Julian Zelizer - Governing America: The Revival of Political History

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my editor Clara Platter, who has been enthusiastic about this book since our lunch at Prospect House to discuss the idea. Chuck Myers has done a great job with the manuscript since Clara's departure. Scott Moyers, my literary agent, who is now the publisher at Penguin, helped to negotiate a deal that would make this possible. I would also like to thank Kety McCoach, my assistant at Princeton, who retyped all of these articles and book chapters that appear in the following pages. Over the years, many colleagues have read the pieces in this book and graciously provided me with comments. Numerous foundations and institutions have also given me financial support to conduct the research that resulted in the work found in these pages. The essays have been copyedited so that there are some minor changes from how they originally appeared.

The book is dedicated to all academic mentors at Brandeis University, including JoAnne Brown, Gordon Fellman, David Hackett Fischer, Louis Galambos, Morton Keller, James Kloppenberg, Sidney Milkis, J.G.A. Pocock, Dorothy Ross, and Ronald Walters, who helped guide me as I embarked on this project. Their training at a time when specializing in political history was not the smartest professional move meant the world to me. They inspired me to continue moving forward. I hope they are all proud of the outcome. In addition, I would like to thank the many scholars at other institutions who supported me in this endeavor.

Finally, the two readers of the manuscript provided outstanding suggestions for revision.

The essays in this volume have been copyedited since they were originally published. References are in the format in which they originally appeared.

ONE

Beyond the Presidential Synthesis:
Reordering Political Time

In 1948, the historian Thomas Cochran attacked the presidential synthesis, the prevailing framework that had structured most narratives about the history of the United States. Cochran (1948) pleaded with colleagues to broaden their analysis beyond Washington, DC, in order to examine the larger social and economic forces that shaped history, as well as developments at the local level. In most areas of history, Cochran's plea would be answered as social, cultural, and economic historians reconstructed our understanding of the past. Even political historians, who found themselves at the margins of the profession after the 1960s, developed complex interpretations of the revolutionary period and nineteenth century that were not centered exclusively on the presidency. But for post-World War II political history, the presidency remained dominant. The last major synthesis of postwar politics continued to place the presidency at the forefront of its story. Not only did presidential administrations mark political time, but the power of the presidency was itself a major theme.

The rise and fall of the presidency from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon was the central story of a newly formulated liberal presidential synthesis. Whereas historians had often explained politics through presidential administrations as a matter of convenience and familiarity, now the expanding role of the presidency became a central story. Organized around the four- to eight-year time frames of presidential administrations, mainstream historical narratives centered on the rapid expansion of presidential power after the New Deal. The executive branch, in these accounts, was the engine for liberal domestic and international policy. The creation of the national security state during the Cold War accelerated this trend, as did the growth of domestic programs in the 1960s. Even the Supreme Court was said to reflect the president who appointed its justices (Burns, 1965, p. 316). Just as important, the president was able to dominate television in a fashion that was difficult for other politicians. While the presidency came under fire during Nixon's administration, and Watergateera reforms in the mid-1970s triggered a resurgence of congressional power in areas such as war-making, historians argued that these reforms were unable to tame presidential power. It was in 1973 that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Coined the phrase that would forever identify this understanding of political history, when he published his landmark book about the Imperial Presidency.

Shortly after the liberal presidential synthesis crystallized in the 1960s, historians turned away from the study of government elites and institutions. There were few individuals who conducted archival research on the history of postwar political elites, other than those who were developing the existing framework. The recentness of the postwar period also constrained the historical vision of historians. The two generations who have written about postwar politics came of age in a culture that emphasized the presidency, both liberals who exalted Franklin Roosevelt's legacy in the 1950s and the New Left scholars who were disillusioned by President Lyndon Johnson. As a result, the synthesis remained in place and was incorporated into almost every textbook account of modern American history.

Just as historians turned away from political history, political scientists discovered crucial weaknesses in the presidential-centered history. In almost every subfield of political science, scholars found that the power of the presidency remained limited after World War II. In many political science analyses of policymaking, the president appeared as an official who faced enormous institutional constraints. In fact, exaggerated perceptions of executive power often bred frustration as presidents, and those who voted for them, discovered that the policymaking influence of the chief executive remained limited. In this context, Franklin Roosevelt seemed like more of an aberration than a norm. Furthermore, political scientists depicted a policymaking process that did not revolve around individual presidential administrations. This political science research made it clear that the liberal presidential synthesisboth its four- to eight-year time frames for organizing political history and its emphasis on the expansion of presidential powerneeded to be thoroughly reexamined by historians. But given the lack of interest in political elites within the historical profession, mainstream historians have never incorporated the findings of political scientists, resulting in a serious disjunction between historical research and that of political science. The liberal presidential synthesis lingered within the historical profession, more through intellectual inertia than any active defense of the argument.

This disjunction is particularly pertinent today, as historians seek to bring politics back into history. They must avoid blending social and cultural history with outdated narratives about political elites. Traditional political history, largely defined by the liberal presidential synthesis, must be reconceptualized by recognizing and incorporating the findings of political science. This essay begins by restating the basic narrative of the liberal presidential synthesis to revisit the important findings of the last generation of postwar political historians. These works, while providing a much richer understanding of each individual, have downplayed institutional questions about the evolution of the office over time. The essay then examines how political scientists since the 1960s have argued that presidential-centered history does not offer the best way to capture the second half of twentieth-century politics. To move beyond the presidential synthesis, it will be necessary to reorder what political scientist Stephen Skowronek (1993) called political time. Fortunately, an exciting body of interdisciplinary research has offered a solid foundation for historians who want to develop new strategies for writing about government elites and institutions. In the end, a revitalized approach to political history will provide a much richer understanding of the presidency itself.