Sophisticated political history is comprised of three overlapping but conceptually distinct elements—the unique, giving to the story its special flavor and identifying detail; the systematic, offering generalized context and causal explanation; and the original, indicating breaks in the time series and a precedent for future developments. Ellis’ account of the 1840 U.S. presidential election masterfully combines all three elements. The resulting volume is well-written and documented, articulate in presentation, rigorous in evidence, and plausible in argumentation.The 1840 presidential election is most often remembered for huge, raucous, popular demonstrations and distorted campaign appeals. The Whig Party portrayed its nominee, William Henry Harrison, as a great war hero from humble, log-cabin origins and denounced the Democratic incumbent, President Martin Van Buren, as pompous and out of touch. In the conventional version of the story, Van Buren’s defeat, ending twelve years of Democratic dominance, demonstrates the political potency of distracting hoopla and partisan vitriol.Ellis does not neglect the dynamics of 1840 presidential campaigning. In enormous detail, supported by more than 100 pages of endnotes, he traces the personal motivations and strategic calculations of the candidates and their supporters, from the struggle for nomination to the party conventions and ultimately to the presidential contest with its propaganda barrage by “cartoonists and wordsmiths” and a “veritable army of political speakers” (213). Nevertheless, Ellis’ explanatory emphasis lies elsewhere, in systematic rather than transitory factors. “All the songs and speeches, merriment and mud-slinging, mattered little,” he writes; by the time the American people became attentive, “the election, for all intents and purposes, had already been decided” (233). As shown in much social-science research, subjective party identification tends to be the most important determinant of voting preference. Few voters know, or even care, about the specifics of public policies. The causal arrow generally goes from party allegiance to policy stance and from party allegiance to symbolic assent, not the other way around (262).Significant deviation from partisan regularity is most often the consequence of economic expansion or contraction. Retrospective voting theory posits that elections are, to a large extent, referenda upon incumbents, attributing to them responsibility for national successes or failures. Unfortunately for Democratic Party prospects, the financial Panic of 1837 was especially painful. Ellis carefully correlates the downs and ups of economic depression, partial recovery, and renewed recession with the results garnered by the competing political parties at the polls, examined across the large number of state and district elections preceding the national contest. His first-rate analysis—a model of how to leverage the available historical data—concludes that the outcome in 1840 was rigorously predictable, depending less on deluded voters than on retrospectively calculating ones.Finally, the book highlights those political trends first appearing, or appearing to the perceptive observer, during the 1840 election. The study of interdisciplinary history has often focused upon situating events in time, investigating patterns, regularities, innovations, and breakpoints in a sequence. As featured in Ellis’ account, 1840 saw the first nominating conventions that did more than simply ratify the decisions by party leaders. For the first time, candidates abandoned the ostensible passivity of their back porch to pursue votes actively. Party organization strengthened, and populist appeals expanded. Slavery showed the first signs of disrupting intersectional party alliances. Voter turnout was much higher than ever before, for first time surpassing that of state and local elections. The 1840 election, beyond mere carnival-style entertainment, provided a distinct step in the development of a more presidentially centered U.S. politics.If the book is subject to any criticism, it would be that most of the formal social science is confined to the endnotes. This choice seems mistaken. Ellis may have felt that excursions into the language of contemporary social science might have disrupted the narrative flow. If so, he could have placed the formal analysis in boxed inserts or chapter appendixes. The study of interdisciplinary history entails the subtle merging of academically separate subfields. An adjustment to their balance in this book would have added yet another dimension to an otherwise excellent analysis.
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Open Access
Feb 1, 2022
Rana Hosni 