POLITICAL PARTIES AND PATRONAGE
Hesseltine, William B.
Political Parties And Patronage AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES: Their Natural History, by Wilfred E. Binkley. Alfred A. Knopf. $3.75. THE CABINET POLITICIAN: The Postmasters General, 1829-1909, by...
...Revieived by William B. Hesseltine GEORGE WASHINGTON, penning his farewell address, expressed the pious hope that the American people would refrain from factional strife...
...But, it may well be asked, who among the Founders could have forseen the strange panorama of American parties...
...In earlier days, he had often deplored the prospect that the people would form political parties...
...Mrs...
...Columbia University Press...
...The Founding Fathers were masons, working with the stones and mortar of government, and they had no crystal gazers among them...
...Had one of their members possessed clairvoyant powers, and had he proclaimed that Democrats, Federalists, Whigs, Populists, Democratic-Republicans, Republicans, and Progressives would rise in the nation, the other members would have tapped their foreheads in significant pity and have hurried the prophet off to Philadelphia's leading psychiatric witch doctor...
...Its greatest merit is its straightforward, clear summary of the party history of the American people...
...Bink-ley's work, this study furnishes a minute and thoroughly competent study of the manner in which the bones and sinews of American political parties are knit together...
...Fowler's account of the Postmaster General in American political history...
...None of them seem to have understood that they themselves were members of a political party and were acting as partisans...
...Charles A. Beard, a latter day philosopher gifted with hindsight, passes judgment on American politics in The Republic...
...No such philosophical insight pervades Dr...
...Although the subtitle of his volume would imply some effort at analysis, the author has contented himself with the familiar recitation of the succession and recession of the major parties...
...Fowler traces the activities of the incumbents of the office from Barry and Amos Kendall under Jackson, to Payne, Cortelyou, and Meyer under the first Roosevelt...
...Moreover, "through the agency of political parties new ideas are often made real in the institutions, practices, and economy of the nation...
...The party so operating becomes more than the mere sum of its interested parts...
...Although he has no major over-all viewpoint, some of his minor points are of interest...
...it brings many little streams of factional power into a common current, mingles them, and becomes something else than its components...
...Historians have frequently marvelled at this strange blind spot in the Father of his Country—a blind spot which he shared with the majority of the Founding Fathers...
...A politicial party, he concludes, "may become a creative force by drawing together interests which would otherwise be factional and perhaps vindictive...
...Her story is strictly political, and she gives practically no space either to the development of the postal system or to the movement for civil service reform...
...He has traced their course from election to election, displaying discernment, and embodying the results of the better scholarship, but he has essayed no exposition of a general theory of the American experience with political organizations...
...From Jackson's inauguration, when the office was raised to cabinet rank, until the present, the Postmaster General has been the official dealer in patronage: since the Civil War he has nearly always been either the chairman of the national executive committee of his party, or a leading member...
...He shows, lor example, a Lincoln wavering under pressure, a conservative Theodore Roosevelt, and a Mark Hanna who is a friend of labor...
...Examined alongside Dr...
...More detailed, if no more philosophical, is Mrs...
...Bink-ley's study of American parties...
...The book's most serious defect is its failure to discuss, and sometimes even to mention, third parties...
...She finds little difference among them in their use of the office...
...THE CABINET POLITICIAN: The Postmasters General, 1829-1909, by Dorothy Canfield Fowler...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 51
