Elections from Van Buren to Cleveland
HESS, STEPHEN H.
Elections from Van Buren to Cleveland Presidential Ballots, 1836-1892. By W. Dean Burnham. Johns Hopkins. 956 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Stephen H. Hess Writer, Presidential nominating process...
...It therefore seems amazing that the study of political behavior in the United States has waited until now to bring together in a workable order its primary tool-the election returns...
...Burnham has collected-is enormous...
...Unfortunately, however, it lacks the illuminating maps of its model...
...The rest of his hidden treasures are divided into tables on distribution of party control by counties, distribution of counties held by each party (sections and states), and distribution of the vote by section, state and county...
...W. Dean Burnham to thank for completing the massive task of running down the county-by-county results for the Presidential elections from 1836 to 1892...
...Even then, the investigator failed to uncover the returns from eight of the ten Nevada counties for the election of 1864...
...This section is equally as good as the one by Robinson...
...The remainder of the volume consists of Presidential election sketches following a voting America from a predominantly rural culture, where the frontier was still a line from Michigan down through Louisiana, to an industrial nation without frontier...
...Since it is unlikely that complete official returns will ever be uncovered for the years before 1836, the Burnham work, alongside the earlier Robinson study, can now be said to have carried this research to its conclusion...
...Burnham has followed the general form set by Professor E. E. Robinson in The Presidential Vote, 1896-1932...
...The value of such a work to the political "content analysts"-those who must deal with the "why" of the statistics Mr...
...Reviewed by Stephen H. Hess Writer, Presidential nominating process project, Educational Television and Radio Center Every academic discipline depends on a compilation of basic data...
...It now remains for the political scientists to tell us, as Dr...
...Burnham has given us the tool...
...Burnham to 44 state capitals and through "misplaced cigar boxes and various statehouse subterranean storerooms long since abandoned...
...Malcolm Moos of Johns Hopkins puts it in the preface, "whether there are really barometer counties such as Coos, Vandenburgh or Calaveras, whether the Germans really elected Lincoln because of an inherent distrust of tyranny, and whether Reverend Burchard's bellicose bellow ("Rum, Romanism and Rebellion") or rainfall made the slightest difference in Blaine's defeat of 1884...
...We are told in the introduction and preface that his search for official returns took Mr...
...Pundits, prognosticators and scholars have Mr...
...Although it would be more valuable, of course, to have the elections broken down into smaller units than the county, this division is still a useful one in revealing past patterns of ethnic, social, economic and regional differences...
Vol. 39 • February 1956 • No. 6
