The Politicians & the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics

Wilentz (George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton Univ.), author of the Bancroft Prize-winning The Rise of American Democracy, a definitive sweeping political history of the antebellum period, here argues that economic and social equality are goals that have defined American political discourse since the country's founding. More so than ideological homogeneity, political partisanship and its trials have been and are still essential components for achieving those aims. All the personages covered in this book were embedded in an age in which partisanship was the temper of the times, and simultaneously iconic symbols of egalitarianism: for instance, Thomas Paine's entreaties to American independence, John Quincy Adams and antislavery in the antebellum period, and the Homestead Strike and organized labor. Each chapter is essentially a book review or two in context, including an evaluation of Michael Kazin's American Dreamers, of which the author is especially critical, and which could be read in conjunction with this volume.