I don't usually write online book reviews, but after reading the seven overwhelmingly positive Amazon reviews of "Uneasy Alliances" I felt that someone needed to provide a reality check. I would like to preface my own very negative review by saying that I really like some of Frymer's other scholarship, especially on the tensions inherent in the New Deal coalition. I feel very differently about "Uneasy Alliances." Here is a direct quotation from an email I wrote to a graduate school classmate shortly after reading it for the first time:



"But speaking of Frymer, have you read the book of his assigned for [Professor X's] class? I thought it was pretty terrible. It starts with a plausible theoretical idea -- that of interest group 'capture' -- and then makes a mess of history in trying to apply it to American politics. My reaction to it was so adverse from the moment I started reading that I fear I may have missed out on its redeeming qualities, which it must have since [Professor X] assigned so much of it."



This quote still basically sums up my reaction to the book. Frymer wants to blame the two-party system for the oppression of African Americans in the U.S., but his argument is just not convincing. He takes an interesting idea ("capture") and tries to shoe-horn race relations in America into his theoretical framework. It doesn't fit. Blacks weren't oppressed because the parties colluded to shut out their political demands; they were oppressed because their demands for political and social equality were not supported by the vast majority of white Americans until well into the 20th century. It is the distribution of preferences in the American electorate that was to blame, not the structure of the party system. And it wasn't blacks' "capture" by the Republican Party that allowed their renewed oppression after Reconstruction; it was the fact that blacks were violently disfranchised in the South -- a outcome that was delayed until the end of the 19th century because of Republicans' partisan interest in safeguarding the voting rights of blacks, their strongest supporters in the region. There are similar logical (not to mention factual -- the book is full of factual errors) problems with Frymer's account of the civil rights era and beyond. In short, "Uneasy Alliances" makes a glib and superficially appealing argument, but it is fundamentally unconvincing to anyone with a thorough grasp of the history of race and politics in the United States. For a more convincing if somewhat less sweeping account of this topic, read Richard Valelly's The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (American Politics and Political Economy Series) instead.