The Page 99 Test: Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld's "The Hollow Parties"

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld's "The Hollow Parties"

Daniel Schlozman is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History.

Sam Rosenfeld is associate professor of political science at Colgate University. He is the author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (exactly a third of the way through the 297 pages of text) begins a capsule biography of Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, a leading Progressive who in 1904 pushed through the country’s first statewide laws for the direct primary and the direct election of senators. More than other Republican Progressives, and certainly more than Theodore Roosevelt, with whom he was never close and whom he very conspicuously declined to endorse in 1912, La Follette saw party bosses as the servants of capital. To him, the railroad interests, not the politicians they backed, ultimately pulled the strings. Unlike the Socialists in Milwaukee with whom he often tactically cooperated, however, La Follette deemed political reform a worthy project in its own right.

The book traces multiple traditions in party politics—we term them the accommodationist, anti-party, pro-capital, policy-reform, radical, and populist strands—all the way from the Founding to the present. The book stresses how these traditions have combined and recombined over time. La Follette offers a good example. He is broadly a figure from the anti-party tradition. He broke power of the dominant Stalwart faction that had dominated state Republican politics and preached a politics done by the people themselves, imbued with education provided by wise leaders, rather than the party spirit and mass spectacle of nineteenth-century politics. But, like so many figures in our pages, La Follette contained contradictions of his own. He dominated the Republican Party in his state even as he clashed with its leading figures at the national level. For all his anti-machine rhetoric, he had a dedicated organization (including state game wardens with dubious responsibilities) to ease his path. The book’s treatment of La Follette is also emblematic in examining party actors’ thoughts and actions together. This method, in a sense, does a kind of applied intellectual history for figures—George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall district leader is the book’s paradigmatic example—not usually thought of as fit for highbrow close reading. But the book usually emphasizes such figures as examples of patterns or trends, and skirts clear of biography. In that sense, the longer treatment of La Follette, befitting not just his importance at an inflection point for party politics but the idiosyncratic character of figures in the anti-party strand skeptical of politics done together, offers a mild departure in approach for a text that primarily emphasizes party actors’ contributions as parts of collective projects for power.