general sense of party failure, and are often given a similar place in the anti-party pantheon. But
what stands out about changing attitudes to party in the late nineteenth century is not a massive
rejection of party, but that in the midst of a society undergoing rapid change and almost daily
revelations of political corruption, national party leaders successfully maintained and renewed
the relevance of party to voters for the new century.
In addition to a brief outline of the character of the Jacksonian party mode, and of the
changes within the late nineteenth century political environment that made reform of the national
party apparatus attractive to national party leaders, this paper highlights three modal innovations
achieved by national party leaders in the late nineteenth century, which I argue produced a new
organizational mode. One was a change in campaign strategy; giving up on locally-dominated
mobilization campaigns, parties adopted the “campaign of education,” which focused on a
consistent presentation of national issues along lines of interest and dominated by the national
committees. The national committees themselves were centralized and empowered to control
the content of campaigns like never before thorough a more formalized national apparatus and
better fundraising networks. Most ambitiously, national leaders created networks of party clubs,
distinct from the regular local party organizations; rather than the Jacksonian framework that
encouraged voters to identify along the geographical boundaries of cities and states, the clubs
attached voter loyalties directly to the national party through horizontal connections between
citizens with shared interests. Together, these internal reforms prepared the parties to co-opt a
significant amount of anti-party insurgency, to adapt to those changes in the political
environment that produced the anti-party reform impulse, and to better face the challenges of the
twentieth century.
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I. Nineteenth Century Party Change and American Political Development
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Convention