The Old American State: The Spoils System & the Long U.S. Capitalist Transition

Jeffrey Broxmeyer, University of Toledo

This paper offers a historical materialist interpretation of the U.S. capitalist transition during the Long Nineteenth Century. I argue that the political clientelism endemic to the “Old American State” (namely: the spoils system) was the organizational expression of capital’s fusion with earlier modes of social inequality at the level of household production, which shaped U.S. state formation in patrimonial, racialized, and mercenary directions of uneven bureaucratic development. The patrimonial character of the pre-modern party-state, and its fusion of popular democracy with imperial rule, made the Old American State highly response to the demands of capital accumulation. My examination of the capitalist state is examined through three types of state power: the coercive apparatus (such as sheriffs, municipal police, and military); the fiscal apparatus (the Treasury department, especially, federal custom houses, but also at the local level with subnational fiscal powers); and economic development (both in public works and also land speculation). Between the 1830s and 1930s, these three corners of the Old American State were interpellated by imperatives of the mass party to win elections, as well as by the needs of different kinds of emergent capitalists: agrarian market producers employing both waged and enslaved labor, merchants, bankers, and land speculators, among others. Crucially, there was little to no separation between the individual officeholder’s household, party organization, business interests, and various forms of state property. Whoever could capture the party, then, and mobilize for victory, gained advantages in capital accumulation. Officeholding through the spoils system was the medium of party rule, where elected and appointed politicians became bourgeois through their control over public authority. Elements of the Old American State endured well into the twentieth century and beyond the rise of the modern administrative state; for instance, with the persistence of officeholding emoluments and other customary practices of petty accumulation.

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 Presented in Session 170. Critical Perspectives on US History