Studies of U.S. politics increasingly aim to make sense of two key trends: party polarization and Republican Party radicalization. Surprisingly, however, party divergences on immigration have been largely overlooked. Drawing on state and national political party platforms since 1980, we document the rise of attention to immigration, the polarization of substantive party positions, and the sharp GOP turn toward restrictive measures. After pinpointing the timing and relative trajectories of national and state-level agenda shifts, we explore potential drivers and establish two sets of flashpoint events worth further study: highly visible and mostly deadlocked congressional battles over immigration grand bargains, and bottom-up reverberations from the widespread 2006 immigrant rights protests and post-2008 Tea Party organizing. We find that grassroots Tea Party efforts were intervening accelerators rather than original causes of the Republican embrace of tough immigration restrictions. The article concludes by stressing the chronological layering of successive party polarizations—from 1960s divergences around civil rights, through clashes about abortion and LGBTQ rights from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and followed by immigration polarization in the 2000s. This process of layering polarizations on top of one another may have supercharged recent GOP turns toward ethnonationalism and tolerance for threats of violence.

Partisan polarization on “culture war” issues has become a defining feature of contemporary American politics. This was not always the case; for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, social issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights played no role in politics. Where and when did the partisan divide begin? Did the initiative come from state or national parties? Was there a critical moment, or was position change incremental? We have constructed an original database of nearly 2,000 state party platforms from 1960 to 2018. These platforms allow us to trace position-taking on these issues and generate estimates of platform ideology. By the time national parties took positions, we show, they lagged state-level position-taking. Contrary to long-held assumptions, we show that state party system polarization did not occur around any critical moment but rather was incremental.

The Social Security Act of 1935 and its 1939 amendments included federal programs for maternal and infant welfare, child welfare services, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). Inclusion of these programs is largely owing to women reformers’ long advocacy for public assistance to families in need. The Social Security Act nationalized aspects of the program championed by the Children’s Bureau, itself a product of women’s civic organization and institution building. These advances laid the ground for crucial components of the contemporary American welfare state, which included surveillance and intrusion into the lives of ADC families and the perpetuation of a system of subnational administration that reproduced racial inequality. Yet critics of these female reformers have not fully considered the institutional constraints they faced and the policy transformations they did not control. This article considers the policy achievement of maternalists in terms of its policy failures by considering the bureaucratic struggles of female reformers once they reached access to federal policymaking, culminating in the Committee on Economic Security that led to the Social Security Act. We consider the strategies from a place of both access and marginalization as they jockeyed for bureaucratic territory with others with different claims to expertise.

In the summer of 1941, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), led by the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, planned to march tens of thousands of African Americans on Washington, DC, to pressure President Franklin Roosevelt to abolish discrimination in the federal government and defense industries. After intensive negotiations, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning those forms of discrimination and creating a federal agency to oversee this work: the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). Randolph and his allies use of pioneering pressure tactics coincided with a critical period of institutionalization of the modern presidency, ultimately resulting in executive action that significantly advanced civil rights and economic opportunity for Black Americans. Many scholars, focusing only on civil rights activists’ fraught relationship with Roosevelt and the Southern Democrats’ stubborn defense of Jim Crow in Congress and the states, have seen the highly contentious battles over the authority and policies of the FEPC as constituting a major defeat for MOWM’s state-centered civil rights strategy. Yet Randolph and his allies continued to believe that the most practical path to reform ran through the executive branch. In this article, we draw a contrast between the actions first taken by President Roosevelt with his wavering commitment to the FEPC and the stronger and more definitive actions taken by President Truman to desegregate the military and civil service, which broke open public-sector employment for African Americans. Beyond strategic considerations, the New Deal expansion of jobs in the national service and military made the modern executive an essential target of Randolph’s campaign to join the battles for civil rights with economic freedoms. Randolph’s decision to focus on employment in the rapidly expanding defense industries, federal workforce, and military thus marked a critical episode in the fight for the economic rights of Black Americans.

This article examines how public opinion—notably political activism and protest, as well as threats of violence, and violence itself—shaped the eventual resolution of the 1876 election. While not discounting the bargaining or machinations of party elites in forging an ultimate compromise, the standard explanation in the scholarly literature, the emphasis here adds important texture and nuance to the conversation, and strongly suggests that public opinion (broadly construed) played a significant, if not exclusive, role in pressuring party leaders to compromise on the eventual Electoral Commission Act that resolved the crisis. In particular, a series of January 1877 demonstrations held across several key states, coupled with the threat of “menace” at the heart of the Southern rifle clubs that were prominent in the campaign and its aftermath, provided strong incentives to partisan leaders and especially members of Congress to seek compromise to resolve the electoral crisis. The article also addresses the contested nature of mass meetings and protests in this era—and in general—and how partisans seek to define terms and behaviors to suit their political positions.

The American state was a republic of patrons and clients throughout the Long Nineteenth Century. Unequal ties of hierarchy and reciprocity went far beyond the partisan administration and electioneering that we associate with the spoils system. As a form of “belated feudalism,” clientelism proved resilient because it was a familial property relation embedded within a diverse and changing society. Officeholding politics subsumed a host of racialized and gendered dependents—White men of lower status, women, children, and the enslaved—into the penumbra of the state, which itself was governed via the extended party household. What elements of patron–client relations endured or changed from the colonial inheritance until the New Deal? This article reinterprets the republic’s classical age, first, by exploring the origins of party patrimonialism, and then, by examining the dynamics of officeholding political economy and the rise of markets for patronage. Political rule before the New Deal had a different orientation. Clientelism fused older lineages of dependence with the kind of profit-seeking exchanges typical of the burgeoning capitalist economy. It was this mixed state, at once patrimonial and capitalist, that proved so difficult to reform at the turn of the twentieth century.

This study charts Bayard Rustin’s contentious career as a biographical subject, from 1987 to 2013. Interpreting biographies of Rustin as “ethically constitutive stories,” I argue that shifting accounts of his life-history address public debates over issue definition and political conduct in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. At stake in rival portrayals of Rustin, then, is not just memory of him but the very idea of civil rights, including how and by whom such rights were—and ought to be—pursued. The article examines the production and reception of two distinct waves of biographical representation, with close attention to how each narrates the pursuit and proper locus of civil rights. I end with notes toward an alternate rendering of Bayard Rustin. Instead of recovering his singular authority vis-à-vis the Civil Rights Movement, the concluding “story” reckons with the manifold history of black politics by reappraising the specificity of “black and gay” peoplehood.

What role did urban machines play in national politics during the New Deal? To what extent did they serve as facilitators in a local-national patronage system, converting the flow of federal funds into their cities into votes for federal Democratic candidates? To answer these questions, we bring together data on urban machines and work relief spending, the New Deal programs that received the most public and political scorn for their supposed patronage uses. Despite long-standing claims that Franklin D. Roosevelt and other New Dealers funneled extra work relief funds to urban machines, and that machines converted those funds into votes for the national Democratic Party, we find little evidence of this exchange relationship. Machines did not receive a disproportionate share of work relief funds, but they did see large influxes of federal funds, just like other cities with high levels of economic need. And yet, based on two-way fixed effects models and synthetic control analyses, we find no evidence that they succeeded at using those funds to turn out votes for President Roosevelt. We find evidence for just one dimension of a local-national patronage system: Democratic Senate candidates did see larger increases in vote share in machine counties versus non-machine counties with similar increases in work relief expenditures.

This article tracks the buildup of the South Carolina criminal legal system between 1867 and 1899 through three eras of its state penitentiary: from the politics of reform to convict leasing to the prison plantation. To track the delayed emergence and unusual trajectory of South Carolina’s criminal legal system, I argue that two approaches became entangled after the Civil War: On the one hand, a modern, nationalized politics of reform, and on the other, a decidedly Southern vision of crime and punishment haunted by the afterlife of slavery. It was the tension between—and variegated blending of—these two approaches that yielded a hybrid carceral project and set the trajectory for the state’s criminal legal system as it entered the twentieth century.

This article examines the Whig Party’s conception of the presidency and argues that it failed to take hold because the idea of an executive which is subordinate or deferential to the legislative branch is fundamentally at odds with the Constitution. To show this, I assess the four presidents from the Whig Party: William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore. Each of these presidents entered office supporting the Whigs’ ideological vision of legislative supremacy and weak executive power, yet quickly abandoned that vision once in office. I contend that this demonstrates the constitutional logic of the presidency and the way it shapes the officeholder’s perspective, orienting presidents toward a robust understanding of executive power. In short, presidents do not act like Whigs because the Constitution directs them not to.

Beginning from 1832, the Democratic Party required a two-thirds majority at national conventions for the nomination of presidential candidates. Despite assessments that this “two-thirds rule” produced excessively long and disruptive nomination battles and low-quality presidential candidates, the rule survived until 1936. The rule's longevity is generally attributed to it functioning as a “Southern veto”: while the Democratic Party performed strongest electorally in the South in this period, the region's representation at conventions was small in comparison. By setting the bar for presidential nominations high, the South was given the ability to block unacceptable candidates. However, while the “Southern veto” argument is pervasive, there are little data and few concrete examples of Southern delegates blocking Democratic nominations through the two-thirds rule. In this paper, I reassess the two-thirds rule's history and appliance and show that Southern states barely had enough votes to block nominations and generally would need to vote against a candidate at a rate of nearly 90 percent to do so. As a result, the South almost never vetoed candidates: in only one case (Martin Van Buren in 1844) was Southern opposition pivotal in preventing a candidate with majority support from winning the nomination. Additionally, the two-thirds rule was generally accepted by broad majorities in the party (both Southern and non-Southern) and, while Southerners were among the defenders of the rule, representatives of the region were also among those opposing it. These findings suggest that the two-thirds rule rarely functioned as a Southern veto—not because the South had no power in the Democratic Party but because the necessity of maintaining intraparty consensus applied regardless of the existence of the two-thirds rule.

We trace the origin of felony disenfranchisement from the colonial period through Reconstruction. On the eve of the Civil War, three-quarters of states had criminal disenfranchisement statutes. These laws were based on “legal moralism” principles, which limited the franchise to those in good standing with the community. Efforts at disenfranchisement grew as access to the ballot increased and criminal justice reforms replaced capital and corporal punishment for imprisonment. We highlight important transformations in felony disenfranchisement during Reconstruction, specifically in new state constitutions and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. All but one Southern state included felon disenfranchisement in their new constitutions that the Republican-controlled Congress ratified for readmission to the United States. Radical Republicans in Congress and state legislatures were in most cases advocates of felony disenfranchisement to exclude former Confederates from political participation.