The GF asks me an interesting question today that I am not sure I have an answer to: why is national American politics between 1864 and 1898 such a black hole in the American memory?

The stories we tend to remember: reconstruction+its failure, "how the west was won," immigration waves, birth of industrial capitalism. But ask people to tell you what the GOP and the Dems were about in this era and you get blank stares. Why is this?

Few hypotheses:

1) The two central issue of these decades--gold vs silver standard, and the exact composition of the tariff--are arcane to modern ears, difficult to understand, and more difficult to translate easily to our own pol moment.

2) No commanding personality like Andrew Jackson or Woodrow Wilson to give the era a shape in the popular imagination

3) Our understanding of the era has been shaped greatly by the progressives who took over the political system right after it. One of the central claims of the progressive movement is that it needed to create a new administrative state because great social issues that arose in

the preceding 40 years could not be handled adequately by an antiquated political order. From the progressives view, then, the important events of the preceding 40 years were not political but social and economic,

and politics is mostly understood and remembered for its inability to keep pace with the issues that animated the progressives.

But honestly thats a bit like judging Nixon for opening up to China b/c of what PRC is doing in 2020. Politics of the late 19th century should be understood on its own terms, not simply as a way station on the road towards the progressives of the 1900s-1910s.

Elections in this period were bitterly bitterly contested and highly partisan. Very silly to pretend like those contests were over nothing whatsoever just b/c the progressives needed to blur the lines b/t the two sides to in order to justify a new constitutional order.