The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880-1896

In The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896 the political scientist Daniel Klinghard accepts modern historians’ understanding that Republicans and Democrats in the Gilded Age offered voters contrasting approaches to governance. Even so, in this revised dissertation he posits a reconfiguration of parties away from what he terms the Jacksonian mode, whereby national parties comprised confederations of independent local organizations on whose cooperation and blessing national party leaders depended during campaigns. Instead, political parties shifted toward a more nationalistic mode in which national party leaders went over the heads of local satraps and appealed directly to individual voters through printed matter and personal presidential campaigning. He characterizes the earlier community-based politics as republican and the succeeding individualistic politics as liberal. In accounting for the change, Klinghard cites an “associational explosion,” the emergence of extra-party, citizen-based interest groups such as the Mugwumps and the Farmers’ Alliance, which served as models for the parties’ new emphasis on mobilizing individual voters (p. 66). In reality, considerably before such groups developed, national parties had engaged in direct appeals. National party entities, including the congressional campaign committees (missing from this account) distributed huge numbers of pamphlets to voters. The presidential candidate Horace Greeley made a campaign speaking tour in 1872, but more often in the early Gilded Age surrogate speakers crisscrossed the country, telling voters directly how their candidate and party would best serve the interests of the nation and individual citizens

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