Republican Politicians Research Articles

Memorandum on Supreme Court Vacancies and Confirmations During Presidential Election Years

The author summarizes historical examples of Supreme Court vacancies during presidential election years (or the year prior), and the outcomes of presidential nominations to those Supreme Court vacancies. The facts are quite striking, and refute widespread arguments by Republican politicians that President Obama should not nominate, and the Senate should not approve or even consider (until after Obama's term concludes), any replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia, who died on February 13, 2016.There is not a single case in American history in which an incumbent president chose not to make a Supreme Court nomination in such circumstances, even for vacancies occurring extremely late during the president's term. Of the total of 26 such vacancies considered, the Senate gave full consideration to nominees in at least 23 cases (88%), and 22 (85%) of the vacancies were successfully filled by the incumbent president.Two of the 26 cases, however, when an incumbent president made a nomination after being reelected, are best excluded as irrelevant. Of the remaining 24 relevant vacancies -- 15 occurring during the election year (or even in the early part of the year following) and 9 occurring during the year before the election year but persisting into the election year -- 21 (87.5%) received Senate consideration and 20 (83%) were successful. Further excluding seven vacancies which occurred after June during the election year (thus much closer to the election and allowing much less time to consider a nominee), 15 of the 17 remaining vacancies (88%) were successfully filled by the incumbent president, and all but one case (94%) received full Senate consideration.In the one solitary case (April 1844) of an early-election-year vacancy that did not receive a full Senate vote, there were actually two vacancies pending that year, and that lame-duck president did obtain two final Senate votes on, and eventually succeeded in filling, the other vacancy, which occurred in December 1843, right before that election year.The most highly relevant comparison would be with the eight vacancies that actually occurred during a presidential election year, but no later than June. The president, again, made a nomination in all eight of those cases, at least seven of eight (87.5%) received full Senate consideration, and six of eight (75%) were successful.

Department of Climate Defense

What will it take to stop and reverse climate change? On the left, we emphasize actions by ordinary citizens whose protests, educational work, and organizing seek to compel governing and economic elites to do the right thing for the rest of us. But not every powerful institution is resisting the truth about the damage being done to the planet. Surprisingly perhaps, the U.S. military has proven itself more open to addressing the climate crisis than Republican politicians who swear over and over again that the men and women who serve in uniform can do no wrong. Jeffrey Marqusee, the former executive director of the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program and a fellow leftist, discusses the Pentagon’s views on climate change and what it has done to mitigate it.

The Independence, Diversity, and Vitality of Early Black Chicago

The Independence, Diversity, and Vitality of Early Black Chicago Ian Rocksborough-Smith (bio) Christopher Robert Reed. Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. xi + 390 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00. Margaret Garb. Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 306pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $50.00. These recent books by Margaret Garb and Christopher R. Reed explicitly treat the history of Black Chicago’s formative years leading up to and including the first Great Migration years of World War I. In both books, which overlap in the treatment of the twentieth-century’s first two decades, we get rich vignettes of some of Chicago’s earliest African American political elites and prolific community leaders, sites, and institutions. Some of these are already well known, while others less so. We learn of the influential John Jones, who became the city’s first elected black official in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, and of the city’s first black alderman, Oscar DePriest, elected in 1915. DePriest’s political ascendance demonstrated Black Chicago’s critical support for the famously corrupt yet relatively beneficent administration of Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson and the GOP machine that dominated civic politics in those years. We also learn about important clubwomen, activists, and reformers such as Fannie B. Williams, Ida B. Wells, and the Reverends Reverdy C. Ransom and Archibald J. Carey with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. The latter two competed to influence congregations of black Southerners newly moved to the city within the local community. We learn especially about how long-time black Chicago residents worked in coalition with newcomers (mainly recent Southern migrants) to the City of Big Shoulders to engage with and impact Chicago’s infamously corrupt machine-driven civic politics. As these two studies show, black Chicagoans became vital constituents and political activists for both local Democratic and Republican politicians and party organizations (not just the party of Lincoln affiliates). Such engagements set the stage for important models of independent black civic politics sustained [End Page 665] elsewhere in urban America in later decades. Moreover, each book offers compelling analysis of Black Chicago’s earliest labor, commercial, cultural, and religious institutions and organizations as the city’s African American population grew exponentially through the first two decades of the twentieth century. Black Chicago’s history through the middle of the last century is, of course, now well examined. From the signal contributions of pioneering urban sociologists like Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake (Black Metropolis, 1945), to the prolific and contemporary writings of novelist Richard Wright, to the manifold studies of the University of Chicago’s School of Sociology, Chicago—for better or worse—has long acted as a critical “laboratory” and/or site for the study of black community formation and strivings. There is now a vast scholarly literature on Chicago through the mid-twentieth century, much of it extended well beyond the formative insights of these authors. Indeed, recent scholarship on Black Chicago has taken exciting new directions from examinations of migrant consumer and religious cultures to local studies of housing; neighborhood politics; labor, educational, and cultural activism; and related issues. Many of these newer studies uncover complex histories of community formation mainly rooted in the years from World War I through World War II, when the Great Migrations of African American Southerners occurred, thus shaping many contemporary and scholarly understandings of urban America.1 However, fewer scholars have specifically examined the years prior to these watershed moments of mass migration to the urban North before World War I. Read together, both Garb and Reed show how African Americans from Chicago, many of them long-time residents (descendants of the “old settlers”—or the first resident black families whose roots went back to the antebellum period in the city) worked to form diverse, vital, independent, and influential cultural and political networks, especially on the city’s South Side. These patterns of community engagement occurred many years before the city’s African...

Goldwater, Bush, Ryan and the Failed Attempts by Conservative Republicans to Reform Federal Entitlement Programs

Social Security and Medicare are federal entitlement programs that represent the current of modern liberalism in the United States. The countercurrent of conservatism has been represented by some Republican politicians who have tried to reform these programs. 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater suggested making Social Security voluntary. In 2005 President George W. Bush made partial privatization of Social Security a key component of his second-term domestic agenda. From 2010 to 2012 Congressman Paul Ryan advocated a reform of Medicare in which the federal government would give seniors vouchers to buy private insurance. Each of these proposals backfired. When conservative Republicans propose detailed alterations to the pillars of some of the Democratic Party’s main legislative accomplishments in the 20th century, they disaffect moderates and independent voters, and they fuel the liberal base of the Democratic Party. The proposals are a liability for Republicans in national elections because Americans fear that entitlement reform will jeopardize the benefits they receive.

Killing off the Competition

In August 1929, James W. Upton, Editor of the republican newspaper, Honesty, discovered that that Seán Lemass and Gerald Boland, the Secretaries of the Fianna Fáil party, had issued a circular to their members that blackballed Honesty and promoted the sales of The Nation, a publication that Fianna Fáil's leader, Éamon de Valera, had recently brought under his control. The event that triggered this action was Upton's decision to publish an article critical of the Fianna Fáil leadership, something Upton did in the interest of freedom of speech. Upton, who was sympathetic to the Fianna Fáil cause, dubbed Lemass and Boland, ‘the Dublin Junta’ and accused them of launching an underhand attack to further their own careers and party ambitions. Fianna Fáil retaliated in the pages of The Nation, declaring that Honesty was no longer a republican journal and thereby destroying Honesty's readership. An exploration of these events reveals political duplicity and a fundamental misfit between the views of a republican idealist and hardheaded professional politicians. Upton believed that republicanism without journalistic freedom was no republicanism at all, whilst Lemass and Boland focused on building a disciplined party machine intent on suppressing dissent, within and without of its ranks.

Speaking Different Languages or Reading from the Same Script? Word Usage of Democratic and Republican Politicians

Words are believed to be indicators of the values that are important to politicians and an impressive amount of empirical research has analyzed variations in language use. While it is generally accepted that there are value differences between Democrats and Republicans, the extent to which these differences are reflected in word usage has been theorized but is largely untested. The connection between values and language is, theoretically, not limited just to politicians, but should be especially evident among politicians as representatives of existing ideological poles. In this article, we examine elite rhetoric through the lens of four value-centered theoretical frameworks (Lakoff’s Parenting Styles model, Moral Foundations Theory, Schwartz’s Values Theory, and Motivated Social Cognition Theory). Contrary to the expectations posited by these four theories, we find little reliable evidence of value-related language differences between Democratic and Republican politicians. Our findings suggest that, at least when it comes to elite rhetoric, widely accepted theoretical claims about the value-based nature of political language and political differences are not consistently supported by empirical analysis.

La réunion électorale au service des républicains français dans le dernier tiers du XIX e siècle

This article examines the link between the Republic and electoral rallies in France in the last third of the 19 th century. Whether in the opposition during the Second Empire or after taking power, Republicans defended the merits of rallies: they put them at the centre of their project to build a political participation on which a democracy could be based, beyond the vote. Allowing voters to interact with candidates and compare their worth, rallies—mostly adversarial at the time—were seen as the best way to promote universal suffrage and to ensure its “accuracy”. The development of electoral rallies at this time must also be linked to the emergence of Republican politicians putting opinion forward as a principle of legitimacy and basing their campaigns on an organization: that of electoral caucuses.

Jan Bernhard Meister. Der Körper des Princeps: Zur Problematik eines monarchischen Körpers ohne Monarchie.

In the Roman Empire, the emperor's body was omnipresent. In every city and military camp it manifested itself through honorific statues in marble, ivory, and precious materials. Jan Bernhard Meister's book, Der Körper des Princeps: Zur Problematik eines monarchischen Körpers ohne Monarchie focuses on how such imperial bodies were politically charged. As the subtitle indicates, his main interest is in whether, following Ernst Kantorowicz (The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology [1957]), the emperor's body could be seen as an incarnation of the Roman monarchy, which Augustus constituted as a restored republic. Unlike later Roman emperors and medieval monarchs, the principes of the first two centuries c.e. lacked regalia. Yet, there were attempts to set the emperors apart by their physical appearance, and this turned their bodies into carriers of political meaning. For instance, the first princeps Augustus, who died at 75, was represented as a serene and beautiful young man throughout the 41 years of his reign. This was a remarkable departure from the statues of republican politicians who were shown as wrinkled, bald, and toothless old men, though with capable and, occasionally, even youthful bodies. Yet, Meister does not pay much attention to iconographic change. Instead, he focuses on literary sources, which almost exclusively reflect the views of Rome's political elites

Social Democracy in America?

Recently, a group of conservative policy intellectuals and writers captured the attention of the media and even of a few Republican politicians. These “reformocons,” including Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review, and Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, believe it is time for the Republican Party to propose public policy solutions to domestic issues like health care and education, rather than provoke the cultural resentments of the party base, what Douthat has called the politics of “white identity.”

Increasing Influence of Party Identification on Perceived Scientific Agreement and Support for Government Action on Climate Change in the United States, 2006–12

Abstract Since the mid-2000s, U.S. conservative leaders and Republican politicians have stepped up efforts to challenge the reality and seriousness of anthropogenic climate change (ACC). Especially with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, ACC denial has become something of a litmus test for Republican politicians to prove their conservative bona fides. Two recent studies find that misperception of scientific agreement on ACC is associated with lower levels of support for government action to deal with ACC. Using nationally representative survey data from 2006 and 2012, the analytical model developed in those two studies was applied to investigate whether the effect of political orientation on perceived scientific agreement and support for government action to reduce emissions has increased since the heightened ACC denial by Republican politicians beginning in 2009. The results indicated that political ideology and party identification are moderately strong predictors of perceived scientific agreement; beliefs about the timing, human cause, seriousness, and threat of global warming; and support for government action in both 2006 and 2012. Further, as expected, the effect of party identification on perceived scientific agreement and support for government action increased from 2006 and 2012, evidence that rank-and-file Republicans in the general public are more strongly embracing the ACC denial espoused by Republican politicians in recent years. Such increased partisanship poses a formidable barrier to public understanding of ACC.

New Deal Liberalism and Racial Liberalism in the Mass Public, 1937–1968

Few transformations have been as important in American politics as the incorporation of African Americans into the Democratic Party over the course of the 1930s–60s and the Republican Party's growing association with more conservative positions on race-related policies. This paper traces the relationship between New Deal economic liberalism and racial liberalism in the mass public. A key finding is that by about 1940, economically-liberal northern white Democratic voters were substantially more pro-civil rights than were economically-conservative northern Republican voters. While partisanship and civil rights views were unrelated among southern whites, economic conservatives were more racially conservative than their economically liberal counterparts, even in the south. These findings suggest that there was a connection between attitudes towards the economic programs of the New Deal and racial liberalism early on, well before national party elites took distinct positions on civil rights. Along with grassroots pressure from African American voters who increasingly voted Democratic in the 1930s–40s, this change among white voters likely contributed to northern Democratic politicians' gradual embrace of civil rights liberalism and Republican politicians' interest in forging a coalition with conservative white southerners. In attempting to explain these linkages, I argue that the ideological meaning of New Deal liberalism sharpened in the late 1930s due to changes in the groups identified with Roosevelt's program and due to the controversies embroiling New Dealers in 1937–38.

One Nation under God: The Religious Right and the Separation of Church and State in the United States

In the increasingly polarised debate that is American politics, religion and religious belief has garnered a significant amount of attention in recent years, particularly `on the right-wing of the political spectrum. Despite the separation of Church and State expressly laid out in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, many Republican politicians and faith-based organisations reject the idea of a secular United States and instead assert the supremacy of Judeo-Christian values in the American political discourse. This paper seeks to examine the activities of right-wing Christian political organisations, who oppose Church/State separation and their connections to U.S. politicians, as well as the deeper causes of the Religious Right’s staunch opposition to the Establishment Clause.

Emotion and the Ultimate Attribution Error

The influence of specific emotions (fear and anger) on the ultimate attribution error was investigated. Participants were recruited from an undergraduate population. There were 420 participants (156 male) with a mean age of 19.26 years. Participants took part in an online study. The study identified participants’ political in-groups (Democrat or Republican), induced them to feel an emotion (fear, anger, or neutral), and asked them to make an attribution (dispositional or circumstantial control) for the good or bad behaviors of Democratic or Republican politicians. Results revealed an ultimate attribution error (participants made in-group favoring/out-group derogating attributions), and an influence of emotion over the pattern of attributions made within this attribution error. The hypothesis that the valence of emotions influences attributions within the ultimate attribution error was supported. No support was found for the hypothesis that appraisal dimensions of emotions influence attributions within the ultimate attribution error. Theoretical implications and future directions were discussed.

Building Blocs: The Group Origins of Cultural Conservatism in the Republican Party

Leading up to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, cultural conservatives felt excluded from major decisions in both parties. New developments in the Democratic Party, such as the increasing presence of women’s rights groups and teachers unions, created conflicts with party members with traditional religious beliefs. Estranged from the Democratic Party, evangelical Christians and culturally conservative pressure groups organized to influence Republican nominations. Despite the promises of a new voting base, many Republican politicians tried to block their influence, partly because they were reluctant to alienate existing voters and interests. A relatively unpopular group of cultural conservatives induced a large political party to address its concerns by mobilizing voters, issuing group-based appeals, and withholding votes. This study conflicts with other accounts by arguing that social group leaders, rather than politicians, were the most important “building blocs” on the assembly line of party transformation. Elected politicians, the public face of parties, impeded the efforts of underrepresented groups to change a party.

War in Earnest: The Army of Virginia and the Radicalization of the Union War Effort, 1862

War in Earnest:The Army of Virginia and the Radicalization of the Union War Effort, 1862 John H. Matsui (bio) "War is . . . a continuation of political activity by other means," wrote the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz in what now amounts to a classic maxim regarding the nature of warfare.1 The American Civil War witnessed its share of politics interfering with and shaping military operations, not least because for the first time in recorded history the mass armies on both sides were composed of citizen-soldiers who were politically enfranchised, literate, and vocal about for what they fought. In other words, politicians and generals did not shape war policy separated from and uninfluenced by the opinions and actions of common fighting men. By the summer of 1862, white Union soldiers and their elected company-and field-grade officers serving in Virginia expressed increased dissatisfaction with the policy of West Point-trained generals to respect the property of civilians who openly aided Confederate forces and scorned the federal government.2 A significant part of this property consisted of the nearly 500,000 [End Page 180] slaves in the Commonwealth, composing almost a third of the Virginia's population. These northern soldiers found slavery appalling even as they remained unwilling to accept African Americans as fellow citizens.3 "War in earnest" was the desire of one New Englander on July 30, 1862. Having "played at war" in 1861, Union soldiers now recognized that the purpose of "war is to destroy, not protect an enemy."4 Rather than rely solely on a top-down or a bottom-up perspective, this article involves analysis of the shifting political ideology of both military elites and enlisted men in the summer of 1862. A word on the article's structure is due. The alliance between Radical Republican politicians and Republican-leaning generals against Democrats (northern and southern) and slavery is the initial focus. The article then turns to the frustrations of Union soldiers at lenient Federal policies toward southern civilians and their growing opposition to slavery via exposure to self-emancipated slaves. Regardless of their antebellum political convictions, by July 1862 volunteer soldiers and their (mostly) elected officers demonstrated increasing willingness to implement harsh policies toward Confederate civilians. The goals of politico-military elites and citizen-soldiers converged in a shared dream of revolution, of remaking the lazy South in the North's image as a year of conciliation was thrown back in the faces of Union occupiers. Internecine politics and slavery both enjoy increasing focus in recent historiography of the American Civil War. In his study of the Confederate army of Northern Virginia, Joseph Glatthaar notes that "politics and generalship went hand in hand in Lee's army" much the same way as in Union armies, and he pays attention to the politics of promotion at the field and company levels. Glatthaar also includes more coverage of slavery as an ideological motivation for Confederate soldiers than previous studies of the main rebel army.5 In Bell Wiley's classic study of the Union's common soldiery, politics [End Page 181] and slaves were only two items on a long laundry list of topics of soldierly conversation and correspondence.6 By contrast, "three in ten Union soldiers" in the study sample assembled by James McPherson for his 1997 analysis of why northern soldiers fought, understood within "the first eighteen months of the war" that the "abolition of slavery was inseparably linked to the goal of preserving the Union."7 Chandra Manning's 2007 book builds on McPherson's text and "rescues slavery from the periphery of soldiers' mental worlds, where subsequent generations have tried to relegate it." This article follows in McPherson's and Manning's scholarly footsteps, particularly with regard to soldiers' increasing awareness of the necessity of destroying slavery as well as Confederate armies to defeat the rebellion in the first year of the war. It also adheres to Manning's view that many Union soldiers were ahead of their president in seeing that the Union "must reform rather than merely preserve itself," a reformation or reconstruction that necessarily involved emancipation.8 Yet Gary Gallagher's recent cautionary comments on...

The Fallacy of ‘Local Control’

The U.S. Department of Energy may have slipped his mind, but Texas Gov. Rick Perry remembered during his debate debacle last fall that he would close the U.S. Department of Education if elected president. He had some help. Every 2012 Republican presidential candidate has railed against federal influence in the nation's public schools, as have most other Republican presidential hopefuls since the department's founding in 1980. Given the nation's long tradition of local control of school policies, the department has been an easy target for Republican politicians playing to the anti-Washington inclinations of small-government conservatives. Ronald Reagan spent more than two years advocating the new department's abolition after he won the White House, even as a commission created by his education secretary was drafting a national school reform manifesto. But today's Republican critiques of the federal role in education are not merely the predictable by-products of a presidential campaign. They're part of a backlash from many points on the political spectrum against the emergence over the past three decades of national demands on local school systems. It would be unfortunate if these critics prevailed at this important juncture in American education history. With the nation's pursuit of equal educational opportunity far from fulfilled and workers increasingly facing global competition for their jobs, there's a compelling case for defining public education's aspirations nationally rather than locally. The tradition of local control runs deep. The U.S. Constitution left authority over education in the hands of the states under the 10th Amendment, and the states passed that power to local school boards. For much of the nation's history, local boards were solely responsible for school funding, standards, instruction, and results. They presided over an education enterprise that stressed low-level academics and vocational training for most students. But faith in local school boards began to erode when the Reagan Administration's reform commission and other influential voices in the early 1980s called on public schools to deliver a much more demanding education to a much wider range of students. Many local school systems failed to deliver, responding, for example, to calls for a stronger high school core curriculum with a myriad of watered-down courses like Fundamentals of General Science and Informal Geometry. Students earned science credits for classes in commercial food preparation and auto body repair. As a result, we've spent three decades shifting strategic decision making in public education from the local to the national levels. Organizations of governors and state education officials, Republican and Democrat presidents, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, and a host of convening organizations replaced local hegemony with more centralized standards, assessments, and accountability requirements--an evolution chronicled by education writer Robert Rothman in a new book, Something in Common (Harvard Education Press, 2011). The logic of this transformation in American education is clear and compelling: National problems require national solutions. As commentator Matt Miller wrote in The Atlantic in 2008 about relying on local school boards to meet today's educational challenges: It's as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories. Local control threatened There have been mistakes along the way. The federal No Child Left Behind Act required states to set high standards, measure student performance, and hold schools accountable for results. But NCLB unintentionally gave states a strong incentive to lower rather than raise standards--by demanding that they judge schools on the percentage of students who met the standards and demanding that all groups of students clear the state hurdles by 2014--and a number of states did just that. …

Newspaper Coverage of Political Scandals

We study the coverage of U.S. political scandals by U.S. newspapers during the past decade. Using automatic keyword-based searches we collected data on 32 scandals and approximately 200 newspapers. We find that Democratic-leaning newspapers—i.e., those with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elections—provide relatively more coverage of scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while Republican-leaning newspapers tend to do the opposite. This is true even after controlling for the average partisan leanings of readers. In contrast, newspapers appear to cater to the partisan tastes of readers only for local scandals.

Violent Fraternities and White Reform: The Complementary Fictions of Albion Tourgée and Thomas Dixon

Violent Fraternities and White Reform: The Complementary Fictions of Albion Tourgée and Thomas Dixon Rebecca Skidmore Biggio (bio) The First Sixty Years or so of the Fledgling nation’s political order resulted in Civil War, and those cultural critics and civic leaders who came to political maturity during the war and rose to prominence in its aftermath inherited a national obsession with an idealized and elusive notion of American democracy and its attendant tradition of violence. In the postwar years, Radical Republicans and conservative southerners alike deployed appeals to democracy and the nation’s foundational ideals to support their contentious political positions, but they were operating with decidedly different working definitions of what “democracy” actually looked like, both theoretically and in practice. As George C. Rable has observed of the Reconstruction era generally, the doctrines of classical liberalism “were distorted for conservative purposes by businessmen and Republican politicians as well as by white southerners attempting to preserve their most sacred values” (1). These clashing ideological pursuits often led to violence enacted in the name of one or another conflicting definition of democracy asserted on behalf of the American people. Questions of citizenship and national belonging were central to these debates, as the political and literary works of civil rights activist Albion W. Tourgée and, a generation later, white supremacist demagogue Thomas Dixon, Jr., attest. The Reconstruction novels of Tourgée and Dixon exemplify postwar cultural negotiations concerning the place of violence in political [End Page 73] participation, or the complicated relationships between mob action, democratic practice, national citizenship, and race. In their respective efforts to differentiate the legitimate responsibilities of democratic national citizenship from the illegitimate exercise of terrorism, Tourgée and Dixon advance narrative appeals to the social possibilities inherent in various postbellum models of US democracy and collective action in a democratic society. As Christopher Castiglia has so aptly noted, “imaginative fiction is not a mere reflection of social values and mores, handy documents of more immediate historical and cultural forces. Rather, imaginative fiction is the archive of the socially possible, an archive of alternatives to the historically or sociologically ‘real’” (12–13). In Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand: By One of the Fools (1879), the socially possible includes a color-blind American justice system and a world in which white Americans and Americans of color peacefully coexist, gradually working toward the incorporation of ex-slaves into an educated and responsible multiracial polity. In this future, mob action is rendered obsolete, replaced by a properly functioning legal system that recognizes judicial (if not social) equality across racial lines. The realm of social possibility in Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900 (1902), however, involves complete control over non-whites, by violence if necessary. In short, both novels vie for the cultural authority to name the new national citizenship and therefore to define democratic participation in terms of who and what constitutes legitimate collective action. Moreover, this cultural work of archiving the social possibilities inherent in collective action was vitally important to the authors’ political agendas at a time when law and legitimacy were determined as much by the immediate force of majority will as by the courts. The correspondence between a white masculine understanding of democracy as collective action, which Tourgée accepted, and a more troublesome mob mentality, which he resisted, is exactly the problem with which Tourgée struggles in his postwar fiction. A Union veteran and a carpetbagger in North Carolina during Reconstruction who steadfastly refused to ignore structural reconstitutions of the principles of slavery like lynching and disfranchisement, Tourgée also served as a lawyer and as a judge and was highly respected, if disliked, for his notorious impartiality on the bench. He would later found the National Citizen’s Rights Association (NCRA) in 1891, draft anti-lynching legislation [End Page 74] for the state of Ohio, and challenge segregation at the Supreme Court level as lead attorney in the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. His portrayal of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan in A Fool’s Errand is a critical one in which he decries the Klan’s...

U.S. Cliffhanger

Developers, Investors and clean energy companies are on tenterhooks over the future of the U.S. renewables industry as Republican politicians train their sights on environmental legislation in the U.S.

Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?

Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?