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Jeffrey Broxmeyer, University of Toledo
Missing from contemporary debates over the “American Road To Capitalism” is the central role of quasi-capitalistic state institutions during the Long Nineteenth Century. By this I mean the outsized role of clientelism, which allowed for political parties to accumulate, invest, and therefore operate, in ways indirectly tied to social property relations. This paper contends that the Spoils System, a partisan variant of public administration from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Capital, represented a mixed historical state that was neither neo-feudal nor fully capitalist. The Spoils System developed as a reconfiguration of old regime forms of patronage dependence adapted to the new age of mass politics. Clientelism was renovated by organizing competition for control over public offices and their material perquisites via mass political mobilization for votes. The goals of political parties—Whigs and Democrats, and then Republicans and Democrats—were twofold: to extract via the state whatever collective resources necessary to win election, and also, to satisfy officeseekers’ quest for personal enrichment. America’s historical legacy of clientelism shaped its road to capitalism over the longue durée. By fusing the logic of capital accumulation with mass mobilization, the nineteenth-century Spoils System cast party politics with a statist class dependence that endures even today.
No extended abstract or paper available
Presented in Session 56. Critical Perspectives on U.S. Historical Development