A Very Short Introduction probably shouldn’t be criticised simply for its omissions. I think it’s fair to assume that readers of this series don’t want the last word on a given topic. If anything, attempting to cram too much into one of these pocket-sized volumes might alienate a non-specialist audience. A good short introduction should provide a way into its subject – to raise questions rather than providing a list of answers. But, in the knowledge that one of these books won’t be conclusive, I think it is fair to ask how the limited selection of facts might influence the sort of foundation readers are being offered. In this case, what does the author mean by ‘politics’? What moments will he chose to focus on? What shape will his story take?
Critchlow takes ‘political history’ to mean a history of political elites – the decisions of congressmen (and, at times, a white male electorate), rather than popular movements, which worked outside the formal political process. He choses four themes from the outset, which run through his entire account: the intensity and continuity of partisanship and polarization, the steady expansion of the electorate to be more inclusive, the continuation of debates over the role and power of the federal government and the importance of the Constitution in framing political debate. Critchlow’s focus on political elites, combined with his four themes, provides a tight structure to frame such a long and complex story. Overall though, the approach results in both weakness and strengths. The author is particularly good at tracing aspects of mainstream political culture, such as partisanship and the role of the federal government. But Critchlow’s account of ‘the steady expansion of the electorate’ is one of a few instances when he tries too hard to emphasise ‘progress’ in US history, treating as inevitable a process that was marred by struggle and, at times, regression.
Firstly, Critchlow is very good at explaining how mainstream political culture has changed in America since the writing of the Constitution. With the very first sentence of this introduction, he makes it clear that he doesn’t accept the idea of a timeless American political tradition. Despite American politicians’ obsession with their own past, the political precedents they often invoke are plucked from eras with fundamentally different values and beliefs. Critchlow makes this clear, bringing in all the drama this story of cultural change deserves. ‘The Founding Fathers who drafted the US Constitution in 1787 feared political parties, popular democracy and centralised government’, he argues, reminding readers that the United States was not designed to be the democracy we recognise today. One of the best aspects of this introduction is the way the author accounts for the gradual, and often contested, emergence of political parties; a facet of political culture, which many non-specialists mistakenly view as intrinsic parts of the United States’ history.
For example, Critchlow resists the temptation to see the feud between Jefferson and Hamilton as an early form of two-party competition, neatly informing readers that this was ‘a time when the word “party” was almost a swear word’. He’s emphatic that ‘these distinct factions should not be seen as mass political parties like we have today’. Indeed, politicians in the early Republic believed rival parties were incompatible with republicanism and reflected the subversion of the public interest. In this era, ‘political victory’ meant ‘permanently driving out the opposite faction’; an ambition 21st-century readers would more readily associate with dictatorship. But, at the same time as emphasising change, Critchlow is sensitive to recurring themes – he doesn’t over-emphasise transitions in political culture. He notes, for instance, that a ‘strong antiparty sentiment’ prevailed among the Whig Party of the antebellum era as they declared themselves ‘Harrison supporters and reformers’ rather than Whigs. During the Civil War, Charles Sumner is quoted saying ‘the Democratic Party is no longer patriotic – it should not exist’. It’s perhaps a missed opportunity, here, not to draw a parallel, made by several contemporary observers, between the perception of the War Democrats as traitors and the unpopularity of the Federalist Party during the War of 1812. But, more often than not, connections across different periods are particularly well drawn and not at all tenuous, rooted, as they are, in first-hand observations. After Watergate, the Republicans, apparently, ‘openly wondered if their party was going the way of the defunct Whig Party’. Indeed, Critchlow hints that this historic anti-party sentiment survives today, explaining that Obama’s ‘high’ but ‘not historic’ victory in 2008 offered people hope of a ‘postpartisan’ era.
However, for a historian who can be so sensitive to the differences between our world and ‘the eighteenth century world of the American founders’, Critchlow’s narrative occasionally becomes marred by hindsight. Despite describing some transitions in political culture, the author plumps for a narrative of political change, which, above all, puts ‘progress’ central to the American story. At times, his narrative seems present-centred, stringing together political triumphs, which make the emancipation of marginalised groups look inevitable. It’s true that the electorate by the end of the 20th century was much larger than it was under Washington. Enshrined in the Constitution, hopefully, this progress is here to stay. But, freedoms have grown in fits and starts; periods of progress have accompanied periods of decline. Furthermore, there’s nothing wrong with foregrounding politicians in an account of political history (although I can think of other ways to tell the story) but Critchlow all too often ends up giving them credit, which should be shared among a much larger pool of protagonists. This isn’t political point scoring: a story of ‘great men’ skews causation. It distorts what happened and why.
For example, introducing his chapter on ‘the Age of Democracy, 1816–44’, Critchlow proclaims that ‘the war (of 1812) gave Americans a new hero – Andrew Jackson – and with it egalitarian democracy took root’. Far too briefly, he mentions that ‘free blacks held voting privileges in only eight of the twenty-four states’. Yes, he alludes to the fact that ‘restrictions of female and free black voting coincided with the rise of propertyless male suffrage’. But, he needs to make much more of the often complementary relationship between the egalitarian democracy of whites and the disenfranchisement and enslavement of African Americans; especially since one of his key overarching ‘themes’ is the ‘steady expansion of the electorate’. In both the North and South, the first half of the 19th century is a story of decreasing freedoms for the majority of blacks in the United States. With the ‘Black Codes’ of 1804, Ohio became the first non-slaveholding state to put voting restrictions on African Americans, New Jersey disenfranchised black voters in 1807, Connecticut in 1818, Missouri in 1821, Rhode Island in 1822 and so on. At the same time, the South went from thinking about slavery as a ‘necessary evil’, to a ‘positive good’, with the rise of a class of religious leaders, editors and intellectuals eager to justify the benefits of slavery and push for its expansion.
Just as Critchlow mines the 19th century for the seeds of ‘egalitarian democracy’, his present-centred view of history turns key political actors into ‘great men’, who possess an uncanny ability to anticipate historical progress. Reading the introduction, it’s easy to forget that Critchlow’s protagonists were complex individuals with the same prejudices and biases that motivated their contemporaries. Lincoln suffers most from this celebratory tone. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 are described as a kind of morality play. Lincoln, apparently, ‘challenged Douglas’ concept of popular sovereignty’ ‘by maintaining that blacks possess natural rights set down in the Declaration of Independence that made them equal as men’. No mention is made that Lincoln also exploited the ‘Slave Power’ conspiracy, and stirred up white Northerners’ anxieties about having their own labour degraded by black people. Although Lincoln based his arguments on the essential humanity of people of all races, Critchlow’s argument that he considered slaves ‘equal as men’ needs qualification, especially when we consider Lincoln’s support for colonisation schemes designed to forcibly remove African Americans from the US to Liberia.
Later, the Emancipation Proclamation, as well being a ‘war measure’, supposedly ‘expressed Lincoln’s deep belief that the war was about freeing slaves’. But, Lincoln didn’t begin the war as the ‘Great Emancipator’. He only saw the need for emancipation after he was pushed by abolitionists and, most importantly, by the slaves themselves, fleeing the Confederacy in large numbers and proving their utility to the Union forces. Critchlow also celebrates the ‘rights of citizenship and voting rights’ that were ‘granted to black men’, whilst not sufficiently stressing the fact that blacks did a lot to take these rights themselves. He goes on to explain that ‘however constricted by state rule, these rights were now embedded in the Constitution awaiting full implementation by future generations’. But, the rights of African Americans were only ‘awaiting implementation’ if readers accept Critchlow’s personification of the Constitution as an active moral force in US history. The phrase implies that the Radical Republicans somehow predicted the gains made by the Civil Rights movement. It provides a narrative of steady political progress, distorting the fact that efforts to guarantee black rights were often a failure during Reconstruction, frequently to the delight of both North and South alike.
Indeed, the section on Reconstruction doesn’t sufficiently deal with the failures of legislation designed to protect ex-slaves. At times, Critchlow makes perceptive suggestions about the problems inherent in the project: ‘Grant pursued a contradictory policy of trying to reconcile white southerners while using the army to protect black rights.’ He also notes ‘the struggle to fulfil these rights and to engage in civic life brought political acrimony at every level of government, national, state and local.’ However, ultimately, the story is one of political progress as Critchlow concludes Reconstruction ‘transformed slaves’ into ‘equal citizens of the nation’ and that they increasingly participated in politics. It would be useful to include qualifications, here, alluding to the decline, as well as progress, in black rights between 1865–77. Historians like John Willis, for example, point out that lynching (something Critchlow describes, just once, as ‘vigilante violence against blacks and whites’) became more frequent during Reconstruction, peaking in the late 19th century.(1) When Critchlow does say that Radical Reconstruction was ‘in decline,’ he mentions only the corrupt elite politics of the era. In fact, when Democrats won southern states, they passed laws which effectively disenfranchised African Americans. At the same time, the Supreme Court interpreted Reconstruction legislation more narrowly as the period progressed.
As well as foregrounding ‘progressive’ legislation, Critchlow’s narrow definition of political activity, again, doesn’t make causation sufficiently clear to a non-specialist audience. The Compromise of 1877, for instance, comes across as primarily a dispute over electoral returns in three states, with little indication that Southern whites used the election as a means to end Reconstruction itself. Critchlow writes that ‘scandal, political corruption and economic depression played to Democrats as they entered the 1876 election,’ before explaining that the political stalemate came down to ‘disputed votes in South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana’. He goes on to write:
‘Finally, after a secret meeting of Republican and southern Democratic leaders a special commission was established with eight Republicans and seven Democrats who reached a grand compromise that gave the election to Hayes. Democrats were allowed to ‘win’ the state election in three states. The eventual withdrawal of federal troops allowed Southern states to suppress the rights of blacks as citizens’.
It is not, in my view, clear enough to general readers that the compromise, which gave Hayes the Presidency, was a direct result of the Republicans agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the South. Instead, Critchlow makes it seem as if the withdrawal of federal troops was almost an unintended consequence of a compromise designed to let Democrats ‘win’ South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. Yet, the party wouldn’t have cared about these state elections had it not been for their desire to end Reconstruction, motivated, as it was, by a deeply rooted racist culture, which legislation failed to counteract and a history of legislation fails to explain.
Later on, Critchlow, at times, takes the label of the ‘Progressive’ movement too literally. Above all, he characterises his chapter on ‘Gilded Age Frustration and the Progressive Response’ as an era of reform. In Critchlow’s words, the election of Theodore Roosevelt ‘ushered in a period of progressive reform that lasted until America’s entry into the First World War in 1917’. Certainly at the turn of the 19th century the public demanded restrictions on big business, and politicians introduced an expansion of government regulation and a professionalization of political bureaucracy. But Progressivism wasn’t synonymous with reform. Historians coined the label ‘Progressive’ to describe a political movement; not as a value judgment on the politics of the era, which, to modern eyes, were often incredibly reactionary. Wilson’s administration, apparently, ‘marked the triumph of progressive reform’, despite passing numerous laws to promote racial segregation, for example making intermarriage illegal in Washington D.C. Critchlow only dedicates a couple of sentences to race during this era, saying Wilson’s administration was ‘marred’ by his postmaster general, who wanted to ‘segregate black and white employees’.
This section on Progressive legislation (and, indeed, the entire book) fails to even mention ‘Jim Crow’; Native Americans make their first appearance after the Civil War in 1960 (except to describe the ‘Indian Bureau’ and when a group of white reformers - ‘mugwumps’ - are said to have derived their name from ‘an Algonquin Indian word’). However, by the 60’s, most of the Indians’ indigenous culture had been wiped out by the ‘Progressive’ impulses Critchlow describes. A longer treatment would helpfully interrogate the term ‘Progressive’, explaining, for instance, why the civilising of Indians in boarding schools and reservations might seem ‘progressive’ to early 20th-century audiences, despite being considered unacceptable and reactionary today. Once again, this problem arises because Critchlow’s history of political elites foregrounds successful legislation, which, in many cases, survives today. He does not, however, deal sufficiently with the more common and consistent incidences of increasing repression and the popular resistance to it.
The post-Second World War section of the introduction changes tone quite dramatically. The celebratory quality of earlier sections vanishes, especially as Critchlow describes the ‘uneasy’ New Deal coalition falling apart during the 1960s. By the mid-term elections of 1974 he claims that ‘the nation stood traumatised by decades of war, racial divisions, a deteriorating economy and scandal’. Popular groups feature much more heavily in this last section. Unfortunately, this might provide non-specialist readers with the impression that women and racial minorities had only just started to influence legislation. Considering Critchlow’s verdict that reform during the Progressive era ‘achieved much’, it seems a little harsh to damn Johnson’s Great Society as ‘raising expectations’ whilst ‘creating backlash among many middle-class and blue-collar whites in the North and South’. The overall feel to the last two sections of the book is a little rushed, adding to this sense of political apocalypse. What other scholars have termed the ‘conservative ascendency’ of the late 20th century requires more time to explain. Readers learn that Reagan filled a ‘vacuum’ on the Right and that he was both a ‘principled conservative’ and a ‘pragmatist’. However, they would benefit from more explanation about the political and cultural shift, which eroded the ‘liberal consensus’ during the 1960s and 1970s. Written by a historian who has published critically acclaimed work on conservatism, the book could do more to explain the rise of social conservatism and economic liberalism among the New Right, which, arguably, paved the way for an entirely new political consensus in the 1990s.(2)
Critchlow’s book is, on the whole, very readable. He has a flair for drama, which should keep most readers hooked. The connections between the chapters create a particular sense of excitement. He also has a flair for revealing details, which inform readers more effectively than long passages of explanation. After describing the caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, Critchlow notes, for example, that ‘the ladies of Charleston presented Brookes with a silver-headed cane, inscribed ‘hit him again’, letting readers draw their own conclusions about the culture of Southern chivalry, honour and violence. There are some very funny sections. Critchlow begins his chapter on the causes of the Civil War with the claim that ‘moral absolutes and democratic politics are not easily reconciled’ before sardonically observing that ‘God’s law was not easily determined by a majoritarian vote’. At other times, though, Critchlow’s narrative doesn’t run as smoothly as it could. He writes that politics in the late 19th century was characterised by ‘self-gain’, ‘partisan loyalty’ and corruption’, which seem too much like arbitrary categories for a chapter introduction.
This Very Short Introduction is a concise, readable narrative of American political history. Critchlow has done a particularly good job at illustrating transitions in elite political culture. He’s at his strongest tracing the tension between democracy and partisanship. But, he’s also too quick to emphasise ‘progressive’ currents in America’s past. The introduction doesn’t do enough to capture the fact that freedoms grow in fits and starts. The way the story is told by focusing on moments when politicians have tried to fight for liberal values results in an overly celebratory tone. Furthermore, his unapologetic focus on political elites does give the book focus, but it also distorts the drivers of events, giving little space to how marginalised groups influence the political process from the bottom-up.
Notes
John C. Willis, Forgotten Time The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War (Charlottesville, VA, 2000).Back to (1)
Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, MA, 2007).Back to (2)
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