The term is much-debated. Daniel T. Rodgers includes ‘the people’ among his ‘contested truths.’ Political definitions center on the question, ‘Who rules?’ Persons calling themselves populists insist on popular sovereignty against (in the words of one Kansas populist, “the plutocrats, the aristocrats, and all the other rats”—presumably not including the democrats (Canovan 51). Socioeconomic definitions (as offered, for example, in Hofstadter’s Age of Reform) point to the agrarian origins of pre-twentieth-century populists, the industrial-working-class origins of many twentieth-century populists. Early populists were “entrepreneurial radicals” of the post-1815 farm (see also Canovan’s formulation, “rural radicalism”). Later populists were industrial workers displaced or threatened by large-scale, shadowy economic forces. Typically, the dichotomy turned up by these definitions pits paper-pushers of various descriptions (bankers, corporation men, bureaucrats, university professors) against the worker/producers, those who (to employ nineteenth-century vocabulary) were described as horny-handed sons of toil. Ideological definitions of populism (seen also in Hofstadter) point to certain key themes in populist discourse as the telltale markers: the imagery of a golden (though not a gold-standard) age; the apocalyptic conflict of good and evil; conspiracy theories; teachings on the primacy of money in the determination of social and political as well as economic power; jingoism or, to use a less Hofstadterian term, patriotism.

These definitions all run up against the very sort of contestation out of which populism itself is born. Is Mr. X or Movement Y ‘truly’ populist? the people are sovereign, but who are the people? Who are the producers? Does Mr. X or Movement Y believe his/its own discourse? The answer will very often depend upon how the writer offering the definition defines the key terms. Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion attempts to short-circuit this dilemma by defining populism as a rhetoric, “a language”—and a “flexible” one, at that—”whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter” (1). I shall use Kazin’s definition as my starting point, working back to the social, economic, political, and ideological markers. When, where, and why have politicized American citizens appropriated the language of populism, the appeal to and for ‘the people.’

Under this definition (although Kazin doesn’t notice it), the first American populists were of course the revolutionaries who deployed the themes expounded in the Declaration of Independence: A “people” is severing the political bands connecting it to another “people”; respectful of the opinions of mankind, they declare their reasons for so doing; these include the principle that just governments are based on the consent of the governed and that when a form of government becomes destructive of certain inherent human rights, the people may alter or abolish that government and frame new governing forms. In America, the Tories had the British and mercenary armies, but the Whig elites/gentry needed soldiers who could only be drawn from the commons. Local militias were also in place, as were the local governments; in both the use of guns and the use of words, American commoners were already empowered before the Revolution began. Economically, the Americans were commercial-agrarian for the most part, and not only did not need but were impeded by the British imperial trading system. socially, Americans were overwhelmingly Protestant, sharing suspicion of ecclesiastical hierarchies. Just as important, America had no titled nobility; this made an unmixed republic possible, obviating the Aristotelian-Polybian need to balance the ‘orders.’

These conditions enabled and encouraged political elites such as the ‘Virginia dynasty’ of Jefferson, Madison, et al. to appeal to ‘the people’ against the foreign and foreign-dominated incipient ‘tyrants.’ The American Whigs borrowed their conspiracy theory, elaborated at some length in the Declaration of Independence, but also in Jeffersonian fulminations against centralized banking, from English Whig sources—particularly Cato’s Letters. Theirs is a perfect example of Richard Bensel’s distinction between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in that sense, the question of populism in America is always not only a matter of ‘when’ and ‘why’ but of ‘where.’ Once the American ‘periphery’ cut itself loose from the British imperial ‘core,’ a new ‘periphery’/’core’ dichotomy arose, between the farmers in the interior of the new country and the merchants along the coast. The battle over the 1787 Constitution, won by the merchant-coastal interests who wanted those farmers to pay their debts, moderated without by any means eliminating the populist elements of the Revolution; the Jeffersonian “Revolution of 1800” saw a return of the appeal to the people, now framed within the new constitutional structure, a return powered by the claim that Hamlton and his allies were secret monarchists bent on establishing their class via a complex and unfamiliar financial system, including that old-Whig bète noire, a national bank.

Kazin excludes the revolutionary generation from populism because it was led by gentry. This is true, but if populism is a persuasion, then it doesn’t necessarily matter who is making the appeal. At any rate, Jefferson founded the Democratic Party, which produced in the next generation no less a common-touch figure than Andrew Jackson, rich but rough-hewn, who again appealed to ‘the people’ against the bankers and their supposed English puppet-masters. In this project, Jackson could appeal not only to farmers and rugged frontiersmen (quite literally dwellers on the periphery) but to small business people, equally at the mercy of “the money power.”

Although drafted into populism by later political orators, Lincoln—first a new Whig, then a Republican—was not a populist. For Lincoln, government of, by, and for the people was a problem, not a solution. Like Publius, Lincoln worried that popular sovereignty may attack unalienable, natural rights; he would, like Publius, guard the people from their own excesses. For the next populist movement we must turn to the decades after the Civil War.

The first self-described populists reacted to the economic hard times of the 1880s and 1890s, and against the corporations, which came to prominence in the years after the war. America went back on the gold standard in 1879; the demand for gold outstripped the supply for most of the next twenty years. Economic contractions occurred in 1882-85 and again in 1891-97 (for details see Friedman and Schwartz, 106 ff.). There was no relief for the consequent deflation, as silver had been demonetized in 1873, remonetized in 1876 in insufficient quantity to inflate the currency. The populists would scarcely recommend anything along the lines of a Federal Reserve Bank, such a thing being decidedly anti-populist. Under such conditions, wherein debtors were paying back creditors in dollars worth more than they were when the dollars were borrowed, the ‘periphery’ had serious, politically exploitable grievances against the ‘core. Third-party ferment—uncontrolled by the Australian ballot system, which wasn’t instituted until the 1890s—crystallized into the formation of the People’s Party, a coalition of Western small farmers burdened by exclusionary and confiscatory monopoly practices by the railroads and Southern small farmers burdened by usurious local storekeepers under the ‘crop lien’ system.

A co-op movement in 1880s Texas got the new populism started; the co-ops were an attempt by farmers to control both buying and selling, and so to cut out the middlemen, including creditors. This venture was undercapitalized and therefore unsuccessful. Farmers turned to politics, thinking that even if they had no credit they still had votes. Silver miners in the West and other political elites could then formulate a convincingly nasty story: Demonetization was “the Crime of ’73,” perpetrated by a cabal of Jewish, English, and Anglo-American financiers who wanted to establish the gold standard so American bankers could pay off loans to other gold standard nations, Britain first and foremost. In later words of Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, “a vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents and is rapidly taking possession of the world.” By 1889, the populists reached out to the Knights of Labor, proposing a coalition of ‘producers.’ In addition, the late 19th-century populists, like the American colonists and the Americans of the Second Great Awakening, were animated by Protestant religious fervor. “Christ himself was an evicted peasant,” one of them claimed. Such language contrasted sharply with the increasingly scientistic language of the elites, who excused hardship by claiming it ensured the survival of the fittest.

The People’s Party ran into several difficulties. North/South wounds hadn’t healed; enlisting freemen in the South would have been a useful counter to the Democratic Party, but, despite some efforts in that direction (most notably in Texas), race prejudice remained too strong. In the North, populism would tend only to take votes from the Republicans, giving power not to populists but Democrats. Also, a ‘people’s party’ still needs to be a party, with organization, funding, professional politicians. ‘The people’ can’t simply take over; even the American revolutionaries needed George Washington, John Adams, Robert Morris. Finally, labor didn’t feel comfortable with the farmers. To an industrial worker in New York City, what’s wrong with low farm prices?

As a result, the People’s Party as absorbed in the West by the Democrats when the latter nominated William Jennings Bryan, and was blocked in the South by Democratic politicians who bribed, intimidated, and played on racial prejudice. On their end, the Republicans were also busy and effective, ruining the populists’ electoral chances, which depended on fusion controlled by themselves rather than co-optation controlled by the Democrats, by instituting the Australian ballot system (Argersinger 287-306), designed to enable individuals to resist ‘popular’ pressures. In the end, as Margaret Canavan writes, “Whether they like it or not, Populists were a collection of minority groups, not ‘the people’ itself” (54). This raises an important point about populist appeals, a point made by almost everyone who writes about them. In the broad, extended, diverse Madisonian republic, designed to make popular sovereignty untyrannical by registering divisions among the people, appeals to ‘the people’ will always be self-limiting. Even in colonial, pre-Madisonian America, the revolutionaries hadn’t represented much more than one-third of the population. Appeals to ‘the people’ are seldom taken up by most, let alone all, of the population. Appeals to ‘the people’ serve rather as means by which one elite can knock a hitherto more powerful rival—to be sure, sometimes benefiting many others beyond themselves. In fact, the ‘new’ elite very often will include ‘new men,’ aristoi of virtue and talent (or at least oratorical ability) who rise from subordinated social classes. This is obviously one of the main appeals of populist movements to ambitious and capable persons.

Farm prosperity from 1900 to the First World War further blunted populist fervor; by the time farmers again had cause for complaint, in the 1920s, they were insufficiently numerous plausibly to claim title to ‘the people’ as a political slogan. In the twentieth century, ‘periphery’ and ‘core’ in the United States had much less geographic salience than at any time previously. Twentieth-century populist appeals shifted for the most part to interest groups—’peripheral’ in social and political ways but not so much territorial ones—starting with the labor movement under Gompers and, as Michael Kazin rightly sees, the prohibitionist movement. The civil rights movement of the 1945-65 period, the student movement of 1962-72, the ‘Moral Majority’ and other right-of-center populist appeals of the last quarter of the century, have all pretty obviously played to groups that cannot seriously be described as ‘the people’ as a whole. What populist rhetoric does do—and here again Kazin is astute—is to give such groups a vocabulary with which to address their fellow citizens in a broad-based republic where Marxist and other class-based appeals sound more strident than they might in a more rigidly stratified society in which old, settled social orders prevailed in recent memory.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt seems to have learned from the Democrats’ co-optation of Bryan. If ever there was a circumstance that might have yielded a renewed populist movement, it was the Great Depression. All the elements were there for an agro-labor coalition: economic disaster, incompetence and corruption on Wall Street, stumbling Washington pols—in Robert H. Wiebe’s phrase, “masterless men in a structureless society” (60). A new version of Coxey’s Army erected Hooverville across the street from the White House. Yet FDR and his professionalized elite—man of them coming out of the secular wing of the Progressive movement—adeptly incorporated these elements (especially the farmers) into a bureaucratic state-building project. And note well: This could be done on the basis of the old program of the People’s Party, insofar as that party advocated increased activity and regulation by the federal government. Hofstadter observes, “Populism [of the late 19th century] was the first modern political movement in the United States to insist that the federal government had some responsibility for the common weal,” by which he means responsibility for its management (61). Once again, organization triumphed over popular energy, but this time the organization wasn’t the old-fashioned party structure, reformed into subordination by the Progressives, but a centralized, state apparatus that regulated populist passions by rechanneling them into a governmental structure (some might say ‘maze’) of institutions and regulations.

Kazin discusses the ‘shift to the Right’ in twentieth-century populist politics; he doesn’t say much about why the Right could appropriate populist rhetoric. If populist appeals set the average, hard-working, productive American against the bloated, lazy, despotic few, then the government itself, particularly when allied to corporate and other organized, professionalized interest groups, could easily stand in for the nearest contemporary equivalent of George III or the Monster Bank. Institutionalized or statist liberalism—’statist liberalism’ being something of a contradiction in terms, as Locke reminded readers of Thomas Hobbes—makes an inviting target for conservatives who subscribe not to The New Republic but the old one. Add to that a foreign threat from the Left, Communism, which is genuinely statist, and to that dark suspicions—very much in the Whiggish tradition of conspiracy-mongering—of collaboration (or at least ‘softness’) by a no-enemies-on-the-Left neoliberal state toward that foreign threat, and you have an enduring political trope of the years 1945-1990. Notice that the solution to political problems advanced by 19th-century populists—a larger national state, intervening in behalf of ‘the people’—could itself become the target of populist ire, once that state was professionalized, co-opted by elites. Notice also that a populist-talking Right, once in power, soon divides into state-tolerating ‘neo-conservatives’ and state-hating ‘libertarians,” the latter sometimes in alliance with state-hating religionists and ‘paleo-conservatives.’

Another way of stating the matter is this: If the plausibility of populist appeals depends upon some real sense of a ‘periphery’ exploited by a ‘core,’ American populism in the twentieth century was fragmented. Except for the dichotomy of ‘the people’ versus ‘the government’—rather blunted because the people elect much of the government—or ‘the people’ versus ‘the corporations’—rather blunted because the people buy products made by the corporations and often buy stock in the corporations themselves—America became the core in the modern world. Real peripheries, and therefore plausible populism, have moved offshore, into Africa, parts of Latin America and Asia. Populism, defined as appeals to the people as a whole, depends upon believable claims that some organizable group can be said to be, or at least represent, the people. Populism thus needs a relatively simple society (an agrarian one will do, very nicely) with a majority class or group of classes that can style itself the producing and moral majority. Populism also needs both an immediate grievance and a structural target—respectively, for example, a depression and a politica/economic elite—to aim at. Populism in the United States has occurred when a material cause—economic hard times, typically—meets a formal cause—a stratified political and economic structure—in the name of a final cause—a threat to the natural rights of the sovereign people, or their ‘progress.’ Add one or more efficient causes—the long train of abuses and usurpations cited in the Declaration of Independence, the Crime of ’73, the Crash of ’29—for new political elites to brandish, and you have populism. The antidote to the excesses of populism is the artfully redesigned structure of political institutions—the Constitution of 1787, the New Deal state of the 1930s.

 

Works Cited

Argersinger, Peter: “Fushion Politics and Anti-Fusion Laws.” American Historical Review, Spring 1980, 287-306.

Canovan, Margaret: Populism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

Friedman, Milton, and Schwartz, Anna Jacobsen: A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Hofstadter, Richard: The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

Kazin, Michael: The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Rodgers, Daniel T.: Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Wiebe, Robert H.: Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Blauner, Robert: Racial Oppression in America. New York: The Viking Press, 1972.

Browning, Rufus P., Marshall, Dale Rogers, and Tabb, David: Racial Politics in American Cities. New York: Longman, 1990.

Dahl, Robert A.: Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970 [1961].

Dubois, W. E. B.: Dusk at Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Schocken Books, 1968 [1940].

_____. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: The Free Press, 1992 [1935].

Greenberg, Cheryl: “Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Katznelson, Ira: City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Mollenkopf, John H.: The Contested City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Moynihan, Daniel P.: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington: Office of Public Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965.

Pinderhughes, Dianna M.: Race and Ethnicity of Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A.: Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare. New York: Vintage Books, 1993 [1971].

 

In 1961 Robert A. Dahl published his well-respected study, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. The city he studied was New Haven, Connecticut–a city which not only surrounds Yale University, Professor Dahl’s academic home, but could be described by him as “in many respects typical of other cities in the United States” (v). This typical city had a very small population of non-whites; only 6% of the residents were African-American, and there were few Latinos or Asians.

Dahl’s primary interest was in showing why economically advantaged people tended to participate less in city government and politics than economically disadvantaged people did (see pp. 293-295). That is, Dahl’s interest in blacks was instrumental to understanding the behavior of whites. As to the condition of black New Havenites itself, Dahl contented himself with saying that discrimination was declining and that they were rather well-integrated into the politics and government of the city.

Who Governs? is a very informative book, still useful to read. But it could not be written the same way now. A city with a nonwhite population of 6% could not be represented as “typical” in America today; even in cities with small minority populations, more care would have to be taken to treat whatever such populations existed as important ‘in themselves,’ not merely as illustrations of some putatively larger point. Inasmuch as Americans have made much of ‘race’ throughout their history, the new approach is truer, or at least potentially truer, to the way citizens in cities actually think and feel. The new approach is therefore likely to have more explanatory power regarding ‘on-the-street’ conditions in the city or cities studied. But as with all scholarly approaches, this one has its dangers, particularly those associated with the concept of ‘race’ itself. Precisely because ‘race’ is a notion deeply felt, but notoriously difficult to define precisely, it can involve scholars in a maze of traps.

Take, for example, the pioneering study by W. E. B. Dubois, The Philadelphia Negro. DuBois deplored the lack of “organization” in the life of urban blacks, a deficiency that put them at a competitive disadvantage in America. He accepted the view that democracy was “premature” for American blacks. Left to their own devices, they would be governed by oligarchs or even dictators. Hence the need for the “talented tenth” of urban blacks to guide a racially insulated (not integrated) population through the hazards and complexities of modern civilization. This is not so much Jeffersonianism as vanguardism; insofar as it is Marxist-Leninist it is a Marxism without much faith in the proletariat as the agency of change. DuBois perhaps thinks of urban blacks as lumpenproletarians, too far removed from modernity to organize themselves effectively. The argument is implausible because before and at the very time DuBois wrote, no less agrarian peoples, often under the tutelage (as it were) of political bosses who had no pretensions of vanguardism, were acculturating their ethnic groups to American city politics. DuBois operates under the spell of a commonplace ideological trope of the time, the claim that civilization in the modern world was a thing so complex that one needed an extraordinarily long apprenticeship to grasp it. DuBois was applying the underlying theory of European imperialism to American urban politics.

DuBois’s major contribution to the study of race isn’t so much in the specifics of his analysis, now understandably ‘dated,’ but in the challenge he issued to his fellow Americans in his later book, Dusk at Dawn. The race problem is “the central problem of the greatest of the world’s democracies and so the problem of the future world” (vii). The race problem may be seen in what DuBois takes to be the fact that “in America, not the philosophy of Jefferson nor the crusade of Garrison nor the reason of Sumner was able to counterbalance the race superiority doctrines of Calhoun, the imperialism of Jefferson David, nor the race hate of Ben Tillman” (139). Whether or not the indictment is too sweeping, it is an indictment and served as a call for future research, to say nothing of future reform.

For a long time this challenge was not answered by mainstream political scientists who looked at urban politics, as may be seen in Dahl’s study. But the urban unrest of the 1960s could scarcely be ignored, and it shattered any complacency with respect to race relations in American cities.

There has been considerable difficulty among urbanists not so much in trying to define ‘race’—those conundrums have been left in the (ham) hands of anthropologists—but in how exactly to assess its political importance. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward begin their book, Regulating the Poor, by emphasizing not race and ethnicity but institutional/legal control of ‘the poor.’ They associate racial focus with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his critique of ‘the black family,’ a critique to which they take strong exception (193). But then, two-thirds of the way through their book, they begin to consider African-American poor in the cities, bringing race and class together under their overall thesis, which is to describe how politicians—in this case, Democrats, who run the cities—have attempted to bypass their own local political machines and to offer a bureaucratic system of poor relief in order to dampen social unrest. This approach makes sense, but it comes rather too late in a book whose authors feel they must engage in elaborate rhetorical and methodological maneuvering just to get to their main point.

Cheryl Greenberg’s “Or Does It Explode?’ has no such inhibitions about addressing race, but commits the opposite error, using ‘race’ too unproblematically, almost as an independent variable in the urban equation. Greenberg tries to account for the fact that newly-arrived European immigrants in the period 1900-1930 rose faster in the economic order than newly-arrived blacks, despite “equally low levels of education in the two communities” (21). This is a continuation of one of DuBois’s questions. She observes further that even well-educated blacks found only menial jobs, and public jobs were in large measure off-limits to blacks during the 1920s. The Depression accordingly brought greater hardships to urban blacks than to urban whites, with blacks accounting for 15% of New York City’s unemployed, even as they were but 5% of the population at the time. Greenberg’s account is descriptively powerful but analytically weak. She explains these discrepancies by citing the racial prejudices of whites as the blockade faced by New York blacks. She does not show the whys and wherefores of such prejudice, which presumably did not just exist as a force of nature.

Robert Blauner interprets the crises of the late 1960 and early 1970s in American cities sociologically. Urban life reflected the American social structure; minority racial groups (Blauner does not overlook Latinos) and their oppression by whites are central features of a social dynamic not reducible to class or economics. Rather, race privilege is a matter of status. Racial groups are not classes but Weberian “status groups,” monopolies of honor, “packet[s] of privilege” (27, 31). This tends to falsify Dahlian optimism, and leads to a more realistic assessments of future prospects. Races will not be assimilated at any time in the near future, Blauner predicts. He was right.

Blauner observes that cities have been centers of industrialization. White immigrants competed successfully for industrial jobs against emancipated Southern blacks and poor Southern whites—a datum that complicates any easy assumptions about racism as an explanation of the condition of urban blacks (64). More ambitious, Blauner argues, racial minorities are colonized, Third-World peoples, “part of the world-historical drama” of Western conquest (74), peoples who may unify as a worldwide political movement (52). Such peoples do not fit “the collective self-image of democracy for all men” established by whites in Europe and North America (52). Third-World peoples did not immigrate to America; they were colonized. This overlooks the fact that Latinos do in fact immigrate to the United States, and many, especially those who arrived prior to the recent ‘waves’ of immigration from Mexico and Central America, seem to be tracking the progress of previous ethnic, notably Italians. If Blauner were to argue that Latinos were colonized by Spaniards and Portuguese adventurers before arriving here, the answer is obvious: Welcome to the club. What ethnic group wasn’t colonized by some more powerful group, before arriving here? Even the English were mastered by the Romans.

Further, Blauner doesn’t show exactly why industrialism would single out racial minorities for long-standing oppression, or why democracy would single them out for exclusion from its “self-image.” There is a somewhat Procrustean attempt by Blauner to fit urban racial politics into a global Leninist network (evidently in imitation of Fanon), an attempt that, though impressive, seems too polemical by half.

Similarly, Blauner’s critique of the McClone Commission report on the 1965 race riot—or, as he prefers to put it, the Watts rebellion—in the Watts section of Los Angeles combines insight with polemical distortion. The McCone Commission report, he charges, assumed that the disorder was simply a matter of law-breaking caused by unemployment and poor education, along with bad public relations by the Los Angeles Police Department. The report ignores the way police were used as controllers of a ‘ghetto.’ The report also ignores the issues of nationalism raised by the ‘rebellion.’ This has the unmistakable hint of special pleading: If the ‘rebellion’ were as politicized as Blauner wishes it were, it would have issued in more explicitly political organization by blacks, in the aftermath of the riot—and not only the blacks who showed up a few years later in Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration. Blauner starts out as a sociologist, but ends by looking at politics in the wrong place, namely, among those excluded from the political process who subsequently made no attempt to enter it.

The more successful efforts focus not on ‘race’ or ‘society’ or economics in isolation or in combination, but on those things as exploited by the political structure of the city. As John H. Mollenkopf notes, whether market-oriented or Marxist, earlier economics-oriented accounts of city life did not allow for political differences; two capitalist cities might differ more from each other than from a capitalist city and a socialist city (8). “[G]overnment intervention follows its own logic rather than that of private interests” (9). Mollenkopf emphasizes the interventions of federal government agencies and of the Democratic and Republican parties in urban politics, and is very informative about politics ‘from above.’ He has no feel for street-level politics. But this isn’t a problem specifically caused by his use of race as a key factor in urban politics.

Dianna M. Pinderhughes, like Blauner, questions pluralist accounts of racial and ethnic groups, observing that pluralism tends toward optimism, partly because it focuses on white ethnics, not racial minorities. Pluralism ignores such governmental practices as redlining and restrictive covenants to confine minorities to certain parts of the city; deliberate division of the labor force along racial lines in order to minimize bargaining power of labor groups; the use of violence and/or heavy police activity; and restriction of black leaders within Democratic political machines to their own neighborhoods, with none of the citywide influence enjoyed by white ethnic leaders. “Racial status so pervaded the Chicago environment that it affected every sector of the economy and the polity (234); Pinderhughes shows how this politics of exclusion backfired in the end, leading to the political cohesion among blacks which resulted in political victory in the 1980s, once blacks had sufficient numbers to form effective alliances with sectors of the white community.

For a survey of urban politics in a number of American cities, a survey that enables the reader to compare the circumstances in a variety of places, Racial Politics in American Cities provides the best-balanced view of any of these studies, deserving of the stature it has earned as a standard text in the field. The authors eschew polemics and repeatedly show exactly how and why blacks and Latinos succeeded (or, in the case of New York, usually failed) to acquire political power commensurate with their numbers. The authors identify two basic strategies that can be used: the “outside” strategy of interest-group pressure on government and the “inside” strategy of obtaining direct power via elections. They lay out the different phases of successful uses of each strategy, based on the specific case studies presented in the volume (12). They discuss various factors influencing outcome: size of minority populations; the extent of support from liberal whites; and what might be described as the political styles (often linked to the political purposes) of black leadership. (To understate the matter, the Black Panthers in Oakland generated a different sort of political atmosphere than moderate-liberal mayor Wilson Goode in Philadelphia.) The authors present information on the political success is assuredly ‘worth the effort’—as measured in the establishment of such long-held minority goals as civilian police review boards, government appointments, city contracts, and government jobs (24). Fully integrated governments are demonstratively more responsive governments. In short, the authors actually ‘do political science’ as it relates to racial politics in cities.

The results show the importance of not assuming that ‘objective conditions’ will flow into a more just urban political order. Political organization building is crucial, both within and among minority communities, and between minority and white communities, especially politicians. As in any democratic regime, the demographic transformation of racial minorities into racial majorities within a city is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success in the election of black, Latino, and Asian mayors and city council members, who can then strengthen coalitions with influential white minorities within the cities. And of course what is made can be unmade. As in Chicago in 1989, a biracial coalition can fall apart if political acumen is missing, or if co-optation occurs.

When done intelligently, the new focus on racial issues in urban politics politicizes urban studies, not in the sense of making them more partisan than they have been, but of getting urban studies away from the technocratic, sociological approach seen in a focus on housing problems, transportation, and finance considered as ‘things in themselves.’ Rather, the study of urban politics becomes ‘political’ in its focus on structures of political authority. Unjust disparities of political power yield unjust disparities in housing, transportation, and finance. In City Trenches, Ira Katznelson worries that race-oriented studies may neglect social class—which can and should be treated politically. Class is particularly salient in understanding the white ethnics, many of whom have thought of themselves as ‘labor’ while in the workplace or union hall, but as Poles, Italians, Irish, etc. as soon as they get back home. This bifurcation of urban life among white ethnics helps to explain the lack of socialist politics in American cities, Katznelson thinks; he might well go on to think that this indicates a deficiency in socialist politics and the ideologies which animate it.

Such cautionary points as Katznelson makes are well taken, but they really suggest only the commonsense observation that any well-delineated picture must include some things at the expense of excluding others. Any single approach to the study of politics, urban or otherwise, will see some things clearly, others obscurely or not at all. That is why one needs to read more than one kind of study of politics.

Unlike parliament-centered governments, in which the chief executive is a ‘prime minister’—a member of the legislature, usually the head of the majority party—American republicanism separates executive from legislative powers, with the legislature itself separated into two branches. This means that different parties might control those branches of government, leading to ‘divided government.’ In America, one-party control of both houses of Congress and the presidency can result only from sweeping victories at the polls.

From 1800 to 1945, such victories were common. Sharply divided government—which I am defining as the circumstance in which the president is of one party and both houses have majorities of another party—occurred only five times during that period: 1849-50, when the Whigs Taylor and Fillmore were presidents and the Democrats held Congress; 1865-68, when Johnson, a Democrat elected on the Republican ticket, was president and the Republicans controlled Congress; 1879-80, when the Republican Hayes was president and the Democrats controlled Congress; 1895-96, the last two years of the Democrat Cleveland’s second term, in which Republicans controlled Congress; 1919-20, when the Democrat Wilson, disabled by a stroke, was president and faced a Republican Congress. Short periods of time, all of them. The longest was during the Johnson Administration, which only occurred because President Lincoln had been assassinated in the first year of his second term.

From 1945 to the present, within the lifetime of the postwar generation, ‘sharply divided’ government has occurred much more frequently, and for more extended periods of time: 1947-48, the last two years of Truman’s first term; 1955-60, the last six of Eisenhower’s eight years; 1969-76, all the Nixon and Ford years; 1989-92, all of George H. W. Bush’s one term; 1995-2000, the last six years of the Clinton Administration; the last two years of George W. Bush’s second term; and the last two years of Barack Obama’s second term.

Modern-day divided government was prefigured during World War II by the erosion of the New Deal coalition in Congress in the period beginning in the midterm election of 1942. At that time the North-South fissure in the Democratic Party began to widen sufficiently to show up in election results. The Democrats, and the Southern Democrats in particular (it will be recalled), faced a serious dilemma coming out of the Civil War. They were the party of treason: rebels in the South, Copperheads in the North. This gave Republicans a rhetorical bludgeon in northern and western States, and they backed up their rhetoric with organization–not only the party itself but the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans’ organization whose members were rewarded with generous pensions from the federal government (cf. Skocpol, passim). From the Civil War to the Depression, only two Democrats won the White House: Cleveland and Wilson. Both presidencies were flukish, in the sense that they were beneficiaries of major splits in Republican ranks.

Thanks to the Depression and the magnetism of FDR, the Republicans were finally discredited and the Southern and Northern Democrats could unite in a coalition that appealed to broad elements of American society. But the legacy of the Civil War persisted, just beneath the surface. Or, rather, the legacy of one major cause of that war, race-based slavery and racial prejudice, persisted. The tension between the Northern and Southern wings of the party had to surface in some way at some point. They were united inasmuch as both sides agreed that the role of the federal government should be expanded dramatically in order to meet the challenges of the domestic and international economies, as well as the challenges of national defense in a world where worldwide conflicts were now technologically feasible. The South had never been economically isolationist; its far-flung cotton trading drove the regional economy. With the political success of the TVA and other New Deal programs, ‘big government’ was no economic threat to the South. But a strong central government also entailed a relative weakening of state governments, and state governments were the bulwarks of racial segregation and of domination by Southern whites over Southern blacks. Big government threatened the social and political structure of the South.

FDR temporized by leaving the Southern states alone; he could afford to do so because the war against Old Man Depression, and then the war against rightist tyrannies in Europe and Asia, galvanized the nation throughout his tenure. But Truman faced a different set of problems, nationally and internationally.

The Cold War against Soviet Union-based international communism gave impetus to the divided government that was only potential during the World War. Elements of the New Deal state apparatus in Washington—specifically, those associated with FDR cabinet secretary and 1948 presidential hopeful Henry Wallace—had been too close ideologically and politically to the Soviet Union, which had been an ally-of-convenience during the war. The Hiss-Chambers case and other espionage cases—some real, some invented—enabled Republicans to compete plausibly with Democrats on foreign-policy territory, despite the Democrat-led victory in the war and despite the key Truman victory of the period, the Marshall Plan. This Republican strategy was fully consistent with their long and consistent history of nationalism, dating from the origins of the party in the 1850s. It was also consistent with their successful strategy of painting Democrats as not quite patriotic enough, an image Democrats had resisted by fighting a couple of world wars. The issue of communism revived a problem for Democrats which might have been supposed to have been put to rest. But the ‘Progressive’/historicist foundations of the twentieth-century Democratic Party, seen not only in FDR’s attempt to court Stalin during the war but in the party’s Popular-Front strategy in the mid-1930s, left it vulnerable to criticism from Republicans. By 1948, the Democratic Party had split three ways: mainstream New-Deal, anti-communists led by President Truman; left-wing ‘Popular-Front’ Democrats led by Wallace; and segregationist ‘Dixiecrats’ led by Senator Strom Thurmond. Truman eked out a victory over a lackluster Republican candidate, but the seams in the New Deal coalition were fraying.

War and international politics generally empower the executive, a point well known to the old Whigs including, in America, the Jeffersonians. An atmosphere of perpetual ‘Cold War’ against the international Left thus put Democrats at a disadvantage in presidential elections. Former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first Republican to demonstrate the truth of this. Democrats retained domestic-policy popularity, as they could rightly take credit for the New Deal welfare state, and voters still recalled the Depression and linked it with Hoover and the Republicans. But Eisenhower did not attack the still-popular welfare state. Rather, he concentrated voters’ minds on the Korean War quagmire—Democrats’ botched anti-communism—while also benefitting from, while deftly distancing himself from—the Senate investigations into communist infiltration of government agencies led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Democrats tried to beat Republicans at their own game in 1960. John F. Kennedy successfully accused Richard Nixon of countenancing a (fictitious) ‘missile gap’ vis-à-vis the Soviets, but his successor Lyndon Johnson’s overextension of American military involvement in the Vietnam War reproduced the Korean-quagmire dilemma, with a difference: This time, not the Republicans (who were hawks) but liberal Democrats split off. Simultaneously, the same liberals were driving Southern Democrats out of the party with their support for federal-government intervention in the civil rights struggles of the South. To put it another way, the Kennedy-Johnson political strategy was to shore up party support among African-Americans by backing their legitimate aspirations respecting civil rights, but at the same time to appeal to conservative Southerners with a strong anti-communist effort in Vietnam. The strategy didn’t work because Southern Democrats cared more about segregation than they did about communists, and Northern liberal-Progressive Democrats cared more about promoting civil rights and ending the war—both popular causes in their constituencies—than they did about keeping the Southerners in the fold.

Republicans inherited many Southern Democrats without losing their anti-communist edge. Alienation from the Democratic Party also entailed substantial party ‘dealignment,’ as well; in the mid-1950s, 20% of voters were ‘independents’ (more precisely, ‘undeclareds’). By 1970, the number was up to around 30%. The jarring shifts in policy seen among Democrats, and especially the social and political dislocations of the 1960s, eroded partisan allegiances along with other bonds of social trust.

Meanwhile, the liberal-Progressive Democats who gained undisputed control of the party by the late 1960s were again vulnerable to the charge of softness on communism. The party’s 1972 nominee, George McGovern, resembled Henry Wallace rather too much to make a plausible major-party candidate, and Nixon buried him that November. But voters hadn’t turned against the New-Deal welfare state, and Democrats continued firmly in control of Congress. Democratic Congressional leadership, sensing they were in for a long siege, began building bigger staffs. In the 1970s House staff tripled, Senate staff doubled (Jones 17-21).

The characteristic technique of an aggressive Congress facing off against an enemy president is the investigation. This has been true since James Madison led the Jeffersonians against the Federalists during the Adams Administration. If conducted shrewdly, Congressional investigations hamstring an enemy president by making him look bad—evil and/or inept. There is a downside, as McCarthy demonstrated, but that only proves that you need to be reasonably intelligent in employing the tactic, and even Tailgunner Joe got a fair amount of play while he lasted. The large Congressional staffs can always find rich sources of scandal in large executive-branch staffs, inasmuch as who is always doing whatever to whom.

Reagan reinvigorated the presidency in the 1980s, faced off successfully against Congressional Democrats discredited by their own scandals. More than one observer considers the Iran-Contra affair to have been the central event in the constitutional history of divided government in the 1980s, as a more-assertive presidential staff clashed with a still-assertive legislative staff over the issue of who would control foreign policy. The longtime Republican trump card, anti-communism, matched the traditional Congressional trump card (Democratic and Republican), investigation into constitutionally-dubious executive-branch doings. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled executive put the squeeze on the Democratic Congress’s domestic agenda with its policy of tax cuts and budget deficits, for which it had just enough Congressional support to sustain—thanks to the depleted by still numerous-enough-to-make-things-awkward ranks of Southern Democrats. In this double conflict within a divided government, the Republicans enjoyed a narrow, vulnerable, and (thanks to George H. W. Bush’s mishandling of the 1991 recession) temporary victory, setting the stage for the politics of the 1990s.

Divided government in the 1990s saw a musical-chairs reversal, with Democrats controlling the White House, Republicans controlling Congress. The first reversal was made possible by victory in the Cold War. Foreign and military policy lost its saliency, at least for the time; coupled with economic recession, this cost the Republicans the presidency. But the young, untried President Clinton overreached in pushing for a national health-care system and in other areas. Congressional Republicans seized control, for the first time in a generation, in the midterm election of 1992.

The new century saw a slight abatement of the trend. The George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations saw divided government, but only in the final two years of their second terms—the ‘lame-duck’ years of any presidency, with or without a hostile Congress.

‘Divided government’ became a common feature of American politics throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, with only a few short-lived exceptions: the early years of the Johnson Administration; the blundering, weak Carter Administration; in effect the firs couple of Reagan years when Republicans had a workable coalition with conservative Democrats; the first, inept, two years of Clinton; the first administrations of George W. Bush and Obama. Its analytic value for understanding major tendencies in contemporary politics is very strong, so long as one keeps an eye on who the players are and what policies they are attempting to enact. As seen above, the power equations within the overall structure of divided government are constantly shifting, and even divided government itself has on occasion been breached.

Divided government does not necessarily mean lack of government, a Burnsian ‘deadlock of democracy.’ David L. Mayhew’s study, Divided We Govern, identifies many other factors that influence policy outcomes. The most important structural factor, perhaps even more than the executive-legislative division, is the bicameral division between House and Senate. Sarah A. Binder has argued that bicameralism is more relevant to policy than divided government. This is clearly consistent with Madison’s argument in Federalist 62, which Binder cites, but even more in keeping with John Adams’s massive study, Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, the pioneering work in American in the field of historical and comparative politics, the principal point of which is to establish the utility of bicameralism as against unicameralism as an essential component for making republican government properly deliberative. The underlying principle is simple: If, to reach the president’s desk, a major bill must pass two hurdles instead of one, and if each ‘hurdle’ is made of different materials—if, for example, members of the ‘lower’ house have shorter terms and smaller constituencies than members of the ‘upper’ house—that bill must be very well-thought-of indeed merely to survive legislative scrutiny, let alone executive scrutiny. When action slows, thought has time to take effect. When action flows, those who can act may see their opportunity and take it: divided government doesn’t divide the bureaucracy; when others cannot legislate, it can still regulate.

Other factors that lead to gridlock or no-gridlock, as Binder observes, include ideational divergence (the greater the divergence, the less incentive for compromise) and the pent-up energy of a party many years out of power, now victorious (most strikingly, Republicans of the Class of ’94), who tend to unite militantly to obtain those legislative objects they’ve long for during their years in the desert. The extra-institutional fact. public sentiment, also matters—the most obvious example in the last century being the first years of the New Deal, when divided government was nearly impossible.

A perennial possibility in the American political framework, divided government has occurred more often since World War II, owing to the instability of the old Democratic Party coalition that predated the war and the political ramifications of the Cold War that came out of that war. Its analytical value in understanding major tendencies in contemporary politics is high, but it is one factor among several, not an analytic panacea.

 

Works Cited

Binder, Sarah A.: “The Dynamics of Legislative Gridlock, 1947-96.” American Political Science Review, Volume 93, Number 3, September 1999, 519-533.

Mayhew, David R.: Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigation, 1946-2002. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Scocpol, Theda: Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.