Two Party System

In Kyle’s notes on the John Quincy Adams biography, the two-party system is the historical hinge Adams sits astride: he is framed as the last “man of the whole country” before parties hardened into the system we have today. The book stresses that America’s Founders were unified in believing political parties were inimical to republican government — “vehicles for selfish or sectional interests as opposed to national and collective ones.” Party spirit arose in the Federalist–Republican struggle, but once the Federalist Party “shrank into insignificance, the nation had returned to a one-party, or in effect no-party, rule” — the so-called Era of Good Feelings that Adams’s presidency straddled before the parties re-formed.

The notes connect this to the rise of the partisan press: the U.S. went from four hundred newspapers in 1810 to eight hundred by 1825, “outrageously partisan” journals that “played a central role in organizing the factions into which the country was becoming divided.” Adams himself read thirty to forty papers a day. The modern two-party system, in this telling, crystallized in the partisan-newspaper-fueled factionalism of the 1820s.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — Adams as the transitional figure between the Founders’ anti-party ideal and the hardened two-party system, amid the rise of the partisan small-town newspaper.