Republican Leaders Research Articles

Medicaid Block Grants and Federalism

Medicaid, the US insurance program for millions of low-income children and adults, has operated for 50 years under a joint state-federal financing system. In exchange for federal funding that covers roughly 50% to 75% of Medicaid program costs depending on the state (the so-called match rate), states agree to administer the program within broad federal guidelines. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) took this combination of federal subsidies and oversight a step further by offering 100% federal funding for those newly eligible under the law’s Medicaid expansion through 2016 (with federal funding now at 95% and ultimately declining to 90%). So far, 31 states have opted into the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, extending coverage to millions and, through heightened public awareness and a streamlined application process, drawing in millions more who were previously eligible. However, Republican leaders are proposing a fundamental reform in Medicaid financing—a shift to block grants.1 Instead of a matching subsidy and federal oversight, block grants would give states an annual lump sum with minimal conditions attached.

Not as Good as Promoted: Arizona’s Hashtag Austerity Budgeting

Author(s): Wells, David | Abstract: The Fiscal Year 2016 budget process began with a new Republican Governor Doug Ducey. He and Republican leadership coalesced relatively quickly on a budget that was promoted as being able to balance the state budget and uphold Arizona’s values. Closer scrutiny instead reveals an austerity budget that made severe cuts to higher education and significant weaknesses in meeting legal K-12 funding levels, cutting Medicaid payments to hospitals, and underfunding or curtailing programs for lower income Arizonans.

A Delicate Balance: Party Branding During the 2013 Government Shutdown

Strong party brands help congressional parties elect candidates, maintain or gain majority control, and advance their policy agendas. Because successful branding efforts depend on consistent messaging, party leaders try to choose issues that most members are willing to promote. But what do leaders do when a party majority pressures them to take up issues that harm the brand for others? We investigate the 2013 government shutdown as a branding event. House Republican leaders instigated the shutdown after learning that a majority of Republicans would not vote for a clean funding bill. However, instead of highlighting the issues that led to the shutdown, they publicized the party’s efforts to resolve it. Party leaders sought to exploit the fact that party brands have both position and valence components to simultaneously address the demands of the party base and the electoral concerns of members representing competitive districts.

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party. By Heather Cox Richardson. New York: Basic Books, 2014. 416 pp.

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party. By Heather Cox Richardson. New York: Basic Books, 2014. 416 pp. Few questions boggle modern political observers more than that of the great in Republican Party ideology. How did the Party of Lincoln become the Party of Reagan? How did a party based in anti-slavery activism among Northern progressives become the redoubt of Southern white conservatism? Heather Cox Richardson's To Make Men Free provides one of the first comprehensive answers to this conundrum. Rather than seeing a complete shift in party ideology, Richardson identifies a tension within Republican ideology present at the beginning of the party and continuing to this day. On one side was Abraham Lincoln's vision of a country where all people could pursue their dreams of economic prosperity. The government's job was to level the playing field and establish the physical, legal, and political infrastructure to make men free. Against this egalitarian vision was one that sanctified private property, seeing its defense as essential to ordered liberty, even if the result was a highly stratified society where the poor remain locked in a perpetual mudsill and the rich grew richer. The egalitarians were dominant among Republicans at first, able to push through a robust agenda in the absence of Democrats from seceded Southern states. This program included a Homestead Act, a Land Grant Education Act, an income tax, a protective tariff, and, by the Civil War's end, a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. As former Confederates threatened to reimpose slavery under President Andrew Johnson's lenient Reconstruction plan, radical Republicans pushed through several Military Reconstruction Acts, passed a Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Act, and then amended the Constitution two more times, enshrining the egalitarian principle of equal civil and political rights into the nation's basic legal framework. From this point on, Richardson notes, Republicans began to split over tactics and, eventually, ideology. For some, the egalitarian pull of the radicals continued until the end of the nineteenth century. But for most of the Republican leadership, the party's future lay with the industrialists, Wall Street bankers, and mine prospectors of the West. The threat of radicalized workers following the 1871 Paris Commune and labor activism during the Depression of 1873 cemented the party's leadership behind the forces of capital. By the 1890s, the Republican Party paid the barest lip service to the rights of African Americans and took a laissez-faire approach to monopolies and labor relations. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, a new force within the Republican Party pushed the party back toward its egalitarian roots. Theodore Roosevelt and the new Progressive wing of the party embraced a strong federal government as the only force capable of reining in the industrial trusts that had found such favor with Presidents McKinley and Harrison. …

Introduction

When the historian Ken Burns spoke at the Stanford University commencement last June, he delivered an exceptionally political address, including an attack on what he labeled the “Vichy Republicans.” Those Republican leaders who had not distanced themselves from candidate Trump, so Burns, were the equivalent of the Vichy French who collaborated with Hitler. That master metaphor, comparing 2016 to 1933, has continued into the new administration, with the anti-Trump camp labeling itself as “the resistance.” Despite Burns's historiographical authority, one might question the validity of the underlying equation. No doubt the policies of the Trump administration are more conservative than…

Can experience overcome stereotypes in times of terror threat?

Research on evaluations of leaders has frequently found that female leaders receive lower ratings in times of national security crisis. However, less is known about countervailing factors. We contend that partisanship and leadership experience in relevant domains are two factors that can counteract the negative effects of terrorist threat on evaluations of female political leaders. To test this expectation, we implemented a national study in 2012 containing terrorist threat and non-threat conditions, and then asked participants to evaluate political leaders. The results show that Republican leaders, including women, are unaffected by terrorist threat; in contrast, Democratic leaders are punished during times of terrorist threat, but this negative effect is smaller for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared to Nancy Pelosi, who lacks similar experience. In short, Republican partisanship is a strong countervailing factor, while leadership experience in national security more modestly countervails.

Wiersze i wypowiedzi epistolarne Norwida o Rzymie i Papiestwie w kontekście polemik francuskich

Norwid was very much interested in the fate of the Papal State in the second half of the 19 th century, which is testified in some of his letters and poems. Many traces of his reading newspapers and essayistic texts (particularly in French) can be found in these texts. From Norwid’s point of view the Pope played an important, historical role. He believed that Pius IX should head a federation-based Italian state. The Pope’s main opponent was Giuseppe Garibaldi who in the 1860s decisively contributed to the Italian unity, although Napoleon III’s France did not allow him to capture Rome itself. Norwid – unlike the largest part of the Polish emigration – had a negative attitude towards the Italian republican leader. He did not consider him (in the period immediately preceding the January Uprising) a model to follow. The main reason of this negative assessment was Norwid’s concept of sacred history that presumes there must exist a relation between the history and sacrum. According to Norwid, Garibaldi’s armed struggle for the establishment of a modern nation state did not fit in the context of sacred history (by contrast, the peaceful manifestations on the streets of Warsaw in the years 1861-62 took an entirely different course). In particular, Garibaldi failed to appreciate the sacerdotal char-isma of the Rome’s ruler. But it was precisely this “Christian-Patriotism” on which the universal mission of the world capital (prefigured by pagan Rome) was based. Norwid, the author of the poem “Do wladcy Rzymu” [To Rome’s ruler], was convinced that this vision of Rome rooted in sacred history would – in spite of temporary setbacks – ultimately triumph.

Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era by Mark A. Lause

Reviewed by: Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era by Mark A. Lause Asaf Almog Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era. Mark A. Lause. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-252-0430-6. 240 pp., cloth, $95.00. In 1848, sisters Katie and Maggie Fox claimed that their house was chased by ghosts. The public reaction initiated the spiritualist movement, which quickly spread and became a curiosity of mid-nineteenth-century America. Spiritualists believed in the ability of ordinary people to contact the spirits of the dead in the afterlife, thus challenging orthodox Christian faith. In Free Spirits, Mark A. Lause examines "the impact of spiritualism as a movement on the social and political course of the nation in a particularly critical period of American history" (2). He argues that the movement's popularity reflected a growing support for political and social equality in Civil War era North: "A generation before Karl Marx's socialism presented itself as a scientific approach to human affairs, spiritualism offered a strangely rational intellectual challenge to the fundamental hierarchies of civilization" (90). Spiritualists opposed slavery and the "slave power," racial and gender inequality, and the rise of capitalism. [End Page 431] They continued Thomas Paine's deism as well as the early socialist theories of British Robert Owen and French Charles Fourier. The book examines the connection between spiritualism and northern political culture from 1848 to the Civil War's end. Throughout the book, Lause argues that the spiritualist movement reflected radically egalitarian assumptions. In addition, he also suggests that the movement influenced the rise of radicalism in the North. He contends that the movement's growth was inextricably linked with the rise of the Republican Party. Spiritualism began to flower in 1854, when the party was established, and both movements continued to grow simultaneously and in the same regions, namely "places where people sought answers to the questions raised by the Kansas crisis and the Dred Scott decision." The spiritualist belief in determinism found an "almost messianic expression in the rapid emergence of a mass party movement and its aftermath" (43). Lause's analysis establishes that spiritualism contained radically egalitarian assumptions, which intensified in the 1850s and 1860s. After the war's outbreak spiritualists embraced the Union's cause as mystical. As the war progressed, spiritualists developed a "radical new egalitarian sensibility," which would manifest itself in a governmental protection of its citizens' equal rights (106). In the war's aftermath spiritualists came to hope that "war for liberty … would further foster the equality of nonwhites, women, and working people" (124). Lause notes that wartime radicalism influenced Republicans as well, but while they quickly backed away from radical movements, "the spiritualists persisted" (123). However, Lause's argument for spiritualist influence on northern radicalism is less persuasive. Discussing the Republican Party's formation, he writes, "Spiritualism provided the third-party insurgency that became the Republican Party, a deeper open-ended theology of 'free labor,' and a deep faith in the national rebirth of the second American Revolution" (37). He devotes an entire chapter to Lincoln's ties to spiritualism. Elsewhere, he argues that some of the leading critics of the Kansas-Nebraska Act "included senators with ties to spiritualism themselves or through their families." Lause lists several senators, but the corresponding endnote references a speech by only one of these, Charles Sumner, which a spiritualist journal reprinted in 1853 (37, 176). However, Sumner originally gave the speech in 1848, and the journal merely offered excerpts. As Lause explains in the prologue, spiritualism's promoters sought to portray it as a national movement. This might explain why they wanted to appropriate national political leaders as supporters (16–18). Lause's other examples mainly consist of local Republican leaders, such as Portland politician Joseph Blake Hall (123–24). If spiritualists wanted to create the appearance of a large movement, we might ask whether their own reports are a reliable indicator of their actual growth. In his discussion of the subject, Lause mainly relies on contemporary reports in spiritualist journals. When he suggests that there was a causation between the rise of spiritualism and the...

Trump and Putin, Through a Glass Darkly

As 2017 dawns, relations between the United States and Russia are at their worst level since the height of the Cold War. Russia has been under U.S. sanctions since it seized Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and new sanctions were added after U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia was responsible for hacking and publicizing emails from the Democratic National Committee and other political actors during the 2016 elections. In recent years, the number of dangerous military incidents between the two countries has skyrocketed, as the Russian military seems determined to test U.S. readiness by provoking hazardous close encounters in the air and at sea. Russia has built up military forces and weaponry along its borders with NATO countries, causing NATO at its 2016 Warsaw Summit to approve small force presence increases in some of its own member states that border Russia, including the post-Soviet Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well as Poland. Moscow regularly stages unannounced war exercises modeled after World War II land battles. Meanwhile, a wide range of arms control treaties between Washington and Moscow, which helped define U.S.-Soviet relations and limit the danger of their interactions in the late Cold War era, lie in tatters. As outgoing President Barack Obama leaves office, communications between U.S. officials and their Russian counterparts have reportedly virtually ceased.But Donald Trump's election has thrown a wrench into predictions about U.S.-Russia relations. Trump has expressed admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin and seems to be heading for another attempt at a reset. However, Trump's statements and cabinet nominations have engendered so much controversy, including within the Republican Party, that it remains to be seen what direction U.S. policy toward Russia will take during his administration. It is also unclear what President Putin may have in mind for President Trump.This essay will first examine the controversies over Russian hacking and their potential consequences, and then consider U.S. sanctions and their likely trajectory. Next, it will examine Russia-NATO tensions in more depth, including Russian use of information warfare against Washington's European allies. It will then turn to a discussion of Putin's seeming aims. The essay will close with an overall assessment of the relationship going forward, focusing on challenges that will need to be overcome for Trump to succeed in his attempts at a new reset in the relationship.Russian Interference in the U.S. ElectionU.S. policy toward Russia under Trump will take shape against the backdrop of ongoing debates about Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. Despite some initial uncertainty about whether the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies converged, more recent reports indicate that the CIA and FBI agree that Putin himself most likely oversaw the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and that the ultimate Russian goal was to support Trump's candidacy over that of Democrat Hillary Clinton. There is additional evidence that Russian sources routinely published fake news on English-language websites in an attempt to swing public opinion against Clinton. Trump initially ridiculed these reports, stating that no one really knows who did the hacking and that he does not trust the CIA because of the bad intelligence it provided in the lead-up to the Iraq War of 2003.Several high-ranking Republican politicians have disagreed with Trump's dismissive comments and demanded an immediate rigorous bipartisan investigation into Russian hacking. The internal conflict among powerful Republican leaders is a crucial bellwether because pitched disagreement between Congress and the White House over U.S. policy toward Russia could wreak havoc on a wide variety of presidential initiatives. A fundamental question to watch, then, as the Trump presidency unfolds is whether Trump takes seriously the U. …

Wiersze i wypowiedzi epistolarne Norwida o Rzymie i Papiestwie w kontekście polemik francuskich

Norwid was very much interested in the fate of the Papal State in the second half of the 19th century, which is testified in some of his letters and poems. Many traces of his reading newspapers and essayistic texts (particularly in French) can be found in these texts. From Norwid’s point of view the Pope played an important, historical role. He believed that Pius IX should head a federation-based Italian state. The Pope’s main opponent was Giuseppe Garibaldi who in the 1860s decisively contributed to the Italian unity, although Napoleon III’s France did not allow him to capture Rome itself. Norwid – unlike the largest part of the Polish emigration – had a negative attitude towards the Italian republican leader. He did not consider him (in the period immediately preceding the January Uprising) a model to follow. The main reason of this negative assessment was Norwid’s concept of sacred history that presumes there must exist a relation between the history and sacrum. According to Norwid, Garibaldi’s armed struggle for the establishment of a modern nation state did not fit in the context of sacred history (by contrast, the peaceful manifestations on the streets of Warsaw in the years 1861-62 took an entirely different course). In particular, Garibaldi failed to appreciate the sacerdotal char-isma of the Rome’s ruler. But it was precisely this “Christian-Patriotism” on which the universal mission of the world capital (prefigured by pagan Rome) was based. Norwid, the author of the poem “Do władcy Rzymu” [To Rome’s ruler], was convinced that this vision of Rome rooted in sacred history would – in spite of temporary setbacks – ultimately triumph.

The role of entrepreneurship in the economic development of the region

In the article analyzed the entrepreneurial activities on the territory of the Republic of Bashkortostan, as well as the tendencies of development of small and medium businesses under favourable business climate. The methodology is the analysis of dynamics of development of business entities based on statistical data. It is noted that the formation and development of entrepreneurship in the regions of the Russian Federation is a complex socio-economic phenomenon arising due to deep transformations in the field of sociocultural relations, because changes in the latter interacts with all the key parties, the social life of the people: moral and ethical norms, mentality, spiritual and material values, social norms and economic behavior. Modern entrepreneurship as a factor of economic development of the region needs continued support from the state with the knowledge of essential managerial and regulatory functions of the legislative and Executive power structures in the economy and society. This fact is explainable by the fact that the entity is a specified function consists of continuous improvement activities of power structures, improvement of transmission channels and introduction of achievements of scientific-technical progress in all stages of the multifaceted and complex structure of social production, providing an invaluable contribution of managerial labor in the common cause of improving the efficiency of the economy. Conclusion: in current economic conditions, the region assigns a significant role to subjects of small and medium businesses, which, thanks to its maneuverability, more adapted to the constantly changing market conditions. Applying comprehensive and systematic measures for the formation of a favorable environment, the Republican leadership promotes the competitive capacity of regional enterprises of small and medium business can compete with large companies.

Medicaid Expansion in a Litmus State: The Missouri Struggle.

For a century Missouri was a bellwether state in presidential elections, always picking the winner. Since 2008 it has been experiencing a partisan divide along urban/rural lines with President Obama losing the state twice. The battle over Medicaid expansion found a Democratic governor unable to convince a Republican legislative majority to support ACA-based expansion. The more highly partisan legislative environment has rendered traditional bargaining and negotiations impossible on the controversial question of Medicaid expansion.Despite supportive advocacy by hospitals and the business community, the Republican legislative leaders have opposed any movement on Medicaid expansion over the past four years. There will be a new occupant in the governor's mansion in 2017, which may create a fork in the road. Democrats are unlikely to regain a legislative majority, and one path is continued Republican refusal to consider expansion. The other path features the new governor responding to the national 2016 election outcome, and creating the prospects for a deal, perhaps around a waiver plan.

Secrecy, State-Private Networks and Operational Effectiveness in Cold War Europe

Secrecy has unintended consequences. The release on 9 December 2014 of the US Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the torture of terrorism detainees focused public attention on the secret activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Regrettably, lost amidst debate over justifying or condemning state-sponsored torture is a more basic concern, the issue of state secrecy, which underlies the discussion of how governments promote national ends. Only two days after the issuance of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, the US House of Representatives adjourned without taking action on the Freedom of Information Act reform bill – despite receiving unanimous approval in both houses. This bill would not have required complete openness, but it would have eliminated many of the arbitrary mechanisms that enable the CIA and other governmental agencies to suppress requests for information. Although the House Republican leadership failed to put the act on the legislative calendar, the Obama administration's Department of Justice also deserves opprobrium for surreptitiously opposing the act behind the scenes. The US government's disregard for establishing reasonable rules of transparency virtually guarantees that the CIA will continue to suppress its records, and thus public scrutiny of its unchecked activities, for a very long time to come.

Geopolitics over Proliferation: the Origins of US Grand Strategy and Their Implications for the Spread of Nuclear Weapons in South Asia

ABSTRACTHow much does the United States care about nonproliferation? Recent scholarship suggests that the fear of spreading nuclear weapons was central to the US grand strategy in the Cold War. In one important case, however, this argument does not hold. This article draws on theoretical debates and newly declassified archives to demonstrate the primacy of geopolitics over nonproliferation in Washington’s policy toward India and Pakistan. Despite their rhetoric, Democratic and Republican leaders consistently relegated nonproliferation to the backburner whenever it conflicted with other strategic goals. Moreover, they inadvertently encouraged proliferation in South Asia at three inter-connected levels: technology, security, and identity.

Remembering the Slave Rebellion of Coro: Historical Memory and Politics in Venezuela

Abstract This article analyzes the construction and circulation of historical memories of the Coro slave rebellion in Venezuela between 1795 and 2014. We show how historical interpreters have inscribed divergent representations of this rebellion in documents, landscapes, historiographies, monuments, and music. In a political climate defined by ethnoracial and political tensions, colonial elites saw in the rebellion the republican ideology and racial violence of the Haitian Revolution. Fearing the persistence of social divisions and political resentment, nineteenth-century republican leaders all but effaced the rebellion from the nation’s historical memory. This episode was finally recovered by historians at the beginning of the twentieth century, and since the 1950s teachers, guerrilla members, and social activists have linked the rebellion to political discourses of ethnoracial struggle, cultural syncretism, bodily suffering, and social exclusion. Recently, communal organizations in the region have begun to connect it to contemporary anti-imperialist and socialist projects. We argue that historical memories have mobilized political identities at different times and imagined regional genealogies of struggle against imperialism and political oppression.

Nationalism, Triumphalism, and the Final Months of the Soviet Union

Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. 520 pp. New York: Basic Books, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0465056965. $32.00. Mikhail Gorbachev, the and last president of the Soviet Union, resigned on Christmas Day in 1991. Gorbachev's advisers had originally planned the announcement for 24 December, Christmas Eve, but decided to wait a day so that television viewers in the United States could celebrate their holiday in peace. As Serhii Plokhy explains in his lively, engaging book on the last six months of the USSR, Gorbachev's resignation speech was just the last of a series of performances played out by the Soviet leader, his rival Boris Yeltsin, and the other republic leaders for US audiences. Discussions of the Soviet collapse tend to focus on causal factors--including the relative importance of nationalist mobilization, the exit of communist elites, or the relative impact of events in Eastern Europe. (1) Most accounts tend to treat the postcoup period as essentially a process of protracted agony, in which the of the USSR's future was more or less already settled. The exceptions have either been memoirs by Gorbachev's associates or works on relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and Russia. (2) The main achievement of Plokhy's book is to bring together the high drama of that short period--the political struggles between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the attempts to win over Central Asian leaders, and the rapidly changing situation in Ukraine. Plokhy is not dismissive of long-term causes--on the contrary, he insists on the importance of the nationality question for understanding the Soviet collapse (409). Throughout the book, however, he emphasizes the importance of contingencies in this period. (3) As Plokhy shows, republican leaders were dealing with two problems in the wake of the August putsch. First, the public mood had changed. If earlier in the year referendums seemed to show substantial support for preserving some sort of union, after the coup the calls for sovereignty and even independence became much louder. Republican leaders who had hesitated to denounce the coup had to fight for their political lives by reinventing themselves as democrats and nationalists. Second, even those who were eager to preserve some kind of union--including the leaders of the Central Asian republics, who counted on investments from the center to prevent economic collapse and to smooth any kind of economic transition--were wary of a union too heavily dominated by Russia. With Yeltsin rising as a political force in 1991 and increasingly dominating not just Russian but Soviet politics, leaders like Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbaev and Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov began to think they might be better off alone. Although Plokhy touches on the role of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other republics, it is and Ukraine that are at the center of his story. Plokhy is especially effective explaining how Ukrainian nationalism developed as a potent political force even as the communist elite in the republic became alienated from Gorbachev. Although the Ukrainian party had supported the coup, the leadership and Leonid Kravchuk himself quickly came out in favor of independence in the wake of the attempted putsch. What made the Ukrainian declaration of independence in August particularly damaging for the union was that it was the case of a communist-controlled legislature taking the lead. Similarly, Plokhy demonstrates convincingly how important the Russia first sentiment, shared by some of Yeltsin's advisers and increasingly by Yeltsin himself, was in the political struggles of 1991. Yeltsin, who was initially a supporter of a strong Soviet Union, became one of the most enthusiastic contributors to its dissolution. The role of other republics, by contrast, is given relatively little treatment. True, Kazakhstan's Nazarbaev, usually left out of the story, emerges as a major political player. …

Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era by Eugene D. Schmiel (review)

Reviewed by: Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era by Eugene D. Schmiel Scott Mackenzie Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era. By Eugene D. Schmiel ( Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2014. 340 pp. Paper $26.95, isbn 978-0-8214-2083-6.) This is a long overdue biography of an important Civil War commander. Eugene D. Schmiel, a retired foreign service officer, argues that Jacob Dolson Cox’s career exemplified the ideal of the citizen-general. Cox (1828–1900) rose from an Ohio politician and lawyer-turned-general in western Virginia to a competent corps- and army-level commander at Antietam, Atlanta, and Nashville. After the war, he served in state and federal politics, and became a prominent Civil War historian. While this book sat on the shelf for too long before publication to engage with the recent vibrant literature on this subject, it is nonetheless a sound biography of a significant figure. The biography focuses on Cox’s experiences with the stresses of his times. Schmiel begins with his early life, specifically his puritanical upbringing in northeastern Ohio from which he became a “detached intellectual” (11). Cox also adopted antislavery ideology but, Schmiel carefully admits, not immediate abolitionism, at Oberlin College. Once married, Cox began a law career that quickly led him into state politics. A protégé of Salmon P. Chase, he became a Republican as soon as the party began in Ohio. The radical gained sufficient influence that Governor Denison made him head of state militia in 1860. When war began the next year, the young politician found himself commanding thousands of soldiers securing northwestern [End Page 94] Virginia for the Union. Schmiel’s attention to detail pays off here as he takes Cox through his baptism of fire. Though he made mistakes, he adapted well to military life—better than many others, professionals and amateurs alike. Schmiel demonstrates this best with his coverage of Cox as a senior commander. First, he calls his performance at Antietam, where he led an entire wing of the Army of the Potomac, “the most effective citizen-general among the Union forces” (97). Despite this success, Cox spent a frustrating year in the political wilderness. He spends an entire chapter on how the lack of allies kept him without a command, ably demonstrating how political connections worked against him instead of the reverse. Skill, he argues, restored him in the western theater. In the Atlanta Campaign and finally at Franklin and Nashville, Cox proved himself to be an able commander. By the war’s end, Schmiel places his subject as the legendary Roman commander Cincinnatus, the citizen who selflessly assumed public service for the defense of the Republic. The last three chapters of the book deal with Cox’s lengthy and varied postwar career. First, he failed in Ohio. Although his war record and aid from Republican leaders propelled him into the governorship in 1865, Schmiel argues that Cox’s independent streak ruined him within a decade. His weak stance on race and support for President Johnson’s Reconstruction plan ostracized him from his party. Second, the same spirit of independence further hurt him as Grant’s secretary of the interior. Third, his coverage of Cox’s extensive writings on the Civil War constitutes one of the best parts of the book. He wrote reviews, books, and a memoir, the highly regarded Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, until his death. These efforts, aided by the Official Records, gave Cox a chance to speak for the non–West Point generals who saved the country and against Lost Cause–oriented southern works. The book’s main flaw is its age. Originally written in 1968, it says little about the new literature on the Civil War, especially memory. His text mentions “recent historians,” but his endnotes merely list them. This detracts from its overall importance. Citizen-General will rightfully become the standard work on Cox for years to come, but it could have been much more. [End Page 95] Scott Mackenzie Auburn University Copyright © 2016 The Kent State University Press

Terrorist Threat, Male Stereotypes, and Candidate Evaluations

How does the threat of terrorism affect evaluations of female (vs. male) political leaders, and do these effects vary by the politician’s partisanship? Using two national surveys, we document a propensity for the U.S. public to prefer male Republican leadership the most in times of security threat, and female Democratic leadership the least. We theorize a causal process by which terrorist threat influences the effect of stereotypes on candidate evaluations conditional on politician partisanship. We test this framework with an original experiment:a nationally representative sample was presented with a mock election that varied the threat context and the gender and partisanship of the candidates. We find that masculine stereotypes have a negative influence on both male and female Democratic candidates in good times (thus reaffirming the primacy of party stereotypes), but only on the female Democratic candidate when terror threat is primed. Republican candidates—both male and female—are unaffected by masculine stereotypes, regardless of the threat environment.

The Multiple Roots of Party Loyalty: Explaining Republican Dissent in the U.S. House of Representatives

Why does any member of Congress choose to be loyal to one's party? The conventional wisdom is that party loyalty stems from constituent expectations, electoral concerns, or a lawmaker's ideological beliefs. However, this neglects two other, less-instrumental reasons for sticking with a political party: partisan identity and personal connections with party leaders. I test these alternative theories as well as conventional ones on a set of key moments in the 113th Congress (2013–2014) when rebellion against House Republican leadership by the rank-and-file was especially noteworthy. The results provide some support for both the party identity and personal connection hypotheses. They also indicate that although constituency characteristics help predict the likelihood of dissent from GOP leaders, there is little evidence for the electoral hypothesis, while cross-cutting ideological preferences as well as preferences along the traditional left-right spectrum prove statistically significant. In short, evidence reveals both personal and instrumental roots of party loyalty in Congress.

Public Intellectuals and Politics in Cuba: A Case Study of Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza (1872–1956)

The dependent character of the Cuban bourgeoisie in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1895–98, the cycles of economic and political crisis with roots in the Island's sugar monoculture and economic dependency on the US and the pattern of US interventions in Cuban affairs under the Platt Amendment produced a profound crisis of legitimacy of the Cuban state during the Republic. Public intellectuals, in Antonio Gramsci's definition, played an important role in mediating the cyclical crisis with the purpose of maintaining public consent for Republican institutions, political parties and elites. Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza was a leading figure among public intellectuals who performed this role on behalf of Republican democracy beginning with the administration of President Estrada y Palma (1902–06) and culminating with the Fulgencio Batista regime (1952–58). His political career provides insights into the root causes of the crisis of confidence in Republican political institutions and leaders that paved the way for the Revolution of 1958.