<p> Popular government in the United States requires an American citizenry capable to confront the difficult questions of a self-governing people. As political science deepens our understanding of the political behavior of the American people, it also narrows our understanding of the citizen's role to election cycles and policy outcomes. The Madisonian Framework for Civic Involvement represents an understanding of the citizen's role as complex and varied as the proposition of popular government itself. The Framework traces three themes (interaction, input and integration) that recur in James Madison's writing as a political theorist and his work as a political actor. </p><p> Rather than a prescription of specific behaviors required from each individual, Madison's work provides a framework for understanding the patterns, perspectives and principles giving shape to an American citizenry capable of countering the worst tendencies of popular government and their own nature. The work presented here revisits an understanding of the citizen's role as Madison imagined it, embedded in his commitments about the proper role of government, the institutional scheme of an extensive republic and the lessons of America's past.</p><p> The Framework demonstrates how the study of American Political Behavior has worked to shrink our ideas about the citizen's role while promoting studies constrained by specific commitments about the relationship between citizens and government. The Madisonian Framework for Civic Involvement makes it possible to suspend debate over Madison's liberal, democratic or civic republican commitments in order to extend our own understanding of civic involvement as it aligns with the more complex understanding of the nature of humankind and government that guided the original design of the American system of government. Finally, the author demonstrates how the Framework has potential to help us understand the political debates (Lincoln-Douglas Debates), social programs (President Johnson's Community Action Programs) and policy initiatives (President Obama's online petition) of the past and future where the understanding of the citizen's role makes all the difference.</p>

This dissertation studies the emergence of a Keynesian political-economic strategy in America during the interwar period. It is concerned primarily with one crucial aspect of this process: the ideological role played by key political, economic, and managerial elites in the emergence of such strategy. It thus traces the political discourse articulated by the Taylor Society, the institutional home of scientific management, from its inception as an industrial research organization to its development as an important policy-making network during the New Deal. It focuses on key figures in the Taylor Society including Morris L. Cooke, Harlow S. Person, Henry Dennison, and Mary Van Kleeck, as well as those who were closely associated with the society, such as Rexford G. Tugwell, Louis D. Brandies, George Soule, Frances Perkins, and Sidney Hillman. The historical narrative shows how during the 1930s the Taylor Society became an important component of the political and economic network that put forward a Keynesian strategy based on the expansion of mass consumption (and thus social purchasing power) via the intervention of the state. This network was critical of the corporatist program, embodied in the National Recovery Administration, in which that state would sanction cartel-like arrangements among capitalists to reduce destructive competition, restrict production, and fix prices. This system of industrial self-regulation entailed minimal state intervention and a reduced role for the unions and the collective bargaining. The Keynesian strategy advanced by the Taylor Society and its allies, on the other hand, advocated an expanded and strong role for the state and unions in the political economy, along with macroeconomic policies that promoted social purchasing power and expanded mass consumption. During the "Second New Deal" the Keynesian elite entered the corridors of power and many of its members took key administrative positions in the welfare state. From these positions they attempted to shape the American political economy.

This work examines the origins of the Cold War from the perspective of domestic American politics. Specifically, the role of the so-called "Catholic vote" in the New Deal coalition built by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Catholics comprised roughly one-quarter of the population and were concentrated in the major urban and industrial areas of the country. These were the same areas that dominated the electoral college and thus were of primary importance to anyone seeking national office or proposing national policy. FDR frequently modified his position on national issues if it appeared this "Catholic vote" might be jeopardized. Throughout the 1930s, as charges of Communist influence on FDR and the New Deal increased in intensity, the official position of the Catholic Church was hardening into a strict anti-Communism. The potential, then, existed for widespread defections of Catholic voters from the New Deal coalition over the issue of Communism. Using a variety of primary sources but especially the presidential papers located at the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, and the archives of the Archdiocese of Boston in Brighton, Massachusetts, this work will demonstrate the impact of Catholic opinion on national policy, especially foreign policy, as it was reflected in the attempt to keep the Catholic vote in the Democratic Party. The response of first FDR and then Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to Soviet domination of largely Catholic Eastern Europe following the war suggests that religion, especially Catholicism, is the overlooked paradigm of the Cold War.

This is a study of popular political thought and its interaction with the culture of governance in three northern states before the Civil War. By putting matters of governance at the center of antebellum politics, this study differs from reigning society-based interpretations of the era. Drawing upon the polity-centered framework of Theda Skocpol and the broader cultural approach to the political public sphere pioneered by Jurgen Habermas, this dissertation emphasizes how political actors struggled to translate socially conditioned anxieties into political questions that bore fundamental relationship to governance. The story pivots on the rise and fall of the Know Nothing movement, a quintessential expression of nineteenth-century American populism. It argues that the movement's breathtaking fury and appeal flowed from a pervasive sense that governance was lacking in a broad moral purpose; that wire-pulling politicians, blinded by partisan calculation, had allowed dangerous special interests to threaten the public good. Like other populist movements, the Know Nothings framed their agenda with transcendent antiparty calls to eliminate office chasers and special interests from public life. While key differences distinguished the movement regionally, Know Nothings in each state cast the decade's principal issues--slavery, immigration, and economic insecurity--as crises of governance within a radically changing public culture. The decline of the Know Nothings suggests what happens to an antiparty reform movement once it becomes a formal political party. Though Know Nothing lawmakers in each state added a significant corpus of reforms to their prescriptive anti-Catholic agenda, this dissertation stresses the limits of populism--a combination of internal contradictions and cultural constraints that can be termed the third party dialectic. Despite the Know Nothings' rhetoric of patriotic unity, factionalism dogged the movement, while leaders undertook praetorian actions which contradicted the rank and file's antiparty designs. The study concludes by examining how the emergent Republican party established partisan loyalty at the grassroots in the context of sectional polarization. By the eve of the Civil War, the Republicans' antisouthern and herrenvolk appeals incorporated the popular ideal of governance devoted to the public good and the parallel fear of special interests in American public life.

Following the collapse of the insurgencies of the 1880s and 1890s, many former populists and Gilded Age radicals linked up with the region's new industrial workers, farmers, small businessmen and political organizers to fashion a socialism cast in a southern idiom. Armed with this heritage, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) would go on to occupy an important piece of a larger pattern of resistance movements that swept through Dixie between the 1880s and World War I. The SPA, not unlike the People's Party, Farmers' Alliance, Union-Labor, and the Greenbackers, provided something of a panacea for those marginalized either materially or philosophically by the New South creed. This study examines Socialist Party activity in the American South from the 1890s to 1920 and considers how the social, political, and economic character of the region in turn shaped the emergent socialist message. Explored is the formation of socialist politics, particularly through the links between the labor movement, agrarian radicalism, and the party's diverse membership. Played out in the region's manufacturing zones, developing coastlines, and in rural stretches were the tensions of industrialization, civic boosterism, and political disfranchisement as confronted by a vision of an alternative New South, anchored in the remnants of populism and fueled by socialist organizing efforts. In examining the one-party South, disfranchisement, and the poll tax, historians have accounted for the exclusionary and antidemocratic character of institutional politics but have slighted the independent political and cultural movements created by those very dispossessed. Indeed, New South industrialism and social change challenged conventional political relationships. The ballot box included union elections, and the South's power brokers just as often assumed the identity of an industrialist as they did political boss. Located in the union halls and workers, libraries, on city street corners, and in the region's mines, mills, and fields were southern politics of a different variety. By embracing socialism some Southerners created a community of adherents otherwise impossible in the alienating world of Democratic politics.

This dissertation argues that even though Americans have had the freedom to assemble since the ratification of the Bill of Rights, it was not until the late nineteenth century that political leaders viewed the holding of public rallies by working-class men, organized as labor unions, as a legitimate form of political expression. Even then there were limitations on who could gather and when. I show that New York’s Union Square played a pivotal role in this transition from elite republican politics to mass democracy by providing a venue for governmental institutions, political parties, and eventually labor unions to present arguments justifying their legitimacy. I argue that physical spaces are historical characters just like the people that inhabit them, showing how Union Square’s location, geography, and cultural identity influenced the gatherings that occurred there, and vice versa. Many books on New York City include information about Union Square —one of the rare open spaces to be designated a National Historic Landmark—but this dissertation throughly examines the history of the space. The area where New York City’s Common Council first developed Union Square in the 1830s was called the Fork in the Roads, since it was where the city’s two main thoroughfares, the Boston Post Road and the Albany Post Road, intersected. Like those roads, this dissertation tells two separate stories that become one in Union Square. One describes how Union Square transformed from an elite residential square with a gated park in its center to the city’s primary gathering space for political expression. The other details how working-class New Yorkers struggled for political legitimacy. The stories converge when the Central Labor Union organized the nation’s first Labor Day parade through Union Square in 1882. In the wake of that and subsequent Labor Day parades in cities and towns around the nations, state legislatures and eventually the federal government came to declare Labor Day an official holiday, suggesting that politicians were finally taking labor seriously. Meanwhile, Union Square had become the most important space for political expression in New York City, and continues in that role today.

This dissertation tells the story of how anticommunism operated on the state and local level in Massachusetts from the depression through the 1950s. Using analytic tools from both political history and social history, it asks: what initiatives were driven by anticommunism, who were the people behind these initiatives, why did they want to suppress political dissent, and where did their ideas originate. The findings show that anticommunism on the state and local level was far more complex than has been appreciated. In Massachusetts, political ideas travel through a prism of class and ethnicity before taking shape as political actions. Neither the pluralist analysis of McCarthyism as a mass based movement from below, nor the revisionist analysis of McCarthyism as an elite rivalry over political power adequately explain what happened in Massachusetts. A more accurate picture reveals pockets of anticommunist activity throughout the state. These pockets were peopled with conservative Yankees, professional anticommunists, Catholic legislators and opportunist labor leaders. However, the ideas driving each group were quite different. What this study shows is the usefulness of anticommunism in helping Americans find common political ground across class and ethnic differences. For most people it was a lot easier to agree on what was un-American than it was to agree on what was American. Massachusetts anticommunists maintained an unbroken thread of activity throughout the period of this study, 1930 to 1960. Evidence of anticommunism and antiradicalism during the Second World War--expressed as opposition to conscientious objectors and support for the Christian Front--links the "little Red Scare" of the depression to postwar McCarthyism. The same groups of people supported anticommunist initiatives during the cold war as had during the depression and war years. The Catholic Church continued to be the single most influential source of anticommunism. Union leaders used anticommunist Catholic labor doctrine to oust rivals from power within the electrical workers union. A legislative commission dominated by socially conservative Irish Democrats investigated subversion among liberal Yankees. Cold war anticommunism on the state level was driven by ethnic conflict not party rivalry.

This dissertation examines the resurgence of Massachusetts Federalists in national politics from 1805 through 1815. During this ten-year period, Federalists were relegated to the periphery of national politics as the Democratic-Republican majority in Congress passed a string of controversial commercial policies directed at French and British violations of America’s neutral trade. However, the rejection of bipartisan solutions, along with the anti-commercialism and sectional bias in Jeffersonian political economy, precipitated a resurgence of the Federalist Party after 1805. In Congress, Federalists, led by Massachusetts’ representatives, compensated for their dwindling numbers and influence in the national arena by adopting a populist stance and opposition platform that attracted New England voters. In fact, this study suggests that national expansion, the spread of slavery, and Jefferson’s agrarian ethos, played a more significant role in the Democratic-Republican Party’s rise to national prominence after 1800, than a widespread rejection of Federalist elitism. By testing the validity of Federalist claims that New England’s ability to safeguard its interests in national government diminished in direct proportion to the nation’s growth, we gain a better understanding of the emergence of New England nationalism and the deepening sectional hostilities that threatened the survival of the Union. Finally, through its reassessment of the Federalists’ opposition to commercial restrictions and their calls for constitutional reform to abolish slave quotas, this dissertation departs from the focus of previous studies, expands the discourse surrounding early national politics, and places Federalists in their appropriate historical context.

The institutions of representation are the target of continuous reform and repair in the United States. This dissertation examines the concepts of representation that have been used to support both representational reform and the status quo. In examining these concepts, I argue that the breadth of the public discourse on representation has narrowed over time. This has been the result of changes in three ideas that constitute the concept of representation: human nature, community, and the purpose of government. The content and relative balance of these ideas shape the concept of representation over time and thus the character of representative institutions.

The Black Panther Party existed for a very short period of time, but within this period they established themselves as a central force in the Afrikan American human rights/civil rights movements. Over the past twenty years the history of the Black Panther Party has been conspicuously missing from material on the 1960's. Particularly, there is an absence of material concerning the rank-and-file grassroots activities. In documenting the grassroots efforts of the Black Panther Party, this study emphasizes the community organizing of the Party in a manner which encourages the student/reader to analyze the effectiveness and relevance of grassroots organizing as a means for developing social change and acquiring Afrikan American self-determination.