The Historiographical Impact of Lee Benson’s “The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy” (Fall 1989)

[I submitted this paper with the full title “The Historiographical Impact of Lee Benson’s “The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy”: At the End of Its Run?” as part of the requirements of a University of Florida grad student seminar titled Literature of United States History (AMH 6148) taught by Kermit Hall in the fall of 1989.]

Any analysis of the historiographical impact of Lee Benson’s The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (1961) faces a formidable task because the book has influenced so many different fields of American historiography. The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy most significantly impacted American political historiography; indeed, in the mid‑1970s, political historians rated The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy as one of the top five most influential books in post‑World War II American political historiography (Bogue,1980,231). Even more important than the immediate debate surrounding his revision of Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson, Benson and his book gave birth to the “sweeping reorientation” called the “new political history” (Bogue,1980,232). But the book’s influence extended far beyond the narrow bounds of political historiography to pervade the entire “new” history movement, a movement to examine history from the bottom up through the use of quantitative methods and behavioral, social science theory. The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy greatly influenced a generation of young scholars, providing them with “the conceptual apparatus and inspiration” to range “across the full sweep of American national history” (Bogue,1981a,162). The true importance of the book lies and will continue to lie not in Benson’s findings on politics in antebellum New York, but as a working example, a “test case,” of a new kind of historiography. The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy must forever wax and wane on the waves of the “new” history and, more than most other histories, have its importance measured, not in terms of historical analysis, but in terms of historiographical impact.

Rather than pursue the hopeless task of tracing all of Benson’s historiographical progeny, this paper will attempt to analyze only one group‑‑arguably the most important‑‑the “ethnocultural school.” This school originated in a simple (yet undoubtedly the most oft quoted) statement found in The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy. Rejecting both the “economic determinist interpretation that Frederick J. Turner and Charles A. Beard impressed upon American political historiography” and the interpretation that American political differences are completely random:

A counterproposition is advanced here: that at least since the 1820’s, when manhood suffrage became widespread, ethnic and religious differences have tended to be relatively [original emphasis] the most important sources of political differences. (Benson,1961,165).

This statement came to be known as the “ethnocultural synthesis” (Bogue et al.,1977,203).

Defenders and detractors of the “ethnocultural synthesis” have equally noted that Benson emphasized “relatively” when referring to the importance of ethnic and religious factors. Benson himself stressed the need for greater theory and multivariate analysis of voting behavior in order to test his counterproposition and would no more have fathomed an ethnoreligious determinism than an economic determinism. He made clear in his subtitle that his study of electoral behavior in New York in 1844 is merely a “test case.” Thus, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy breaks ground for all future voting studies regardless of whether they confirm his findings on the importance of ethnic and religious values in American society.

However, Benson clearly believes that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy is much more than a simple “test case.” He intends his counterproposition to capture the essence, not only of nineteenth century American politics, but of American society past and present. Accepting the Hofstadter‑Hartz consensus thesis, Benson seeks to completely destroy the Marxist class conflict thesis by identifying the few areas of genuine dissent in American history with ethnic and religious differences. To Benson, the Marxist thesis is incompatible with the tremendous heterogeneity and high social mobility present in the United States (1961,165).

Benson’s contribution to American political historiography goes far beyond the “ethnocultural synthesis” and his promotion of mass voting analysis. Benson contributed greatly to the debate on critical election theory with his hypothesis of election cycles (Benson,1961,125‑131). But his effect in this area was secondary to that of V. O. Key, Jr. and Walter Dean Burnham and Benson has since disassociated himself from the concept of voting cycles (McCormick,1982,89n; Benson,184,121‑122). Benson also played a central role in Jacksonian revisionism but again his role was one of supporting player to a long cast including Bray Hammond, Richard Hofstadter, Marvin Meyers, Richard P. McCormick, and Edward Pessen. As Allan Bogue has often pointed out, the “ethnocultural synthesis” was Lee Benson’s baby (Bogue,1978,94n). In no other area can one judge the impact of The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy than in the ups and downs of the ethnocultural school. ¹

Because Samuel P. Hays’s published an article in 1960 which discussed ethnocultural factors, predating the appearance in 1961 of The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, many have assumed that Hays originated the idea. But Allan Bogue makes clear that Benson first propounded the ethnocultural thesis in a more elemental form in a “widely cir­culated paper” titled “An Operational Approach to Historiography” delivered at the 1954 American Historical Association (Bogue et al.,1977,203,218n; Bogue,1978,94n; Bogue,1980,240). Bogue, a graduate student along with Benson under Paul W. Gates at Cornell, reports that “Benson was a committed economic determinist when he began his doctoral work but, particularly in his study of Jack­sonian democracy in New York, he discovered that his formula was inadequate. Ethno‑cultural conditioning seemed to explain more than did economic interest” (Bogue,1968,19). The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy climaxed “a decade of research, thought, and preliminary publication on the substance and methods of American political history,” (Bogue,1980,240) including a “pathbreaking” essay pub­lished in 1957 which many historians have recognized as “the first important contribution to “a ‘new’ American political history'” (Silbey et al, 5‑6; Bogue,1968,19).

But in reality, Benson simply instigated the renaissance of the historical analysis of mass voting behavior, a field of scho­larly study with quite a long tradition in both history and the social sciences (Silbey et al., 7). Historians such as J. Franklin Jameson and Frederick Jackson Turner, who had both trained under Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University in the late nineteenth century, had earlier stressed the empirical analysis of human behavior. In 1885, as if anticipating Benson, Jameson stated: “‘The true history of our nation will not be written until we obtain a correct and exhaustive knowledge of the history of public opinion upon politics, and the history of the political views and actions of the ordinary voter'” (Jensen,1969,231). Turner, special-izing in statistical cartographic techniques of election analysis, had by far the greatest impact on the use of a behavioral approach to politics. Charles Beard built An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution upon the ratification vote analysis of Orin G. Libby, one of Turner’s first graduate students. Jensen traces at least thirty “Turnerian historians of elections” including U. B. Phillips, Arthur C. Cole, Dixon Ryan Fox, Carl Becker, John Hicks, James Malin, Ray Allen Billington, and Merle Curti (233‑234,242n), whose work impacted all American social and political history.

Like the “new political historians,” instead of treating politics from the viewpoint of grand historical trends, or petty backstage maneuvering, the Turnerians stressed voting patterns, campaign strategy, and the responses of the political system to the demands of constituents” (Jensen,1969,234). But, by the 1920s, the Turnerian school had already started dying out as “young historians began tyrning away from difficult statistical research and inclined instead to biography and diplomatic history” and a simpler economic determinism (Jensen,1969,235). ²

In the post World War II era several scholars, led by V.O. Key, rejuvenated interest in election analysis. The publication of several compilations of county returns by Jasper Shannon, Walter Dean Burnham, and Richard Scammon contributed greatly to that rejuvenation (Jensen,1969,239‑240). Samuell Lubell in The Future of American Politics (1952) analyzed presidential voting in the United States since 1892 using local election returns, census data, and local histories “to piece together the distinctive economic, religious, cultural and political characteristics of the major voting elements. His basic premise was that subconscious predispositions, which all of us inherit, really determine our voting habits,” although Lubell placed slightly more stress on economic factors than Benson and later ethnoculturalists (Swierenga 67‑68).

Lee Benson must be credited, however, with rekindling the historians’ interest in mass voting behavior, an interest that had lain dormant since the 1920s. After completing his doctoral dissertation at Cornell on the economic and political background of the Interstate Commerce Act, he pursued post‑doctoral work first at Harvard and then at the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research where he came under the influence of such great social scientists as Walter Isard, Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Ernst Nagel (Bogue,1968,19; Benson,1973,742). Benson’s work at Columbia led directly to his seminal 1954 address, 1957 essay, and ultimately The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy in 1961 which cleared the trail and paved the way for the “new political history.”

“But if Benson was truly part pioneer, part prophet, and part proselytizer, he was also symptomatic of an era when other historians had become dissatisfied with a political history that sudenly seemed excessively subjective and imprecise” (Silbey et al., 13‑14). Richard Hofstadter, Louis B. Hartz, Thomas P. Cochran, Charles G. Sellers, Richard P. McCormick, Roy F. Nicholls, and at the University of Iowa, William O. Aydelotte, Allan G. Bogue, and Samuel P. Hays all contributed much to the growth of this “new” approach to political historiography (Silbey et al., 13‑14).

The initial general scholarly response to the book was tremendous. In 1967 Frank Gatell reported that, “The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, has in the few years since its publication in 1961 gone through several printings, including two paperback editions, and has become one of the most widely discussed volumes on Jacksonianism, even gaining the rare accolade of a session at a historical convention devoted entirely to its appraisal” (236).

Political historians, however, responded much more cautiously. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., although not denying the importance of empirical and quantitative research, bemoaned the whole behavioral, quantitative, scientific approach to history. “As a humanist,” said Schlesinger, “I am bound to reply that almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantification” (33). But most political historians did not go so far, taking a wait‑and‑see attitude and admonishing against easy generalizations and debunking of traditional interpretations based on limited research. Most seemed to anticipate that Benson’s book would have a significant impact on American political historiography (Richard P. McCormick 512; Sellers 745; Gatell 236), but few would have come close to predicting the actual impact.

Indeed, the actual initial historiographical response was rather slow (McCormick,1974,355). When Allan Bogue first surveyed the “new political history” in 1968, no ethnocultural school existed. Indeed, the contribution of mass voter analysis was minor compared to the behavioral studies of legislatures and elites. Eleven years after Benson’s “path‑breaking monograph” and seven years after The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, only a few articles published in small regional journals had appeared taking up Benson’s call. George Daniels (1962), Stanley B. Parsons (1963), Robert Swierenga (1965), and Paul Kleppner (1966) contributed articles on the nineteenth century immigrant vote which generally supported Benson’s hypothesis, but there were few other studies of ethnocultural effects on voting (Bogue,1969,7; McCormick,1974,355).

Until Benson received the support of a second generation of “new political historians” in the early 1970s, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy did come under some severe specific technical criticism. The most frequent criticism was Benson’s too easy dismissal of class and economic factors based on flimsy evidence (e.g., Thernstrom 65‑66). Interestingly, almost all of these critics called, not for less quantification, but for more quantification. Starting with a general critique in 1963 titled “The Significance of Claptrap in American History” and followed by a highly penetrating essay “The Jacksonians: Paradox Lost?” published in 1968, Michael Lebowitz, a Marxist historian, finds that Benson’s failure to consider changes in economic status and the use of a suspect measure of wealth (average value of dwelling unit) makes his conclusions subject to several different interpretatons. Lebowitz directly criticizes Benson’s statistical approach: “The promised land cannot be reached by selecting high and low units in each county‑‑despite the economy of such an approach” and instead proposes a rigorous multivariate methodological framework which would include ethnic variables “to see if they add significant explanatory power” (1968,87n).

David Hackett Fischer most significantly attacks Benson for not testing the central thesis of his book, that there is little correlation between party affiliation and economic wealth. “Benson’s thesis is asserted rather than proved. One looks in vain, through 340 pages crowded with numbers, footnotes, and tables, for any comprehensive and unequivocal attempt to calculate the correlation of political affiliation with economic wealth” (113‑114). Indeed, Fischer takes some of the analyses that Benson does do and shows that they tend to refute Benson’s argument (114‑116). In a 1967 article in Political Science Quarterly, Frank O. Gatell proved that Benson’s analysis of a directory of wealthy New Yorkers showed serious sampling errors. Benson had found that Whigs and Democrats were present in equal numbers, but a more rigorous analysis by Gatell found a preponderance of Whigs.

Edward Pessen remains the most consistent critic of The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy in his two editions of Jacksonian America (1969,1978). Pessen notes the great counter‑evidence against a universal ethnocultural interpretation, such as the political behavior of New York’s merchants, the lack of ethnic or religious impact on southern political preferences, and the thousands of Catholics who particpated in in temperance crusades in Milwaukee and New York (1978,249). Pessen’s major argument revolves around the limitations of voting analysis, that “‘no statistical procedure can explain why any individual does anything'” (1978,250).

A few more quantitatively oriented historians, evaluating Benson’s work from the perspective of the behavioral social sciences, reported The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy woefully lacking. Allan Bogue, in a mild chastisement, found that “despite his concern for theoretical explication, Professor Benson’s work sometimes falls short of the standards that many behavioral scientists consider essential. One searches the first edition of The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy in vain for any detailed discussion of the methods by which he selected his indicator precincts, or of the number of voters in his sample, or of correlations or significance tests underlying the party preference percentages which he ascribed to the various ethnocultural groups living in New York during the 1830s and 1840s” (Bogue,1968,11)

David Hackett Fischer picked on a lot of people in his 1970 book Historians’ Fallacies but he pulled no punches in singling out Benson and The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy as the prime example of the “fallacy of statistical impressionism”: “its major points are either inaccurate or unsubstantiated,” “the rhetoric of quantification…but little of its reality,” “the worst of both methodological worlds‑‑history researched as an art and written as a science,” an “interdisciplinary effort which combined the worst of both worlds‑‑the stupidity of historians and the ignorance of sociologists” (37,113‑116). Amazingly, in the same breath, Fischer credits Benson with having “done more than any other single individual to make possible more thorough and exact quantification in American political history” (116).

Apart from Fischer’s vicious attacks, the early criticism of Benson was fairly weak. No one ever followed through with Lebowitz’s plan to test an alternative theory on the New York data. The New Left, in the best position to attack, never took up the challenge of quantitative history. Although Gatell’s conclusions “demonstrate a gross and serious inaccuracy in Benson’s use of the Beach list,” other historians have questioned those conclusions and have discredited Beach’s list in general (Fischer 115‑116,116n; Pessen,1971,415‑426;1978,252-253).

The arrival on the scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s of a group of graduate students, many trained under Benson and Hays, with published books spanning the entire 19th century United States, and all corroborating the ethnocultural interpretation, quickly put an end to such simple technical debates over The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy. In the 1970s, as Vandermeer noted in a most thorough review in 1978, systematic studies of party voting behavior “mushroomed.” Reversing the emphasis Bogue had found in 1968, voting studies had catapulted far beyond legislative studies and collective biographies in both numbers of books and articles (Vandermeer 265‑278). Benson’s influence wielded a veritable onslaught of “heavily quantitative studies on voting behavior and the social structure of party elites that refined and affirmed Benson’s basic arguments about politics, culture, and class” (Wilentz 47).

The main works in this onslaught were: Michael F. Holt’s Forging A Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848‑1860 (1969); Frederick C. Luebke’s Immigrants and Politics: The Germans of Nebraska, 1880‑1900 (1969); Paul Kleppner’s (a student of Hays) The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics: 1850‑1900 (1970); John M. Allswang’s (a student of Hays) A House For All People: Ethnic Politics in Chicago, 1890‑1936 (1970); Bruce M. Stave’s (a student of Hays) The New Deal and the Last Hurrah: Pittsburgh Machine Politics (1970); Ronald P. Formisano’s (a student of Benson) The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827‑1861 (1971); Richard J. Jensen’s The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888‑96 (1971); Samuel T. McSeveney’s (a student of Hays) The Politics of Depression: Political Behavior in the Northeast, 1893‑1896 (1972); and William G. Shade’s (a student of Benson) Banks or No Banks: The Money Question in Western Politics, 1832‑1865 (1972).

Covering the entire breadth of the American history from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century, these scholars created “a veritable ethnocultural school of American politics united by their belief that American political (and, by inference, social) divisions are explicable in terms of ethnicity and religion and not of class” (Wilentz 47). By the early 1970s, the ethno-cultural interpretation was dominant for the simple reason that they “had made a more compelling empirical case” (Wright,1973,654).

The emergence of this ethnocultural school inevitably raised the level of critique to a much broader historiographical and methodological debate over the findings of this “new” political history. Critics as well as proponents of the ethnocultural school focused most specifically on the work of Formisano, Kleppner, and Jensen. These three books stress the religious component of culture and explain nineteenth century politics by aligning the Republicans with pietistic or evangelical church groups (such as Baptists and Methodists) who stressed “right behavior” and Democrats with litur-gical or ritualistic church groups (such as Lutherans and Catho-lics) who stressed “right belief”. As others have noted, Benson previously identified such political divisions among groups called “Puritans” and “non‑Puritans” (Benson,1961,186‑207;Thelen,1971,84).

However, concentrating only on the works of Formisano, Jensen, and Kleppner pushes the other ethnoculturalists to the fringes and eliminates much of the diversity of findings. Most of the ethnocultural work stresses, as Benson himself does, the complexity of factors that affect political alignment. Luebke stresses the dynamics of a “mixed immigrant comunity” where the degree of dominant native American presence can have a tremendous effect on the establishment of “social and religious institutions on an ethnic basis” (35). Others substantiate the significance of “ethnocultural factors…but modified, at times considerably, by factionalism, localism, and personalities” (Wright 660). Such interpretations support Benson’s conclusion that ethnic and religious factors were relatively most important without substituting a monolithic ethnoreligious for a monolithic economic interpretation.

McCormick makes clear that there is no “one” ethnocultural approach. “While ethno‑culturalists share a common commitment to the study of the social and cultural bases of mass behavior, they are not in full agreement on the relationship between ethnic and religious identifications and political affiliations” (1974,352). McCormick identifies “three distinct, though not necessarily incompatible, theories to explain how cultural impulses become political ones: (1) negative reference group antagonisms, (2) conflicts of custom and life‑style, and (3) differences in religious values and world views” (1974,352).

Both Hays and Benson employ all three theories but most of the other ethnocultural historians do not (McCormick,1974,359‑361). “Most recent ethno‑culutral historians assume that nineteenth-century ethnic and religious voting groups took one another as referents, often as negative referents, and that that orientation was a determinant of voting behavior” (McCormick,1974,361). But, unlike Formisano, Jensen, and Kleppner who concentrate on “differences in religious values and world views,” most other ethnocultural historians focus on “conflicts of custom and life-style” even when examining the same issues (McCormick,1974,366). “[C]rediting world views with the determination of partisan loyalties is quite a different explanation than citing cultural defense or simple group hatreds. These represent strikingly divergent theories about the kinds of human motives which are the source of political activity” (McCormick,1974,367).

Even among the “central” ethnocultural group of five‑‑Benson, Hays, Formisano, Kleppner, and Jensen‑‑there are distinct divi-sions. Benson, Hays, and Formisano offer much more pluralistic explanations than Kleppner and Jensen. “Benson and Formisano are reluctant to associate the two clusters of values with theology”, unlike Hays, Kleppner, and Jensen (McCormick,1974,365n).

“By the early 1970s some believed the ethnocultural interpretaton to be the most important interpretive development in Ameican political hisotry since Turner enunciated the frontier hypothesis” (Bogue,1977,203). Yet, by the mid‑1970s, the ethnocultural school had gone on the defensive and few new books were written from this perspective. The criticism over Benson’s type of socio‑political history revolved around two points: (1) that it is the wrong social history not focusing on class structure; and (2) that it is the wrong political history not focusing on political structure. Benson placed political history within its social context, but later historians have criticized the subsequent depoliticization, the removal of power from both the social and political equations. In 1980 Kammen noted that the “new political history” “has become a half brother (or stepsister) of social history (35) and, in 1982, Kousser wrote “Political history is in danger of becoming a mere branch of social history” (1982,569). But even those historians who still favor incorporation of politics within its social context criticize the school for ignoring power, class, and economics. and obscuring the role of government (Bourke and DeBats,1985,459‑466; Holt,1985,60‑69).

Ethnoculturalists still defend the importance of analyzing election returns in order to relate the political process to the essential democratic process of voting. But every ethnocultural political history must now include a disclaimer that such history can never explain the formation of public policy: “[V]oters’ values do not explain political change over time. Leadership decisions do” (Holt,1985,68). Ethnoculturalists lament “how ‘minor’ is the revolution in our understanding of electoral history, a revolution requiring a further integration with our understanding of the history of political institutions” (Hammarberg,1983,652).

The ethnocultural interpretation of voting behavior did not go unchallenged and the opposition increased proportionately with the number of books taking ethnocultural tacks. Increasing numbers of voting studies in the 1970s tended to stress the importance of socioeconomic factors over ethnocultural factors, but much of this research did not receive the attention it deserved due to the dominance of the ethnocultural model. Although the ethnocultural historians stress multivariate analysis which “does not guarantee that every voting study will turn up particular results,” in practice, ethnocultural historians give short shrift to socioeconomic factors themselves and criticize work which come up with socioeconomic interpretations (Formisano,1976,60-61).

Included in this new “socioeconomic” group are several studies of the Populist era: Roger L. Hart (1975); J. Morgan Kousser (1974); Peter H. Argersinger (1974); James E. Wright (1974); Stanley B. Parsons (1973); and Lawrence Goodwyn (1976). (Robert McMath’s study of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (1975), however, stresses cultural and religious factors.) Melvin Hammarberg’s The Indiana Voter: The Historical Dynamics of Party Allegiance During the 1870s (1977), “the most sophisticated statistical analysis then available” (Bogue,1980,242), emphasizing occupational categories, finds that “ethnoreligious values have been overstressed as fundamental to the midwestern political context in the late nineteenth century and have been given a shape and meaning they did not inherently possess” (Hammarberg,1977,178). Wyman’s work on Wisconsin shows that “allegedly pietistic Norwegians responded mainly in economic terms to the tariff issue in 1890 and that German Lutherans voted Republican in 1896 not out of revulsion at Bryan’s pietism but out of fiscal conservatism” and additional research by Thelen supports Wyman’s conclusions (Thelen,1971,85). Baum finds that “economic factors consistently explained more of the variation in the Republican vote that did religious or ethnic groupings of the electorate…[and] that Republicans, at least in Massachusetts, were intereested in anti‑slavery, not nativism” (Baum,1984,212).

An alternative model, focusing on local‑cosmopolitan cleavages and concentrating mostly on studies of the two‑party system in the antebellum South, developed simultaneously with the ethnocultural model but received scant attention. Starting in 1963 with articles by Thomas Alexander and his associates, this model received strong support from James R. Sharp’s analysis of Ohio, Mississippi, and Virginia counties in The Jacksonians versus the Banks (1970) and, importantly, from as far away as Donald B. Cole’s study of “Jacksonian Democracy” in New Hampshire (1970) (Formisano,1976,

60‑61). More recently, Harry L. Watson’s intense study of antebellum Cumberland County, North Carolina in Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict (1981) has lent strong credence to this model.

The technical criticism restricted in earlier years to non‑political historians has blossomed into a major battle within the “new political history.” Most of the arguments revolve around methodological and conceptual problems: aggregate voting analysis and the ecological fallacy; problematic identification of church affiliation and religiosity; “the tendency of American deno-minations to blur theological distinctons” (Latner 20); weak substantive support for party political division along evangelical/antievangelical lines; the assumption of homogeneous units; the problematic collinearity between class, status, and economic and cultural variables; the ahistorical treatment of “religion and ethnicity, without reference to time, place, rate of acculturation, or individual personality” (Wright,1973,664); the substitution of dichotomous monolithic ethnoreligious determinism for economic determinism; the complexity of effect of ethnic and religious association on behavior; the inability to link ethno-cultural to modern religious studies; the problematic conflicts between cultural attachments (Wright,1973; Latner and Levine,1976). Since his own findings tend to contradict the ethnocultural interpretation, Hammarberg believes that ethnoculturalists have created the pietistic‑liturgical polarizaton by using aggregate level data rather than individual level data (1977,178).

The most vicious in‑house fighting has emanated from J. Morgan Kousser’s call for a greater statistical rigor, a battle which even got Lee Benson’s goat (Kousser,1976,1982,1985; Benson,1984, 122‑128). In looking back on The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, Benson believes he stressed too much the “‘hard’ quantitative methods used in the ‘mature’ social sciences” when his actual practice belied such “hard” quantitative methods. He believes the “methodological pluralism” he practiced in The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy actually had the right balance of qualitative and quantitative methods appropriate for historiography (Benson,1984,128). However, Kousser’s points have validity for the ethnoculturlists have not lived up to Benson’s call for a “multivariate approach.” Kousser has carried on the early Benson debunking tradition while Benson and the ethno-culturalists have sat back on their laurels. Kousser’s call today is not unlike Benson’s call in 1957, except that Benson’s timing ended up being right and Kousser’s timing looks all wrong.

More increasingly, political historians have called for the integration of the various subfields of the new political history‑‑mass voting behavior, legislative roll‑call voting, and collective biographies‑‑into a greater analysis of policy formation. This has necessarily led to a greater interest in legislative voting and the attempt to link the behavior of the elected and their electorate, to identify “the mechanisms connecting the expectations and demands of the constituents with the legislative behavior” (Campbell,1976,189). Major studies include Donald (1965); Silbey (1967); Alexander (1967); Levine (1977); Holt (1978); Campbell (1980); and Bogue (1981,1989). ³

Richard L. McCormick has proved to be the most effective critic of the ethnocultural school and was among the first to call for a reinjection of politics into political history. “Unless political history becomes a subdivision of social history, it is important to specify precisely how cultural identifications become politically salient, and to face squarely the question of what, if anything, mobilizing voters has to do with making policies” (McCormick,1974,377). McCormick’s critique most clearly points out the paradox of ethnocultural studies for the study of political policy, which rarely dealt with cultural or religious issues. “The most important message conveyed by ethnocultural analysis is not that voters are ethnically and religiously motivated, but that grass‑roots concerns are so irrelevant to public policy making” (McCormick,1974,371). ⁴

Ethnocultural historians usually treat public policies “in terms of their symbolic meaning for the masses” (Formisano,1971,11), symbols created by the elite around which to mobilize voters and organize political coalitions (McCormick,1974, 372‑3). “Election campaigns and party loyalties were important forms of entertainment and of social and cultural expressions in the nineteenth century, but what they had to do with other aspects of the political system remains unclear” (McCormick,1974,377). Paula Baker’s finding in Schoharie County, New York in the 1890s support McCormick’s “more traditional vision of politics…, one in which electoral machines are assigned an important place and elections a social function” (Baker,1984,182). ⁵

Overall, none of the ethnoculturalists see the previous work as in any way limiting, but rather as providing great opportunity for an expansion of our understanding of the political process (Hays,1985,481‑499). Kleppner states that mass voting behavior studies and analyses of the intermediary role of political parties are critical to any study of policy formation in legislatures (Kleppner,1979,378).

The greatest threat to the ethnocultural school and to the “new political history” in general ultimately lies outside of political history in the rapidly rising “ideological school” of social history. This school includes among others Eric Foner, David Montgomery, Sean Wilentz, and Steven Hahn. Criticisms within the “new political history” lead the discipline along the path of development foreseen by the earliest practitioners but conflicts between the “ethnocultural” and “ideological” schools offer little room for compromise since “the two do differ fundamentally,” as shown in the vicious Foner‑Formisano debate (Formisano,1975,185; Foner,1974,1975). Unfortunately for the “new political history,” in‑house critics, like the new economic historians who ganged up on Fogel and Engerman, do inevitably provide ready ammunition for those who totally oppose the “new political history.”

According to Wilentz, social historians, except for “the most thoroughgoing behavioralists and quantifiers,” have an “instinctive distaste” for Benson’s brand of history and look upon the ethnocultural school “with varying degrees of boredom and hostility” (47‑48). “Revisionist axioms about the paucity of any ‘meaningful’ popular political consciousness [run] counter to the entire enterprise of social history” (Wilentz 48). The “ideological” school claims that the ethnoculturalists have “construed politics far too narrowly, and thereby distorted social relations, social consciousness, and the exercise of political power” (Wilentz 48), ignoring how the “social tensions and solidarities” of class, sex, and race “might have shaped the structure and conduct‑‑the very social context‑‑of party politics, and the use of power outside elections” (Wilentz 49).

The attack of the “ideological school” represents an attempt to bring back economic determinism in a much more subtle, complex form, wrapping a Marxist class framework in “republican” clothing. These “ideological” historians replace the strict socioeconomic division of class according to wealth distribution with the more sophisticated Gramscian division according to social relations of production and replace class conflict with “republican hegemony.” In this way, the “ideological” historians basically accept the major point of the Hofstadter‑Hartz‑Benson hypothesis‑‑a genuine consensus in American politics‑‑ while at the same time ignoring or dismissing the ethnocultural emphasis on ethnoreligious conflict (over class conflict) as inconsequential. At best, as represented in the works of Herbert Gutman, Paul Johnson, and Mary Ryan, the “ideological” school might show how ethnic and religious values blend with economic interests into a common class consciousness (Wilentz 50; Thelen,1972,355).

One of the main “ideological” attacks has centered on the biggest hole in the ethnocultural interpretation: the failure to find a reasonable explanation of the coming of the Civil War (Foner,1974,199‑200). “Most recent students of secession found little place in their explanations for the findings of the new political historians” (Silbey,1985,169). Since 1958, Benson himself has devoted much effort to developing an analytical frameworks for studying the Civil War, and Silbey and Formisano have tried to implement some of these theories, but all for nought. An ethno-cultural explanation of the origins of the Civil War fails because the political historians resist considering economic and ideo-logical causes and the central issue of slavery. In defense, Formisano argues that “nativism, anti‑Catholicism, anti-Southernism, anti‑slavery and racism did not flow through the political universe in neatly separate streams…Rather, one must understand how racial, ethnic, religious, economic, sectional, and other groups were interwoven symbolically and how issues such as Popery, Slavery, Party, and Rum permeated one another with emotional resonance” (1975,188). But the new political historians fail to show how the anti‑slavery and anti‑southern dogma entered the debate, unlike nativism and temperance which directly affected the lives of all northerners. ⁶

So where does The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy still stand after all of this ethnocultural debate? Simply, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has been raised to the status of a classic, “the one study indispensable to an understanding of subsequent developments in quantitative political history” (Bogue,1978,93). Critics of the “ethnocultural school” gently praise “the old man,” reserving their attacks for the second generation. Whether friend or foe of the “ethnocultural synthesis,” all historians recognize the importance of The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy to modern American historiography.

Overall, Benson’s book has had quite a bit of success. Sean Wilentz in 1982 credited Benson with putting the final stake in the Progressives’ heart, with killing the belief that clashing economic interests dominated party politics (45‑46). Degler in his 1980 major review of American historiography credits Lee Benson’s The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy as the preeminent work in the revision of Progressive interpretations of conflict in American society. “Contrary to Marxists’ assertions, it seems to me that the principal conflicts in American society have more often been related to racial and ethnic consciousness than to class conscious-ness” (Degler 18). Indeed, in many ways the “ideological” school arose in response to the very success of the ethnoculturalists who forced Marxist class historians to consider the role of culture. In general, ethnocultural historians have made all social history more sensitive to ethnicity, religion, and politics (Formisano,1986,15).

No longer criticized for lack of technical expertise, everyone now champions the book’s simplicity, “a masterful if still elementary demonstration of the fusion of social science theory and historical data” (Silbey et al,1978,6‑7). In 1984, Benson himself concluded that “two decades of subsequent research have only strengthened my belief in the rudimentary theory of voting behavior sketched in Jacksonian Democracy” (Benson,184,128). Bogue’s chidings of Benson’s failure to fulfill his grand calling have gotten milder and milder over time; Bogue now accepts that Benson’s lack of rigor simply reflected the times (1981,164). In 1980, J. Morgan Kousser, never one to restrain himself in attacks on the “ethnocultural school,” credited Benson (along with Conrad and Meyer and Merle Curti) with launching the quantitative social-scientific historiographical revolution (1980,433).

Yet somewhere along the way Benson’s ultimate goal of a more scientific history was lost. To Benson, like social scientists, the theory was more important than the specific application of the theory. Benson treated ethnocultural groups as just specific cases of Merton’s greater reference‑group phenomena. But later ethno-culturalists ignored the greater reference‑group theory in favor of the highly specialized variant that explains only historical party affiliation (Bogue et al.,1977,205). If ethnocultural historians “had retained the concept of multiple‑reference groups and group memberships already developed by social scientists,…we might have eliminated much of the either/or chracter of the debate over the ethnocultural interpretation, reconciled the apparent antinomy between ethnocultural groups on the one hand and occupational, class, status, and other groups on the other, and devoted more attention to assessing the relative weight of multiple factors in explaining behavior” (Bogue et al.,1977,205‑206).

Several historians have noted that, in reality, Samuel B. Hays’s “social analysis” approach exerted a much stronger influence on political historiography than Benson’s “scientific” approach (McCormick,1974,354). “Most of the new political historians, whether consciously or not, actually followed Hay’s model more closely, though it must be added that the example of Benson’s book, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, was quite evident in the structures and outlooks of the books” of the ethnocultural school (Formisano,1986,10).

Raising The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy to the level of classical history inevitably sounds the book’s death knell. McCormick notes in 1985 that voting studies no longer dominate as they had a dozen years earlier (15). The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy no longer directly influences young scholars to pursue “scientific” or “ethnocultural” histories. Older and younger historians alike have rejected such demanding, unrewarding history for a simpler, traditional history. Even the older political historians, like Kleppner and Formisano, who continue to pursue ethnoreligious factors, turn out books which seem more like traditional than “ethnocultural” history.

The parallels between the “Turnerian political history” and the “new political history” are striking. Each originated as a reaction against a more institutional and ideological political history and led to a more empirical study of human behavior as reflected in voting. Both had only a limited run as political historians eventually turned away from the more demanding statistical requiremenets of behavioral analysis to the more traditional forms of historiography. In both cases, historians would come to question the importance of the individual voter in favor of some variant of economic determinism. In 1930, “Howard Beale, a student of Turner and disciple of Beard, finally concluded that ‘claptrap’ so obscured the ‘real’ (i.e. economic) issues in elections that voting behavior analysis was practically irrelevant” (Jensen,1969,236).

Both the Turnerian and ethnocultural schools succumbed to a failure to progress past the methodology of its founders. “[B]y failing to provide an adequate training in statistical methods, Turner left his students vulnerable to frustration and the enticement of a simpler paradigm, economic determinism” (Jensen, 1969,235). Similarly, “critics note that the quantitative foun-dations of ethnocultural research are less firm than they ought to be, owing to the inexperience of historians in the use of empirical methods” (Bogue,1980,250).

Yet each movement would have a lasting impact on a younger generation of scholars and historiography in general would be forever changed. Although the “ethnocultural school” may have run its course and The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy may no longer provide the “structures and outlooks” of the latest dissertations in American political history, Benson’s book has a life independent of the “ethnocultural synthesis.” For Benson, the analysis of voting behavior was never the end but rather the beginning of a greater analysis of human society. As Sean Wilentz notes: “The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy raised a host of questions about the complexity and character of American liberal political culture that are only beginning to be debated and clarified” (46). But far and above discussions of American political history, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy will have a life as long as scholars aspire towards a more scientific history.

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