Congress and America’s Regimes
Morton Keller
Brandeis University
Byron Shafer and Anthony Badger observe that there is a dearth of “broad-gauge,
recent histories of American politics with a large P.” But Karen Orren and Stephen
Skowronek detect a growing search for syntheses that set political change and public
institutions into more spacious periods of time.
I’m one of the searchers (though I make no claim to being one of the finders).
Trying to write what Morgan Kousser calls “total political history” is, I am well aware, a
tall order. And a conference paper is a small glass. So I will limit myself here to an
overview of my larger project, and offer some suggestions as to how the history of
Congress might fit into it. 1
The Polity and Its Regimes
The theme of party systems delineated by “critical” or “realigning” elections has
had a commanding place in the literature of American political science and political
history since the 1950s. But as William James observed, the trouble with all social
theories is that they leak at every joint. Over time the concept of party systems has lost
much of its early allure. Six systems (Federalist-Jeffersonian, Jacksonian-Whig, Civil
War-Gilded Age, the System of ’96, New Deal, and post-New Deal), each lasting from
32 to 38 years, is a little too pat, too much like the endlessly recalibrated constructions of
financial chartists. And critical elections as the measure, and motor, of party systems
realignment have come in for a beating in recent years. 2
2
Other ways of dividing the political history pie are cropping up. Joel Silbey
proposes four 50-year-plus “political eras,” tracing an ascending, and then descending,
curve of partisanship and party alignment: Prepartisan/prealignment (1789-1838);
Partisan/alignment-realignment (1839-1893); Postpartisan/realignment-dealignment
(1839-1893); Nonpartisan/postalignment (1946-). In a similar vein, Calvin Jillson
speaks of a Politics of Democratization (1765-1828), of Party Competition (1836-1896),
of Interest-Group Liberalism (1902-1968), and of Post-Partisan Hyper-Pluralism
(1968-
). 3
Even more sweeping overviews have washed up on the farther shores of political
analysis. Richard Ellis finds five American political cultures--individualist, egalitarian,
hierarchical, fatalist, and hermitlike (don’t ask)--running not sequentially, but
concurrently, through the course of American political history. Brian Berry’s The
Rhythms of American Politics links a recurrent conservative-liberal cycle to the peaks
and troughs of the nation’s macroeconomic experience. A coding of American party
platforms since 1844 finds them adhering to expressive, adoptive, instrumental,
integrative, and expressive patterns. The grandest of all formulations is William Strauss
and Neil Howe’s Generations, which divides all of American history, from the end of the
sixteenth century to the present, into five periods, Colonial, Revolutionary, Civil War,
Great Power, and Millennial, each composed of four generations (Idealist, Reactive,
Civic, and Adaptive), their actions shaped by the particular challenges of their time, and
by their relationship to their generational predecessors.
4
Hugh Heclo stresses the need to relate ideas, interests, and institutions to one
another in the context of a distinctive historical “order.” This poses a problem of
3
perspective for much contemporary political science, which (quite understandably, given
its theoretical bent) views history more as a warehouse--a Wal-Mart, as it were, of data-than as a context for analysis. In my current work I am trying to reverse that process: to
draw, as best I can, on the work (and the framework) of political scientists, while
attempting a historian’s recasting of the history of American public life. 5
My study rests on two concepts: the polity, and its regimes. I shall briefly define
these terms, and then offer an overview of the evolution of the American polity through
three large, inclusive historical regimes, with some attention to the place that Congress
has occupied in that story.
By the polity I have in mind what the dictionary calls “a politically organized
community,” or “the state.” Defined in terms of social function, the polity is that cluster
of institutions primarily devoted to the definition, allocation, and application of public
power--just as the economy may be defined as those institutions chiefly concerned with
the creation and distribution of wealth. In this sense the polity consists primarily of the
political system (parties, elections, voters, political thought) the legal system (case and
statute law, courts, judges, lawyers, and legal thought), and governance (bureaucracy,
administrative agencies, the military, state and local government). .
It is of course true that just as getting and spending goes on through other than
primarily economic institutions (the family, for example), so public power is wielded by
private as well as public institutions (the media, corporations, and voluntary associations
come to mind). But in the case of the polity, as in the case of the economy, those
institutions that are primarily charged by society with the exercise of this particular
responsibility have the commanding role to play.
4
I propose to examine the evolution of the American polity from its origins to the
present by setting it into the framework of three large regimes. One dictionary defines a
regime as “a manner, method, or system of rule or government; a system or institution
having widespread influence or prevalence.” Montesquieu spoke of the distinctive
“spirit” of each regime, Madison of “systems of policy.” The most familiar use of the
term (at least before Gulf War II) was the ancien régime, applied (c. 1792) to prerevolutionary France, and then extended to early modern Europe at large. The common
denominator here is the sense of spaciousness--chronological and topical--that inheres in
the term.
6
American historians are not ordinarily given to a longue durée perspective. (We
speak of an “age of Jackson,” or a “Progressive era,” no more than a decade or two long.)
Yet the sheer staying power of the institutional forms of American public life--the form,
content, and frequency of elections, legislative and judicial procedure, and governance-makes a strong case for an approach that dwells as much on continuity, persistence, and
evolution as on change, transformation, and revolution. (On the preference of historians
and political scientists for the latter over the former, see Appendix A.)
In my formulation, the American polity from its origins to the present may be
seen as made up of three regimes:
Deferential-republican, stretching through the colonial period through the early
Republic;
Democratic-party, running from the early nineteenth century through the early
twentieth century;
Populist-bureaucratic, dating from the 1930s to the present.
5
Regimes, like party systems or any other chronological division, inevitably raise
the question of regime change. To put it in political science terms, how do we get from
one equilibrium path to another? The broad theme of a polity evolving through a
succession of regimes frees us from the obligation to rely on such narrow measures of
change as critical elections, and instead to treat the evolution of American public life as
the slow and complex process that in fact it is. It allows us to look at a variety of
revealing indices, such as the evolution of political language (frequently examined in this
paper).
How does the history of Congress fit into this scenario? Has the institution
evolved in accord with the three regimes? One advantage of the regimes formulation is
that it allows for differences in the pace of change among the several institutions that
constitute the polity. (As David Brady has observed, there is a clear difference between
electoral change on the presidential and the congressional levels.) In my view the
juxtaposition of the regimes hypothesis and the Congressional experience is mutually
beneficial: each illuminates the other.
An example: David Mayhew’s observation that Congress is an institution
designed to serve its members’ primary goal of re-election is highly relevant to the
collective action problem, and to the question of whether Congressmen’s quest to satisfy
their preferences is best examined within or outside the party framework. These are
matters of special concern to political scientists. At the same time it is necessary to
square the image of the Congressman-as-rent-seeker with the historical fact that, over
time, the level of Congressional seat-holding has varied substantially. (One formulation is
6
of high but declining rates of incumbent reelection from 1787 to 1828; relatively high
turnover from 1829 to 1895; safe seats and slower turnover from 1896 to 1957;
entrenched incumbency from 1958 to 1994.)
7
The political science view of the Congressman as seat-holder, and the historical
fact that the longevity of seat-holding has had its ups and downs, are in fact quite
compatible. The ebb and flow of longevity is clearly related to members’ changing
perceptions as to the value of their seats, or to varying degrees of their (or the
institution’s) efficiency in retaining them, or to larger determinants of how successfully
Congress (or Congressmen) order their affairs: all considerations appropriate to historical
analysis. At the same time, historians benefit from bearing in mind not only institutional
change but members’ preferences. Doing so adds to our understanding of the relationship
among leaders, members, and parties; of career choices and how they can vary over time;
and the impact on Congressional policy toward the bureaucracy of the need for
alternative careers. 8
The Deferential/Republican Regime
The first regime of the American polity was defined by a persisting tension:
between the baggage of received ideas (primarily from Tudor, Stuart, and Georgian
England) as to the proper forms of politics, government, and law, and American
conditions that fostered adaptation and change. During the century and more of
organized American public life that preceded the Revolution, the folkways of American
politics, law, and government gradually sculpted a distinctive American polity. That
transformation came to a head with the sequence of revolution, independence,
7
constitution-making, and nation-forming that went on during the half century from 1775
to 1825.
9
The first stage of the massive regime change fostered by these developments was
the Revolution, independence, and the creation of a republican government (1760s-1790).
The second stage, stretching from the 1790s to the 1830s, saw the republican polity, and
the still substantial traces of the deferential colonial regime, replaced by a more
democratic, party-dominated regime, one that would predominate for a century to come.
It is hard to think of a better example of regime change than a successful national
revolution and the establishment of a new nation. Yet the shift of power and the
Constitutional revision of the forms of government went hand in hand with the
perpetuation of older ways of thinking and acting. The political language of eighteenth
century America and Hanoverian England was strikingly similar. Terms such as interest,
clique, faction, and junto were common currency on both sides of the Atlantic. Caucus,
an American word, quickly entered into English political discourse. And when the
American revolutionaries found it necessary to develop a rhetoric of their own, they drew
heavily on the seventeenth century English revolutions and eighteenth century radical
Whig dissent.
The Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans were cadre parties, not unlike
their Tory/Whig counterparts. The early presidency was shaped by the rhetoric and
experience of Augustan/Georgian Britain. George Washington was regarded (and to
some degree saw himself) as that ambiguous being, a republican monarch; Alexander
Hamilton less equivocally aspired to be an American Chancellor of the Exchequer. While
the Founders were extraordinarily original, creative state-makers, they dwelt in good
8
English eighteenth century-Georgian fashion on virtue, reputation, and ambition. Some of
them fought stylized duels over points of honor; most of them derogated the morals,
honor, and patriotism of their political opponents in a fashion instantly recognizable by
their English Whig and Tory contemporaries. Madison and Jefferson assumed the
trappings of a Whig opposition, and identified their Federalist rivals as Monocrats; the
Federalists returned the compliment by failing to see much distinction between the
Jeffersonians and Jacobins.
Much the same intermix of old and new characterized government in the early
Republic. The new capital of Washington was designed by a French engineer in accord
with the military-defense as well as the aesthetic requirements of a modern European
capital. Policy models drawn from the past or from abroad--treaty-making with Indian
“nations,” a Bank of the United States echoing the Bank of England--set the early tone.
Congress initially was as unorganized as Parliament, and Blackstone was the most often
cited (or, more accurately, misused) source in its early sessions.
10
But this was not to last. Two centuries of divergent social development, a
successful revolution, and the unfolding consequences of the Constitution and the new
nation, assured that the process of regime change unleashed in the 1770s continued
through the turn of the century. Instead of a modified, republican version of the colonial
polity, the first half-century of the new nation saw an ongoing process of regime change
that, in its way, was as profound as what had come before.
Congress, like the presidency initially, was an intermix of received tradition and
the innovative thrust of the new Republic. At first it closely resembled its
9
Continental/Confederation precursors. It had no party organization or standing
committees, few procedural rules, a ceremonial Speaker, floor rules that treated all
members equally, and for its first two decades relied on ad hoc committees to draft bills:
some 200 of them in the First Congress. 11
But as part of the Republican regime of the early Republic, the Federal Congress
turned out to be far more successful than its pre-Constitution predecessors. The inability
of the Confederation Congress to respond to Robert Morris’s fiscal plan, or to come up
with a permanent site for the new nation’s capital, stands in dramatic contrast to the
Federal Congress’s enactment of most of Hamilton’s financial plan and the selection of
the District of Columbia. Although the participants, their preferences, and the policy
alternatives facing the two Congresses were similar, the rules of the Federal Congress
were different: single-member instead of state-unit voting; a simple majority instead of
super-majorities to pass important legislation; the removal of constraints on the writ of
Congress (except for the still-unclear check of judicial review). The greater utility of the
Constitutional system of the new nation was as evident in the legislative as in the
executive branch of government.
12
The Democratic-Party Regime
Political scientists and political historians are in full accord that during the 1820s
and the 1830s a new kind of American polity emerged. Its most obvious manifestations
were the rise of what they (but not me) call the second party system of the Jacksonian
Democrats and the Whigs, and, more importantly, a distinctive new political culture.
Differently structured, more democratic parties were the keynote of the new regime’s
10
political life. The rise of an instrumentalist style of law (more concerned with finding
legal justification for new economic and social impulses than with legitimating past
interests and practices) had a comparable place in the legal system. And a host of new
social and economic issues, previously more or less excluded from public life, gave a
new tone to American governance. Everywhere the larger social goal of regime change
was the same: to clear the way for greater participation and opportunity; to bring the
polity’s institutions into closer accord with the unfolding meaning and direction of the
American experiment in democratic government.
These changes have been interpreted as products of a new, democratic American
nationalism, evident as well in religion, literature, and social behavior; and/or as a set of
adaptations to the demands of the market revolution. What is most important in my view
is to have a sense of their scale, depth, and range, and how the transformed polity would
define American public life for a century to come. 13
The centerpiece of this transformation was the evolution of the deferential/cadre
party culture of the Early Republic into the mass-based democratic/party culture that
emerged in the 1820s and the 1830s. The existence of that change is generally agreed
upon; how and why and when it happened, less so. But if the process is examined not
from the relatively narrow perspective of a shift from a first to a second party system, but
from the more capacious perspective of regime change, a tight chronology matters less
than a broad sense of the transformation of the polity.
Some measures--traces--of that transformation:
The Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs embodied the new belief (most
commonly associated with Martin Van Buren) that mass-based parties are not a problem
11
but a positive social good. In his person and his presidency Andrew Jackson embodied a
new kind of presidential leadership; Van Buren and Thurlow Weed were a new breed of
party managers; the election of 1840 embedded a new style of campaigning.
A new political vocabulary, drawn from everyday life and very different from the
more elitist, confined language of deferential-Republican politics, emerged in tandem
with the change in party culture. The new political culture is active and energetic.
Candidates run instead of (as in England) standing for office, they bluff and bolt or take a
walk. Election campaigns include booms, landslides, avalanches, prairie fires, tidal
waves, stampedes, and clean sweeps. Much of the imagery and aphorism of the new
politics draws on the prevailing agricultural/equine culture of the nation: dark horses,
running mates and front runners; shoo-ins and trial heats; stalking horses and war horses
and horse trading (and the admonition not to change horses in the middle of the stream).
Fence-mending is a political as well as a farming duty; a bellwether is both the belled
lead sheep of a flock and an indicative voting district; politics is grass roots; politicking
requires barnstorming; party loyalists are dyed-in-the-wool. Politics, like the farmyard,
has pork barrels and lame ducks and feeders at the public trough. 14
Corruption is another indicator of the changing character of the polity. This was a
subject very much on the minds of the Founders, and then of the Jeffersonian
Republicans. Their conception of corruption reflected the perspective of the eighteenth
century Anglo-American world. Patronage, preference, perquisites were the traditional
sources of the ancien régime. To this the Jeffersonians added the vice of a taste for
aristocracy and monarchy, which they associated with leading Federalists John Adams
and Alexander Hamilton.
12
But corruption assumed an inverted class meaning in the democratic-party
regime. The spoils system, appropriately enough the creation of the Jackson
administration, became the embodiment of political corruption, a manifestation not of
aristocracy but of democracy, and the source of a critique not by self-styled democrats
against their social betters, but by their social betters against self-styled democrats. 15
Violence, too traced the arc of a changing political culture. The highly stylized
Burr-Hamilton duel in 1804 was shaped by conventions inherited from an aristocratic
European past. Though affairs of honor of this sort continued in the antebellum South, the
most conspicuous political violence in the party-democratic regime took other, more
indigenous forms (or the lack thereof): the street brawl between Jackson and Thomas
Hart Benton and his brother Jesse in Tennessee in 1813; most notably, South Carolina
Congressman Preston Brooks’ assault on Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate: the
antithesis of an affair of honor. 16
More substantively, the party-democratic regime saw a flood of new issues
entering into public life. They were political (the democratization of voting and
officeholding, the location of county seats, the admission of new states), economic
(banking and monetary policy, tariffs, land policy, internal improvements, incorporation,
workingmen’s issues), and social (temperance and prohibition, nativism and antiCatholicism, education, prisons, hospitals, slavery and antislavery). Their cumulative
effect was to infuse American politics, law, and government with challenges that
dramatically increased both the possibilities and the dangers inherent in the world’s first
democratized polity.
13
These features of the new regime--an exploding political language, a new style of
locally responsive political leadership, more rough-hewn social manners, an ever wider
range of issues--played out conspicuously in Congress, and gave that institution a
dramatically new cast. (Thus it appears that Congressmen, ever prone to add to the
bombastic, orotund quality of their remarks on the floor, pioneered in the lazy American
custom of creating compound words by adding suffixes--e.g., Americanize. This practice,
widely circulated in the press, had a marked effect on American English.) 17
By the 1830s Congress more closely resembled its descendant a century later than
its predecessor twenty years before. As Brady and McCubbins observe, “the early House
and Senate were so different that they were in many ways more akin to the legislature of
a foreign country than to the modern U.S. Congress.” By the same token, what happened
to Congress in the decades after 1815 was in close accord with the change from a
deferential-republican to a democratic-party regime. The Congress of James Madison,
Edmund Randolph, and Rufus King was the cultural equivalent of the presidency of
Washington, Adams, and the Virginia dynasty. The Congress of Henry Clay, Daniel
Webster, and John C. Calhoun was as much a part of the new democratic-party regime as
the presidency of Andrew Jackson and his successors. 18
Conditional Party Government (CPG) as the deus ex machina of Congressional
change readily fits into the frame of the democratic-party regime. Procedural rules
designed to serve the interest of the majority, and the rise of standing committees as the
principal conductors of the business of Congress, came early, in close accord with the
requirements of a two-party system.
14
But what of the alternative theoretical emphasis, on individual legislators’
preferences leading to institutional change? The argument has been made that more
important than the (demand-side) political ambitions and power thrust of Clay were the
(supply-side) requirements of rank-and-file members. Not yet strongly party-defined, but
seeking to adapt the institution to meet their political needs, they were the compelling
force behind the rise of the standing committee system. Again, there is no need to choose
one rather than the other explanation. Insofar as personal ambition dovetailed with, or
was channeled into, the emerging mass party structure, individual and institutional
aspirations were bound to coincide.
19
Henry Clay’s career may be seen not only as the fulfillment of personal ambition,
but as a reflection of the political dynamic that was bending politics, the presidency,
Congress, the bureaucracy, and the courts to the conditions of a democratic-party polity.
A strong Speaker and a highly developed committee system made for a Congress whose
legislative responses would be more responsive to the desires of a larger, more involved
voting public. During the one-party years after 1815, there was relative unity (at least on
organizational issues) among the members, and a high degree of homogenous preference
prevailed. As that coalition fell into disarray during the 1820s, Clay tried to control the
course of events by setting up committees to deal with touchstone issues such as the tariff
and internal improvements. But when it came to the more divisive issue of foreign
policy, he was ready to include dissenting voices in the relevant committee, even if it
diminished his power to determine outcomes. By the end of Clay’s Speakership in 1825,
the position had come under the thrall of the regnant Republican party. As local and state
party structures grew, as did the fractiousness of party politics, during the antebellum
15
years, the Speaker--often a compromise choice after numerous ballots--continued to
occupy a less powerful place: testimony to the fact that the character of the office
depended heavily on the character of the party-in-Congress. 20
Under the darkening cloud of the sectional-slavery division in American public
life, Congress along with other political institutions--the presidency, the Supreme Court-lost stature and authority. The impact of sectionalism is evident in the failure of Clay,
Webster, and Calhoun, the leading political figures of their time, to gain the presidency.
The sectional-slavery dilemma, added to the intense factionalism inherent in a more
democratic public life, proved impossible for politicians (and, for that matter, the parties)
to handle. One measure of this was what happened to the Congressional task of making
aspiring territories into new states. From the admission of Missouri in 1819 until the
Civil War, that process was defined more by sectionalism than by partisanship: in
particular, the demand of the South for admission on equal sectional terms, so as not to
upset the balance of power in the Senate and the electoral college. In consequence, as the
issue of statehood heated up in the 1850s, there was little in the way of a tradition of
party-led negotiation to soften the impact.
21
It was no accident that when the reins of party grew slack, in the late 1840s and
the 1850s, Congress became chaotic and disorganized, a “cave of the winds” with each
member out for himself, many armed and ready to use their weapons. The interplay
between the self-seeking, autonomous impulse shaping the evolution of Congress, and
the external forces operating on it from the evolving party system and the larger society,
is evident in Clay’s failure to secure the Compromise of 1850. By focusing on the
omnibus measure—an expression of his personalist conception of Congressional
16
leadership--Clay failed to secure crucial majority support. Douglas, more attuned to the
sectional decomposition of party solidarity, emphasized specific adjustments aimed at
individuals, and managed to extract the Compromise from an atomized Congress. 22
For all its successes, the democratic-party regime was unable to cope with the
paradox implicit in having a system of human slavery embedded in the American
republic. The runup to the Civil War was shaped and defined by the regime’s core
issues: what John Aldrich calls the “great principle” of the relationship of the powers of
the central government to the states, and by the question of the ability of government at
any level to deal with the growing conflict over slavery. If an “excess of democracy” lay
at the heart of that failure, the excess was inseparable from the democratic-party
regime. 23
But the Civil War and Reconstruction did not initiate a process of regime change
comparable to the Revolution, the Constitution, and the establishment of the new nation.
The democratic-party regime established in the early nineteenth century evolved; it was
not superseded. The late nineteenth century polity became more professional and highly
organized, but without deep changes in its culture, ideology, or popular appeal. The
parties assumed an all-but-unquestioned place at the center of the policymaking process;
courts and the law expanded on the quasi-administrative role that they had already begun
to take on in the antebellum years. An American state of courts and parties--or more
accurately, a state of parties and courts--predated as well as postdated the Civil War. 24
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century parties were not so much a new
system as an adaptation of the democratic-party regime of the early nineteenth century.
17
The politicians of the time secured popular support by invoking emotive rather than
policy-specific causes: the Bloody Shirt or the Lost Cause; tariff protection or free trade.
They tended to shy from issues of the sort that might lead to loss of control, as had
happened in the 1850s. John Sherman observed in 1870: “Questions based upon
temperance, religion, morality ought not to be the basis of government.”
Party itself became the defining cause. When a court reporter in 1867 sought a
sentence to test the keyboard of that new invention the typewriter, he came up with “Now
is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.” New York Democrat
Samuel J. Tilden’s biographer said of him: “From boyhood to death, the…Party…took
the place of wife, children and church”; New York Republican Roscoe Conkling once
observed: “If any Church is worth belonging to, it is worth belonging to not a little. …
That is as true in politics as in religion.” 25
As before, American language provides an entrée into the character of the regnant
political culture. The heritage of the Civil War was evident in the more martial
vocabulary of Gilded Age politics: “From the opening gun of the campaign the standard
bearer, along with other war-horses fielded by the party, rallied the rank and file…” The
terms boss and machine took on their political connotations in the 1850s, and came into
their own in the late nineteenth century. So too did a flock of words reflecting the
primary place of manipulation (and corruption) in the ever more expensive, organized
world of party politics. The party faithful--rock-ribbed regulars, standpatters--included
hacks, henchmen, hangers-on, cronies, ward heelers, and good soldiers. They looked up
to party elders. The pressure to get out (or get up) the vote led to the use of floaters,
18
repeaters, and the cemetery vote; the complex and expensive business of party politics
was fueled by boodle, graft, loot, ripper legislation, slush funds, and rakeoffs.
26
Terms of opprobrium in the Civil War era--Copperheads, carpetbaggers,
Scalawags--gave way to reflections not of ideology but of party factionalism (Stalwarts,
Half-Breeds) and the denigration of anti-party reformers (Mugwumps, goo-goos, dogooders, man-milliners). This was the language of a politics defined not so much by
ideology as by party affiliation (or disaffiliation). In the late 1870s Thomas Nast
represented the Republican party as an elephant and the Democratic party as a donkey:
neutral (in the latter case, neutered) beasts, a reflection of the fact that in the wake of the
Civil War and Reconstruction era the politics of organization had superseded the politics
of ideology.
27
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century American government, like its
politics, was conducted primarily within the major-party frame. No modern, autonomous
American state emerged from the Civil War-Reconstruction experience. Potentially
divisive issues such as civil service reform, labor-capital strife, anti-Catholicism, and the
protection of black citizenship were avoided. The creation of new states, once subject to
the dictates of sectionalism, now fell under the sway of party politics, as the six-state
package of the 1889/90 Omnibus Act and the Arizona-New Mexico interparty deal of
1912 made clear. Increases in spending and government employment reflected party, not
state purposes: the party faithful were locked into place by a nascent civil service; the
soldiers’ pension system designed to ensure the Republican fealty of Civil War veterans;
expanded post offices and customs houses providing government salaries for party
regulars.
19
This was not Leviathan, or the beginnings of a welfare state, but the weak
antebellum American state upgraded to meet the needs of an ever more expensive system
of organized parties. In retrospect it may seem that actions such as civil service reform,
railroad regulation, and army reform were harbingers of a new American state. But in
fact, civil administration, business regulation, and the military remained subject to the
(partisan) will of a Congress, presidency, and legal system very much part of the party
regime. 28
If we fast-forward (as is commonly done by political scientists) from the time of
Clay to the time of Thomas B. Reed and Joseph G. Cannon, we can see the impact of the
post-Civil War rise of a more organization-determined party culture (the second part of
the democratic-party regime) on the institutional form and shape of Congress. Congress’
role in the polity, rejuvenated during the Civil War-Reconstruction period by issues and
ideology, was reshaped in later years by the rise to dominance of organizational party
politics. Before Reed and Cannon, there were James G. Blaine and Roscoe Conkling and
John Sherman: not oratorical giants like Clay and Webster and Calhoun to be sure, but
adepts at playing the new organizational politics game.
The implications (and consequences) in Congress of a stronger, more unified
party culture most fully emerged around the turn of the century. The partisan muscleflexing of the 51st Congress (1889-1891), when for the first time in 14 years the GOP
controlled the presidency and both houses--the selection of Reed as Speaker, the passage
of such party-engendering legislation as the McKinley tariff, the Sherman Antitrust and
Silver Purchase Acts, the Omnibus bill admitting new states, the Pensions Act--is ample
20
testimony to the centrality of party in the organizational stage of the democratic-party
regime. 29
Policy buttressed party governance in Reed’s Congress; so, too, did Reed’s Rules.
It is not inconsistent to attribute this assertion of control over the business of the House
both to the greater institutionalization that the increase in House business demanded, and
to Reed’s personal (and not inconsiderable) leadership ambitions. These considerations
neither exclude nor conflict with the party-aggrandizing impulse. Much the same can be
said of the closely related rise in the importance of seniority: a practice that enhanced the
authority both of the parties and their longest-term (and hence most influential)
Congressmen.
This became evident when the iron law of unintended consequences came into
play and the Republicans suffered a massive electoral defeat in 1890, in part a reaction to
the GOP’s over-assertion of its legislative power. The Democrats took control of the
House during the 52nd and 53rd Congresses (1891-1895). Their Speaker Charles F. Crisp
was as committed to his party’s small-government traditions as Reed had been to GOP
activism. Nevertheless Crisp found it prudent to retain the Reed rules as a way of
blocking obstructive tactics by the GOP minority. The realities of party governance
trumped ideological difference. 30
The age of strong Speakers continued when Boss Cannon followed in the
footsteps of Czar Reed. The revolt against Cannon, and the stripping of some of the
powers of the Speaker in 1911, was part of a larger Progressive challenge to the bossmachine aspect of the party-democratic regime. But it may also be seen as a chapter in
the ongoing tension between the demands of party loyalty and the demands of
21
constituencies. It has been suggested that Cannon’s failure to respond to the constituency
needs of members was more destructive of his authority than divisions over policy: that,
indeed, party cohesion in voting peaked during his Speakership. 31
The Senate, too, evolved in step with the evolution of the party-democratic
regime: but more slowly, as was appropriate to its distance from direct democracy. State
party leaders--Conkling, Sherman, John A. Logan, Matthew Quay--made their way to the
upper chamber. But the relatively parochial base of their power helped ensure that
neither party would have Senate spokesmen as such. Turn-of-the-century influentials
Nelson Aldrich, William B. Allison, and Arthur Pue Gorman had no formal party
standing as Senate leaders; their authority derived from their character, ability, and/or
legislative expertise.
This changed around the turn of the century, as the Senate came more firmly
within the ambit of the regnant parties, and the members faced the necessity (formalized
by the Seventeenth Amendment) of directly appealing to voters. Steering committees
charged to set party agendas and shape legislation came into being, as did party whips
(1913-15). The press began to speak of majority and minority leaders. Floor
management by the Senate leadership through unanimous consent agreements (UCAs)-the upper chamber’s equivalent to Reed’s rules in limiting debate and amendments-rapidly became the norm. Senate party spokesmen such as Henry Cabot Lodge and
Gilbert M. Hitchcock prefigured powerful Senate party leaders such as Alben Barkley
and Lyndon Johnson later in the twentieth century. 32
Thus did Congress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflect, and
participate in, the regnant party-political culture of the time. Politics was organization-
22
driven and party-dominated; so too was Congress. Both the major parties and Congress
were subject to dissent from the prevailing system: Populism and Progressivism in the
one case, defections over the currency and Midwestern Republican Insurgency in the
other. But by 1930 the party system appeared to have overcome those challenges, and
was much closer to what it had been over the course of the past century than to what it
would become in the next half century. So, too, was this the case with Congress.
The Populist/Bureaucratic Regime
Since the 1930s the American polity has been evolving into a third regime,
comparable to its predecessors in scale and scope. That a sea change in American public
life has occurred over the past three-quarters of a century is hardly a novel idea. Lowi
speaks of an “era transformation” evident in such developments as the change of the
presidency under FDR and his successors, the appearance of the first real peacetime
American state in the 1960s, and the rise of the public interest movement. John Aldrich
distinguishes the coalitional parties that flourished during (at least) the century from
1860 to 1960 from the very different character of party politics over the course of the
near-half century since. Like Lowi, he sees the 1960s as the critical period, characterized
not by electoral realignment (as in the democratic-party regime) but by a cultural
realignment, in which “a new breed of benefit seekers, motivated more by policy
concerns than by the selective incentives of jobs, contracts, and the like typical of the
machine age,” came into their own. The result is “a candidate-centered electoral arena
and an individualized, incumbent-centered government.”
33
23
The period from the 1930s to the 1980s was an era of large national and
international events, and profound domestic socioeconomic change, comparable to the
decades from the 1770s to the 1830s. The defining events were the Great Depression,
World War Two, and the Cold War. Deeper undercurrents were the postwar
transformation of American economic life, and the social changes embodied by suburbia,
the consumer revolution, the civil rights movement, and the cultural revolution of the
1960s and after. It is not surprising that there was a comparably extensive transformation
of the American polity: in short, a regime change.
Like its two predecessors, the populist-bureaucratic regime in which we live today
has distinctive features.
Populism is the first term by which I seek to convey my sense of the distinctive
character of the third regime. The traditional American application of the word was to
the Populist party of the 1890s. But in recent decades it has assumed a more generic
meaning. I use the word to refer to a politics whose electorate is increasingly detached
from strong party ties, and whose agenda and electoral activity is increasingly
defined by extra-party spokesmen such as the media and advocacy groups.
As in the past, a distinctive vocabulary--the language of populist politics--has
arisen in pace with a new political culture. Hard-edged ideological labels--radical,
reactionary, fascist, socialist, communist--were rendered obsolete by the transforming
developments of the late twentieth century. Populist has come to have a generic
application, without regard to a particular place on the ideological spectrum. Fuzzier
labels—progressive, liberal--have come to be the defining terms of the Left, as have
conservative and neo-conservative for the Right. Nonpartisan, bipartisan, independent,
24
centrist, moderate, mainstream have become important words in the modern political
lexicon, as befits their descriptive value in a more fluid political culture.
Of course, sharp-edged policy differences flourished in a public life defined by
the Great Depression, World War Two, the Cold War, and the civil rights and cultural
revolutions. Although traditional regional, Protestant-Catholic-Jewish, and workercapitalist antipathies faded, divisions over foreign affairs, race, gender, and social
morality have flourished.
But it is worth noting that the descriptive language of these issues stands outside
the ambit of party politics. Isolationists and interventionists, hawks and doves, appeasers
and fellow travelers, warmongers and peaceniks--none of them sharply party-delineated-are conspicuous members of the modern political bestiary. So too are practitioners of
movement politics, black power, and civil disobedience, the China Lobby, the Jewish
Lobby, the Irish Mafia, the civil rights coalition, the gun lobby, the pro-choice and prolife movements, and the moral majority.
The Left, in the eyes of the Right, is populated by bleeding hearts (initially parlor
pinks, then limousine liberals) who are soft on Communism and/or subscribe to a
politically correct party line (terms, in fact, of Communist party origin). The Right, in the
eyes of the Left, is dominated by a lunatic fringe of hard-core, hard-line, right-wing
kooks and hidebound reactionaries. Liberals, in the eyes of liberals, are advocates of the
public interest, the common man, the living wage, affirmative action, and choice (in
procreation rather than education). Conservatives, in the eyes of conservatives, are
apostles of freedom, individualism, law and order, the right to work, and choice (in
25
education more than procreation). This is a vocabulary rich in issue imagery, but notably
deficient in party imagery.
The media have become an ever more conspicuous force in public life, and the
language of politics reflects this. Press secretaries, aides, and agents manage the news,
and set up photo opportunities and off-the-record backgrounders. Speechwriters-phrasemakers, wordsmiths--and spin doctors are at every major politician’s beck and call.
Ubiquitous pollsters (and their polls), warn against premature peaking and advise on a
campaign’s demographics. There are political as well as television channels through
which to network; politicians sign on to scenarios; they worry about equal time on the
tube, leaks in their offices, and above all their image among pundits and the public.
The declining salience of party to a growing number of voters is a distinctive
feature of the politics of populism. Moe Fiorina’s definition of partisanship as “a running
tally of retrospective evaluations” would be eroded not only by black, Catholic, white
Southern, and Northern Republican deviations from traditional party norms, but by more
subtle and widespread developments as well. One of these is the slackening of family
and ethnic ties, and the growth of differences between generations, which appear to be an
inescapable part of modern times. Though Tocqueville ascribed these developments to
democracy itself, contemporary culture (not least because of its stress on the new, the
different, and the immediate) surely has strengthened them. Political participation has
been eroded also by mass entertainment and the rise of other ways (the courts, the welfare
state, corporate welfare, voluntary associations) of satisfying public needs.
If the political aspirations of voters have been thus dulled, and the richest electoral
pickings are in the non-inflamed center, then why do the contemporary parties appear to
26
be drawn to ever-sharper ideological differences? One explanation is that since party
similarities reduce turnout, it makes sense to woo the ideologically committed as most
likely to work, contribute, and vote. And indeed during the past half century a new kind
of political benefit-seeker--activists driven by causes and beliefs more than by the lure of
public office or other material payoffs--has become a familiar presence on the American
political scene.
The new political conditions have encouraged mainstream politicians to identify
more with particular issues and advocacy groups, and less with the parties’ tendency to
adopt inclusive one-big-umbrella stances. The autonomous position of the activists has
been strengthened not only by the parties’ increasing dependence on them, but also by the
infrastructure of money and organization commanded by major advocacy groups such as
the environmentalist and civil rights coalitions, the gun lobby, and the Christian
Coalition. The largest consequence has been that the parties’ ideological character is
closely related to the growing influence of extra-party advocacy groups and increasingly
autonomous politicians. In this sense, as in the 1850s, sharper ideological polarization is
an expression not of party strength but of party weakness.
If the politics of parties have been evolving into a politics of populism, American
government and law have undergone a comparable transformation: a transformation best
described as bureaucratization. By bureaucracy I mean the accrual and application of
power and authority by public bodies decreasingly subject to the will of the parties.
The major manifestations of this development have been autonomous regulatory bodies
dealing with an ever wider range social and economic regulation and social welfare, and
27
a judiciary inclined not only to define the legality and constitutionality of government
practices but to define and enforce public policy in a broad range of civil and human
rights.
Modern political language is full of words that reflect the administrative/
bureaucratic mindset. Deterrent, containment, fail-safe, escalation, détente, peaceful
coexistence, rapprochement, open skies, MAD, fallout, missile gap, garrison state, hot
line, overkill, satellites, bipolar; security risk, loyalty oath, guilt by association: this is a
language of foreign affairs and national security defined as much by diplomacy and
technology as by ideology.
The welfare state, like the warfare state, is a spur to the language of complex
administration. The domestic Kitchen Cabinet of Andrew Jackson was succeeded a
century later by FDR’s technocratic-sounding Brains Trust, and then by Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara’s Whiz Kids. Fearsome if hazy threats to the society--the
military-industrial complex, the power elite, the Iron Triangle, the Imperial Congress, the
Imperial Presidency, the Imperial Judiciary, shadowy Left- and Right-wing conspiracies
embracing ideologues, the foundations, the media, and finally the parties--reflect a view
of power as much organizationally as politically defined.
Less normative but no less descriptive is the jargon of government as
bureaucracy: boondoggle, gobbledegook, red tape, feedback, fallback position,
technocrat, cost efficiency, position paper, in-house, time frame, infrastructure, options,
zero in, task force, expertise, phasing in and out, pump-priming, pay-as-you-go. The
language of political power and influence derives from the large organization as it once
did the farm: clout, flak, crunch time, backlash, pecking order, influence peddler.
28
Euphemism--a characteristic verbal tic of bureaucratic life--is as common as the vivid
barnyard/racetrack language of the democratic-party regime once was. Conservatives
prefer to call school vouchers opportunity scholarships, the inheritance tax the death tax,
tax cuts tax relief. Democrats prefer investment to spending, affirmative action to racial
quotas and preferences.
What is the relation of the modern Congress to these sea changes in American
political life? On its surface, the legislative branch might seem to challenge the view that
the power and saliency of parties has declined. When it comes to the organization and
management of Congress, or to party alignments in roll-call votes, the primacy of party is
as great as it has ever been. Only in the 1950s was there a significant rise in interparty
accord. From our present perspective, that was a fleeting phenomenon.
34
But the current ideological polarity in Congress is not a product of leader- or
party-imposed discipline of the sort exercised in the past. Rather, it is a reflection of the
degree to which there has been an ideological sorting out of parties from below: a marked
feature of the third regime. Each party’s Congressional members may display an
unprecedented ideological cohesion. But at the same time they are far more autonomous
in their funding and constituency relationship. In both senses Congress accurately
reflects--and is part of--the contemporary political regime.
This contiguity is evident also in Congressional-Executive relations. The Great
Depression and the New Deal imposed unprecedented strains on dealings among the
branches of government. One consequence was the rise of a new responsiveness by the
majority leadership to the President’s programs. As significant was the reaction in
29
Congress to FDR’s efforts after the 1936 election to enact a more sharply ideological
New Deal agenda. The appearance of the conservative coalition in Congress during the
late 1930s--an alliance of Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans who for
generations had been the primary opposing forces in Congress, and over the course of the
next three decades would often be the dominant force--was also without precedent. It
was both an ideological and an institutional response to a regime change in the
relationship between the legislative and executive branches.
Institutional adaptation to regime change is evident as well in the post-1960
dismantling of the Speaker-seniority-Rules-and-Appropriations power structure that for
so long controlled the business of Congress. As the conservative coalition rose in
response to the New Deal, so was its displacement a consequence of the civil rights
revolution and the rise of black Democratic and white Republican voters in the South
(and, less noticeably, a concomitant reduction of liberal Republicans and conservative
Democrats elsewhere in the country). The reduction of the power of Rules chairman
Howard Smith and his fellows in other key committees, and the great increase in
subcommittees (Every Man a Chairman), were not transient expressions of disaffection,
as in the case of the revolt against Cannon. Rather they reflected the sharpened
ideological division between the parties, and the greater autonomy of Congressmen,
which had come to be distinctive features of the new regime. 35
Far be it for me to intervene in the Tong war between the PIEs (PreferenceInduced Equilibriums) and the SIEs (Structure-Induced Equilibriums) over the sources of
Congressional change. My typically equivocal historian’s view is that the new character
30
--sorry, the new equilibrium--of Congress is the product of both preferential and
structural pressures.
What is that new equilibrium? Weak and/or vulnerable “leaders” (Wright, Foley,
Gingrich, Lott, Hastert); extensive constituency services; relatively clear-cut ideological
differences in party positions and roll-call votes; exceptionally high seat-retention levels;
a decentralized, multiple-subcommittee system. Here again, the preferences of the
players and the structural adaptations of the institution are responses to the demands of
the populist-bureaucratic regime.
That response is about what one expect in a political culture where parties have
attenuated relations with their constituents, and appeal to culturally distinct blocs of
voters; a substantial independent vote sloshes around in the presidential electoral
barthtub; candidates are relatively autonomous in their campaigning and fund-raising;
and issues are defined by voices (the media, advocacy groups) related to, but hardly
dependent on, the parties. In this sense, much is indeed new. But in the larger sense of
the interplay between Congress and the political culture, what else is new?
31
Appendix A
Hits from America: History and Life (1964-present)
“change” – 18,015
“revolution” – 12,282
“transformation” – 2,657
“continuity” – 1,181
“evolution” – 4,744
“persistence” – 820
Hits from J-Stor (1900-2000)
History
“change”
Political Science
26,580
24,457
“continuity”
6,172
4,015
“revolution”
17,214
9,315
“evolution”
9,225
5,937
“transformation”
8,313
5,811
“persistence”
3,398
2,364
Notes
1
Byron Shafer and Anthony Badger, ed’s., Contesting Democracy: Substance and
Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000 (Univ. Press of Kansas, 2001), x;
Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order: Notes for a
‘New Institutionalism,’” in Lawrence E. Dodd and Calvin Jillson, ed’s., The Dynamics of
American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations (Westview, 1994), ____.
32
2
Byron E. Shafer, ed., The End of Realignment? (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1991) and
David R. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (Yale UP,
2002).
3
Joel Silbey, “Foundation Stones of Present Discontents: The American Political Nation,
1776-1945,” in Byron Shafer, ed., Present Discontents: American Politics in the Very
Late Twentieth Century (Chatham House, 19__), 1-29; Calvin Jillson, “Patterns and
Personality in American National Politics,” in Dodd and Jillson, ed’s., Dynamics, 31f.
4
Richard Ellis, American Political Cultures (Oxford Univ. Press, 1993); Brian
Berry et al, The Rhythms of American Politics (Univ Press of America, 1998) ; William
Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations (Morrow, 1991).
5
Hugh Heclo, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutions,” in Dodd and Jillson, ed’s., Dynamics,
c. 377-81.
6
On regimes, Jillson, “Patterns and Personality,” ___. Bruce Ackerman’s We the
People (Harvard Univ. Press, 1991, 1998) posits three constitutional regimes, dating
respectively from 1787-1791, the Civil War/Reconstruction era, and the 1930s.
7
David Mayhew, The Electoral Connection (
1974); Stephen C.
Erickson, “The Entrenching of Incumbency: Reelections in the United States House of
33
Representatives, 1790-1944,” Cato Journal, 14 (1995), 397-420. Eric Schickler,
Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress
(Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), makes a cognate argument in his stress on the interplay of
multiple interests and purposes in institutional change.
8
John Aldrich, “Rational Choice Theory and the Study of American Politics,” in Dodd
and Jillson, ed’s., Dynamics, 223.
9
Samuel Huntington, “Political Modernization: America vs. Europe,” in Huntington,
Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale Univ. Press, 1968), 93-139; Bernard Bailyn,
The Origins of American Politics (
10
11
)
James R. Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic (Yale Univ. Press, 1993);
Jeffrey A. Jenkins and Charles H. Stewart III, “Order from Chaos: The
Transformation of the Committee System in the House, 1816-1822,” in David W. Brady
and Mathew D. McCubbins, ed’s., Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress
(Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 195f.
12
John H. Adlrich et al., “Why Congress? What the Failure of the Confederation
Congress and the Survival of the Federal Congress Tell Us About the New
Institutionalism,” in Brady and McCubbins, ed’s., Party, 315f.
34
13
George Dangerfield, The Awakening of American Nationalism 1815-1828 (Harper &
Row, 1965); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).
14
H.L. Mencken, The American Language (4th ed., Knopf, 1936), Ch. IV; ibid.,
Supplements One and Two (1945, 1948).
15
Morton Keller, “Corruption in America: Continuity and Change,” in Abraham S.
Eisenstadt et al, Before Watergate: Problems of Corruption in American Society
(Brooklyn, 1978), 9-11. See also James C. Scott, “Corruption, Machine Politics, and
Political Change,” American Political Science Review, 63 (Dec., 1969), 1142-1158.
16
V.G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1988); Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the
New Republic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001); Marquis James, Andrew Jackson:
The Border Captain (Bobbs-Merrill, 1933), 161-163.
17
Mencken, American Language, 141.
18
Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, ed’s., Party, 2.
19
Jenkins and Stewart, “Order from Chaos,” in Brady and McCubbins, ed’s., Party,
35
195f.
20
Randall Strahan, “Leadership and Institutional Change in the Nineteenth Century
House,” Brady and McCubbins, Parties, 237f.
21
Nolan McCarthy et al, “Congress and the Territorial Expansion of the United States,”
Brady and McCubbins, Parties, 392f.
22
Sean M. Theriault and Barry M. Weingast, “Agenda Manipulation, Strategic Voting,
and Legislative Details in the Compromise of 1850,” Brady and McCubbins, ed’s.,
Parties, 343f.
23
John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? (Chicago: U of Chi Press, 1995), 72; David H. Donald,
“An Excess of Democracy: The American Civil War and the Social Process,” in Donald,
Lincoln Reconsidered (Vintage Books, 1961), 209-235.
24
Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford: Stanford UP,
1991) stresses this continuity, as do Michael Holt, Richard L. McCormick, and Theodore
Lowi (in Shafer and Badger, ed’s., Contesting Democracy, ___; Stephen Skowronek,
Building a New American State (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), 24. See also Richard F.
Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization 18701900 (NY: Columbia UP, 2000), which argues that the American response to
industrialization occurred within the framework of the existing democratic political order.
36
25
Morton Keller, Affairs of State (Cambridge: HUP, 1977), 248.
26
Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest (
27
Keller, Affairs of State, ch. 7.
28
Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in
), 11.
America, 1859-1877 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers
and Mothers (Harvard Univ., Press, 1992), and Skowronek, New American State,
have a different take. But see Theodore Lowi, “Forward,” in Dodd and Jillson,
ed’s., Dynamics, xiii; and Morton Keller, “(Jerry-) Building a New American State,”
Reviews in American History (June, 1983), 248-52.
29
30
Keller, Affairs of State, 299-307.
Strahan, “Leadership,” 260. See also David Brady, Congressional Voting in a Partisan
Era (Univ. Press of Kansas, 1973).
31
Timothy P. Nokken and Brian R. Sala, “Institutional Evolution and the Rise of the
Tuesday-Thursday Club in the House of Representatives,” in Brady and McCubbins,
ed’s., Party, 270f; Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism, Ch. 2.
37
32
Gerald Gramm and Steven S. Smith, “Party Leadership and the Development of the
Modern Senate,” in Brady and McCubbins, ed’s., Party, 287f
33
Lowi, “Foreword,” in Dodd and Jillson, ed’s., Dynamics, xiii; Aldrich, Why Parties?,
160.
34
David Brady,
35
Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism, Ch. 4, 5; Nelson Polsby, How Congress Evolves:
Social Bases of Institutional Change (forthcoming, Oxford Univ. Press, 2003).