The paradox of progress : economic change, individual enterprise, and political culture in Michigan, 1837-1878 / Martin J. Hershock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hershock, Martin J., 1962-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Republican Party (U.S. : 1854- )--History--19th century.

Republican Party (U.S. : 1854- ).

History.

Michigan--Politics and government--1837-1950.

Michigan.

Politics and government.

Michigan--Economic conditions.

Economic conditions.

Physical Description:

xvi, 324 pages : maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Athens : Ohio University Press, [2003]

Summary:

The Civil War era proved to be a time of transformation for Michigan's state economy. Rapidly climbing prices, mechanization, and an incessant demand for agricultural products and livestock encouraged Michigan farmers to turn from traditional subsistence crops to commercial farming. The mining, manufacturing, and lumber industries boomed, and immigrants flooded into the state. The harbinger and apotheosis of Michigan's new market economy was, of course, the railroad, and its arrival in the back-country brought the new economic order to the doorsteps of rural producers. Martin Hershock traces the ways in which all classes in the state of Michigan found themselves simultaneously attracted to the enticements of the new world of the market and repulsed by its excess and instability. The Paradox of Progress is a fascinating study of Michigan history and politics as well as an insightful analysis of the factors underlying the history of the GOP and its evolution from the party that supported the antislavery movement, free soil, free labor, and Lincoln the Rail-Splitter into the party of Mark Hanna, J. P. Morgan, and William McKinley.

Americans have long recognized the central importance of the nineteenth-century Republican Party in preserving the Union, ending slavery, and opening the way for industrial capitalism. On the surface, the story seems straightforward -- the party's "free labor" ethos, embracing the opportunity that free soil presented for social and economic mobility and condemning the danger that slavery in the territories posed for that mobility, foreshadowed the GOP's later devotion to unfettered enterprise and industrial capitalism. In reality, however, the narrative thread is not so linear. This work examines a contradiction that lay at the heart of the supremely influential ideology of the early Republican Party.

The Paradox of Progress explores one of the most profound changes in American history -- the transition from the antimarket, antimonopoly, and democratic ideology of Jacksonian America to the business-dominated politics and unregulated excesses of Gilded Age capitalism. Guiding this transformation was the nineteenth-century Republican Party. Drawing heavily from both the promarket commitments of the early Whig Party and the anticapitalist culture of Jackson's Democratic Party, the early Republican Party found itself torn between these competing values. Nowhere was this contested process more obvious or more absorbing than in Civil War-era Michigan, the birthplace of the Republican Party. In The Paradox of Progress Martin Hershock reveals how, in their determination to resolve their ideological dilemma, Republicans of the Civil War era struggled to devise a formula that would enable them to win popular elections and to model America's acceptance of Gilded Age capitalism.

Contents:

1 "We Were then, as it were, Still in Our Knickerbockers" Michigan's Growing Pains 1

2 "Because the People are, by the Grace of God, Free and Independent" Jacksonian Political Culture in Michigan, 1850 12

3 "This Age is Big With Importance" Socioeconomic Change in Michigan, 1850-1860 52

4 "Politics ... have Undergone a Thorough Change" The Crucible of the Republican Party 76

5 "Misfortunes Make Strange Bedfellows" The Creation and Consolidation of the Republican Coalition in Michigan, 1854-1860 118

6 "We Know no Party Until the Contest Is Over" Michigan Partisan Politics during the Civil War Era, 1860-1866 158

7 "I am Sick and Pained that our Republicans so Act" The Fraying of the Republican Coalition 193.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-307) and index.

ISBN:

0821415131

OCLC:

52373894