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Author ORCID Identifier
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
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.