Invention of the American political parties
- New York Macmillan 1967
- 416 p.
Roy F. Nichols, one of the most distinguished of American historians-his Disruption of the American Democracy won a Pulitzer award is the first authority to analyze the extremely complicated evolution of the American political party machine. Oddly enough, the two-party system was unplanned. As Mr. Nichols points out, it was "conceived and developed without any statutory or con stitutional authorization."
A significant phase of the process began when a rotund figure named Benjamin Frankli Halle of Massachusetts had a de sire to convert the Democratic party of his state into a winning combination and to con-. found Daniel Webster. "He was," Mr. Nichols writes, "an only son with thirteen sisters and thus took naturally to political organization." Actually, of course, centuries of evolution had preceded Mr. Hallett. Some of our patterns of political behavior are as old as the tribes of Britain, and include cus toms predating the Religious Reformation of the sixteenth century. Our particular Ameri can pattern may be said to have started on the ships bearing the first migrants from England to our shores. Only after a half century of experiment with various forms of factions operating on state and federal levels did parties as we know them today emerge on the eve of the Civil War.that eventually shaped our political machine is told here for the first time. It is of great importance as general American history as well as American political history. Mr. Nichols is a writer of grace and wit as well as profound scholarship, and his book will be relished as much by the general reader as by the specialist in American history.
ROY F. NICHOLS began the study of political behavior as a graduate student at Columbia University. This is the fourth in a cycle of books dealing with the history of the Demo cratic party, the first three being The Demo cratic Machine, 1850-1854, Franklin Pierce, Young Hickory of the Granite Hills, and The Disruption of American Democracy. His most recent previous book, published in 1963, is Blueprints for Leviathan: American Style. His research and his many years of teaching brought him to the conclusion elab orated in this book that the basic patterns of political behavior were "both ancient and not indigenous to the United States." He is now Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania, and during 1966 was president of the American Historical Association.