Farewell to the "Party Period": Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America

Historians of the United States have long contended that the study of governmental institutions, including the history of public policy, is no longer central to the teaching and writing of American history.¹ Some lament this development; others hail it as a sign that other worthy topics are finally getting the attention they deserve. Yet is it true? The recent outpouring of scholarship on the relationship between the state and the market, or what an earlier generation would have called political economy, raises questions about this venerable conceit. Indeed, if one were to pick a single word to characterize the state of the field in the history of American political economy, it might well be "robust."

Consider, for example, the recent publication by Norton of Inventing America—a major new U. S. history textbook co-authored by four highly regarded senior scholars—Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles. The theme of Inventing America is innovation, including political innovation. In deliberate contrast to previous textbooks, it places "renewed emphasis" on national and state governments in the conviction that these institutions have "often acted as powerful agents of social and economic change."²

This article surveys recent scholarship on the history of political economy in the United States. Its focus is on work published since the mid-1990s on the long nineteenth century that opened with the adoption of the federal Constitution and closed with World War I. In no sense is it intended to be comprehensive; rather, it seeks merely to highlight some of the most important recent trends. A similar essay could be written for the twentieth century and for the colonial era. Yet it is particularly notable that so much innovative work has been published, and is soon to appear, on a period during which it has long been assumed that the American state was weak and unimportant. According to this view, which has been endorsed by historians as well as political scientists, the nineteenth-century American state was a "state of courts and parties" in which few governmental institutions other than courts and parties had a major influence on American life. Even courts and parties were typically assumed to have reflected changes originating in the wider society, rather than the other way around.³ Courts were treated as agents of commercial development, parties as reflections of changing social trends. To highlight the centrality of the political party to nineteenth-century politics, proponents of the courts-and-parties school dubbed the decades between the 1830s and the 1880s the "party period" in American political history, a periodization that Richard L. McCormick popularized in his influential Party Period and Public Policy (1986), and that Joel H. Silbey relied on in his American Political Nation (1991).⁴

The scholarship surveyed in this article suggests that the party-period paradigm is under assault. Though no new paradigm has yet gained widespread acceptance, it points to the rapid emergence of what one might call the political economy synthesis.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate this historiographical sea change is to highlight the variety of recent scholarship that can fit under the rubric of political economy. Such works range from the detailed investigation by Sven Beckert and Robert Johnston of the New York bourgeoisie and the Portland, Oregon, middle class to the synthetic exploration by Richard Franklin Bensel and Elizabeth Sanders of the Gilded Age Republican party and the Progressive Era farmers' movement.⁵ The relationship of the state and market has long been a focus for scholarship in legal history, and it draws much of its inspiration from the well-known books and articles of Willard Hurst and Harry Scheiber. Among the recent scholarship in this tradition are books on state government by Ballard C. Campbell and Colleen A. Dunlavy; on regulation by William J. Novak, Barbara Young Welke, and Victoria Saker...