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Whirlwinds From the West
| Article
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14170 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1988 |
3,049 Words |
| Author
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Richard Jensen
Richard Jensen is professor of history at the University of
Illinois Circle Campus and has written widely on American
elections. |
Alf Landon, who hoorayed for Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and encouraged Ronald Reagan in 1987, saw many changes in his hundred years, but none so radical as the transmutation of our politics. William McKinley or Woodrow Wilson would have been at home in the campaigns of Harry Truman or John Kennedy. They all understood state parties and local organizations. Each had built a national coalition that included key men from every state and every district. Their supporters were rewarded with patronage and prestige. As master politicians they appreciated the loyalties of the core electorate and the vacillations of the independents. They knew how to run a national campaign and how to raise the big money required. Advertising meant billboards and newspaper ads rather than TV spots, but the principle of flashing short, coded messages to an audience in a hurry was the same. The issues of economic prosperity at home and national honor abroad had changed little from 1900 to 1960. These master politicos all had finessed the woman's issue and the race question, and they all had perfected their appeal to the civic-minded middle-class citizen. Furthermore, newsmen, local politicians, active citizens all understood and appreciated the leadership qualities of these men. They were elected because they had something of substance to offer, something the people knew the nation needed.
The revolution of the 1960s and '70s bears a historical resemblance to the 1820s and '30s. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren used the patronage power of the fast-expanding nation-state to build an all-encompassing political network, based in the counties and the states, that fed into Washington and was sustained by patronage flowing outward. Held together by particular personalities, starting with Jackson himself, and by regional and sentimental ties, Jacksonian democracy dominated the land for decades, and even when Abraham Lincoln and like-minded Republicans forged a new, dominant coalition in the 1850s and '60s, the new party closely resembled the Democratic model in organization and style. Indeed, American parties changed less in the century and a third from Jackson to Kennedy than they have in the last quarter century.
Finally in the 1960s a new politics came out of the West, out of California especially, and also Arizona, Colorado, and other western states. It arose there because westerners are more typically "American"--that is, they are less bound by customs and old social structures. The West has always had the allure of freedom from social, intellectual, and cultural traditions, and correctly so. In the days of William Jennings Bryan, when Nebraska was out west, the region was rebellious and innovative. But it was too small, too peripheral, to
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