Julian Gumperz (1898-1972) in 1923
Julian Gumperz did a piece for the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung Vol 1 (1932). For the most part, his analysis does not hold up well. And it has faults that should have been obvious in 1932.
In theory, a social-democratic or Marxist view in 1932 of the American Revolution and the American Constitution wouldn't be different from a capitalist ("bourgeois") democratic viewpoint. The general democratic understanding, and the social-democratic/socialist understanding in particular, was that capitalism and the democratic-republican form of government with which it became associated in its classical forms - the Glorious Revolution in England, the American Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789 - was a progressive development in history, a process in which the emerging capitalist order and the new social classes and political consciousness that accompanied them established a form of government more suited to the demands of the historical period and its dominant economic system. Classical liberal historical accounts might use a different theoretical framework to describe it than socialists, but they would be in agreement with the basics as I've described them here.
His analysis of American parties has some valuable points, particularly his description of how lobbies were the primary form in which specific economic interests including labor most directly asserted themselves in American politics. He also gives a good description of how a reform like the direct primary could in fact function in a less democratic way than the smoke-filled-room approach they replaced in the early years of the 20th century.
Gumperz argues that the Progressive reform of the direct primary, which was meant to give the party rank-and-file a more democratic role in selecting the party's candidates, in fact made the process less democratic. Only small percentage of the party's voters actually show up for primaries, giving the urban party "machines" particular clout, because they could turn out the voters for their preferred candidates. (Today, lobbies make their preferences felt through campaign donations which are necessary for the primary campaigns.)
Gumperz takes special note of the "huge influence" that women's organizations have as lobbies in the United States, without further exploring the democratic implications of that fact. That influence was built from the early 19th century by primarily female activists building grass-roots organizations using methods that emerged from the Jacksonian democratic movement.
He also takes account of the role of African-American voters and the slavery issue and their effect on the US party system. But he doesn't mention the segregation system and what a radical limitation on small-d democratic politics that represented in the US. It's not a trivial fault, since it had such a central role in what the Democratic Party was in 1932. And on how the seemingly non-ideological nature of the American parties, on which he places a great deal of emphasis, actually played out in practice.
But the main lines of his analysis of the American party system are badly flawed. In the most immediate sense, he didn't see the ideological and party-political shift that would become apparent in the 1932 elections, and was already evident in the Presidential election of 1928. The Democratic Party would become the Party of the working class and attract increasing African-American votes in the North, which would reshape the Party landscape.
But even without the benefit of hindsight from the subsequent developments, his analysis is problematic.
It's cringe-inducing today to see him citing Lawrence Dennis' book Is Capitalism Doomed? (1932). In fairness, in that book Dennis wasn't yet advocating an American brand of fascism to solve the problems he saw in American society, and hadn't yet become the leading intellectual of the Hitler-loving far right in the US. (Lawrence was a thoroughly weird character, an African-American who passed for white and became a leading American fascist, as Gary Younge describes in The fascist who 'passed' for white Guardian 04/04/2007.) And what he quotes from Dennis is a fairly straightforward observation that the displacement of rural farm populations to the cities where they became part of the industrial work force didn't tend to reinforce their devotion to prevailing doctrines concerning private property. (In the 3/1933 number of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Gumperz gives Is Capitalism Doomed? a glowing review.)
Gumperz provides the following basic account of the US party system: The Constitution of 1789 was a conservative effort to block the democratic currents making themselves manifest in American society, the currents which had fired the American Revolution itself. Parties have never been particularly ideological in the United States, but rather vehicles through which various capitalist factions have competed for power. Since the division of powers in the Constitution effectively restricts popular democratic aspirations by largely paralyzing the federal government, the political parties also became a necessary vehicle to make the federal government function. Only through means of the parties could the inherently paralyzing tendencies of the three-way division of power and the bicameral national Congress be sufficiently surmounted for the national government to function effectively at all.
From the time of Andrew Jackson until the turn of the 20th century, he argues, the basic conflict in American politics was between industrial capitalism, represented by the Republican Party, and capitalist agriculture, represented by the Democratic Party as the party of agrarian "resistance". His description of the party differences as industrial vs. agrarian is so superficial as to have barely surface plausibility. The notion that the Democratic Party was ever a "purely agrarian" one, much less that it was so into the days of Bryan's leadership, is silly.
His account of the Constitution is based heavily on the arguments of historian Charles Beard, whom he cites, and they don't hold up to scrutiny. Gumperz, like Beard, is just off-base in arguing that the Constitution represented a reactionary restraint of democracy. In fact, using the left-right schema that emerged during the French Revolution, the Constitution was defended by the democratic "left" and generally opposed by the reactionary "right", who supported rule by the wealthy and included most of those who favored an American version of monarchy.
He doesn't understand the significance of Jacksonian democracy, and seems unaware that the Jacksonian movement represented the emerging urban labor movement among its core constituencies. He doesn't even mention the Abolitionist movement, nor does he discuss the emergence of the Whig and Republican Parties. I was tempted to stop reading on the third page of his article, where he drops the historical whopper that James Madison, one of the most important leaders of Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, had been a leader of the Federalist Party along with Alexander Hamilton. That's a very basic error of fact, and one that also undermines any confidence in his Beard-derived analysis of the early Republic.
Gumperz is very critical of the "spoils system", which he understands superficially. He rightly credits Andrew Jackson with initiating it, but mostly misses the democratic significance it had in 1829, when Jackson took office as President. though he does mention in passing the "hard-fought democratic achievement" that Jackson's Spoils System represented. He describes the city party machines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a conventional Progressive manner as sordid, corrupt institutions promoting personal servility to Party bosses. The urban party machines, he charges, "usurped the power which Constitutionally belonged to the voters".
Oddly, he does quote one source approvingly who explains some of the practical nuances of the party machines and contradicts the stereotypical image of machines as simply a corrupt bunch of party hacks. But he doesn't seem to grasp that the machines had particular benefits for working-class voters. Contrary to the Progressive narrative that long dominated American history writing on the urban party machines, more recent analyses have stressed their practical value as vehicles of working-class participation in democratic politics and as mechanisms that directly responded to many practical needs of working people.
In fact, the great strength and organizational basis for the longterm success of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) in Vienna, a success that was evident in 1932 and which continues to this day, was based on what was and is a urban party machine. Given that "red Vienna" was then and is now one of the great success stories of Social Democracy, it's surprising that he didn't make that connection in this 1932 article.
Gumperz' argument is confused on the ideological nature of American parties. He argues that the direct primary in connection with the party machines sharpens the distinctions between the parties. But he doesn't explain how that meshes with his picture of American parties as non-ideological, and of direct primaries as having their potentially democratic function mitigated by city machines.
In fact, after making the argument about party primaries promoting distinctions, he goes on to argue that personalities rather than programs are particularly important in American elections, because the political programs are so little different. He does put it in the context that "the parties in the United States are not class organizations in the programmatic sense of the word," perhaps his point is that because American parties didn't have the kind of more specific class allegiances that European parties did, that the programmatic distinctions were less significant. But if that is his point, he doesn't spell it out very clearly. In his presentation, it is lobbies that give more clear expression to class interests in American politics than the parties themselves.
He seems not to appreciate the specific institutional effect of the winner-take-all electoral districts on making the American system tend heavily toward a two-party structure. This neglect undercuts his attempts to explain why, in comparison to Europe, a distinctive Labor Party or other distinction interest-group based parties have not emerged.
Tags: frankfurt school, julian gumperz
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