Too Subtle by Half

...In 1904, the editors of the New York Times grumbled: "Campaigning is only a political name for advertising...

...Maybe those developments, familiar to any student of American history, are too obvious for him, and he prefers a subtler explanation...

...If any national politician of the period felt there were votes to be mined through spectacle, the torchlight parades and bonfires would certainly have glowed on...

...Since the appearance of that study in 1963, a "virtual academic industry" has arisen to stress the persistence of ethnicity, and frequently to champion it...

...Sollors is prone to follow his own idiosyncratic fancy, and I doubt many readers will care to keep up with him as he chuffs along, examining the theme of the melancholic Indian in American theater and pursuing other such wayward topics...

...Is the word "democracy," covering everything from putting out the bunting to organizing a corporate pac, being asked to do too much work...

...The whistle-stop was developed...

...Beyond Ethnicity should have been better than it is...

...The affective, passionate side of politics was eliminated for the average voter...

...and if any modern leader believed marching bands and demonstrations were a way to drum up support, we would be seeing a lot more tubas in the streets...

...By emphasizing education in campaigns, they transformed politics into a rationalistic, top-down, elitist process, and so paved the way for the contemporary advertising style...

...Attention turned, too, from the 19th century's popular rallies to the individual candidates...

...With elections so clearly immersed in the life of the community in postbellum United States, almost a folk ritual, how meaningful, for example, is a modern foreign policy that attempts to impose a democratic procedure on nations where the political soil is barren and the roots not very strong...

...The candidates themselves hardly seemed to matter and, indeed, it was considered in bad taste to wage an active race...

...The parties distributed detailed literature and seriously attempted to address the issues...

...Sollors, the white chairman of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department, is, perhaps understandably, opposed to the particularist tendencies fostered by this kind of scholarship: "Taken to its radical conclusion, such a position really assumes that there is no shared history and no human empathy, that you have your history and I have mine...

...They "fused thought and passion in a single style accessible to all—a rich unity of reason and passion that would be alien to Americans in the 20th century...

...Little did they know...

...In political fashions, as in other kinds, quasi-conspiracy theories tell us very little...

...Quite properly, he focuses on the period surrounding the turn of the century, for this appears to be the moment when a critical shift occurred...

...McGerr fails to show how their ideas and desires got translated into a wide political consensus, why the display style suddenly began to look old-fashioned to so many people...

...Subtlety is also an aim of Werner Sollors in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford, 294 pp., $24.95), a book that might more appropriately have been entitled Beyond 'Beyond the Melting Pot.' Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan's classic provides Sollors with his starting point...

...In a series of chapters that are really separate essays, he traces this theme through discussions of ethnicity, Puritanism, 19th-century popular culture, and immigrant literature, drawing on everything from Crevecoeur to Mel Brooks...

...There have been two exceptions to this rather consistent record: In the 1920s, the turnout dropped below 50 per cent, and in our own era, starting in 1972, participation rates fell to the low to mid-50s...

...That is too bad...

...By 1892, in fact, partisan display was coming to be considered distinctly old-fashioned...

...Sollors' interdisciplinary method is commendably ambitious and his fundamental stand seems sound...

...No other political group" writes McGerr, "did so much to discredit the rationale of 19th-century partisanship...

...McGerr's answer is no less interesting than his question...

...During the 1892 campaign, as the display style was yielding to the educational style, observers for the first time noted "apathy," "astonishing lethargy," "a great lack of enthusiasm or even of interest.'' And once the advertising style gained ascendancy, such complaints were commonplace...

...No longer participants in a community ritual as much cultural as it was political, they became passive spectators whose sole function was to mark a ballot or pull a lever...

...Politics was an all-consuming enterprise, an assertion of identity as well as a vehicle of entertainment, the rock concerts of that time...

...The style of our politics, he argues, has changed profoundly since the Civil War...

...Through the year 1900, when 73.2 per cent of all eligible voters went to the polls, participation in Presidential elections always topped 70 per cent and occasionally reached above 80 per cent...

...It had revised the traditional notion of assimilation by demonstrating that the Jewish, Irish, Italian, Hispanic, and Black ingredients which had been thrown together into the vaunted American pot were not so rapidly or readily melting...

...The effect of this transformation, says McGerr, was to remove people from the actual electoral process...

...McGerr provides a rewarding, even nostalgic, glimpse into the way politics used to be in this country, and a reader can spin out some intriguing implications from his study...

...In the 1880election between James A. Garfield and WinfieldS...

...But sometimes the obvious answer is the right one...

...As many as 5,000 of the 16,000 eligible voters were personally involved in the campaign...

...Sollors scores some solid hits with his observations about our contractual society's high regard for romantic love and how the concept of "generation" helps resolve consent/descent anxieties...

...These men, hostile to parties and partisanship, sought to replace popular display with something more genteel and circumscribed...

...Since then, percentages have regularly hovered in the middle to upper 50s and low 60s...

...In the 1920s, academics found themselves analyzing the phenomenon of the "vanishing voter," and a new kind of public-interest movement appeared in American life—the Oet-Out-the-Vote campaign...

...To understand the—probably irreversible—course of American political styles, we must look to broader social forces than the yearnings of a few frustrated Mugwumps...

...Not content to point out the changes in styles, McGerr is eager to explain it by spotlighting the activities of some middle-class reformers, newspapermen and opinion leaders before the turn of the century—the Liberal Republicans and Mugwumps who supported good-government advocates like Samuel J. Tilden and Gro ver Cleveland...

...By 1912, you could enter a movie theater and watch the silent, flickering image of Woodrow Wilson while a recording played his speeches...

...These include the decline of the small town with its more intimate forms of human interaction, the growing influence of the Federal government, the maturing of immigrant groups whose traditions differed from America's Anglo-Saxon heritage, the rise of mass media and instant communications, the spread of alternative leisure activities...

...Are the two basic American styles of electioneering, popular display and advertising, actually different kinds of democracy, and perhaps different systems altogether...

...Although all are mentioned at one point or another in The Decline of Popular Politics, McGerr concedes their importance only grudgingly...

...Writers & Writing TOO SUBTLE BY HALF BY BARRY GEWEN The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928(Oxford, 307 pp., $24.95) Michael E. McGerr tackles an interesting question: Why has voter turnout decreased so dramatically compared with the post-Civil War years...

...He sees the key to American culture in a perennial conflict between contractual, assimilationist, self-willed impulses and native, ancestral, inherited qualities—between consent and descent...

...Beginning with Mark Hanna's carefully crafted campaign for William McKinley in 1896 and increasingly thereafter, a style emerged that depended on advertising, including all of the paraphernalia that has become so familiar to us today—political managers, campaign committees, public relations specialists, opinion polls, press releases, media events, photo opportunities, paid advertisements...

...Politicians took to "pressing the flesh," shaking thousands of anonymous hands and kissing countless drooling babies...

...Both are periods when large numbers of new voters—women in the first case, 18-21 year olds in the second-were brought into the electoral process...

...Too sophisticated to revert to some updated version of the melting pot, Sollors adopts a rather dialectical approach...

...In this sense, elections represented both more and less than a straightforward, formal political choice...

...At the same time, it must be said that the answer he offers to the problem he originally posed is unconvincing...

...Yet the various analyses do not build to anything...

...McGerr's suggestive book inspires these and other questions...

...Hancock, for instance, scarcely a contest likely to arouse great passions, the city of New Haven, with a population of 62,000, produced 42 political clubs and 68 marching companies...

...The major difficulty with this analysis is that it gives too much credit to a small clique of individuals...

...Spectacle at first gave way to an educational style...

...The book has a tedious, mushy quality...

...The advent of radio and, later, television merely accelerated the trend toward personalized contests, until Presidential races were reduced almost entirely to the stage-managed face-to-face TV confrontations we now sentimentally label "debates...

...From the 1860s to the mid-1880s, the dominant mode of political expression was spectacular partisan display—parades, marching bands, fireworks, bonfires, street celebrations, what McGerr calls "popular politics...

...As one who has had a hand in putting together some of the larger campaign rallies of our time, I can assure McGerr that the display style is not easily revived...