Confidence man and canny operative, charlatan and manipulator--William A. A. Carsey emerged from the shadow of Tammany Hall to build a career undermining working-class political organizations on behalf of the Democratic Party. Mark A. Lause's biography of Carsey takes readers inside the bare-knuckle era of Gilded Age politics. An astroturfing trailblazer and master of dirty tricks, Carsey fit perfectly into a Democratic Party that based much of its post-Civil War revival on shattering third parties and gathering up the pieces. Lause provides an in-depth look at Carsey's tactics and successes against the backdrop of enormous changes in political life. As Carsey used a carefully crafted public persona to burrow into unsuspecting organizations, the forces he represented worked to create a political system that turned voters into disengaged civic consumers and cemented America's ever-fractious two-party system.
Mark A. Lause is a professor in the department of history at the University of Cincinnati. His many books include Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era and Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class.
Introduction Acknowledgments Prologue Carsey's Paternities: The Son of the Streets and the Odysseys of Father Columbia Paper Party Power Broker: The Entrepreneurial Roots of Labor Reform Insurgency Independents and Partisan Pantomimes: The Dilemma of Third Parties under a Two-Party System Counterfeiting Class: The Secret Society Tradition and the Deep Origins of the American Federation of Labor Monopolizing Antimonopolism: Ben Butler and the Preemption of Insurgency The Path through Populism: From Henry George to William Jennings Bryan Epilogue Carsey's Progeny: The Forgotten Grandfather of American Progressivism and the Political Unmaking of an American Working Class Notes Index
"Lause, one of our most talented historians of nineteenth century America, spotlights the influential political huckster William A. A. Carsey. More than a century before the Tea Party's phony 'grass roots' mobilizations, the underhanded techniques Carsey and his allies employed kept laborers from forming their own independent political organizations. An excellent study with a convincing answer to the age-old question: why no Labor Party in the U.S.?" --Chad E. Pearson, author of Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century
