The Intellectual Origins of Mass Parties and Mass Schools in the Jacksonian Period: Creating a Conformed Citizenry. By Julie M. Walsh. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998. Pp. xi, 288. $64.00.) The Emergence of the Common School in the U.S. Countryside. By Donald H. Parkerson and Jo Ann Parkerson. (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 178. Illustrations, figures, tables. $79.95.) "Because schools have tended in the past to cultivate apathy and passivity," Julie Walsh notes at the outset of The Intellectual Origins of Mass Parties and Mass Schools in the Jacksonian Period, "people have understandably forgotten that schools are supposed to perform public and thus political functions" (3). Such an insight bears articulation, as does Walsh's driving thesis that across the ideological board, the "internalized discipline" (68) of Jacksonian "pedagogical prescriptions . . . tended to cultivate a passive citizenry" (31). And so the reader begins this book hoping for a trenchant deconstruction of political categories and a subsequent revelation of some "deep level" (33) in which the "hegemonic mind-set" (33) of the Jacksonian episteme will be bared. The assertion that political "[p]references are not driven by coherent ideologies . . . but by something else" (11) is quite compelling. The only problem is that Walsh never offers a satisfying idea of what that "something else" might be. In fact, this study staggers as soon as it begins to try to prove its point. Using as her basis the period of 1830s and early 1840s, when the "founding of a system of mass schools followed on the heels of the introduction of mass parties" (4), Walsh intends to "highlight both consensus and conflict among selected representatives of three of the political parties of this time, namely the Whigs, Democrats and Workingmen" (4). Her test cases consist of such oft-examined figures as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, Horace Mann, Orestes Brownson, Robert Dale Owen, Thomas Skidmore, and Frances Wright. First, Walsh provides a thumbnail of biographical information. Then she portrays the pedagogical approach of each individual as yet another example of the procedural paradox of internalizing strict, regulatory discipline in order to assure independent yet responsible action within a democratic society. In passing, Walsh notes a number of interesting conjunctions, such as the twin Whig foci of "internal commerce" (roads and canals) and "internal improvements in their rhetoric" (166), but does not pursue them. She contrasts Democrats as extollers of "nature" and Whigs as venerators of "culture" (166) but appears unable to redeem such political oversimplifications by placing them anywhere within those unsettling new epistemologies of order that would eventually typify the nineteenth century. The uncanny, across-the-political-board thrust of increasing classification and regulation within common schools (roll, grade levels, standardized marks) appears to have happened within a cultural void, as though such schemes were not at the very least a part of some elaborate reaction formation to the growing social chaos of Jacksonian America. The spectre of tautology haunts these pages, particularly regarding Walsh's introduction of and eventual reliance upon highly synthetic categories such as "organic republicanism," "egalitarian republicanism" (5) and "rights," "utility," and "democratic liberalism" (6). These highly factitious organizational principles never succeed in convincing the reader that they have any reason for being introduced other than that they eventually may be destroyed. In fact, Walsh revels in her highly refined taxonomies of liberalism and republicanism, offering tables (14, 18) that themselves seem to have emerged from some wacky eighteenth-century political nosology. She ultimately finds herself imprisoned by her own rhetoric. The Federalists looked to organic republicanism for direction, while the Clubs relied upon the egalitarian variant. …