Involved Disengagement? Reconsidering the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy

Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin. Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Xii + 316pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

It has been said that all history is informed by concerns about the present and Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin's book is no exception. Reflecting on apprehensions about declining voter turnout, they question the implicit and sometimes explicit contrast drawn by pundits and historians between a golden age of political engagement in the nineteenth century and the present. Writing more than 30 years after the last great popular political mobilizations in the United States, the authors conclude that this is not the case, that the nineteenth century, just like the twentieth century, was characterized by widespread disinterestedness among voters, to the point of an aggressive distaste for politics. Politics, they argue, is and was the affair of a minority of activists, doing their best to garner support and legitimacy from a largely uninformed and uninterested citizenry. Because there was no "golden age" of participatory democracy, there has also been no "decline of popular politics," which sets Altschuler and Blumin's argument in sharp contrast to the interpretations of Michael McGerr, Robert Wiebe, William Gienapp, and others, all of whom have emphasized the transition from the broad-based democracy of the nineteenth century to the disenchanted and demobilized voters of the twentieth century. ¹ While for these historians, "politics entered into everything," Altschuler and Blumin see it remaining enclosed in its own, limited "social space." "It is our contention," they write, "that the political engagement of nineteenth-century Americans did vary significantly, over time and among ordinary citizens at any given time, and that the recognition of these variations leads to fundamental questions about Americans and their politics" (p. 5).

Rude Republic enters a spirited historiographical debate and does so with a clearly articulated argument. With strongly revisionist intentions, the authors' contend at the outset that voting records, contemporary descriptions of massive rallies, and the lore of a mobilized citizenry alone are insufficient to gauge the degree of political engagement. They instead want to investigate what social space politics occupied in the lives of nineteenth-century Americans, and in American culture more generally. In this inquiry, Altschuler and Blumin come to two conclusions: They find that the social space occupied by politics (the importance of politics to the lives of Americans) varied widely, and, more controversially, they deny that politics was a central preoccupation of many citizens and voters. While a small minority of Americans was so deeply engaged in politics that they can be considered among the "party leadership," and a more substantial group entered the political fray in a more sporadic but still durable manner as "active" or "very active" partisans (p. 25), the vast majority of citizens, even of voters, had little interest in active political engagement. With this conclusion, Altschuler and Blumin in effect challenge the writings of a whole generation of political historians who have emphasized the vibrancy and deep-rootedness of American political culture in the nineteenth century. According to Altschuler and Blumin, however, widespread political disinterest should not surprise us, considering that important strands of religious thought expressed concerns about the primacy of secular institutions, a widely-embraced "vernacular liberalism" undermined citizens' focus on the public realm, republican beliefs challenged the legitimacy of parties, and middle-class citizens expressed increasing concern about the disrespectability of politics. Essential aspects of American culture hence worked against widespread political engagement.

In order to make this provocative argument viable, Altschuler and Blumin need to explain why, despite large numbers of allegedly apolitical citizens, voter turnout, beginning with the election of 1840, was extraordinarily high. That year, the participation of eligible voters in presidential elections soared to more than 80 percent (remaining there until the end of the century), a number nearly twice that of modern elections. The authors question, however, what these numbers...