Don't Whig Out

Sean Wilentz responds to Fred Siegel.
Compiled by Kevin Arnovitz
Updated Thursday, Dec. 15, 2005, at 12:21 PM ET

That's An Overstatement: Sean Wilentz is flattered by the review of his new book in Slate, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln — a work Fred Siegel calls "impressive" — but the historian takes issue with Siegel's interpretation of an article Wilentz penned in The New York Times Magazine on the parallels between today's Republican Party and the Whig Party of old:

I was delighted to read the review of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Fred Siegel, a historian I greatly admire. Yet I'm afraid that he has misapprehended my book as a brief on behalf of the modern Democratic Party. He bases his misreading not on the book itself but on an article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, which pointed out some of the similarities between the forgotten Whig Party and today's Republican Party. Siegel says that the article flatly equates the Whigs and the Bush Republicans, and that this somehow betrays an esoteric polemical agenda behind my book. Actually, the article stated that "there are significant differences between the Whigs and today's conservatives." I pointed out some important points of similarity between the past or the present, but did not, as Siegel surmises, construct "a tidy lineage" or "suggest there are historical plumb lines" that place all virtue on the side of one political party. Nor does my book claim, even cryptically, that only good things were contained in the Jacksonian Democratic Party, and only bad things were Whig.