The Paradox of Progress: Economic Change, Individual Enterprise, and Political Culture in Michigan, 1837-1878 (review)

Nothing seems as persistently unsatisfying as our explanations of what happened to the second party system during the decades leading up to the Civil War. When this reviewer was in graduate school, Paul Kleppner and Richard Jensen had just set us all straight with an ethno-cultural thesis that marked the triumph of popular voter prejudice over other salient variables. But since then Michael Holt, Joel Silbey, Ron Formisano, Bill Gienapp, and a host of others have served up "Yes, but..." replies, with the result that virtually every clarifying schematic collapses when viewed at closer range or from a different perspective. Even though we feared at the time that we would have to meet by name every county commissioner in antebellum Alabama, many of us embraced J. Mills Thornton's Bruegelesque mural of Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (1978) as the only safe approach. Following Tip O'Neil's famous quip—that all politics is local politics—historians have grown wary of anything but detailed, grounded narratives even though such stories generally fail to explain anything.

It is in the Thornton tradition that Martin J. Hershock's The Paradox of Progress tries to portray Michigan politics as a game of mediation among economic interests and political ambitions that was never only about party. The game of politics always blended the contest to get power with the temptation to wield it in ways that appealed (pandered?) to voters and candidates on several levels at once. The challenge for historians is to find a way to frame and present that game so that its multiple dimensions interact freely and faithfully, using primary sources full of deceitful rhetoric deployed (at least in part) to make speakers seem to be what they were not.

The state of Michigan came into being just as the Panic of 1837 ruined public internal improvement programs all over the Midwest, producing a crisis of confidence in government and the burgeoning market economy. The backlash resulted in constitutional "reforms" and painted incumbents of all persuasions with the stain of miserable failure. In Michigan the fallout was especially confusing, because it had been Jackson Democrats who promoted internal improvements, leaving normally pro-business, pro-corporation Whigs to denounce monopolists and the money power. Hershock rightly sees the market revolution as one fulcrum for political leverage, but nowhere else did politicians so torture their positions on the market, corporations, state power, and economic development as they did in this Michigan snakepit.

As voter frustration grew in Michigan, disillusionment with national concessions to what locals called the "Slave Power" shed what seems like a clarifying light on the muddle. A "people's party" called "Republican" emerged, promising free soil, free labor, freedom of the common for livestock, free markets, free banking, free incorporation, and economy in government—one of the oddest mixtures of principle and interest yet seen in American politics. Oh yes, and some wanted freedom for slaves too. Of course, once enfolded in the national Republican movement by 1858 or so, Michigan voters found that they could keep the new party from being truly radical, but they could not otherwise control rapidly exploding events. So the election of the centrist Lincoln yielded secession after all, and the exigencies of war took the Republicans to places many—perhaps most—of the Michigan faithful never wanted to go. As a result we hear their plaintive voices after 1865 calling "What about us?" as vengeful Republicans in Washington implemented a nationalistic revolution almost nobody west of Pittsburgh could approve.

Hershock's story is well told. It is especially important that he carries it into the 1870s in order to highlight the betrayal felt by Republicans all over the upper Midwest in the wake of the Union triumph. However, this author's focus on Michigan sources is often too narrow to...