Three Declining Plateaus of population growth provide an empirical framework for American social history (Nugent, 1981). After a pre-history, self-sustaining demographic regimes appeared in the form of a frontier-rural mode of life common to most Americans by about 1720 and remained unchallenged until the mid-nineteenth century. From the 1860s to the 1920s, the frontier-rural mode continued to exhibit considerable strength but in rapidly contracting areas of the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Columbia Plateau. During that period of fifty years, however, the second plateau was increasingly supplanted by the metropolitan (or urban-industrial) mode of life. After 1920, by demographic measures, the frontier-rural mode of life had been replaced virtually everywhere by the metropolitan one familiar to Americans ever since.

In June of 1948, during the peak period of strike activity in the United States in the past fifty years, Philip Murray, President of the CIO, the most successful militant labor organization of the twentieth century, published an article giving his views on labor organization, democracy, and “our American system.” He argued that “if we pull together . . . we shall surmount the present crisis.” He felt confident about his prediction because, he said, “We have no classes in this country; that’s why the Marxist theory of class struggle has gained so few adherents. We’re all workers here. And in the final analysis the interests of farmers, factory hands, business and professional people, and white-collar toilers prove to be the same” (Murray, 1948; quoted in Lipsitz, 1981: 143).

In a 1902 North American Review article, United States Commissioner General of Immigration Terence Powderly called for stricter health controls on arriving aliens. Powderly cautioned that unless “proper precautions” were taken to detect two contagious diseases—trachoma, an eye infection, and favus, a dermatological disease of the scalp—the future American might be “hairless and sightless.” He called upon Americans to refuse to allow their country to become “the hospital of the nations of the earth” (Powderly, 1902).

American political parties achieved their peak importance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Numerous voting studies have demonstrated the level and significance of party identification, and evaluations of legislative behavior have shown that party loyalty had a primary influence on roll call voting (Bogue, 1980; Kleppner, 1981; Thompson and Silbey, 1984). Surprisingly, other aspects of parties have received very little attention. Only a few scholars have examined the extent of party structure and activities or their connections with political culture and the broader political system (Jensen, 1969, 1971, and 1983; McGerr, 1986; Keller, 1977; Mayhew, 1986: 203–256, 308–332). Even fewer have evaluated systematically the overall patterns of committee membership and the characteristics of party leaders to determine which social and political qualities were important (Stave, 1970; Watts, 1979).

During the Reagan years, the New Right has been the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention. Some have studied the secular New Right movement (Crawford, 1980); others have focused on the contributors to New Right organizations (Guth and Green, 1984a, 1984b, and 1986). Some scholars have studied the organizations of the New Right (Latus, 1983); others have examined the processes by which these New Right organizations were formed (Guth, 1983; Liebman, 1983). A good deal of work has focused on the New Christian Right. Some studies have explored the sources of support for the Christian Right in the general population (Buell and Sigelman, 1985; Wilcox, 1987a; Sigelman et al., 1987), and others have examined the activists in Christian Right organizations (Wilcox, 1987b).