Review: The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton Legacy Library) by Lee Benson

The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton Legacy Library) by Lee Benson by Lee Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

WHAT a political party claims to stand for and what it actually represents are closely related but significantly different. Aside from the principles and policies it adopts and advocates, a party radiates an aura that influences the way the electorate appraises and responds to its principles and policies. A useful distinction can be made, therefore, between a party's program and its aura, or character. The program is concrete and refers to known actions or proposals; the character is intangible and connotes general qualities. Though the program of a party is more easily and reliably determined than is its character, historians can- not concentrate on the former and ignore the latter; the combined impact of program and character form the image which is projected to the electorate.

But political parties do not confine themselves to projecting their own images; they also try to influence the electorate by projecting an image of their opponents. Thus parties create both an official self-image and an official image of opponents. Many different means are used to project official images, but, at least for the period

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Aside from its intrinsic interest, the political conflict between Masons and Antimasons illustrates how "reference group theory" might help us to understand the process of party crystallization in the late 1820's and early 1830's; this theory might also advance our understanding of American history in general. The concept of the negative reference group, as defined by Robert Merton, "is a general concept designed to earmark that pattern of hostile relations between groups or collectivities in which the actions, attitudes and values of one are dependent upon the actions, attitudes and values of the other to which it stands in opposition."
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Movements that the American Republican Party typifies are usually described and dismissed as temporary outbreaks of "nativist" and "anti-Catholic" bigotry. Those epithets are accurate. Unfortunately, they tend to obscure the significance of the phenomena they stigmatize. Stripped of their peculiar characteristics, nativist and anti-Catholic movements illuminate the cultural conflicts and tensions inherent in a heterogeneous country such as the United States, In New York, for example, essentially the same kind of phenomena might have been observed from the time the English and Dutch first came into contact and collision in the seventeenth century." Between 1834 and 1844, however, the conflicts between "natives" of Protestant background and Catholic immigrants (and certain other "foreigners") developed much greater intensity than those that simultaneously existed among Yankees, Dutch, Palatine Germans, and Scots in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. Though many factors influenced the result, their greater intensity owed much to the belief that the cultures of the new immigrants threatened the success of the American experiment in republican government.

Ethnocentrism, bigotry, ignorance, misunderstanding, political calculation, desire for "clean government," economic competition, status considerations-all substantially contributed to the movement for political action oriented around nativist, anti-Catholic appeals, "Are we to derive no advantage on account of the 'accident' of being the children and heirs of revolutionary fathers? And is it of no account to be an 'American born'?" ...

According to the American Republicans' reading of history, the country had begun to develop a truly national spirit and sense of purpose prior to the rapid increase in the number of immigrants, That spirit and purpose had arisen out of the Revolution and rep- resented a healthy reaction against slavish copying of Old World institutions, customs, and habits. But "nationality in feeling" and a distinctive American culture were threatened by the hundreds of thousands of foreigners particularly the Catholic Irish and Germans now pouring in annually.

Instead of the "melting pot" image, which depicts immigrant cultures as contributing valuable ingredients to the national stock, the American Republicans projected the nightmare image of a witches brew-a "great seething cauldron of society" which produced an increasingly debased people. Thus the American Republican viewed with alarm the influx of 230,000 foreigners in 1843: "At least two hundred thousand of these are Catholics-reared in the belief, daily and hourly inculcated that their priest is infallible, and can not only pardon all their offenses theft, drunkenness, fornication, robbery and murder in this world, but can pray them out of purgatory hereafter and that the Pope, next to the Virgin Mary, is the most powerful and omnipotent being in the Universe that to read the Bible is perdition, and to confess to the priest the only moral obligation that cannot be violated with impunity. Is it wonderful that with such impurities as those cast annually in such immense quantities into the great seething cauldron of society in America, public morals have become degenerated, pauperism and crime unendurably abundant, and religion and morality little better than idle words? But worse than all-that political virtue is rapidly becoming extinct beneath the hands of these vile, ignorant and superstitious hordes...
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