The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition£¬ 1918-1932

ISBN: 9780674689404

¶¨¼Û: 48.00

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PREFACE???
~986
This story of rural and urban provincialism within the Democratic
party of the 192os is a critical look at regional and social clashes
in a time before the mass media has lessened differences within
most of American culture. I did not intend to be particularly hard
on either AI Smith s urban Democrats or the rural wing of the
party??? looking to William Jennings Bryan and then to William
Gibbs McAdoo. But although The Politics of Provincialism is prob-
ably harsher on the McAdoo Democrats for their ties to the Ku
Klux Klan??? prohibition??? and anti-Catholicism??? some academic lib-
erals said that the chapter called \"The Brown Derby Campaign\"
amounted to a demolition campaign against AI Smith--in the
style of Leslie Fiedler s \"Hemingway in Ketchum\" or Paul K.
Conkin s The New Deal??? concerning FDR. Except for Lawrence
Levive s contemporaneous sympathetic study of Bryan s last de-
cade??? Defender of the Faith (i965)??? political histories had disdained
the Bryanites??? perceiving them as bigoted persecutors of a more
vigorously and tolerantly democratic urban immigrant culture.
Many American historians had been raised on the liberal tradi-
tions of the New Deal that owe so much to urban voters in the
Democratic party. My unfavorable remarks about the hinterland
nativists therefore must have seemed no more or less than a dis-
passionate transcription of the truth??? while my observations about
the big city were taken by some to be a gratuitous attack on social
forces that have rejuvenated and remade American society. I in-
tended no such attack. My own upbringing was upstate??? rural???
and Protestant. But one component of that Protestantism was the