lines. . . each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and
fearlessly what should be said on the vital issues of the day,” and insisted that Republican leaders
did not “represent the rank and file of the Republican voters.”
Further, it is difficult to imagine
the Democratic party of the New Deal Era competing as late nineteenth century parties had; the
parochial base of support for Franklin Roosevelt’s policies was simply much weaker than its
support among interests and within the broader public, and while Roosevelt played parochial
politics as well as any nineteenth century politician, his mastery of a national politics of
education is usually the lynchpin of scholars’ assessment of his party leadership.
In reshaping the content of national campaigns, centering control of party organizations
at the national level, and reorienting the basis of party affiliation, national party leaders in the
late nineteenth century anticipated the recommendations of the American Political Science
Association’s Committee on Parties by more than a generation. Substantive campaigns, national
organizations, and interest-based affiliation are the electoral hallmarks of what political scientists
call “responsible” mass parties. While this argument does not seek to prove consistently that the
Committee’s idea of party was shaped by the late nineteenth century idea of party, it does
suggest that an organic idea of mass party organizations existed outside the realm of academic
speculation long before calls for a “responsible” party organization shaped the way that political
scientists assess parties in America. The parties thus deserve to be reinstated in a primary place
in the history of the development of the national state, and “party decline” should be re-evaluated
as “party change.”
188
Theodore Roosevelt, “Speech Before the National Convention of the Progressive Party,” August 6, 1912, in John
Gabriel Hunt, ed., The Essential Theodore Roosevelt, (New York: Gramercy Books, 1994), 282, 285.
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Convention