3 - Political Parties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2009
Summary
In 1880 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., reflected publicly on the nine presidential elections in which he had been actively involved since his youthful participation in antislavery parties. “I think, of the whole nine, there was but one, that of 1852, which at the time was not emphatically pronounced to be the most important election in its consequences ever held,” he mused. “The issues at stake were always too tremendous to be calmly contemplated; and if the day was lost now it was lost forever.” Of all those elections, he had come to believe, only one, “so far as the grand results were concerned, was really important … that of 1864, when we were in the midst of the Rebellion.” He advised his audience that the time was overripe to put aside disputes “over the possession of a little temporal political authority,” and his explanation provided a classic formulation of nineteenth-century liberalism:
The future of this country is in the hands of our universities, our schools, our specialists, our scientific men, and our writers. Why! take in the grand results, what does Washington do but impede? As an obstacle to intelligent Progress, the National Government is an undisputable success. … We do not care which [party] is in office and which in opposition; we only ask that one shall be in office and one in opposition; we who manage the schools, the press, the shops, the railroads, and exchanges will take care of the rest. … The first object of the thinking citizen, therefore, now should be, not to keep one party or the other in power, … but … to insist on order and submission to law. That secured, all else must follow.
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- Citizen WorkerThe Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century, pp. 115 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994