This study began as a search for remedies for the familiar disease of party decline. It made sense to look for such remedies in the late nineteenth century, the period of American parties' supposed peak performance. Perhaps, I supposed, by better understanding the parties' defense of methods that have since come to be mistrusted, today's parties could be strengthened. This original purpose quickly collapsed. As I pursued the public and private writings of party leaders of the time, I was struck by just how willing they were to jettison much of what political scientists believe made the parties strong, and just how willing they were to adopt practices that presaged twentieth-century party politics. Instead of a ringing defense of traditional methods – along the lines of George Washington Plunkitt's famous series of very plain talks on very practical politics – I found a raging debate over the need to renew party organizations in America. This is odd. Why would party leaders be experiencing a crisis of confidence in parties at precisely the time that many political scientists believe parties to have been operating at optimal productivity?

This book is an account of their collective wondering, their struggle to preserve institutions that held great emotional and practical value to them, while adjusting them to a new political environment. It is a story of changing ideas and changing institutions, but it is also a story of what it is that allows institutions as loosely constructed as parties to perpetuate themselves.