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Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 14:19:51 -0400
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Subject: Jensen on Renda, _Running on the Record_

Lex Renda. _Running on the Record: Civil War-Era Politics in New
Hampshire_. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. x + 258
pp. Appendix, notes, selected bibliography, and index.  $32.50(cloth),
ISBN: 0-8139-1722-0.

Reviewed for H-CivWar by Richard Jensen <[log in to unmask]>,
University of Illinois-Chicago

Lex Renda has written an outstanding history of New Hampshire politics in
the Civil War era.  _Running on the Record_ is a fitting companion to
Donald B. Cole, _Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800-1851_ (1970)
and James Wright, _The Progressive Yankees: Republican Reformers in New
Hampshire, 1906-1916_ (1987).  Each is a meticulous analysis from a
behavioral perspective, sensitive to both the voters and the politicians.
The strengths of Renda's book include a thorough discussion of every
election campaign, insightful analysis of candidates and platforms, good
summaries of newspaper editorials and extant private letters, and an
excellent review of legislative accomplishments and failures.  Using
ecological regression analysis on town data, Renda analyzes voting
behavior in the state in exhaustive fashion. He attends to social and
economic factors, showing the rural base of the Democratic party.

Thanks to Isaac Hill and the Jacksonians, New Hampshire was long a
Democratic stronghold. However, after the Compromise of 1850 that party,
and its main opponents, the Whigs and Free Soilers, ran out of ideas and
programs. The threat of slavery expansion represented by the Kansas
Nebraska Act of 1854 angered many if not most citizens. The new "American"
(or "Know Nothing") party emerged out of nowhere, based on a network of
secret local chapters. New issues were afoot-- many citizens were worried
about the dangers of poverty and crime in the cities (especially
Manchester), and wanted to restrict Irish immigration.  Others were
alarmed that a clannish element controlled by priests (and perhaps by the
Pope himself) threatened republican values.  A riot in the summer of 1854
underscored the troubles. The Democratic party was increasingly dependent
on these Irish votes, and at the same time was preaching democracy and
local sovereignty, thereby rejecting the principle of free soil and
facilitating the spread of slavery in the western territories.  The
American party artfully combined nativism and anti-slavery, and offered
nominations to both Whig and Free Soil politicians.  To this mix Renda
adds a severe draught for farmers and a business downturn, both of which
soured otherwise optimistic voters. The American party crusaded against
dread evils--there was a plot afoot to impose aristocratic and Catholic
values, so secrecy was necessary. Three-fourths of the Whigs, and 90
percent of the Free Soilers, despairing of victory under their own
tattered banners, joined the nativist crusade.  The Democrats,
unaccustomed to being on the defensive, did not defend Catholicism,
slavery, or liquor, but instead dismissed the dangers as exaggerated.
Opposing "Popery, Mormonism, Codfish Aristocracy, Socialism, White, Red
and Black Slavery, intemperance, monopoly, cliques and demagogues,"  the
American party rolled to a landslide victory as turnout billowed to 83
percent (51-55).

The new party passed its entire legislative program despite fierce
Democratic objections (55-57). They lengthened the waiting period for
citizenship, reformed the court system, expanded the number and power of
banks, strengthened corporations, defeated a 10-hour law, reformed the tax
system, enabled the creation of high schools, increased spending on
schools, prohibited the sale of liquor, and denounced the expansion of
slavery. In a nutshell the Know Nothings fought against traditionalism and
promoted the more rapid modernization of New Hampshire. In the 1855 fall
elections the Know Nothings again carried the state over both the
Democrats (who focused on repeal of prohibition) and the small new
Republican party. In 1856 the American party merged with the Republicans,
carrying by a small margin the once solidly Democratic state.

Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Baptists now became core Republican
voters, leaving the Democrats with the Catholics, the Free Will Baptists,
and a slim majority of Methodists. Realignment had come to New Hampshire.
In occupational terms, the more traditional farmers were still Democrats,
but the more modern urban sector voted Republican, including both the mill
workers and, especially, the business and professional men who comprised
the urban middle class (196-201). Thus Renda estimates that in 1864
the farmers voted 55-38 Democratic (with the remainder not voting),
factory workers were 40-23 Republican, and the urban middle class 72-13
Republican. The patterns resemble those of the Midwest at about the same
time.

The book is a distillation of Renda's Ph.D. thesis, directed in 1991 by
Michael Holt at the University of Virginia, which ran over 1200 pages.
Holt clearly gave very good advice on how to shorten a manuscript (even
though his own recent book on the Whig party ran 1000 pages.) Doubtless
anyone who wants even more detail on New Hampshire can go look it up in
the dissertation. What disappoints me is not lack of detail but one sin of
omission, and one of commission.

One omission is an explanatory model for how different ethnic and economic
groups voted.  Renda has plenty of material to support an ethnoreligious
model of voting, as well as a modernization model.  He does not take the
opportunity to evaluate or test either of those models against his data
sets. So we do learn that Methodists voted Republican and Baptists
Democratic, but there is no examination of sermons or religious
newspapers, nor an analysis of how liturgical and pietistic value systems,
and local ministers, interacted with specific political issues, such as
prohibition. Renda's narrative shows that in New Hampshire, as elsewhere,
farmers were mostly Democrats and they resisted banks, tariffs, factories,
canals, railroads, and the market revolution. The conflict raged
throughout the period, especially in 1840-43 when Democratic radicals
succeeded in blocking business expansion, and in imposing unlimited
liability on corporations (p. 21). But Renda fails to draw any conclusion
about traditionalists fighting modernization, or how well the
modernization model fits his state. He does provide an enlightening
analysis of how in 1860 Republican efforts to destroy infected cattle
split that party and united the Democrats against the "pleura- pneumonia
oligarchy" (89). (That reminds me of how traditionalistic farmers in the
early 20th century resisted the public health officials trying to destroy
tubercular milk cows.)

The sin of commission is the unsupported assumption that voters always
looked backward not forward: "If voters issued mandates to politicians,
such directives were more akin to votes of confidence based on past
achievements in the same or similar policy spheres than to stamps of
ideological approval for prospective policy blueprints"  (p.180). But
Renda offers no evidence for a backward- looking, rather than
forward-looking, electorate.  Most likely it was neither, but rather a
predominantly party- loyal electorate that was committed long-term to one
party, and which was well trained in how to explain away successes claimed
by the other side or apparent failures on their own side.  Every
legislative session was different, with some successes for one part, some
for the other, and often frustration.  Yet the granite state moved
steadily ahead, just as if the vast majority of the voters were lifetime
loyalists.  Try some "retrospective voting"  yourself: if the deficit goes
away in 2000, will you vote for Bush or Gore? When the USSR lost the Cold
War did you vote for Bush or Dukakis?  If the Union is restored and
slavery abolished, would you vote for the Republicans, who won the war, or
Democrats, who called it a "failure"? You might think the Republicans
would have a terrific appeal for retrospective voters in 1868 but in the
gubernatorial election the Democrats won a higher share of the potential
electorate in 1868 than ever before or after in the era.  Indeed, only a
miniscule 1-3 percent of the electorate switched parties in the mid and
late 1860s was well below the average for the period (194). People surely
noticed the Civil War, but nothing that happened during the 1860s inspired
much shifting between parties.

The retrospective voting model was developed to fit a late twentieth
century regime of low partisan loyalty, low levels of interest, and high
levels of abstention and switching. (Incidentally, a model that stresses
prospective voting based on candidate promises does just about as well
today.) Party loyalty in New Hampshire was far higher than today. Split
tickets were rare. Turnout rose steadily from 75 percent in the 1840s to
87 percent in the 1870s.  Renda estimates the year-to-year switching was
always under twelve percent and usually under five percent, except for one
year (1854-55) when it soared to 36 percent (194). In a word, Renda uses a
model that might fit many voters today, but would fit well under a quarter
during the Civil War era.

Today voters talk economics ("Are you better off than you were four years
ago?").  Renda unfortunately does not provide economic indicators, such as
wage rates, tax levels, or the prices of farm products, that voters might
have used to gauge their economic situation. He downplays economic issues
in favor of any number of other issues, such as the slave power,
nationalism, secession, religion, Reconstruction, civil rights, business,
banking, railroads, schools, taxes, liquor, women's rights, corruption,
and cattle disease.  But for none of the issues does Renda provide an
explicit empirical test of what "retrospective voting" would look like and
not look like.  Instead he assumes his main conclusion, regardless of the
evidence in his tables.

Renda's sins are venial, and can largely be ignored by the aficionado of a
political tale well analyzed.

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