reality, parties were made into a national force by the national network of party regularity and
national party conventions; as Sidney Milkis argues, the localized structure of the Jacksonian
parties “could provide a vital link between constitutional offices. . . and the people. . . by
balancing state and local communities. . . and the national government.”
linkage is not the same as defining that link, and the particular character of party regularity had a
profound effect on the operation of the Jacksonian mode, shaping national and local party
politics alike. This network was powerful in its ability to mobilize nation-wide campaigns, but
was ill-equipped to coordinate those campaigns in such a way as to create national mandates.
This conceptual problem leads to a historical problem, which fails to recognize the
nationalizing impulses that existed within the parties themselves, especially the Republican
party. Skowronek’s account, for instance, emphasizes the role of department store magnate and
Republican party spoilsman John Wanamaker in teaching the corrupt parties to adjust to the
reform assault on the officeholder assessment system of party fundraising by appealing instead to
large business interests for campaign financing.
State-building, in this account, is understood
as a slow struggle for power between the old order of party—defined rather monolithically by
Skowronek—and the new order of reform politics devoted to rationalization of central state
captures the distinction between those individuals who used routinized sources of power to take advantage of the
parties’ resources and the parties themselves. Because adherence to regularity was required for participation in the
councils of party power, machines adhered to the formalism of regularity, because it was the only way to gain access
to the resources that the party controlled. Moesi Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties,
vol. II, trans. Frederick Clarke, (1902; reprint, New York: Haskell House Publishers, Ltd., 1970), 371
15
Sidney M. Milkis, Political Parties and Constitutional Government: Remaking American Democracy,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 3.
16
Steven Erie notes that inter-governmental alliances played a determinative role in ensuring party power locally.
Inter-governmental alliances depended upon the contingency of a congruence of group interests at the state and
national level, which did not always occur even when leaders at both levels were members of the same party. This
account rightly explains variations in the character of urban machine as the product of a.) variations in local
alliances with state and national party organizations and b.) variations in the stages of machine development. Erie’s
inability to explain these variations as anything more than contingent arrangement of social forces that allow local-
state or local-national ties to emerge, and that allow some machines more time to develop than others. Erie’s
account begs the question of how the national parties produced the structural constraints that enabled intra-
governmental alliances and made control of local party franchises attractive to local machine politicians. From the
national perspective, urban machines related in a very specific way to the national party structure; it was party
regularity that structured the incentives for and against intra-governmental alliances.
Steven Erie, Rainbow’s End, 9, 10.
17
Skowronek, Building a New American State, 74-78.
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Convention