Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Dissertations that have an embargo placed on them will not be available to anyone until the embargo expires.
Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0703-6941
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
History
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
Jennifer Fronc
Second Advisor
Barbara Krauthamer
Third Advisor
Christian G. Appy
Fourth Advisor
Michael Hannahan
Subject Categories
Political History | United States History
Abstract
American historians have traditionally divided the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era; however, this arbitrary periodization obscures more than it reveals. My dissertation argues that the Republican and Democratic Parties—like the American nation—passed through a period of reconstruction. Using the four-way presidential elections of 1860 and 1912 as bookends, I examine national politics through the lens of the two generations of politicians—the Civil War and Progressive generations—who oversaw the United States’ transition from an agricultural to an industrial political economy. The Civil War generation’s inability to address the excesses of industrialization called into question classical liberalism’s emphasis on unfettered individualism for competing visions of a regulatory state. Touching off an internecine intergenerational struggle that spread from Democrats, in 1896, to Republicans, in 1912, both parties coalesced around competing visions of a federal regulatory state that took shape, ultimately establishing the ideological foundation of modern
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/14195745
Recommended Citation
Fobare, Christopher, "A Generational Divide: The Reconstruction of American Party Politics, 1865-1912" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1613.
https://doi.org/10.7275/14195745
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1613
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.