National Party Platforms 1840 1968

Arranged chronologically, this book contains the platforms of the major parties and principle minor parties from the campaign of 1840 through that of 1972. Platforms are the principal official statements of party principles and policies and are evidence of what party leaders believe to be important issues of the year.

In the first biography of U.S. House Speaker John W. McCormack, author Garrison Nelson uncovers previously forgotten FBI files, birth and death records, and correspondence long thought lost or buried. For such an influential figure, McCormack tried to dismiss the past, almost erasing his legacy from the public's mind. John William McCormack: A Political Biography sheds light on the behind-the-curtain machinations of American politics and the origins of the modern-day Democratic party, facilitated through McCormack's triumphs. McCormack overcame desperate poverty and family tragedy in the Irish ghetto of South Boston to hold the second-most powerful position in the nation. By reinventing his family history to elude Irish Boston's powerful political gatekeepers, McCormack embarked on a 1928 - 1971 House career and from 1939-71, the longest house leadership career. Working with every president from Coolidge to Nixon, McCormack's social welfare agenda, which included Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration reform, and civil rights legislation helped commit the nation to the welfare of its most vulnerable citizens. By helping create the Austin-Boston Connection, McCormack reshaped the Democratic Party from a regional southern white Protestant party to one that embraced urban religiously and racially diverse ethnics. A man free of prejudice, John McCormack was the Boston Brahmin's favorite Irishman, the South's favorite northerner, and known in Boston as "Rabbi John," the Jews' favorite Catholic.

During the past fifty years American democracy has been transformed by the collapse of non-ideological and decentralized traditional party organizations and also by the emergence of more ideologically distinct and integrated service vendor parties and their allied groups. In this book, Joel Paddock uses several original data sets to provide new insights into the ways parties adapt to politics in the telecommunications age, growing interparty ideological differences, the changing relationship between parties and interest groups, and party nationalization. Well-suited for either graduate or undergraduate courses on political parties or linkage institutions, this book provides a fresh perspective on party transformation and the American democratic process.

American Political Parties is a core textbook on political parties in the United States that places the US party system into a framework designed around the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. White and Kerbel argue that the two-party system in the United States began with a common agreement on the key values of freedom, individual rights, and equality of opportunity but that Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed—often vehemently—over how to translate these ideals into an acceptable form of governance. This text develops a unique historical perspective of US party development using the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson as a framework for analysis. While Hamilton wanted to marry freedom to a strong, active federal government with an energetic president who would act on behalf of all citizens, Jefferson believed that freedom should be allied to local civic virtue, with governmental responsibilities placed primarily at the local level. Today, Hamiltonian nationalism finds its home in the Democratic Party, while Republicans have espoused Jeffersonian localism since 1964. Using this historical framework, American Political Parties examines a range of topics including marketing and social media, campaign finance, reforms in the presidential nominating process, political demography, and third parties. In this new edition (previously published as Party On!), the authors describe four possible futures in the wake of the 2020 election and why Americans believed it was “the most important” election in their lifetimes. The unique history of US political parties as set forth by the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson is at an inflection point. Republicans have become an insurgent party fully under the control of Donald Trump while Democrats have an opportunity to create a new majority coalition. This juncture poses unique challenges to our democracy and constitutional framework, and the book describes four possible outcomes, postulating where American political parties are headed in this decade.

From 1969 to 1977 the executive branch of the U.S. government was dominated by politicians and their advisers who called themselves "conservatives." In their speeches they professed belief in such values and institutions as social order, military strength, market capitalism, governmental decentralization, and traditional morality. But did these social ideas have much influence on their actual policy decisions? Or were their decisions, as some observers have argued, largely based on personal ambition, partisan interest, and pragmatic response to the day-to-day problems of government? To answer these questions, A. James Reichley examines the effects of conservative ideology on the formation of specific administration policies under the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The policies covered include the development of detente with the Soviet Union, welfare reform, revenue sharing, resistance to "busing," the imposition of wage and price controls in 1971, and governmental reorganization under Nixon; and, under Ford, adjustment to the rise of the third world and problems with detente, the drive for decontrol of oil prices, and the fight against inflation. In the last chapter Reichley considers whether the Nixon and Ford administrations can be truly described as conservative, and suggests what the future role of conservatism in American politics is likely to be.

This highly readable narrative history of the Republican Party profiles the G.O.P. from its emergence as an antislavery party during the 1850s to its current place as champion of political conservatism.