessIncident at Baranivka: German Reprisals and the Soviet Partisan Movement in Ukraine, October‐December 1941*Truman AndersonTruman AndersonLondon School of Economics Search for more articles by this author London School of EconomicsPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 71, Number 3September 1999 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/235290 Views: 102Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref © 1999 by The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jared McBride Contesting the Malyn Massacre. The Legacy of Inter-Ethnic Violence and the Second World War in Eastern Europe, Soudobé dějiny 24, no.44 (Dec 2017): 477–537.https://doi.org/10.51134/sod.2017.027 The Great Patriotic War and after, (Sep 2013): 122–146.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047746.007Waitman W. Beorn A Calculus of Complicity: The Wehrmacht , the Anti-Partisan War, and the Final Solution in White Russia, 1941–42, Central European History 44, no.22 (May 2011): 308–337.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938911000057Jeff Rutherford ‘One senses danger from all sides, especially from fanatical civilians’: The 121st Infantry Division and Partisan War, June 1941–April 1942, (Jan 2010): 58–79.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290488_3Waitman Beorn, Tim Cole, Simone Gigliotti, Alberto Giordano, Anna Holian, Paul B. Jaskot, Anne Kelly Knowles, Marc Masurovsky, Erik B. Steiner Geographies Of The Holocaust, Geographical Review 99, no.44 (Nov 2019): 563–574.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2009.tb00447.xBEN SHEPHERD THE CLEAN WEHRMACHT, THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION, AND BEYOND, The Historical Journal 52, no.22 (May 2009): 455–473.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X09007547Alexander Statiev Was Smuglianka a Lunatic or a Siguranţa 's Agent-Provocateur? Peculiarities of the Soviet Partisan Struggle in the Western Borderlands, Journal of Strategic Studies 31, no.55 (Aug 2008): 743–770.https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390802197860Edward B. Westermann Partners in Genocide: The German Police and the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, Journal of Strategic Studies 31, no.55 (Aug 2008): 771–796.https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390802197977Simon Wessely War stories: Invited commentary on… Documented combat exposure of US veterans seeking treatment for combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder, British Journal of Psychiatry 186, no.66 (Jan 2018): 473–475.https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.186.6.473

The management of urban services in the city of Buenos Aires

This paper reviews the changes in the management of urban services in Buenos Aires over the last 100 years and discusses their implications for the quality of service provision in recent decades and for the future. It identifies three distinct stages. The first, decentralized private management, was evident in the late nineteenth century when provision for infrastructure and services was of a quality comparable to cities in Europe at that time. But, over time, municipal regulation and control of private enterprises became instruments in the partisan struggle for power. A crisis in service provision and an increasingly interventionist government led to the second stage, centralized public sector management, but this created a growing gap between local users and federally controlled utilities. When this coincided with economic decline, it led to poorer quality services and increasing numbers of unserved inhabitants. The third stage, introduced in 1989, was the centralized private management model but this failed to address a weakness of the earlier models, namely the lack of political influence and representation for users. In addition, the companies responsible for service provision assumed no responsibility for those people who were unable to afford the prices they charged.

Changing with the times: the views of Bruce C. Vladeck. Interview by John K. Iglehart.

PROLOGUE: Bruce Vladeck has presided over the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) since May 1993, at the most politically perilous time in its twenty-year history. His initial “ challenge came in the early days of the administration, when President Bill Clinton brought to the White House an antipathy toward the agency formed around federal/state Medicaid battles he engaged in during his gubernatorial days in Arkansas. But Vladeck also steered HCFA through the acrimonious debate over health care reform, a partisan struggle over paring the budgets of Medicare and Medicaid, and, now, a major reorganization intended to better prepare the agency for the new imperatives of market-based insurance. Perhaps only his own agency has an adequate appreciation for the delicacy of his long-time balancing act and the instrumental role he has played as an intellectual architect of administration health policy and a close adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. In this interview, Vladeck touches on many of the issues he has dealt with at HCFA, an agency that finances more than one-third of all health care purchased in the United States. Vladeck's stewardship at HCFA is the second longest in the agency's history. A born and bred New Yorker who is destined to return there, Vladeck presided over the United Hospital Fund of New York for a decade before joining HCFA and also worked at The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (1982-1983). Vladeck holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and two graduate degrees (political science) from the University of Michigan.

Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996, xiv + 158 pages, $45.00 (cloth), $12.95 (paper).Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a Crow Creek Sioux Tribal member and Professor Emeritus of English and Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University, is well-known in academic and Native American circles as a forthright literary critic and proactive political commentator. Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner is an anthology of her more provocative and insightful critical essays from past three decades.Cook-Lynn's essays address a range of Native American Studies concerns -- from Indigenous philosophies, historical and contemporary realities, to literature, theory, criticism and appropriation. In addition to challenging Western paradigms and constructs of Native American experiences, she challenges Indigenous scholars to push beyond existing academic confines. Native American Studies reaches its 30th anniversary in 1998, and Cook-Lynn's work provides an overview of criticisms, pitfalls and challenges facing it. Most importantly, she forcefully distinguishes Native American Studies from conventional disciplines by reminding us why it emerged 29 years ago -- why our subjects, objectives, methods and theoretical developments make us different.One essential and distinct element in Native American Studies derived from Indigenous intellectual knowledge is the reality of race memory connection to land (p. 82). Since relationship between Indigenous peoples and land is inherently spiritual, it is imperative that Native American scholars maintain spiritual and ideological groundings in their own intellectual traditions. Further, since Indigenous intellectual traditions inform discourse, Native American scholars are most valuable and inspirational when proactively engaged in partisan struggles (p. 39).These essential criteria, often called grass-roots intellectualism, are evident in each essay. Cook-Lynn intimately places herself in her texts and grounds her work in best of both worlds -- her tribal tiospaye and her transdisciplinary academic background which is predominantly informed by postcolonial critical thinking of Said, Deloria Jr., Medicine, D'Souza, Momaday, Otriz and others. Politics also informs core of her work, a point criticized by mainstream scholars who perceive it as a lack of objectivity. Native American scholars agree that Eurocentric standards of objectivity serve as rationales which often undermine, minimize and negate our scholarship.Cook-Lynn's field is Native American literatures and she challenges Native American writers to engage their own and each others' work more critically. …

Divided Government and Institutional Combat: The Case of the Quayle Council on Competitiveness

The Quayle Council on Competitiveness is best understood as the latest executive branch weapon in the interbranch institutional combat that prevails during periods of divided government. This exploration of the Council's impact begins with an overview of the divided government debate, explores its battles with congressional Democrats over regulations implementing the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, and ends with a brief discussion of how the contours of partisan struggle over regulation were altered by the advent of unified party control in 1993 and the return to divided government in 1995.

The Making of a Cold Warrior: Karl Gruber and Austrian Foreign Policy, 1945–1953

In the years1945 to 1953, Karl Gruber exerted an influence over Austrian foreign policy at times resembling the dominant influence of a Kaunitz or a Metternich. But as a diplomatist Gruber did not come close to the finesse and shrewd sense of power that his two great predecessors possessed. Moreover, Gruber had to maneuver in less predictable domestic and international terrain. During his tenure in the Ballhausplatz, foreign policy wassubject to domestic partisan struggle as well as parliamentary control and public opinion. Furthermore, Austria no longer figured as a great power and was locked into the monumental Cold War struggle between East and West on the frontline of the superpower tensions. Gruber operated in an extremely hostile international environment. Instead of the traditional well-balanced nineteenth-century “concert of powers,” which had profited so much from Austrian professional statesmanship, the inexperienced Gruber faced the United States and the Soviet Union, which were in almost total control of international politics. The two superpowers were engaged in a gigantic ideological struggle, each striving for a preponderance of power. A small nation such as Austria was buffeted to and fro between the conflicts in Central Europe and could hardly escape the pull of the global “empires” fashioned at the time. The United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other in spiraling arms races (nuclear and conventional) and rigid alliance systems in an uneasy truce called the Cold War. In this context of a tight bilateral international system, even England and France—the former great powers reduced to the status of middling powers after the ignominious loss of their great colonial empires—had a difficult time holding on to their traditional influence in the international arena. Small powers like Austria were largely impotent, unless they fashioned for themselves some room to maneuver between the superpower blocs.

Carnival and Caucus: A Typology for Comparative Frontier History

As Dykstra and Silag (1985) have noted, the analysis of American frontier towns continues to yield a plethora of local histories that might provide an empirical basis for generalization, if a theoretical basis for comparative analysis might be offered. The development of a rigorous methodology for historiographie and statistical analysis has facilitated the accumulation of empirical evidence, but the analysis of local history has not advanced far beyond the initial debate regarding the basis for democratic governance (Taylor, 1956). Instead, two research traditions have developed—one seeking to identify the socio-cultural basis for community solidarity, the other focusing on the partisan struggles that shape democratic governance.

From Voluntary Association to Welfare State: The Illinois Immigrants' Protective League, 1908-1926

X\WITH the decline in recent years of the welfare state as a major political issue, it is perhaps now time to trace its administrative history. American historians, fascinated by the partisan and ideological struggles of American liberalism, have produced a substantial literature on the intellectual and political movements which culminated in the New and Fair Deal. They know much less, however, about the social and technological changes which made a national welfare state possible, and they have little knowledge of earlier state and local contributions. This was a crucial phase in the modernization of American government, and social scientists and public officials as well as historians might profit from examining how bureaucracies began and what experiences prior to 1933 made such innovations possible. What happened in early twentieth-century America to spur the development of public welfare bureaucracies? Modernization, after all, implies that certain types of changes have made other types of changes much more probable. Before a welfare state is feasible a society must have at least the following: (1) a permanent group of people who are continually occupied with social problems and who develop the expertise to deal with them; (2) provisions for the expansion and transmission of such expertise; (3) organization and techniques to integrate that expertise into public recognition and state action.' While not exhaustive, these three criteria are necessary

The Philippines: Politics of the "New Era"

It was apparent at the beginning of 1962 that much of the political and economic activity of the year would center on the person and policies of Diosdado Macapagal, the new Liberal President of the Philippines. It was not clear, however, how successful the new President would be in inaugurating his New Era for the Philippines after eight years of Nacionalista control. The Macapagal Administration was, in fact, born into the midst of a controversy not of its own making, one which made inevitable a series of political showdowns and was to involve all three branches of the government. Behind this atmosphere of controversy lay the results of the November 1961 elections. The electorate had then voted out of power the Nacionalista administration of Carlos P. Garcia, electing Macapagal and his running mate, Emmanuel Pelaez, by a comfortable majority. In the senatorial elections, voters also favored the Liberals, giving them six of the eight seats at stake. At the same time, however, the Nacionalistas were returned to control of the lower house by a margin of more than two to one. Since, additionally, the Liberal triumph in the Senate elections was insufficient to overcome the Nacionalista advantage among the Senate holdovers, the new President was faced with a hostile Congress, which the opposition controlled on a continuing basis. When, in the final days of 1961, Macapagal was inaugurated, the opposition party confronted him with a fait accompli. His predecessor had, during his last days in office, made approximately 350 midnight filling a large number of positions some long vacant and others created by elevation of incumbents with lame ducks and political favorites. The new President met this initial threat to his Administration by an executive order which revoked the Garcia appointments, a move which the Supreme Court subsequently upheld. (He was not to be as fortunate in subsequent encounters with the Court on questions of appointments, however.) Thus, when the new Congress convened in January, the scene was set from the outset for a partisan struggle which promised to pit the executive against the legislative branch of government and minority against majority. The size of the Nacionalista maj ority in the House appeared to argue against the ability of the Liberals, who held only 31 of the 104 seats, to capture that body. The constitutional prerogatives of the Philippine president, however, are such that opposition offers few rewards. Moreover, there are ample precedents for political realignments on the Philippine scene. Much of the hundred-day session of Congress was dissipated, in