Title: Republicans and Realignment: The New Deal Years
Abstract: Republicans and Realignment: The New Deal Years Patrick D. Reagan (bio) Clyde P. Weed. The Nemesis of Reform: The Republican Party During the New Deal. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. xiv + 293 pp. Appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $37.50. The presidential election campaign of 1932 has often been considered a watershed in U.S. political history marking the decline of the Republican coalition that effectively had dominated national politics since 1896. In 1932, the Democratic party under Franklin D. Roosevelt created a new majority coalition with 22,821,857 popular votes (472 electoral votes) to the defeated Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover’s, 15,761,841 votes (59 electoral votes). New Era Republicans caught up in what one Boston business leader called the “slowly sucking maelstrom” of the Great Depression lost 103 seats in the House of Representatives and 12 in the Senate, giving Democrats a majority of 313 to 117 in the House and 59 to 35 in the Senate. Ever since, scholars have debated the political and historical significance of the election. In The Nemesis of Reform, Clyde Weed, a political scientist at Southern Connecticut University, joins that debate by arguing that minority party behavior, especially by activists and party elites, has been just as important to completing the process of political realignment as the more commonly studied work of the new majority party. Political historians have built on the work of V. O. Key, Jr.’s idea of “critical elections” to create a sizeable literature on the nature, timing, and significance of national elections that have so thoroughly altered the landscape of party politics that we can point to either “realigning elections” or, more generally, “realigning periods” providing a broad overview of how political change has mirrored broader economic, social, or ethnocultural changes. Yet in contradistinction to the work of such well known scholars as Walter Dean Burnham, Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., and James L. Sundquist among others, Weed suggests that realignment theorists have given too much credence to the rationality of vote-maximization-seeking behavior of parties and too little to the more passionate beliefs, rhetoric, and behavior of party elites in minority parties caught in the midst of realigning periods. [End Page 132] Weed suggests that beyond the work of James T. Patterson, historians have paid too little heed to how the political changes in Republican party circles in the 1932–1939 period affected the consolidation of the New Deal majority. Rather than providing us with a detailed history of the party in the 1930s, he is more interested in placing that history in the context of how Republican leaders’ political strategies and flawed perceptions of public opinion prior to the post-1936 use of detailed opinion polls delayed the Republican response to the New Deal system by accepting its new position as the minority party. He attempts to go beyond traditional scholarly study of mass voting behavior to focus on “party strategies, interest groups, and the process by which elites innovate new party positions” (p. 1) during realigning periods. The author organizes the study in three parts, which give a brief overview of Republican party dominance to 1932, the “Descent to Minority Status” in the 1932–1936 years, and confronting the New Deal in the 1937–1939 period. Weed draws on a wealth of information ranging from classic secondary accounts through printed sources such as the Congressional Record and the New York Times to research in individual manuscript collections at the Library of Congress, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, and Yale University. At a number of key points, Weed relies on the standard historical accounts of the period, with especially heavy emphasis on works by William Leuchtenburg, Albert Romasco, Barry Karl, and James Patterson. 1 Throughout the work, Weed presents detailed data and striking quotations that place the politics of the 1930s in a new light for most historians while challenging political scientists and those historical sociologists who have been calling for us to “bring the state back in” to pay more attention to the role of party elites as historical actors. The most striking sections of The Nemesis of Reform are those which detail the subtlety of...
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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