New Books in American Politics

Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics since 1920 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) is a wonderful and sweeping exploration of the way that women and their access to the ballot have contributed to politics and life in the United States for the past century. Editors Stacie Taranto, professor of history at Ramapo College in New Jersey, and Leandra Zarnow, professor of history at the University of Houston, have compiled a broad and deep group of contributing authors, all of whom have written chapters that examine women, politics, power, activism, and citizenship in the United States. This is an intersectional history of American feminism and an analysis of women in politics and as citizens. The book is split into three sections, that follow the historical contours of social movements and political engagement, starting with the period before the 19th Amendment but spanning the period of suffrage through post-World War II America. The next section of the book pays close attention to the wave of advocacy and activism from the 1960s through the 1980s. The final section of the book focuses on more contemporary history and politics, examining the period that straddles the new century, from the 1990s up to the Trump era. By centering biography in many of these chapters, the authors and editors explore political history through those who actively participated in politics.

Taranto and Zarnow have assembled a book that looks at where women have been, in terms of achieving voting power, to where women have moved, as citizens and in elected and appointed office, in terms of acquiring and using political power. The full sweep of the book weaves together women’s history and political history, moving away from thinking about politics through the lens of constitutionally regulated election cycles, especially presidential election cycles, and instead focuses on engagement with politics, activism, and policy change. The editors set up the framework for the broader analysis and research in the book, examining the ways that citizenship and power are gendered male in the United States, and how this constructed perspective and expectation has impacted women, especially as they were granted more of the rights of citizenship. These constraints also affected different women in different ways, benefiting white women, while excluding black women, Asian women, and others until later in the century. At the same time, the role and impact of republican motherhood is also examined within the pages of Suffrage at 100. In this anniversary year, Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics since 1920 is a great companion to Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder’s A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections since Suffrage (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which concentrates specifically on the role that women have played as voters in American elections over the past century. Suffrage at 100 takes the same sweep of time, with a similar focus on women, but in this case, the thrust is biographical, in examining particular women who engaged in politics over the course of the last century, and historical, centering women as political actors within the scope of social and political history.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Donald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan rhetoric about the country being unsafe or the military being underfunded plays well, it obscures an important reality about the relative size of U.S. military funding. The United State spends more than the next ten leading countries combined. The Democratic Party, while often criticized as soft on defense, generally supports high military spending. This seems to contradict many statements made by politicians, and it also confounds expectations about where one might expect the Democrats’ priorities to lay. How did it get to be this way, with Democrats and Republicans supporting high military spending?

Michael Brenes’ For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy explains this contradictory history. Brenes argues that after the beginning of the Cold War, defense spending became an important part of the federal social safety net, winning over adherents from both parties who sought guaranteed employment. This blurred lines between Republicans and Democrats, instead creating a “Cold War Coalition” that was propped up by anticommunists and liberals. While occasionally challenged by progressives and the left or by libertarian-minded conservatives, this coalition has persisted to the present and explains why bipartisan support for the military-industrial complex remains so strong.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

In the past few years isolationism, which had long been derided in the national discourse, has been making a comeback as a political force. In Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (Oxford University Press, 2020), Charles A. Kupchan traces the history of the concept in American politics and considers its future influence on American foreign policy. As he demonstrates, isolationism was long dominant in shaping American foreign policy, as for decades political leaders heeded George Washington’s advice to steer clear of entangling alliances. By the end of the 19th century, however, America’s growing engagement with the world sparked policy shifts as various forms of internationalism were introduced. Though isolationism remained a powerful influence on foreign policy, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 publicly discredited isolationism for millions of Americans, paving the way for the adoption of Franklin Roosevelt’s approach of “liberal internationalism.” While this remained the consensus approach through the Cold War, Kupchan shows how the post-Cold War overreach of American foreign policy offered new life to isolationist concepts, giving it a renewed influence shaping America’s relationship with the world.

When did Black Americans move from stalwart party of Lincoln Republicans to dedicated New Deal Democrats? How did a group of self-organized Black economists, lawyers, sociologists, and journalists call out inequality in the New Deal and push President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to consider the relief of Black Americans? Dr. Jill Watt’s The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt (Grove Press, 2020) traces the origins of a group of self-organized Black men led by a remarkable Black woman to answer these questions and help readers reflect on parties, policy, data, and diversity in American politics.

The book is divided into three periods – tracing two versions of the Black Cabinet.

Early in the century, a group of African-American office holders who had come to Washington, DC as appointees of President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt) began meeting regularly for “talkfests” at an upscale black-owned DC restaurant. When they started meeting in 1908, most Black Americans lived in the South: disenfranchised and denied equal access to the criminal justice system. Despite the power and violence of White supremacy, a group of highly educated men had secured positions in the federal government. They included Ralph W. Tyler (auditor of the Department of the Navy), James A. Cobb (special assistant to Washington, DC’s district attorney); Robert H. Terrell, Washington’s first Black judge), John C. Dancy (DC’s recorder of deeds), Calvin Chase (newspaper editor), and Kelly Miller (Howard University professor. As men who had come of age during Reconstruction, they were Republicans who associated Democrats with blocking access to the polls and vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Although Republicans abandoned Black voters and Reconstruction, President Rutherford B. Hayes nevertheless appointed Frederick Douglas and other Black men federal positions and President Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House (the first Black American ever to be a dinner guest). Washington subsequently provided Roosevelt with recommendations for appointments to federal posts.

But these appointments were often without sufficient power and national conflicts demonstrated that Republican presidents would not protect Black citizens (e.g., in Atlanta, Teddy Roosevelt refused to send in troops to protect the black population from white mobs and Brownsville, Texas Roosevelt dishonorably discharged Black veterans after false, racially-motivated charges). Although widely covered by the Black press throughout the country, the Black Cabinet was unable to thwart the segregation of federal employees (particularly once Woodrow Wilson became president) and, by 1915, the Black Cabinet folded – even as individuals fought the virulent racism in the GOP and Democratic parties.

By 1932, many of the original members of the Black Cabinet were dead but a new group of leaders – Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Vann, Robert Weaver, Alfred Edgar Smith, Bill Hastie – ambitiously moved to ask Black voters to turn the picture of Lincoln to the wall. In the election of 1932, a small minority of voters moved from the GOP to the Democratic party to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936, a significant number of Black voters (many who consider themselves Republicans) vote for Roosevelt.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

The United States experienced race-baiting, polarization, executive overreach, and inequality before the presidency of Donald Trump. Does that political history demonstrate resilience – or vulnerability? Suzanne Mettler (John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government department, Cornell University) and Robert C. Lieberman (Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University) use insights gleaned from comparative politics (particularly the study of liberal democratic and authoritarian regimes) and American politics to interrogate five periods in American political history to argue that there are four central threats to American liberal democracy: political polarization, racism and nativism (issues of who belongs), economic inequality, and excessive executive power. The United States has faced these political threats (even combinations of them) in the past. But those periods of political conflict have had serious, long-term consequences for the robustness of American political institutions and practices. At the beginning of the 21st century, Mettler and Lieberman observe all four: a unique and serious state of affairs.

Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy (St. Martin's Press, 2020) highlights five political moments that span three centuries. “Polarization Wreaks Havoc in the 1790s” unpacks the emergence of factions and proto-parties emerging over the Alien and Sedition Acts – and highlights how the rhetoric of John Adams (targeting of immigrants, the press, and demonizing his political opponents) parallels that of Donald Trump. “Democratic Disintegration in the 1850s” charts the breakup of the Union and Civil War. “Backsliding in the 1890s” interrogates debates over voting rights, identity, and citizenship – and the remarkable violence that enforced white supremacy as states stripped Black Americans of the voting rights that helped protect their civil and political rights. The national government failed to effectively uphold those rights, leaving most Black Americans without effective voting power for over 60 years. In “Executive Aggrandizement in the 1930s,” Mettler and Lieberman demonstrate how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s forceful use of executive power to thwart fascism in Europe and respond to broad public needs in the United States opened the door for the use of power for other purposes. In “The Weaponized Presidency in the 1970s,” they show how Richard Nixon deployed that power to punish political enemies but also how each branch played their constitutional roles to force a president from power.

Designed for students and all readers interested in American history and politics – trying to make sense of the 2016 election and contemporary American politics, the book provides clear and concise definitions of any political science terms or theories.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

There are so many Abraham Lincolns. There is the ruthless Lincoln willing to suspend habeas corpus and who, as president, presided over record levels of bloodshed on American soil. There is the political opportunist Lincoln who declined to take the bold stand against the Know Nothings that some of his contemporaries did, Lincoln preferring to let the movement implode without much action on Lincoln’s part. Lincoln also famously hung back from outright abolitionism for decades, believing that the time was not yet ripe for freeing the slaves. There is the Lincoln who exercised presidential power to an extent that made Andrew Jackson look meek by comparison. There is the Progressives’ Lincoln who saw in him a pioneering backer-in-chief of big government programs such as the creation of land grant colleges and big infrastructure spending such as on a Pacific railroad. There is the Lincoln who supposedly lorded it over Congress like some mafia kingpin demanding fealty and no questions asked. There is Lincoln as the leader of the so-called Second American Revolution who, by destroying the quasi-feudal southern social system and passing landmark economic legislation, drastically reshaped America.

Not so fast, says Jon D. Schaff in his book Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Liberal Democracy (SIU Press, 2019). Rather than smashing societal structures willy-nilly and wielding presidential power like a bludgeon, Schaff’s Lincoln was far more deferential to Congress than many of us realized. Schaff fascinatingly shows how Lincoln’s Whig allegiances and distrust of autocratic figures like Jackson and Lincoln’s own background as a legislator at the state and national levels shaped his presidency and governing preferences. And, far from being a proto-New Dealer, Schaff’s Lincoln was very much preoccupied with sound money, making him seem more like a McKinley or a Hamilton than an FDR.

Anyone interested in American government, the presidency, Congress and the mainly domestic aspects of Lincoln’s presidency should read this book. There is even an intriguing comparison of Lincoln’s ideas with those of the Catholic-associated economic theory of distributism.

And those who long for an account of a harmony-seeking governing style will find this a congenial read. Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

Few have ever enjoyed the degree of foreign-policy influence and versatility that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the grand-son of Woodrow Wilson’s senatorial antagonist, did. In the postwar era, perhaps only George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. Cabot Lodge, however, had the distinction of wielding that influence under presidents of both parties. For three decades, he was at the center of American foreign policy, serving as advisor to five presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford, and as ambassador to the United Nations, Vietnam, West Germany, and presidential envoy to the Vatican.

Cabot Lodge’s political influence was at times immense. He was the first person, in 1943, to see Eisenhower as a potential presidential material; he entered Eisenhower in the 1952 New Hampshire primary without the candidate’s knowledge, crafted his political positions, and managed his campaign. As UN ambassador in the 1950s, Cabot Lodge was effectively at times a second secretary of state. In the 1960s, he was called twice, by John F. Kennedy and by Lyndon Johnson, to serve in the toughest position in the State Department’s portfolio, as ambassador to South Vietnam. In the 1970s, he paved the way for permanent American ties with the Holy See. Over his career, beginning with his arrival in the U.S. Senate at age thirty-four in 1937, when there were just seventeen Republican senators, he did more than anyone else to transform the Republican Party from a regional, isolationist party into the nation’s dominant force in foreign policy, a position it held from Eisenhower’s time until the twenty-first century.

In this book, The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2020) historian Luke A. Nichter professor of history at Texas A & M University–Central Texas, coeditor (with Douglas Brinkley) of the New York Times bestselling book The Nixon Tapes: 1971–1972, gives us a outstanding narrative of Cabot Lodge’s extraordinary and consequential life. Cabot Lodge was among the last of the well-heeled Eastern Establishment Republicans who put duty over partisanship and saw themselves as the hereditary captains of the American state. Unlike many who reach his position, Cabot Lodge took his secrets to the grave—including some that, revealed here for the first time, will force historians to rethink their understanding of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

The story of America is the struggle between our liberal ideal and illiberal resistance. Donald Trump catalyzed a reactionary revolution by tapping into the dark, shadowy side of American democracy that embraces exclusion and inequality. Throughout American history these alarming impulses have come to the forefront of our culture—during the Civil War, the era of the Robber Barons, and the Civil Rights Movement—but have now come to fruition in the presidency of Donald Trump. 

Arguing that the contemporary Republican Party is waging a counterrevolution against the core beliefs of the nation, journalist and scholar Kevin C. O’Leary cracks open American history to reveal the essence of America’s liberal heritage by critiquing the reactionary illiberal currents that periodically threaten American democracy. American politics is no longer an ongoing debate between liberals and conservatives because the new Republican Party embraces the feudal values of the Old World. While there are millions of conservatives in the population, the elected leadership of the GOP is deeply reactionary. 

Today’s marriage of white-identity Southerners and their northern allies to moneyed libertarians is no run-of-the-mill political partnership. Instead, it is extraordinarily dangerous. Clearly, conservatives have lost their party. And without conservatives debating liberals in an intellectual, respectful manner to address the nation’s problems, Madisonian democracy breaks down. 

A stimulating reinterpretation of the American experience, Madison’s Sorrow: Today's War on the Founders and America's Liberal Ideal (Pegasus Books) exposes the intellectual and moral deficiencies of the illiberal right while offering a robust defense of the liberal tradition.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

Historians often portray the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as a conservative force in debates over free enterprise, battles against unions and government regulation, and the rise of capitalism in the United States. In The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism (Princeton UP, 2020), Jennifer Delton (Professor of History at Skidmore College) provides a comprehensive and nuanced political history. Delton focuses on the conservative policy goals of the organization but also its surprisingly progressive tactics and internal conflicts such as welcoming women and workers with disabilities, supporting the UN, embracing aspects of cosmopolitanism, and supporting the ERA, Civil Rights Act, and aspects of affirmative action. Delton deftly identifies the wider economic, ideological, and institutional concerns that drove NAM actors. As the book interrogates how the National Association of Manufacturing did – and did not – work, NAM emerges as a capitalist modernizer. She examines 125 years of massive change in American economic policy with the NAM at its center in order to interrogate manufacturing’s role in the development of capitalism at home and abroad – with implications for how we understand neoliberalism – especially liberal internationalist tendencies. Delton argues that liberal internationalism (associated often with Woodrow Wilson) can be seen as a crucial step toward the international institutions favored by post World War II European neoliberals.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one traces the ascent and reorganization of industrial manufacturing from the 1890s to 1940. Part two highlights manufacturing’s dominance in US society and the world (1941-1980) as the US lowered tariffs and pursued free trade. The share of GDP peaked in 1953 when manufacturing represented 25.8% of domestic production. Part three treats the decline in manufacturing (beginning in 1960) and emphasizes deindustrialization, globalization, and the disintegration of the large multidivisional corporations in the 1990s.

The book investigates how the globalizing impulse of neoliberalism played out historically in 20th century US politics – more specifically, how liberal internationalist ideas that were promoted by Democrats and antithetical to traditional political conservativism came to be espoused by the Republican party. Delton writes that “this is especially relevant now, as the current head of the Republican party [President Donald Trump, Republican] seems to be undoing the work of neoliberalism and liberal internationalists alike.” NAM’s history helps explain the bipartisan support for economic internationalism, freer trade, and what would later be called neoliberalism, even before the Cold War and Reagan, and even as voters (and Congress) remain extremely divided about these issues. The story of the NAM is full of contradictions, but The Industrialists deftly tracks them all, contextualizing the impacts on the national and global economy.

In the podcast, Dr. Delton describes how the NAM archive was shaped by professional staff members – particularly one woman – whose views departed from NAM leaders. The referenced article, “Who Tells Your Story: Contested History at the NAM” is here.

Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

Francis Buckley, who is Foundation Professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, has written a fast-moving and provocative new book about the opportunities and possibilities of a second American secession. The publication of this book couldn't be more timely, as the conclusion of an election cycle highlights both the diversity and the tribalisation of American voters. What holds the nation together? To what extent is the Constitution the source of the nation's historic and current difficulties? If small is beautiful, and smaller nations tend to be happier, why shouldn't a state like California secede and put its savings from national defence into a scheme for national health? Tune in to hear how Professor Buckley explores these and other ideas in his new book, American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Break-Up (Encounter Books, 2020)

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of Survival and Resistance in evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford UP, 2021).