Martin Meenagh blog

  The Republican party dominated the period between 1876 and 1912, winning all but two presidential elections and Congressional elections in 1880, 1888, and from 1894 to 1910. The two Democratic administrations of the period, in addition, were one man, Grover Cleveland, who was elected twice non-consecutively, and with only pluralities of the popular vote. Similarly, Democratic dominance between 1932 and 1980 was characterized by every Congress being Democratic with two exceptions between 1932 and 1980, and 8 Democratic victories in presidential elections in the same period. At first glance, dominance can be attributed in both cases to a combination of events and party weakness. Democrats in the late nineteenth century were split between Southern ‘Bourbons’, populists, bimetallists, and over religion, to the point where nominating conventions were frequently deadlocked. Republicans, by contrast, proved capable of developing and applying a locally based infrastructure nationally...

  Prohibition in the United States was a product of two wars and protestant social reform. It had a substantial latent underside of anti-Irish, anti-German, and anti-Catholic support. Characterising it in such a way places it alongside campaigns against Mormon polygamy, prostitution, and immigration between the Civil War and the First World War. It has been viewed as seperable from the movement for female suffrage, which arose at mostly the same time and the coalition of support for which broadly overlapped with prohibition. The great historian Richard Hofstadter, in fact, called it a ‘ludicrous parody’ of social reform in 1955. Such an outlook also allows for the limited federal prohibition regulations of 1918 in the Wartime Prohibition Act to be seen as opening the door to a ‘constitutional blunder’ in 1919, when Nebraska ratified the prohibition amendment, leaving New York, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nevada isolated. A standard narrative has develope...