Festive Nationalism and Antiparty Partyism

The emergence of a two-party political system remains one of the most intriguing paradoxes of the founding era. For the framers, “party” connoted faction, the pursuit of selfish interests at the expense of the larger public good. Yet within a few years of ratification, a fundamental split had emerged, pitting the supporters of Washington and Hamilton against the supporters of Jefferson and Madison. Both the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans claimed to be the true standard-bearers of the American Revolution. Each branded the other the mortal enemy of republican virtue; neither acknowledged the legitimacy of political partisanship. From that time on, permanent political parties coexisted with a defiant rhetoric opposing such divisions.

Previous generations of historians have explained the emergence of parties in a variety of ways: as a clash between democratic and aristocratic notions of governance; as the power of strong personalities to shape the political system; or as an inevitable conflict between strict and loose constructions of the Constitution. What characterizes all these interpretations, however, is a continuing emphasis on great white men and elite ideas. Whereas the fields of social, cultural, and women’s history have transformed the political history of other eras, these approaches have, until now, made few inroads into the scholarship of the early national period. Prize-winning books, such as Gordon Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) and Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick’s Age of Federalism (1993), synthesize the best of the older approaches; they do not break new methodological ground nor alter the basic outlines of the political narrative. ¹

In contrast, Simon Newman, Len Travers, and David Waldstreicher produce the outlines of a new narrative. Taking a cue from historians of other periods, ² they uncover whole strata of popular political participation that have been overlooked or ignored. In their rendering, politics extended far beyond the halls of Congress or the exercise of the franchise. From the pre-Revolutionary era onward, Americans acted politically through parades, celebrations, and public rituals. Events as diverse as the New York Federal Procession of 1788, yearly Independence Day celebrations held throughout the country, and the wearing of colored badges provided ordinary people, including women and African Americans, with a means of political expression. Far from being passive spectators, people challenged the hegemony of their social betters and negotiated for control of the political process. Non-elites thus claimed a partisan identity; at the same time they helped shape a national political culture.

To the extent that all three historians share this interpretive framework, they have made a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the early national period. Yet the works also make qualitatively different contributions to the revised narrative, with varying degrees of success. Their strengths and weaknesses provide a clue as to the most potentially fruitful directions of future research in the field.

Travers’s Celebrating the Fourth is the most narrowly focused of the three studies. Drawn primarily from newspapers and other contemporaneous accounts, Travers closely analyzes the development of Independence Day rituals from 1777 to 1826 in three cities: Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. He argues that these celebrations “articulated and reinforced that critical faith [in American nationalism], temporarily extending the ‘community of allegiance’ beyond state and regional boundaries” (p. 226). This community even extended to the otherwise dispossessed. Women, for example, presented flags to local militia companies and attended public orations. In Philadelphia and Boston, African Americans marched in parades, congregated in common areas, or provided...