New Books in American Politics

Mary E. Adkins has written Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida, 2016), an account of the reformation of the Florida state constitution in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the history of the state’s constitutions since it was first incorporated into the United States in the 1840s. Yet, she concentrates on the reform efforts begun during World War II and culminating in a new constitution in 1968. Adkins reviews the political interests that pushed for a new constitution, from the League of Women Voters to the new residents in the emergent southern coasts of Florida in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the process of reforming a constitution that was rooted in the traditional rotten borough politics of 19th-century Florida. She analyzes the impact of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s that forced states to reapportion their legislatures, contending that Florida’s districts were so malapportioned that without the Court’s decisions there might not have been any constitutional revision. Adkins also discusses today’s constitutional revision process, which is ongoing every 20 years and is occurring in 2017. Florida’s political context has always been an amalgam of traditional Southern politics and the emergent commercial and tourism-based economy of a coastal state. Adkin’s book illuminates how these conditions produced political conflict and constitutional change. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

31 Mai 20171h

From the moment he entered politics as the manager of John F. Kennedy’s 1952 Senate campaign, Robert Kennedy’s political career was subsumed into that of his older brother. With President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 his grief-stricken younger brother suddenly found himself unmoored politically. In The Revolution of Robert Kennedy: From Power to Protest after JFK (Bloomsbury Press, 2017), John Bohrer describes how Robert Kennedy came into his own in the years that followed. Now bearing the weight of a nation’s expectations, Robert faced both the pressure to uphold his brother’s legacy and the hostility of the new president. With Lyndon Johnson forestalling any effort to make Robert his running mate in 1964, Kennedy focused his aspirations instead on the United States Senate, winning a seat in New York against a popular incumbent. As Bohrer demonstrates, once in the Senate Kennedy quickly emerged as a political leader in his own right, as he used his outsized prominence to address the issues that mattered most to him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

25 Mai 20171h 2min

One of the rising stars in American politics during the 1930s was Paul Vories McNutt. As governor of Indiana, McNutt refashioned the state government to address its citizens needs during the Great Depression, and was seen by many of his contemporaries as a future president of the United States. Yet McNutt never attained this goal, and his political career ended barely a decade and a half after it began. In Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR (Indiana University Press, 2015), Dean Kotlowski recounts McNutt’s life and career, explaining both his many achievements and how his ultimate ambitions were frustrated. The son of a small-town Indiana lawyer, as a young man McNutt distinguished himself academically and socially, and after serving in the army during World War I he assumed leadership positions at both Indiana University and in the American Legion. As a Democrat, he won the governorship in the 1932 election, and over the course of his term he won plaudits for his effectiveness in the office. Yet afterward his ascent stalled, as his potential rivals steered him towards service as high commissioner in the Philippines in order to sideline him. McNutt returned in time to pursue the Democratic Party’s 1940 presidential nomination, but Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to run for a third term ended both McNutt’s hopes for it and what proved his best chance to become president. Though McNutt continued to serve in key offices throughout World War II, these lower-profile posts led to his eclipse politically and his abandonment of politics soon after. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2 Apr 201750min

John William McCormack served as Speaker of the House of Representatives throughout most of the 1960s, during which time he shepherded the legislation of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program through the chamber. As Garrison Nelson demonstrates in John William McCormack: A Political Biography (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), this was the culmination of a long political career that stretched back over a half-century to the impoverished South Boston neighborhood where McCormack was raised. There, in an environment where ethnic and class identities defined ones political prospects, McCormack covered up his father’s Scots Canadian heritage to establish his Irish Catholic bona fides. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1928, he was well positioned to benefit from the dramatic transformation in the fortunes of the Democratic Party during the Great Depression, becoming the House Majority Leader. As Nelson demonstrates, it was McCormack’s personal relationships which shaped his career, most notably those with Sam Rayburn, the legendary Speaker alongside whom McCormack would serve in the House leadership for over two decades, and John F. Kennedy, the scion of two Boston political families and a man who often found himself at odds with the longtime Congressman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

16 Mar 20171h 13min

Does sex play a determinative role in political contests? Recognising the dual political realities of voters holding gender stereotypes and female candidates achieving electoral success, Kathleen Dolan’s innovative book When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2014) is crucial for understanding the gendered dynamics of America’s political climate. As part of the Presidential Gender Watch 2016 Syllabus, Professor Dolan’s two-wave survey methodology delves into the gendered psyche of elections by analysing the public attitudes and voter choice of over 3000 individuals. Finding that gender stereotypes in voter consciousness are present but not determinative, Dolan rewrites the conventional wisdom that stereotyped attitudes are detrimental to a woman’s electability. However, in forcing the reader to acknowledge the nexus between voter and candidate, Dolan’s data analysis extends to campaign strategy. Based on the 2010 races for Congress and Governor, When Does Gender Matter? builds on the work of other political scientists that have found evidence of candidate emergence being gendered (Lawless and Fox 2010), and analyses every televised campaign ad of the candidates for whom the 3000 survey participants voted. In the gendered terrain between attitude and action, for both voter and candidate, Dolan’s scholarship provides a roadmap for its multi-disciplinary readership into the gendered psyche of American elections. Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonc’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture. Find her on twitter @TaylorFoxSmith3. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

21 Feb 201745min

With public debate about immigration law and policy at a peak, Anna Law is on the podcast this week to discuss her book The Immigration Battle in American Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2014) which came out in paperback in 2014. Law is the Associate Professor and Herb Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights Political Science at Brooklyn College, CUNY. In the book, Law assesses the role of the federal courts in immigration going back to the late 18th century. She follows the institutional evolution of the Supreme Court and the US Courts of Appeals through the early 2000s as new waves of immigrants arrive in the country. What she discovers is that by the turn of the 20th century, a division of labor developed between the two courts as the Courts of Appeals retained its original function as error-correction courts, and the Supreme Court was reserved for the most important policy and political questions. We ended our conversation about the book by reflecting on how the courts may treat the Trump administration executive order on immigration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

13 Feb 201718min

This week on the podcast, I speak with Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, the co-authors (along with Pei-te Lien and Christine Marie Sierra) of Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hardy-Fanta is Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Pinderhughes is University of Notre Dame Presidential Faculty Fellow as well as Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Africana Studies, and chair of the department of Africana Studies. Based on comprehensive data from the Gender and Multicultural Leadership (GMCL) National Database and Survey, Contested Transformations provides a baseline portrait of Black, Latino, Asian American, and American Indian elected officials at national, state, and local levels of government. The book presents a complex picture of office holders across race and gender groups and the various backgrounds, paths to public office, leadership roles, and policy positions. The authors argue that the advances in political leadership by people of color are transforming American politics, but these gains have been hard fought and struggles for equality continue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

6 Feb 201728min

In the forty years between 1881 and 1921, the United States Navy went from a small force focused on coastal defense to one of the world’s largest fleets. In Congress Buys a Navy: Politics, Economics, and the Rise of American Naval Power, 1881-1921 (Naval Institute Press, 2016), Paul Pedisich describes the role that the legislative branch played in making this happen. At the start of the period, the Navy possessed a more decentralized organization than today, with the bureau chiefs who ran it more responsive to Congress than the executive branch. The legislators who played critical roles in shaping policy during this period were often driven more by local concerns than any overarching vision of what the Navy should become. Starting in the 1880s, however, successive presidential administrations gradually persuaded Congress to provide more funding to build modern ships. Over time, America’s growing engagement in global affairs led to the expansion of the navy, as the acquisition of an overseas empire brought the United States into competition with European powers, which required a naval force that could defend the increasing number of American interests abroad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

30 Jan 20171h 10min