PRIMED FEELINGS

 

With the Romantic period one has a multifaceted movement originating in Europe that made its way to the US with the onset of the nineteenth century.  Actually, the movement started in the late 1700s and can be seen as one of those social forces that served to heighten people’s awareness of the detrimental effects of a growing political upheaval and the initial industrialization of European life. 

Central to its messaging was a focus on emotions and individualism.  Part and parcel of its impact was its influence on liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, and radicalism.[1]  While the movement’s most observable affect was on that time’s art and literature, the political world was also highly impacted.  But to appreciate in which ways it moved politics, one needs to appreciate the directions it maneuvered the creative world of the arts – both the physical arts and in their written forms. 

The Enlightenment adopted the classical tradition; the Romantics favored medieval expression.  In that, it turns away from concerns of balance, proportion, and idealistic form (the bedrocks of classical art) to expressions of raw emotions and seeing art as the opportunity to be exposed to real experiences.  That even included stirring the emotions of horror, terror, fear, and awe.  But in the main, it shifted people’s attention to nature and its abundant beauty in its raw states.

With these focuses, Romantic art placed newfound appreciation for what had been previously judged to be common and plebian, that being folk art and national expressions.  Now, with this newer view, such traditions were judged as worthy of being honored as noble.  This included ascribing honor on national traditions of artistic endeavors that originated in those medieval days before firm national borders and national institutions took hold.[2]

An early expression of this newer sensitivity can be traced to Germany.  There the Sturn und Drang (“storm and desire”) movement in that nation’s music and literature – taking place in the late 1760s to early 1780s – one finds works highlighting extreme emotions.  They were considered as concerted efforts to rebel against rationalism as dictated by the Enlightenment.  Credited with its early expression in words was the works of the philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann, an early proponent of the philosophy of language.

The movement, first in Europe and then in the US, had a recurring tangible target, that being industrialism and urban living as it sprawled with the rise of factories and other manufacturing centers.  It was a recurring reaction to the lasting consequences of the Enlightenment, not the least being the French Revolution, even soliciting criticism among many Romantics who initially supported that overthrow of the French monarchy. 

As this messaging matured, definite themes emerged.  Those included placing high credit on the spokespeople of the movement judged to be heroic as individuals and artists, championing a better society.  Especially honored were those seen as leading the way by the expressions of their individual imaginations.  A general sense of liberation took hold, that being free from classical dictates as to what was legitimate art and it ushered in a Zeitgeist of this visceral expression.

A German artist, Casper David Friedrich, captured the new thrust with his summary remark, “the artist’s feeling is his law” or the English poet, William Wordsworth’s notion that art is the product of an artist’s powerful feelings that gets refined through the tranquility of his/her recollection.  Handed down rules from previous disciplined schools of art were merely considered obstacles to the creation of legitimate art, for after all, these rules were artificial and not the product of the creative process. 

The new criteria were authenticity, originality, and the expression of genius.  Ultimately, great art was the creation of an expression from nothing.  Interpretation or derivation were belittled, originality or novelty were praised.  To this one can readily see the role of emotions, not well-thought-out plans or rationales, to calculate what should be done, what should be expressed, and what should be illustrated.

And what better source of such inspiration than nature?  While not an essential attribute of Romanticism, nature turned out to be a recurring subject that Romantics exploited in their works.  It functioned as a normative standard of goodness, unaffected by societal corruption.  People are born as a product of nature and as such are initially innocent as they begin their lives.  It is society that corrupts not only humans but defaces nature as well. 

Nature, sans society, is pure and worthy of almost spiritual esteem.  It took on a status among many Romantics as being worthy of devotion.  A painting that is often is depicted as symbolizing this association between the movement and nature is Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog.

Born with the backdrop of war in Europe, this movement had first the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars up until 1815 as its setting.  In France, the generation that took up the Romantic movement was weaned with the sounds and turmoil associated with this upheaval.  According to Alfred de Vigny, the initial artists of this movement were “conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums.”[3]

As for political views, Romantics are judged to have been mostly liberal to progressive but not exclusively.  Within their ranks, mostly due to their emotional strains, conservative and even nationalist biases developed.  In the extreme, this line of thought or feelings even led to fascism in the twentieth century.  Constant attacks on reason led to the questioning – even rejection – of objective truth.

Before finishing these initial introductory remarks on Romanticism, a word on its relation to nationalism seems in order.  It, the Romantic inclination, became a source of ongoing messaging or linking of emotional ties to this excessive attachment to one’s nation.  And that, as just mentioned above, survived into the twentieth century, and some would argue, the twenty-first century. 

This is attributable by historians to the emotionalism of that time.  It led to ties not only to a person’s nationality but his/her ethnicity, and race.  Of special interest was/is national language and a nation’s folklore.  With that, people expressed increased interest in local customs with their accompanying traditions.  It also led to national policies that had little concern about the legitimate claims of other nations or peoples.

During that time, Europe, partly because of this emotional bias, experienced various redrawing of national boundaries and even the creation of newer national polities, for example, the unification of Italy and Germany.  In addition, nationalism incentivized people to become familiar with the medieval history of their nations when many of the folkloric traditions they could still identify got started and added to their sense of peoplehood.

Renewed popularity in epic poems from that past took on a special interest.  And some of that digging into the past even stretched to pre-Roman, Latinization days especially in Germany and Celtic Scotland and Ireland.  In many areas of Europe, Napoleonic Wars caused further motivation to heighten national commitments to first fight off this threat and then the actualization of French control. 

This is a bit ironic in that the initial reaction to the French Revolution, as alluded to above, stirred Romantics to support its aims and successes.  But as Napoleon expanded his control over the various nations of the continent, those nationalists became anti French and anti-Napoleon.  Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a German philosopher, provides an eloquent expression of this line of thought:

 

Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole … Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality – then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be.[4]

 

And that sets the stage for this blog to look at the way Romanticism made its presence known in the US.

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[1] John Morrow, “Romanticism and Political Thought in the Early 19^th Century,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought:  The Cambridge History of Political Thought, eds. Garth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2011), 39-76.

[2] Nuria Perpinya, “Ruins, Nostalgia and Ugliness:  Five Romantic Perceptions of Middle Ages and a Spoon of Game of Thrones and Avant-Garde Oddity,”, Logos Verlag Berlin (2014), accessed September 9, 2021, Buchbeschreibung: : (logos-verlag.de) .

[3] “Neoclassicism and Romanticism,” Lumen:  Boundless Art History (n.d.).  Accessed September 9, 2021, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/neoclassicism-and-romanticism/.

[4] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Modern History Sourcebook:  Johann Gottlieb Fichte:  To the German Nation, 1806,” Fordham University (n.d.), accessed September 9, 2021, Internet History Sourcebooks (fordham.edu) .

AN UNFEELING PEOPLE?

 

The last posting ended this blog’s review of the Whig Party.  The purpose of that review was to gauge how true that party was to the ideals of a parochial/traditional federalist thought.  As this blog has pointed out, federalism calls on people to see the polity within which they live as a partnership. 

This reflects a legal/constitutional structure of governance – one made up of a people coming together to formulate and maintain their polity – and an emotional/reasoned commitment to promote the health and survival of it as an ultimate, espoused political value.  In this form of federalism, said commitment only includes those within a given racial/ethnic tradition and that, in America, being of Western European stock.

          The challenges the Whig Party faced limited its viability within the national political landscape to just over twenty years.  But within those years, through its inabilities, it offered Americans a set of practical lessons or guardrails that political entities need to respect if they are to sustain their position within their polity.  

For one thing, an American political party must realize that this polity exists within a national, general governing arena or zone and not as a compilation of a national level system alongside local or state level systems.  American federalism is not a dual leveled arrangement with the general government addressing national concerns and states taking care of local issues, but of a cooperative system.  Of course, each has its emphasis on what it addresses, but the areas of mutual concerns are many and continually arising.

          As such, its institutions, especially ones so central as political parties, must function nationally as well as locally.  Yet the Whigs prided themselves for honoring the localism of its members without taking into account national implications.  They allowed, without any disciplinary checks, all sorts of messaging and advocacies ranging the spectrum of political whims of that time. 

In striving to understand that proclivity, one is helped by noting an influential mindset affecting American political thought in the antebellum period.  As with the Enlightenment, that theorizing originated in Europe.  It preceded the start of the Whigs by twenty years but caught the imagination of many Americans through that party’s existence and, as with the Whigs, saw its influence wane in the 1850s. 

That theorizing was known as Romanticism.  Actually, in America there was a precursor to this line of thought and feeling during the colonial years.  That was the sentiment expressed during what is historically known as the First Awakening.  As with this later fascination, the First Awakening was a reaction to the influences of the Enlightenment, but especially in terms of religious thought. 

Nineteenth century Romanticism had a more pervasive effect on a broad range of interests from literature and art to politics.  But a review of the earlier version can give one the essence of what Romanticism was.  As will be further explained in the next posting, this newer view was a reaction to what was deemed as the Enlightenment’s over emphasis on reason.

Here, at this point, this blog diverts a bit from describing this newer movement and provide some context as to how Romanticism is historically portrayed.  Commentary seems to rely on an assumption, that being that the Constitution was the product of the Enlightenment.  It was a bit of political architecture that was based on reason – the mainstay of the Enlightenment – and that that engendered various consequences.  Yes, if one accepts that premise, one can see that as the 1800s moved on, this reasoned experiment seemed to be working, but it did solicit at least two negative judgements of some importance.

The first was directed at that other example of a “reasoned” political experiment, the French Revolution.  There, reasoned arguments led to an uprising of the masses that resulted in much tumult and violence with a hefty death rate.  Popularizing the image of the guillotine, it was difficult for anyone who valued a peaceful society to see much to admire as that Revolution evolved not to a truly democratic nation, but to the semi autocratic rule of Napoleon Bonaparte.  And beyond that initial world wind, it would lead to an Industrial Revolution in which …

 

Enlightenment’s greatest scientific achievements brought the natural world under mastery of humanity, but humanity then turned and converted that mastery into smoke-belching factories, cheap mass production of goods, and the swollen wealth of a new ruling class, the bourgeoisie.[1]

 

The other criticism aimed at the Enlightenment, as it was experienced in America, was that excessive reason rendered Americans to be a shallow people.  That all they seemed to be to European “observers” was that this newer country was comprised of a population lacking in a national identity.  All one had in this burgeoning nation was a people running around trying to maximize the amount of money they could accrue.  To this, this blogger objects.

As this blog has claimed – with a good deal of scholarly support – the American Revolution and the Constitution was the product of various cultural/political developments.  Among them was the Puritanical/covenantal tradition, the emotional movement of the First Awakening, English constitutional tradition (including ideas of separation of powers and a strong sense of localism), the relative autonomy that the British Crown extended to the colonies, along with the Enlightenment thinkers (e.g., Locke and Hobbes), and the common sense philosophers (e.g., Reid and Hutcheson). 

To claim Americans are solely the product of Enlightenment thinking is to shortchange all these other contributions of thinkers and historical events.  By so doing, one underestimates how complex a political or overall culture Americans had developed by the time they secured their independence and their constitutional arrangement.  But according to Guelzo, that image of a short-sighted people seems to be how Europeans tended to see their American cousins.

While this blogger does not agree, for the sake of contextualizing this newer source of influence, Romanticism, it helps to take that view of Americans at face value.  That would set up a model of sorts:  i.e., one begins with the beliefs of the Enlightenment which leads to a successful American Revolution which sets up an eventual constitutional formulation which landed up with a nation of self-centered, shallow materialistic people.  As an example of this judgement, Guelzo offers:

 

Thomas Jefferson was preeminently the American man of reason, but his political allegiance to an anti-mercantile agrarianism and the need he felt to justify slaveholding on the grounds of racial inferiority of slaves constantly pulled him in romantic directions, reason and enlightenment not withstanding.[2]

 

But to the extent that Americans saw themselves as being too over dependent on reason, to the exclusion of more emotional or intuitive thinking, Romanticism provided another approach to social, artistic, and political thinking. 

          As this blog approaches the effects of the Enlightenment on America, it will, starting in the next posting, review the history – ever so cursorily – of the development of Romanticism in Europe.  And then it will report the major events that ushered in its influence in how this movement developed in America.  Here in the US, the term transcendentalism was adopted to designate this movement, and the name Ralph Waldo Emerson will become prominent in that story.

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[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part II – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 21.

[2] Ibid., 24.

WHIGS’ LASTING LEGACY

 

This blog of late has been sharing the views of the American Whig Party – that were mostly anti-slavery and probusiness in the early 1800s – as reported by Michael F. Holt.[1]  His admiration for that party is not difficult to discern, and he owns up to it toward the end of his book.  That party’s failure to survive, Holt suggests, might be considered as a reason for the tragedy of the Civil War.

            What does he share that suggests this thought-provoking claim?  To begin, with its demise, the nation lacked two major parties.  Given the funneling function a party provides (described two postings ago), legitimate interests were left without an appropriate voice in the national political arena.  This, of course, adds to the disruptive environment that the general state of polarization was imposing on the nation as it marched toward civil war. 

Also, as compared to the Democrats, the Whigs were uncompromisingly pro-union.  As the “anti-slavery” party, anti-slavery Northerners were, without the Whigs, more or less forced to vote Republican.  That was a newer party, which was recruiting many Whigs, including Abraham Lincoln.  But that switch had a price.

The Republicans, while an anti-slavery group, was still, in 1860 more of a regional entity – that of the North – and its candidate winning the presidency added to the insult Southerners felt.  Here, they perceived that the North was going to dictate to them and that intensified their demand to secede.  And secede they did.

There is a question Holt leads his readers to ask:  if the Whig Party had survived, could its rhetoric have convinced the South to stay in the Union?  The Whigs, according to Holt, played that role in 1850.  This blogger questions that.  Slavery was an issue then, but its vibrancy grew during the ’50s.

 How?  As the provisions of the Compromise of 1850 took hold, both sides saw that the addition of each newer state – a number that grew as a result of the Mexican American War – promised a pitched battle between pro and anti-slavery forces.  For example, by 1860 the nation experienced the consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  It led to a great deal of disruption – e.g., the horrors associated with “bleeding Kansas” in which pro and anti-slavery forces engaged in guerrilla warfare against each other.

In addition, while the Whigs did serve to encourage union, its very lack of a more responsible rationale or ideology seemed not to meet the challenge of the time.  That is, as this blog has reported, the party prided itself in neither lacking any national ideology nor engaging in effective disciplinary practices to keep its members in line.  While American political parties are not known for well-thought-out political treatises, given the profound challenge slavery represented, that party, to be a force, needed to be clear so as to convince or even sway a national electorate.

On the other hand, the act of seceding was no small matter and perhaps the addition of any meaningful voice counseling against it might have made a difference.  Either way, one can surmise that if the Whigs did not prevent the Civil War, one can safely judge that the Civil War or its approach provided the last nail in that party’s coffin.  There was no Whig or near Whig candidate in the election of 1864.  Some limit the years of the Whig Party from 1833 to 1856.  This blogger can agree with those dates and would only point out there was no coroner to establish the death of a political party. 

In summary, Allen C. Guelzo offers the following general observations of the party:

 

·      Initially, the party was spurred by a profound hatred of Andrew Jackson.  They saw Jackson as a militarist threat to American republican governance.

·      It sought to represent the interest of commercial enterprises – that of small businesspeople, burgeoning industrialists, cash-crop agricultural interests, and merchants.

·      In representing those interests, they fought for internal improvements and a higher tariff rate.

·      To assist business but also to allow the national government to fund healthy national government projects, they fought for the rechartering of a national bank.

·      And they tended to ally themselves with moral voices one found in collegiate campuses.  Here, the party seemed to adopt a rhetoric echoing that of evangelical Protestants – values such as personal responsibility, thrift, and sobriety could be easily found in the language they employed.  A federalist message of a “harmony of interests” along with a general sense of optimism can also be easily detected in their campaigning.  This contrasted with the language of victimization that the Democrats used.[2]

 

Guelzo writes,

 

As Daniel Walker Howe has put it, the Whigs promoted a society which would be diverse but culturally uniform.  Democrats preferred economic uniformity and equality, especially of an agricultural or agrarian sort, but tolerated the spread of cultural, ethnic and moral diversity.[3]

 

And with that, this blog is ready to move on – although it reserves the right to revisit the Whigs at some future time.  This blogger, fortunately or unfortunately, finds that party particularly relatable to the ongoing themes this blog addresses.

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[1] Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1999).

[2] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part II – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).

[3] Ibid., 16.

A SOFT FOUNDATION

 

After the last posting’s short lesson on politics – from an old civics teacher – this posting continues Michael F. Holt’s account of the final days of the Whig Party.[1]  Despite a record of bouncing back – albeit within a short history – as the 1850s fell upon the American landscape, the Whig Party was experiencing the consequences of a succession of election loses.  That was a meaningful level of defections which included its national chairman, Truman Smith. 

And then there was the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska proposal that finally led to the party’s final days, but not due to what one might suspect.  Many of the party’s woes had to do with its internal division between its northern and southern contingents.  And given that the Kansas-Nebraska issue had to do with the expansion of slavery, one would suspect it was the issue further dividing the remaining Whigs.  But it turns out that both segments of the party, at least initially, were antagonistic toward the proposed legislation. 

Its most consequential aspect was that it did away with the Missouri Compromise formula as to where slavery would be allowed to expand by introducing its feature of popular sovereignty.  That is, in the two new states that the bill was to create, the people of each were to determine whether slavery would be allowed to exist.

This was judged to be so egregious by anti-slavery advocates that it encouraged Southern Whigs to join with Northern Whigs in their opposition to the bill.  Perhaps due to this newfound unity, the remaining Whigs felt they could survive as a party until the 1856 election.  But interim elections, both at the state and national levels, would prove to be too detrimental.  That’s because newer parties garnered enough popularity or disenchanted Democratic voters took up various Whig positions to prevent the Whigs from gaining ground. 

These other parties included the Know-Nothings, the Free-Soilers, and the newly formed Republicans.  The end was finally obvious when in the next Whig national convention, in Baltimore, only 144 delegates showed up and half of them were from near-by New York.  Given the events that led to this state of affairs, one might question various aspects of the American political scene in those antebellum years.

For example, can a political party be too federalist for its own good?  In answering that question, one needs to be careful about how related terms are used.  Is it too federal to rely on the politics of localities when a party, in order to survive, needs to succeed at a national level when the polity in question is of ample size such as that of the United States? 

Holt writes,

 

State legislatures and state nominating conventions met while congressional Whigs struggled with [the outstanding national concerns and] … what happened in those legislatures and conventions decisively influenced Whigs' behavior in Congress, just as developments in Washington shaped how rival Whig factions opposed each other within the states.[2]

 

While one can see such goings-on as the fate of all political parties – as part of the funneling the last posting highlighted – with the Whigs one took this behavior to a dysfunctional level.  And in that, one learns that federal politics must sufficiently respect the various arenas – the various levels of governance – in which it chooses to participate.  In that, the party should recognize the augmentation of power and consequences – which increases as one advances to the national level – that each arena can entertain.

          What was telling, for example, was the poor showing of the Whigs in getting control of the US Senate.  In those days, state legislatures named the respective senators for each state.  So, localism held inordinate influence over who served in the upper house of the US Congress.  Poor vote getting at the local level, as the Whigs experienced, had its affect up the federalist chain and the Whigs found it more and more difficult to have a voice in that national body. 

The problems that party confronted were many and this concern over Senate representation was only one.  Another already mentioned in this blog was over patronage.  The Abraham Lincoln case is readily cited as an example.  He chose to not seek reelection to his House seat in 1849 in the hopes of securing a bureaucratic job, a Land Office appointment in Zachary Taylor’s administration and someone else was chosen.

Taylor, a Whig, did offer him the governorship of the Oregon Territory, but Lincoln declined it.  However, the case illustrates how the party found it difficult to reward local partisans who needed to be content in order to get out the vote on election day.  Those partisans worked, through a variety of strategies, to get fellow party members to vote.  Analysis of many of the Whig losses reveals that they were caused by a lack of Whig turn out in those elections.

Bottom line, the party did not handle patronage well enough to maintain the support of many around the country. The demise of the party is probably best understood through the review Holt gives his readers of the many varied stories, like that of Lincoln, emanating from more local developments in not only state capitals but town halls and other political centers.  That is, they are told through many stories that Holt tells in the pages of his book. 

But of importance here is to note how federal the system was during those years and how much the institutions of the system worked their way through the challenges that a federal approach offers those who work in its “trenches.”  Of these developments, Allen Guelzo gives his review of Holt’s work a flavor of those stories.  He shares,

 

And Holt clearly revels in the telling of them, in the local cut-and-thrust of politics, of the ill-timed public letter, of the public witticism that gets twisted by skilled opponents around a candidate's neck for life, of desertions, reconciliations, petty vindications, and even pettier vindictiveness.[3]

 

And in this, as polarization rose in the years leading up to the Civil War, one sees a diminishing loyalty to federalist commitments, at least at the national level.  It was still the dominant view of the way Americans saw governance and politics, but the immediate political needs of the time took primary focus among them and the centrifugal forces from local politics to that of Washington took hold.

The issues that incited this sense of animosity among Americans were several, but slavery, what was an incubating problem, began to burst in the consciousness of Americans of the 1850s.  It was demonstrated in the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and it served to give that polarization its shape and form.  With that stage, one is ready to consider the final nail in the coffin of the Whig Party – the banging will be described in the next posting.

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[1] Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1999).

[2] Ibid., 460.

[3] Allen C. Guelzo, “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party:  Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 22, 2 (Summer 2004, 71-86)), accessed July, 23, 2021, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0022.206/--rise-and-fall-of-the-american-whig-party-jacksonian-politics?rgn=main;view=fulltext . 

A FUNNELING GAME

Before this blogger gets into the meat of next challenge that the Whig Party faced in the 1850s, he believes a word on political parties seems to be wise.  In providing that “word,” this blogger is reminded of his high school teaching days.  One image he used to describe politics, especially at the national level, was to point out that a lot of coalescing needs to occur before a government, especially a democratic government, is apt to issue a policy, be it judged effective or not.

          He would first ask his students to think of the top three things they would like government to do – he would say, just go idealistic and disregard the likelihood of the government doing it.  He would give the students some time to think and have them jot down their thoughts.  Perhaps they might want a free lunch program, a more readily available park, or, in a public school system, an improved teacher hiring policy, whatever. 

Then without looking at their fellow students’ lists, how likely would their list match with those of the others’?  It could be, despite some overlap, that most lists would be different.  They then would be asked to think about what led them to include what they listed.  It could be their grade level (usually twelfth graders), their family’s income, their social relationships, their personal skills, or ambitions, etc.  In short, there is a myriad of potential causes. 

If a choice is seen as important or essential, how does one get the government to provide or help develop a desired end?  How students answer that question goes a long way in giving one an insight into how realistic students’ views of governance are.  Since, this blogger does not have a class of students before him, let him just say that one needs to organize with like-minded others to be politically effective.

Hopefully that would be with many other voters or people with political assets (money or influence).  If the student can organize those people, as an interest group, they would present a coordinated approach to governmental policy makers or policy enforcers and present their demands.  If they can make such demands from a position of power, then they are in the running to get what it is they seek.

And their chances would increase if their interest could be matched up with others – beyond their group – so as to bring to bear more political “weight” to their petition.  Or stated another way, a lot of politics is a matter of funneling demands and, in that process, one can detect a pattern.  That is, beyond the efforts of any one such group, there are strategies that have proven to be more effective.

First, it’s identifying those immediate people a person knows or knows of who might share his/her concern.  Here, basic communication skills help as the initial person or group goes about organizing its politicking.  Perhaps some of those like-minded people need a bit of convincing that their shared desire is legitimate, important, and worth pursuing. 

If the demand takes on a wider audience, an interest group can be formed on a more formal basis.  Here, designated ties can be formed or identified and a level of formality either established or, if already in place, utilized.  All this is important since achieving any satisfaction – in the form of government action – usually calls for the use of resources that the government owns or to which it has access. 

Students need to see that resources are scarce and the satisfaction of one set of demands will very likely lead to others either not having their wants or needs being satisfied or being limited.  Hence, this state potentially – even likely – casts others, who don’t share in the sought-after demand, as potential adversaries.  And that introduces the notion of political conflict. 

That is a competitive arena materializes or an existing one grows by the introduction of any new group joining an existing conflict. And if the demand is important enough, allies might be called on to join the fight.  But as one seeks help from “friendly” others, this might bring together entities not seeking the same or exactly the same ends.

Why would others help?  Because these others might be sympathetic to the initial demand, but in fighting their own battles, might expect some exchange of resources with any other groups to which they choose to associate.  Negotiations are probably needed to smooth out those elements that might conflict with potential allies.  That is, this is all part of the funneling process and what happens is that goals or ends might very well be altered, trimmed, or otherwise changed in order to solicit the help of others.

This whole process can take many pages to describe, but the purpose here is to give the reader a lens by which to evaluate the Whig Party.  Let it suffice to point out that at any stage of funneling, political assets or resources can assist the efforts of any participant.  And generally, the most prominent assets are the ability to deliver votes, money, and expertise.  And the more one is apt to secure these assets, the more one is apt to win individual conflicts. 

Therefore, to understand a lot of what makes up politics is to appreciate this general political process that seems to reoccur with varying details among a whole slew of conflicts at any given time.  And that process is:  first like-minded individuals identify their commonality and begin to organize, second, if sufficiently strong, they formalize their commonality into an organized interest group, third, they identify related interest groups to form alliances, and they, in turn, fourth, associate themselves into a political party. 

At each stage, compromising is called for to make the alliance a mutually felt advantage.  Of course, if an actor on his/her/its own account has sufficient political assets – say, a multinational corporation – it can skip these various stages, except one.  That one is being aligned with a political party.  In that case, the entity doesn’t need to compromise as long as each of those entities understands that if it remains in its own political lane, it need not elicit the help of others.

What the above should indicate is that the ability of one to predict how others will behave – especially in carrying through any negotiated agreements – is central to establish the level of assured expectations upon which each level of commitment demands.  If one cannot count on how perspective or existing allies will behave, one is ill suited to establish or continue any such relationship.

The last posting indicated that the Whig case illustrated not so much what a political party should do, but what it should not do.  And the above stages can give one insight about what that would be.  This blogger apologizes to readers who see the above as elementary, but it is offered to allow all readers to see what this blog will claim was central to the Whig’s shortened history.  Through its failure to survive, it provided all other political parties a bit of a lesson.

If one sees a functioning political party as an organization that has under its leadership a grand alliance of interest groups, then one has a basis by which to evaluate the Whigs – not on moral grounds, not on necessarily federalist grounds, but on very practical grounds.  As a matter of fact, this might sound to readers of this blog as applying a counter message from what the blog usually promotes.  That is, it likely sounds as if this blogger has adopted a natural rights view.  All he can say is that even a federalist has to account for basic political realities.

And with that short political lesson, this blog is ready to reenter the mid-1800s.  As it has been pointed out, the nation was facing a slew of issues.  Becoming more strident was the issue of slavery.  But in addition, there was a significant level of anti-immigration sentiment (spurring the political movement of the Know-Nothings) and the demands of the business class and how it, as a sector of the economy, felt a level of antagonism toward the land-based interests of the agricultural sector.

And one more factor should be pointed out.  Unlike the political landscape of today, with a legal structure governing the operation of political parties, there were few limitations or disincentives for third parties springing up in the years leading up to the Civil War.  Today, due to party registrations, voter registration restrictions, and public funding (i.e., the use of tax dollars that usually go to major party presidential candidates), third party efforts are much harder to get started.[1]  This was not the case in the 1850s.

The sum-total was that the demand on the Whigs to get it right, even though it was the “other” major party, was even more strident than would have been the case if the structural elements supporting a major party were in place.  Of course, they further confounded their situation by lacking any sort of party discipline and by suffering a string of losses at the polls.  The next posting will look at how this party’s reaction to the next big challenge, that being the Kansas-Nebraska controversy of 1854.

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[1] In terms of matching funds, see “Public Funding of Presidential Elections,” Federal Election Commission/United States of America (n.d.), accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/understanding-ways-support-federal-candidates/presidential-elections/public-funding-presidential-elections/ .  

SPLIT IDENTITY

 

Relatively recent historical work concerning the Whig Party of early to mid-1800s runs the gamut from fairly inoffensive judgements to more critical treatments.  On the neutral side, Harry Watson attributes to the Whigs the first efforts to promote the interests of the business class and by doing so that party, by its own accounts, furthered the interests of all Americans, i.e., he finds with the Whigs the first utterances of a “trickle-down” rationale. 

At the other end, the critical theorist, John Ashworth, remembers the Whigs as antebellum promoters of elitists.  These elitists made their riches from merchant or capital-based assets.  In this account, the Whigs opposed a party, the Democrats, who promoted the interests of a racist slave-owning class, and its supporters.  Added to the fact that the Whig Party had a short history, the general opinion among historians have not been very positive.[1]

The last posting of this blog shares a more positive account offered by Daniel Walker Howe.  This posting looks at another historian who provides a positive narrative and that is Michael F. Holt.[2]  To begin with, according to Guelzo, Holt saw the rise of the Whigs as a parallel development to the rise of the Jacksonians.  And one politician that stands out as the central figure in that political reaction was Henry Clay, senator from Kentucky. 

The name, Whigs, represented symbolically this sense of opposition to what was being characterized, among their ranks, as a Jackson presidency approaching dictatorial powers.  Foremost, they claimed to be republican antimilitarists and given the popularity of General Jackson, of New Orleans fame, this was a tough message to sell.  But to assist them, the Panic of 1837 provided the political wedge that encouraged citizens to give the Whigs a level of acceptance and consideration.

They, the leadership of the party, took on a probusiness stance and that proved to be their lasting image and helped define their base.  With a pro-development policy bias – one that sided with those businesspeople – they attracted the non-agricultural based interests of the nation.  That included commercial proprietors and those engaged in an initial manufacturing sector. 

The Panic helped Americans to define Democratic policies as failing and through that perspective, the newer party secured the support of more market-oriented Americans.  Bottom line, the Whigs garnered a definite base of support of sufficient size to pose a legitimate challenge to Democratic rule.

That resulted in victory in the 1840 presidential election when William Henry Harrison – another former general – won the White House.  Plus, that election saw significant victories for the Whig Party beyond the presidency.  “Whigs captured three-fifths of the new voters and triumphed, not only across the nation, but across all class, religious, and ethnic divisions.”[3] 

But one should not assume that they became the dominant American political party – that would still be the Democratic Party.  Undermining Whigs’ popularity – along with causing the Democrats, to a lesser degree, similar concerns – were their internal divisions especially between their northern and southern contingencies.  And that division, generally, would lead in the coming years to losses, and some were big losses.

These results especially occurred when their internal discord bubbled up in the press and gave the electorate the sense that the Whigs were armatures.  Other factors affecting them negatively, at least at the polls, were an overreliance on press-friendly, “charming” candidates or their willingness to compromise with the Democrats on major issues as will be described below. 

These factors were so strong in relation to how Whigs were seen, that one is justified to wonder what kept them as a party for over two decades.  At some level, they did seem to agree on a core set of beliefs, but that vision lacked sufficient definition.  In turn, that made defining the party difficult for the electorate and to sustain a rock firm sense of who were these Whigs not only among the voters, but among the politicians that made up their numbers.

Instead, they boasted that they were an assemblage of independent agents and attempted to cast Democrats as a party of lockstep followers.  It was common to find Whigs attacking each other, constantly undermining their image as a party standing for a set of policies or ideals.  They were seen not as a party of statesmen – what they hoped their image to be – but as being undisciplined or unruly bunch of hacks. 

But central to this blog’s concern, the Whigs – and the Democrats, to a lesser degree – exhibited a responsible course of action by compromising for the sake of what they saw was the common good.  In retrospect, one can question what they saw as being the common good, but that is seeing things from a twenty-first century perspective.

And in terms of their disunity, no development demonstrated that problem like the time when their members of Congress passed legislation to recharter a national bank.   They did this despite the antagonism of the sitting president, a member of their party.  This demonstrated their ability to split with President Tyler who proceeded to veto two efforts to pass such legislation.  The net effect was the dismay Whig voters who stayed home in great numbers during the next election and the party experienced heavy losses in the 1842 midterms. 

This level of dishearten-ness plagued the party until 1848, through the tenure of the Democratic president, James Polk.  In that year, the nation next elected a Whig to the presidency, Zachary Taylor.  If the Whigs were wise about anything, it was their ability to bide their time and allow the Democrats to harm themselves in the eyes of American voters and, what also helped in ’48, was a post Mexican American War recession.  The Whigs successfully blamed the Democrats for the economic downturn, and that proved sound, at least until that election. 

Starting with the Congressional elections in 1846 and more so in 1848, the Whigs reestablished themselves and in ’46, the Whigs won control of the US House while the Democrats retained control of the Senate.  In ’48, with Taylor’s noncommittal campaign (instead it relied on his military fame), the Whigs, were able to win the presidency, kept their control of the House, but were unable to gain control of the Senate.  

But success, to the extent they achieved it, was short lived.  Following a nonpartisan approach to patronage – what this blog would claim was a more federalist approach – they handed out government jobs to deserving candidates (instead of to party supporters), but that discouraged a strong Whig turnout (as in 1842) in the next Congressional election.  This led to widespread Whig losses.

The Taylor administration could easily remind people of the previous Whig presidencies of Harrison and Tyler.  To add to the sense of a replay, as with Harrison, Taylor suffered an untimely death in 1850.  This elevated Millard Fillmore to the presidency.  Fillmore, in turn, sided with the Democrats in Congress (as Tyler did regarding the national bank) and supported the Compromise of 1850.

This blog has already reviewed the provisions of that compromise, but in terms of the party, Northern Whigs felt betrayed, and they developed the conclusion that even the Whigs in the southern states had sold out to the slave owning class of that region.  According to Holt, Fillmore was motivated to further the interests of the nation by advancing what he saw would help national unity.  But this rationale was not accepted by those Northern Whigs.

Along with increasing levels of internal division, the party sought another leader as the 1852 election approached.  They dumped Fillmore for Winfield Scott, another war hero.  But Scott’s charm failed and the Democrat, Franklin Pierce, won the presidency and took office in 1853.  Pierce, according to Holt, was not up to the challenge of the office as the nation was drifting into serious levels of polarization.  As this blog has reported, the Whigs were now in free fall and their party was disorganizing itself mostly due to the polarization befalling their ranks and the nation.

Many Whigs, especially in the North, found their way into joining a newly formed Republican Party.  For those who remained and hoping for a replaying of developments that led to the elections of Harrison and Taylor, the 1850s would prove to be a different political landscape then what one found in those earlier years.  And central to that newer landscape was the early signs that the incubating issue of slavery was getting ready to erupt.

The first sign of this newer political stage was the advancement of a group promoting xenophobic messaging, the Know-Nothings.  Initially, an anti-immigration group, it was populated by a more parochial, anti-Catholic collection of people with a heightened sense of Americanism that they defined as an Anglo-based population. 

Among those so lured were a good number of Whigs.  Under the banner of the American Party, the Know-Nothings nominated the former Whig president, Fillmore, in 1856 even though he disowned their anti-immigration rhetoric.  How could that happen?  One need only remember that the Whigs prided themselves for tolerating diversity of beliefs. 

In that, the Whigs offered a good case of what an organization, in this case a political organization, needs to address so as to survive – not in terms of what they should do, but in terms of what they should not do.  And this blog will, in the next posting, look at the events leading up to 1856 and the final formal demise of the Whig Party.

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[1] Allen C. Guelzo, “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 22, 2 (2001), accessed August 19, 2021, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0022.206/--rise-and-fall-of-the-american-whig-party-jacksonian-politics?rgn=main;view=fulltext .

[2] For example, Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1999).

[3] Guelzo, “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party:  Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 79.