Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century. By Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 316. $35.00.)

In Rude Republic, Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin of Cornell University elaborate an argument about nineteenth-century Americans' pervasive disenchantment with partisan electoral politics that they first presented in a provocative article about the antebellum period in the Journal of American History. Here they extend their analysis to the 1880s. They also cite additional evidence for Americans' alleged disdain for politics from samples of popular fiction and personal diaries, Currier and Ives lithographs, and, most ingeniously, state legislative committees that interrogated individual voters while investigating disputed elections.

According to Altschuler and Blumin, an entire generation of political historians, including this reviewer, has mischaracterized the last six decades of the nineteenth century as an era of unprecedented and subsequently unequaled popular interest and participation in partisan political life. Instead, citizens then were no better informed about or engaged by partisan politics than citizens in the late twentieth century, when voter turnout rates were dramatically lower.

Their quite sensible corollary to this dubious contention is one that few political historians would dispute. Precisely the difference in degrees of political knowledge and commitment between partisan activists and the less engaged potential electorate accounts for political parties' Herculean efforts to mobilize voters. The parties succeeded spectacularly at this task, the authors admit, but they failed to "engender effective, satisfied, or deeply engaged voters" (272).

Why then, one wonders, were the parties so successful at mobilizing voters? The authors never tell us. If they are correct, indeed, this success is inexplicable, for they contend that the public's dominant response to politics was aversion, not simply disinterest. As connoted by their title, they argue that partisan politics during the nineteenth century was perceived by many as being rudely contentious, unseemly, and disreputable. Politics thus affronted those with deep religious sensibilities and those who aspired to middle-class respectability and refinement. "Blatant office-seeking and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the cultivation of political loyalty among newly enfranchised workers and recently arrived immigrants, the inclusion in political organizations of saloonkeepers, street toughs, and other unsavory characters, the employment of manipulative techniques of mass appeal, and the equation of these techniques with other forms of crude humbuggery, imparted an unseemliness to politics that considerably complicated the simultaneous pursuit of respectability and active political life" (8). And many people, insist the authors, resolved this dilemma by opting out of political life except for routinely and unthinkingly voting on election day.

Far from being democratic forums that were open to popular input and decision-making, parties' nominating conventions were tightly controlled by a few insiders and sparsely attended. People came to campaign speeches and rallies primarily for the free entertainment, food, and drink, not any interest in what speakers said. Many of those famous rallies and parades, moreover, were salted with party workers from other communities to inflate crowds and exaggerate popular enthusiasm. If people voted in huge numbers, most were eager to get the ordeal of campaigns over with, and many were uninformed about the issues at stake and occasionally about whom they were voting for.

The authors' primary source of evidence is newspaper coverage of three-year election cycles in a slightly changing sample of small towns, a tiny Louisiana hamlet, and one mid-sized Iowa city from 1840 to the 1880s. The authors never make clear why they chose these particular towns. What is clear is that they rarely examined their towns' relationship to other political units in state legislative and congressional districts. Yet that information could easily supply an alternative explanation for the low attendance at nominating conventions about which they hoot.

Similarly, their use of newspapers is highly selective and biased to support their case that politics was a meaningless "circus." They love to quote partisan editors' worries about...