Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth-century Americans, Cornell professors Altschuler and Blumin argue, were political animals, and politics did not stop at the voting booth--it encroached upon everyday life, with references to elections and political parties popping up in plays, songs, parades and teatime small talk. If there were Americans before 1860 who doubted the importance of politics, the Civil War drove home the relevance of congressional votes and presidential elections. One local newspaper reported that two women ended a decades-long friendship because they disagreed about Lincoln. After the Civil War, politics, which had occupied a peripheral role in fiction before the war, took center stage in such bestsellers as Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand (1880), a novel about the politics of Reconstruction. (Altschuler and Blumin often exaggerate the extent to which politics' pervasiveness was a new phenomenon. When they write that during the Civil War, politics invaded the pulpit, with preachers offering their opinions not just of the Bible but of the president as well, readers may recall the highly politicized sermons from the Revolutionary era. The authors constantly complicate the story they tell: just after convincing readers that politics dominated every novel written after 1870, they show that a close reading of diaries from the era indicates that some men were increasingly detached from electoral politics--a tension that is never satisfactorily resolved. Still, theirs is a rich and entertaining study. 22 b&w illustrations. (Apr.)