A Concise History of American Politics: U S Political Science up to the 21St Century

By David McCaffrey

This book is intended to be an efficient way to look at the primary events and aspects of the foundation and evolution of American politics. Because political events and laws affect every one of us on each day of our lives, it seems helpful to look at the structures of our political systems. A Concise History of American Politics is, as the title suggests, a simple recounting of how we proceeded to become what we are as a political entity. Our systems of learning in both the areas of politics and of history tend to be focused on specific events or specific theories. Maybe a brief, concentrated presentation on the broad picture of our past can be helpful in keeping track how the exigencies of our constitutional republic have evolved. Hopefully, it is even-handed and lucid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796032963

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Copyright © 2019 by David Mccaffrey.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019906121

ISBN:                Hardcover              978-1-7960-3298-7

                          Softcover                978-1-7960-3297-0

                          eBook                     978-1-7960-3296-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 08/08/2019

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgement

Prologue

Chapter 1     Colonization

Chapter 2     Revolutionary War

Chapter 3     Formation of a Constitutional Republic

Chapter 4     U. S. Presidents 1 - 6

Chapter 5     Early 18th Century and The Rise of The Democratic Party

Chapter 6     U. S. Presidents 7 - 15

Chapter 7     Abe Lincoln and Republicans Ascend in 1860

Chapter 8     U. S. Presidents 16 - 25

Chapter 9     U. S. Presidents 26 - 31

Chapter 10   U. S. Presidents 32 -37

Chapter 11   1960s: Political Maelstroms But The Body Politic Perseveres

Chapter 12   U. S. Presidents 38 - 42

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

O ur father was Maurice McCaffrey. He provided the incentive for writing this book. During his lifetime, Dad augmented his advertising business with an array of political advertising. His understanding of voters and issues led to a string of campaign successes from school boards, to mayors, to governors to members of Congress. He was witness to many years of good, bipartisan statesmanship and felt the foundations of our American constitutional republic were worth remembering. He became frustrated in his later years as he saw the increasing polarization and self-aggrandizement of politicians. He felt that the Founding Fathers’ desire for civil service seemed to transmute into long term perquisites for elected officials. This is reflected in diminishing approval ratings for Congresspeople. This evolution suggested to him that we need to bear in mind some simple recountings of the history of our American political systems.

As part of Dad’s background, he spent three years in an orphanage in Minneapolis. He then put himself through the University of Minnesota during the Great Depression and became the nation’s youngest Advertising Manager of a major department store chain. He married a perfect woman and put four kids through private colleges. He closed the loop by becoming the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the orphanage. He wrote two books that were prescient in anticipating first the rise in importance of advertising in elections (in 1962) and then the slide of statesmanship (in 1982). He could see that the reduction in civics classes and the dearth of political science writings on the history of American politics were making it tough for the electorate and the elected officials to maintain perspective. He started work on an epistle that would glorify the inspiration and promise of American altruism.

It is the intent of his son not to present a book which flatters the perfections of our American political system but provides a somewhat even-handed view of its history. The Founders fully understood that no system of government is perfect and that human frailties would worsen situations where power becomes too great. Controlling bad acts and bad actors seemed to be best served by spreading power among a multitude of States and among multiple branches of government. As we enter the 21st Century, it is interesting to watch the juxtaposition of plumetting Congressional approval ratings yet a 92% reelection of incumbents. Understanding the simple aspects of our political history is a worthwhile endeavor.

PROLOGUE

Premise

P olitics represents the primary mechanism through which humans have structured their lives since the beginning of time. Family and clan have evolved into a dizzying array of political structures for societies to function. Of course, virtually all political structures have had difficulties establishing and maintaining their rules and structures; human foibles and strengths will always cause both complications and improvements. Over time there have been many important writings on politics.* The surprising constancy in these works is that they all understand how we humans have sundry needs including the motivations to survive, to be accepted, to be taken care of, to achieve, and to increase our power and control. Studies of politics have generally aimed at theories with less reliance on histories of politics.

The purpose of this treatise is to somewhat efficiently trace the history of the political essentials of the United States.

While many poli sci academicians have written that the ideal political structure is a benevolent dictatorship, they tend to concur that we humans cannot maintain benevolence as our power increases. That has left the most enduring structures to be those that rely on human achievement while controlling human greed.

Because politics has created literally infinite numbers of thoughts and events, it is easy to spend a lifetime studying micro-issues of political exigencies. This treatise is intended to take a brief look at the macro-events in American political history to allow for understanding the basic underpinnings and trends of the evolving American political landscape.

Political Steps

I n America, the colonists were generally distant from politics. They were avowed subjects of the British king, and that was it.

Then in 1774, John Adams orchestrated an assemblage of these colonists in disobedience to the oppressive dividends of an autocratic and greedy King Charles II and to Britain’s Intolerable Acts of 1774. This evolved into the First Continental Congress, composed of 55 men who were willing to risk being hung. The joke was that Adams was concerned about this hurdle, but he got over it.

Politics emerged in the Second Continental Congress of 1775 to 1789. The nascent political science was purely philosophic and theoretical. Federalist Alexander Hamilton sought central governance, and he was quickly challenged by Thomas Jefferson, who defined politics as Republican-Democrat; he was ahead of his time in various ways. The theories were promulgated as city versus country but were really central venues versus states’ rights. Some scholars considered this divide to be the genesis of the Civil War.

The basic tenet of the origin of the United States of America was to establish not a pure democracy but a constitutional republic. Or more exactly, we have a representative constitutional republic. It is a misnomer to call the American government a true democracy, but it does have a democratic basis. Technically, a pure (or direct) democracy has the voters voting on the laws that may be created by their representatives. The basis of one-person-one-vote is central to the American system; so it is frequently alluded to as a democracy. As Winston Churchill said in a speech in the British House of Commons in 1947, Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

It always has been and always will be enticing to seek broad changes and improvements to America’s political system, particularly in a country which in 2019 is composed of 329 million people with diverse backgrounds and beliefs. The Founding Fathers sought to create a political system that would be based upon spreading power in order to prevent overly swift changes to the basic system. This system was intended to take into account that humans have inalienable rights and strengths and have innate charity and altruism if the proper structure is present but also have foibles, have intrinsic needs to maintain and increase personal security, acceptance and power (as Abraham Maslow would describe more thoroughly in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation). The American political system would be interwoven with an economic system of market capitalism with personal incentives and upward mobility, but the political system has been intended to endure significant changes to that economic system.

The sundry developments up through the creation of the United States were dramatic and have remained the basis of a political system which has helped create the wealthiest, most philanthropic, strongest, most upwardly mobile nation in the history of the world. In political science, we try not to make value judgments as to whether these results are necessarily good—or bad—but to look at data and results. The one certainty is that no political system is perfect just as the people who operate the system are never perfect. The one universal standard that may suggest there is good in this political system is the fact that the United States enters the 21st Century as the most eleemosynary country on the globe, with individuals contributing 1.44% of GDP to charity (nearly twice as high as any other countries according to the Charities Aid Foundation).

Structured parties did not emerge in the United States until 1831 when the Anti Masonic Party held the first organized, national convention. This organizational fusing of parties continued until 1860 when the new Republican Party sponsored Abraham Lincoln to become the sixteenth president of the United States. At that point armed politics took center stage until unity was revived.

Then a century of multi-political parties prevailed and whistle stop hustings joined the personal rallies and parades of person-to-person campaigning. In the 1950s that all changed when media altered politics, and the era of the press and television began. By the 1960s, the media provided for the creation of political consultants at a time when the United States and the rest of the world were going through an array of cultural upheavals.

As the media and political consultants became increasingly pervasive during the last decades of the 20th Century, political campaigns and professional politicians relied less on personal contact with friends, neighbors and caucuses and more on image and party recognition. The lucrative and scene-altering nature of creating and preserving political careers is described in The Rise of Political Consultants by Professor Sabato of the University of Virginia.

Images of politicians have been further intensified by the astonishing growth of the next generation of media—social media. The complicated juxtaposition of exposure within social media is that research can be instantaneous and flaws that may or may not be real are exposed; perceptions often become reality in ways that can both help or harm a politician. This has created the significant change in the public’s view of its elected legislators during the last half of the 20th Century. Public approval of Congresspeople has dropped precipitously and will continue to do so with voters saying "I denounce most people in Congress