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36 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Tragic Genius and the American Tragedy, December 31, 2003
Martin van Buren invented the American Democratic Party.More broadly, he was responsible as much as any other single man for the overall political party structure which exists in the United States to this day. Yet, to most of his latter-day countrymen, he is merely one of those forgettable nobodies who inhabited the White House between Andy Jackson and Honest Abe. Joel Silbey's readable and engaging book tries to correct that historical neglect. Silbey ably tells the story of van Buren's rise from modest beginnings to dominance of the New York political scene, van Buren's movement to the national stage and his restructuring of the national political party system, his ascendance to the Presidency, and his ultimate failure to attain his long-term political goals. As fascinating as is the story of van Buren's successes, it is his failures which hold the greatest lessons for posterity. As a young, loyal Jeffersonain, van Buren early in his career supported "Mr. Madison's War" (the War of 1812). But the increase in federal power and enhancement of federal legitimacy which came from that war led the country in the direction of expanded federal activity and authority relative to the states. This offended van Buren's laissez-faire/states-rights Jeffersonian sensibilities. To combat what he denounced as resurgent Federalism, van Buren created a new political structure around a new political party based on states rights, limited government, and laissez-faire economic policy. That party was the Jacksonian Democratic Party and, until the end of the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party largely adhered to the principles which van Buren imprinted upon it at its birth. (It may seem strange to hear that the Democratic Party was, through most of its history, the limited-government/states-rights party in the United States. Yet, as late as 1928, Frank Kent, in his lengthy "The Democratic Party: A History" defined states rights as the central unifying principle of the Democratic Party. It was only in the depression of the 1930s that party positions were reversed and the Democrats abandoned the founding principles upon which van Buren had built the party.) Although the Democrats did generally adhere to van Burenite principles through the nineteenth century, in the course of the nineteenth century the Democratic Party slowly lost its ability to control the nation's destiny. By the middle of the twentieth century, the party had abandoned all of its founding principles: van Buren would have been appalled by the militarism, welfare-statism, corporate favoritism, and outright imperialism which now characterize the Republic he so loved. What went wrong? Van Buren himself was brought low by two intractable problems of nineteenth-century America: imperial expansion and slavery. As Silbey narrates in detail, van Buren lost the Democratic nomination in 1844 due to his refusal to countenance imperial expansion (the annexation of Texas, which led, ultimately, to the U.S. seizure of half of Mexico). Van Buren vacillated wildly in his attitudes toward the slave states: as President he was an outspoken enemy of the abolitionists and ally of the slave power, but in 1848 he became the Presidential candidate of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party. In his final years, van Buren endorsed Abraham Lincoln's military crusade against the slave states, a crusade that decisively destroyed the states-rights position which had been the guiding star of van Buren's political life. But perhaps the ultimate problem, which van Buren failed to perceive, was the inner logic of the Constitutional structure established in 1787. The Constitution, unlike the preceding Articles of Confederation, created a strong federal Executive and granted the power of taxation to the central government: the Constitutional system was, in its intrinsic logic, despite the Founders' intentions, not a confederation of sovereign states but a centralized, national government. Of course, neither the actual text of the Constitution nor the intentions of its authors mandated the huge, interventionist, imperialist federal government which we possess today. But to believe, as the Framers and van Buren did believe, that the Constitutional government could be prevented from turning into an all-encompassing leviathan was politically naive. So great was van Buren's political genius (he was known in his time as the "Little Magician") that he almost succeeded in his grand historical aims. For over three decades, until the catastrophe of the War Between the States, the poltical structures created by van Buren succeeded in defying the logic of history and keeping America as a decentralized federation rather than a centralized nation-state. But van Buren's grand design for a strictly limited federal government was ultimately wrecked by the War Between the States and by the economic and geopolitical disasters of the twentieth century. In our own day, both American citizens and all the nations of the world must confront the results of van Buren's historically tragic failure. Can the federal government of the United States of America somehow be restrained in either its domestic powers or its international adventurism? Silbey's brief but fascinating book is a cautionary warning to all who now grapple with this central problem facing the human race.
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