Future Book Manuscript

Proposed Title: "A Generational Divide: The Reconstruction of American Party Politics, 1865-1912."

Abstract

This study traces the Republican and Democratic Parties’ evolution from sectional entities to national parties. Focusing a lens on the two generations of politicians who oversaw the United States’ transition from an agricultural to an industrial political economy, A Generational Divide traces the ways in which the Civil War, Reconstruction, and industrialization fostered a fluid political environment that culminated with an intergenerational reconstruction of American party politics during the four-way presidential election of 1912. Similar to the way that the four-way presidential election of 1860 served as the climax of long running debates about the influence planters exerted over the nation’s antebellum agricultural political economy, early twentieth century Americans came to the conclusion that industrialists formed “a money power” that replaced the antebellum “Slave Power” as a threat to the widespread economic mobility that the nation’s Founding generation pegged as the cornerstone of individual liberty. I argue that the presidential election of 1912 led the Republican and Democratic Parties to coalesce around competing visions of a federal regulatory state that served as the ideological foundation of two-party politics for remainder of the twentieth century. As a result, the Third-American Party System was the byproduct of post-Civil War industrialization, not the antebellum agricultural political economy it replaced.

Future Projects:

• Biography of New York Senator Roscoe Conkling: Following the publication of my dissertation, my next book project will be a political biography of New York Senator and Stalwart Republican leader Roscoe Conkling. Although Conkling was one of the most consequential figures during the Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur administrations, the last serious study of Conkling was published in the 1930s. The biography will focus on the role that he played as a member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, his multi-year effort to undermine civil service reform during the Hayes and Garfield administrations, and his extraordinary fall from power on the eve of President James Garfield's assassination before becoming a corporate lawyer and devising the legal theory of "corporate personhood."