The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (review)

354civil war history demography, economy, ideology, and social priorities. A crowded environment made organized activity mandatory and spectator sports possible. Industrialism expanded leisure time and its regimentation created a need for vicarious fulfillment. The spirit of competition fostered by sports was embraced eagerly in a business cidatel imbued with Darwinian notions of "survival of the fittest." Sports contributed to the liberation of women and offered new opportunities for oppressed minorities, especially the Irish. The study devotes careful attention to the role of Negroes in New Orleans sports. By demonstrating that black athletes competed against whites in many activities until the color line tightened after 1890, Somers has offered convincing support for the Woodward thesis in an area heretofore largely ignored by the Woodwardians . All in all, The Rise of Sports in New Orleans soundly upholds Somers' conviction that sports can provide an excellent mirror to society. In March, shortly after publication of his book, Dale Somers succumbed to cancer in Atlanta. His friends and fellow students of American life will miss this talented, tough-minded young man very much. He has left us with a challenge that cannot be ignored, that professional historians abandon their inane belief "that such a lowbrow topic scarcely merits highbrow consideration." Roger A. Fischer University of Minnesota, Duluth The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861. By Ronald P. Formisano. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Pp. xii, 356. $12.50.) Formisano has written an important book. Skillfully blending descriptive sources with quantitative correlations, he has reached beyond earlier studies to give us a new synthesis. The book is rich and complex ; several individual chapters and subchapters raise questions which, while part of the basic thesis, will intrigue social historians who are not mainly interested in political parties. Formisano emphasizes the religious basis of Michigan's political parties . Rooted in the Anti-Masonic movement, evangelical Protestants used the Whig, Liberty, Free Soil and Republican parties to express their hatred of the Popery, aristocracy, intemperance, "southernism," alien voting and tight party discipline they associated with the Democrats . The advent of mass-based parties in the 1830's made politicians "more deliberate" in their exploitation of ethno-religious politics than they had been before. He finds that Michael F. Holt's conclusions about the origins of the Republican party in Pittsburgh hold true for Michigan. Formisano traces how wars between militant Catholics and Know Nothings in 1853 seriously damaged the existing party system in local elections, making it possible for the Kansas-Nebraska agitation BOOK REVIEWS355 to channel the evangelical fusion movements that would become the Republican party. Anti-Southernism gave Repulicans a strong claim to the egalitarian tradition—for whites only. More zealous than expedient , evangelicals, since their political baptism in Anti-Masonry, turned away from major party politicians (Whigs after 1840, Republicans in 1857-58) who showed too much interest in the votes of wets, immigrants , or Catholics. The great irony was that the evangelicals called Michigan's first territorial political convention (in 1829), and this convention provided the impetus for the mass-based party system and resulting professional politicians whom the evangelicals would spend the next generation attacking. While Formisano's main interest is in the relation of moral-religious issues to political parties, he recognizes that politicians exploited economic issues. He reports debates over banking and incorporation issues , and over a property basis for suffrage and internal improvements. But he insists that ethno-religious conflicts, which created party allegiances , cut across class lines. Rejecting the progressive historians' claims that parties reflected class conflicts, he asserts that the new mass parties "inhibited class resentments" and "probably insulated the social order from any serious challenge." Because Formisano's book is less rigid than most contributions of the "new political history" in the insistence on polarizing economic against ethno-religious behavior, it illustrates dramatically a major historiographical problem that is developing. The "new political historians," including Formisano, have so assiduously attacked the economic categories of the progressive historians that they are producing a stilted painting of grass-roots political behavior. They are ignoring, for example , the work of a group of able young historians, inspired by European social historians and by Formisano's Rochester colleague Herbert...