The Spirit of Party and Faction

This is a transcript from an earlier broadcast of this episode, there may be slight differences in wording.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf. In the years after the American Revolution, the country’s very survival seemed threatened by factional bickering.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Poor Alexander Hamilton confronts a bunch of people in 1795, protesting a treaty. And when he tries to calm them down and say, look, you don’t have a right to protest a treaty. Who cares what you think about a treaty? They throw rocks at his head.

PETER: But a century and a half later, the nation was still here. And challenging the political status quo remained a tricky business, as the breakaway Dixiecrats learned in 1948.

JOSEPH CRESPINO: The organizers of the meeting had to go up and actually round up people to come to sit in the seats to make it look like it was actually full. And so, they would recruit college kids to come sit in the seats for Kentucky.

PETER: Today on BackStory, a post-government shutdown special, the history of political factions.

Major funding for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and an anonymous donor.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hi.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: We’re going to start today in the early 1800s. This was a time when the US government was still a new experiment, one that looked as likely to fail as to succeed. And Americans worried about a new trend in politics, politicians organizing into self-interested blocks.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Which they thought was a horrible thing, because it meant that people basically were lining up to promote themselves and not thinking any more about serving any kind of national good.

PETER: This is Joanne Freeman, a historian at Yale. She says that today, we call these blocks “political parties.” But at the time, politicians called them “factions.” And nobody thought they were a good idea.

One of the people most anxious about this new trend was a Connecticut congressman, named James Hillhouse.

JOANNE FREEMAN: And he believes that the thing that’s possibly going to tear the nation apart is the demon of faction, the demon of party. It needs to be crushed. And he has the great way to crush it.

ED: Hillhouse thought the root of the country’s faction problem was the presidential election. All that campaigning tended to get Americans roused up and divided against each other. So his solution was simple, just take the popular vote out of the election.

JOANNE FREEMAN: And so he comes up with this idea– which does sound a little insane, but which he actually meant seriously– which is that you have a box. And in the box, you have a whole bunch of white balls and one colored ball. And every senator would pull a ball out of the box, and whoever gets that colored ball becomes president of the United States.

PETER: Hillhouse’s plan was never implemented, but it did have some high-profile backers. Years later, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, wrote that, while the whole popular election thing had sounded good while the Constitution was being written, in retrospect he would have preferred the colored balls plan. Just about anything, apparently, would be better than a government structured around factions.

BRIAN: Factions, of course, are still very much with us. And it’s not clear that they’re serving us well. Earlier this month, you’ll recall jostling between the Republican old guard and the GOP’s Tea Party faction resulted in a government shutdown, and very nearly in the nation defaulting on its debt. So today on the show, we’re going to try to shed some light on that battle by examining earlier instances of splintered parties.

We’ll look at how a Republican faction after the Civil War forced through their radical agenda, equal rights for all citizens. And we’ll consider the Democratic Party faction they gave rise to the states’ rights rhetoric in today’s Republican party. Throughout, we’ll be considering this question, when has intra-party conflict stalled the government, and when has it been a force for change?

PETER: First though, we’re going to return to my interview with Joanne Freeman. She explained that, for the founders, faction and party meant pretty much the same thing, a small group of citizens pushing for their own interests. Nobody liked the idea of factional conflict, but they figured it was inevitable.

But when factions started to get big and they started to look more like what we would call national political parties, well, Freeman says the founders began to worry.

JOANNE FREEMAN: The thing that really frightens them is not local, small, clashing factions, but the idea that you might have national factions. That you might have national teams that extend broadly enough, sweepingly enough, geographically enough that it would affect the national government.

And you know, it would’ve been mind-blowing for them at the very beginning to conceive of something being able to be continent-wide. I mean, they would have assumed there were so many interests, so much diversity, so much localism, the idea that you could have two national teams, I just don’t think they would have assumed that would happen or that it would happen so quickly.

PETER: And the whole theory of the Constitution as its drafters imagined it was that it would be an insider job. That I would represent the interests of my state, and we’d work out some workable agreement. There wouldn’t be, in other words, a national political public. There wouldn’t be a national public opinion. National politics was, essentially, the preserve of the big men who were sent to New York, Philadelphia, or Washington.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Absolutely. The Congress would be a lot of guys representing local interests, banging up against each other with their interests, and somehow or other coming to some kind of agreement that– generally speaking– would serve some kind of general good.

PETER: And that notion of a national political elite solving problems and coming up with workable solutions, that’s what was at risk when there was national party formation. Because it would no longer be an insider job, and then all the risks that are associated with a volatile and mobilized public would come to the fore.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Exactly. That’s yet another component that’s scary about a national party, is if it’s national and publicly organized, it’s not just a bunch of elite guys teaming up. It’s a bunch of elite guys who have a means of arousing huge numbers of people to take a side against another side.

PETER: Was this just an abstract concern, or did they actually encounter what they feared?

JOANNE FREEMAN: No, they actually encountered what they feared. I mean, they were scared of massive numbers of people in the streets protesting, parading, marching, gathering in groups and speaking out against the government. Poor Alexander Hamilton confronts a bunch of people in 1795 protesting a treaty. And when he tries to calm them down and say, look. You don’t have a right to protest a treaty. Who cares what you think about a treaty? You’re not the government. They throw rocks at his head.

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: Whoa, Hamilton rocks. That’s great.

JOANNE FREEMAN: Yes, Hamilton rocks, in ways he never would have imagined.

PETER: Joanne, when fearful politicians looked out at the popular mobilization, democratization of politics and said, whoa, where is this going? What were they worried about? What form would this excess of democracy take?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well if you put yourself back in that period when you’ve got a brand new government that people aren’t sure, at the time, is going to be sticking around for a very long– I mean, you do have people, in letters at the time, saying things like, if this government lasts another five years, here’s what I think we should do.

It makes perfect sense that having a roused populace would seem as though it’s something that could rip the nation apart. Because some of those early parties seemed to many people at the time to be sectional. You had the Federalists, who seemed to be more of a New England kind of a party, and the Republicans who seemed to be more a southern-based party.

And so part of what begins to happen really more in the 19th century is that the nation is expanding. And as it expands and it gets new states, the question keeps coming up again and again and again. Well, is this going to be a slave state or free state?

And that brings this issue again and again and again into public view, brings the controversy again into the middle of Congress, into the middle of public affairs. So slave states and free states always have that big, major problem– among other problems– that are dividing them. And it’s something that people at the time were very aware needs to be overcome.

PETER: So parties in this early period are, well, suspect. They have questionable legitimacy because they seem to jeopardize the whole national project. But something happens over the next couple of decades. And that is, Americans get right with parties.

How does that understanding of party transform? What are the sources of the normalization of party conflict? What enables that to happen?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well partly, that’s a matter of practical politics. Partly, you have people like Martin Van Buren– he doesn’t get a lot of credit for much, but we can give him credit for this. He’s an early person who was a New York politico, was really skilled on a local level with organizing and structuring politics and getting people engaged in winning elections.

And he’s an early person. And he writes an extended essay in which he says, you know, I actually think national parties could be a good thing. Because they’re going to allow people to join up together. And not only that, but if we have national parties, they’ll hold together the North and South, because they’ll be joined together on one team.

So he actually makes that realization that actually, maybe a national party could be not only practical, not only something that could help one win if you’ve really corralled that force, but could perhaps be union-saving.

PETER: Yeah, how would it save the Union, though? You’ve suggested that there are deep strains in the union at the outset– sectionalism, and the big differences over slavery. How could parties transcend those differences?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, if you get people who have enough shared interests that they’re willing to find a way to– I don’t want to say fudge– get around, massage the slavery problem. Essentially, if you can get people on the same side working for the same thing who are willing to try and figure out what to do with the slavery issue in order to get these other things that they agree on, then– in that sense– a national party could hold North and South together. It could, in a sense, force people to figure out how to get by on the slavery issue in order to get other things that they want.

PETER: So the whole premise is that you have to have controversial issues that are just controversial enough to justify mobilization, but not so controversial that they’d destroy the Union. That’s a fine line, isn’t it?

JOANNE FREEMAN: I guess it is kind of fine line. Luckily for us, we have lots of issues.

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: What’s remarkable is the Martin Van Buren takes so long to come up with a rationale for national parties. How many years have elapsed? Almost a half-century before Martin Van Buren says, you know, what we’ve been doing is actually OK.

JOANNE FREEMAN: It’s amazing it takes that long. And it’s amazing even then that the response is kind of, huh. What an interesting idea.

PETER: Yeah, yeah. So how about the dangerous people we talked about? How did the politicians get right with the people? I mean, if parties are going to be normalized, then a mobilized people has to seem less threatening. So what makes it possible for politicians– who are, of course better than we are, and they rule the world– to accept democracy?

JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, one of the vital connectors in this whole process– and it’s not that it didn’t exist before, but it’s much more national to a much greater degree later– is the press. Because politicians, beginning more in the 1820s and 1830s than before, really realize that they can very personally use the press to talk to the public, to engage with the public, to corral the public.

PETER: You mean they’re manipulating public opinion?

JOANNE FREEMAN: They are manipulating public opinion. They are. They are happily manipulating public opinion. They are learning how, as a matter of fact. I mean, they’re in the process of learning how. You can see them in Congress in this period, standing up and saying something, and then trying to take it back when they realize that maybe they shouldn’t have said that, because the press is watching.

And actually, on second thought, you guys in the gallery taking notes on this? Don’t take notes on that. So they’re on training wheels, as far as figuring out how to milk this resource. But they’re definitely very deliberately trying to use it for all it’s worth.

PETER: Joanne Freeman is a professor of history at Yale University.

ED: It’s time for a short break. When we get back, we’ll consider whether there are any parallels between today’s Republican insurgents and southern secessionists on the eve of the Civil War.

PETER: You are listening to BackStory, and we’ll be back in a minute.