This is a useful book for anybody mired in the study of US politics. It is handy, practical, compact. The Historical Dictionary of United States Political Parties provides a no‐nonsense one‐volume guide to every aspect of party competition: practices, institutions, job titles, political figures and of course, the parties themselves. There are no pictures and no documents: just 350 pages of entries. However, the book is also equipped with 15 appendices (mostly lists of office‐holders) and a good booklist. Together the extras make up one‐fifth of the whole. It is not a scholar's reference book in that it contains no extended entries on the big subjects. The piece on the Republican Party is only two pages long – like the item on the Democratic Party. Professor Bass offers us a quick reference book for readers who do not want to dawdle.
The original intention of the Founding Fathers was to have been a polity without parties. They felt that parties encouraged strife and bad feeling. But for a country which started there, America has certainly spawned enough of them: who today, apart from scholars of the subject, would remember the Greenback Party, John Bell's Constitutional Union Party, the Know‐Nothings and the Free Soilers? Most of these minor parties have been short‐lived phenomena which met a particular electoral need and then evaporated. It is a complex picture.
As for the two major parties, they may appear to be the two pillars of a stable system but there are complications here as well. Both of them have passed through various incarnations in their long history. These changes have given us a succession of “party systems” as the political scientists call them: the “third party system”, the “fourth party system”, and so on. At present we are living in the era of the “sixth party system”. It is possible, however, to detect continuous threads stretching through the history of each party. Generalising broadly, Republicans started life in 1854 as a party of urban business interests, economic nationalism and nativist feelings. Democrats tended to represent states' rights, the south and the newly arrived. Some of these elements have survived into the modern age. However, this constant protean change has added further complexity to the history of parties in the USA.
Although Professor Bass covers the whole span of the Republic, he has most to say about recent times, the years when the party system has reached its highest stage of development. The book begins with a short chronology and an introductory essay on the evolution of parties. Then comes the main body of the book – about 800 articles arranged alphabetically. About half the entries are biographical. Professor Bass does his best to cover the kaleidoscope of party histories and the luxuriant language which it has generated. Esoteric terms abound: we all know what “Landslide” and “Lame duck” mean but what about “Bull Moose Party”, “Stalwarts” and “Half breeds”, “Barnburners” and “Hunkers”, “Dixiecrats”. For that matter, who “Waved the bloody shirt” and why?
Sometimes Bass lets us down. The lifeblood of modern political parties, certainly in the USA, is money. This leads us to lobbying, Public Affairs Committees and the so‐called “527 groups”. Over 13,000 lobbyists now spend $2.5 billion a year in trying to influence Congress: the “hired guns” on K Street are big stuff. Bass includes articles on Campaign Finance, Soft Money, FECA and the McCain‐Feingold Act of 2002 (listed under its proper name). But there was nothing on the PAC's themselves or pressure groups or lobbying and the “revolving door”. Since these groups are virtually woven in the fabric of the main parties, I think the whole topic deserves more heavy‐duty treatment.
Other scattered items were wanting: the Christian Coalition and Moral Majority, which have been so influential in recent elections, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, the Rockefeller Republicans, the Militia movement, George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. More important was finding nothing under Roosevelt Coalition – a hugely important piece of modern party building. FDR's assemblage of the organized working class, the southern states and the blacks gave us the “Fifth Party System”, a system which endured until Nixon's bid for the south in 1968. Other items, like those on the party nominating conventions, were just too skimpy. In all fairness, however, one appreciates the problem of drawing a line, especially in a short book, between the subject of parties as such and overlapping issues like Congress, elections and the mainstream of American politics.
Now an index would have been helpful here. One can forgive the occasional omission but not the book's lack of an index. An index is the prime method of giving readers an alternative access to names and terms which do not merit an entry in their own right. There simply is no excuse for printing a work like this without an index; a black mark, I am afraid. In addition to that, it would have been valuable to print a plain list of every article in the book at the beginning. It helps readers to navigate through the contents.
What about the biographical entries? Lots of useful data can be found here, some of it on fairly obscure people: chairmen of National Democratic Committees and failed candidates at party conventions. But here too there is a roster of inexplicable omissions. Bass should have covered a wider range of figures: from a bygone age we have nothing on such movers‐and‐shakers as Roscoe Conkling and, a little later, Nelson Aldrich and Senators Orville and Thomas Platt (no relation). In recent times Joe McCarthy, Ralph Nader and, amazingly, Ted Kennedy are all missed out. Maybe these names are buried in the text somewhere. I come back to my original refrain – an index please!
Now let us consider the supplementary material. The fifteen appendices include an assortment of office‐holders and a few statistics. These vary in usefulness. Presidents and Vice‐Presidents are easy to find; Floor Leaders in Congress and heads of the party National Committees less easy to find. Then comes the Bibliography. It amounts to thirty six pages and is divided into sections. Here is a new touch. Each section begins with the author's “recommendation”: an introductory item which he considers sound and reliable for the beginner. It is like taking “whatever the wine waiter recommends” when you order a meal instead of trying to decipher the wine list. To keep up with the times, Bass ends with about 20 good web sites on the subject.
This book seems to be Professor Bass's own work. He is the author, not the editor. Bass, who has taught for 30 years at Ouachita Baptist University, a small liberal arts college in Arkansas, names the party system as one of his big interests. The book first appeared in 2000 and this second edition has given him a chance to include modern luminaries like John Kerry and the present incumbent and vice‐incumbent (both of whom are pictured on the front, grinning broadly). I was disappointed by the limitations of the book but perhaps it is simply not possible to do justice to such a big subject in 400‐odd pages. Physically, it is a modest sized octavo, well printed on good paper. I am not happy about the binding because for £75 one expects a sewn book, not pages which have been glued together. It remains to be seen whether this modern binder's glue will last. As for the text, Bass has written a solid, utilitarian volume: limited but quite useful.
