Martin Meenagh blog

    The Spanish American War, conducted across a little under four months in the Summer of 1898, has often been seen as the inauguration of he twentieth-century power of the United States. In this telling, the American media and administration, armed with a growing Navy, overwhelmed a decaying European power and established dominance in the Caribbean, associated itself with democratic movements in Cuba, and colonised the Philippines as the consequence of a form of republican Imperialism. This energised the American economy after the panic of 1893, and helped heal the wounds of the Civil War amongst white Americans. As so often with historical events, the commonly understood narrative is in itself a product of some of the contingent needs of tellers. The War could in fact be contextualised as the culmination of Gilded Age trends which speak as much to the past as the future. For example, both Secretary of State Blaine and President Harrison, in office between 1889 and 1893, wer...

  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...

  Although crude opinion polls were reported by the Delaware and North Carolina press for the 1824 presidential election, they were essentially private ‘straw polls’, and modern ‘scientific’ polling can only be traced from the 1930s. It is therefore hard to look to direct data from the 1868 and 1872 presidential elections, as well as testimonial evidence, to gauge how US Grant was seen by contemporaries.  The fact that he carried 31 out of 37 states, won by a margin of greater than 11% over his opponent, and was mooted for a third term in 1880 does not suggest that he was widely viewed as a failure at the time. One of the youngest men to be president, Grant was vigorous in office, and both wielded executive power in the South, and made proposals both of consequence and potential from 1869 onwards. He was not marked by personal scandal, and, as his tours beyond the United States showed, was popular abroad. Grant is however often blamed for the failure of reconstruction, and f...

  This is rather a longer post than usual, because I watched this campaign from afar when I was 15, and felt from the beginning, with the arrogance of youth, that I were watching a slow motion car crash. It was not the first political disappointment I experienced by any means, but it was a memorable one.   Both the Democratic and the Republican Party laboured under difficulties in the period leading up to the 1988 presidential nominations. On the Republican side, vice-president Bush had been closely associated with the Iran-Contra scandal which had damaged the presidency of Ronald Reagan in his second term. A split had also opened between the evangelical supporters of the Republican Party, who had largely supported the religious leader Pat Robertson in the early primaries, Bob Dole, who was a leader with substantial midwestern and conservative support, and George Bush. Though Bush had powered through to win the Republican nomination, he was, for someone so qualified—he had...

  Abraham Lincoln, for most of his career, was a failed politician. He was a candidate for the Illinois General Assembly in 1832. He lost. He was a candidate for a Whig nomination for the House of Representatives in 1843. He lost. He attempted to become a Commissioner of the General Land Office under President Taylor, which was a bureaucratic role, but was turned down. He was elected to the Illinois legislature in 1854 but did not take his seat, and in 1858, he lost the United States Senate seat for Illinois to Stephen A. Douglas. He was a compromise candidate for President in 1860, won a four-way election, and was promptly discounted and abused across the United States and Confederacy, as well as abroad, until having to create his own party to run for reelection in 1864, which was unexpected.  All Lincoln could really show in terms of elections between 1832 and 1860 was a single term as a member of the House of Representatives in a failing Whig party between 1846 and 1848. ...