Tragedy At Avondale by Robert P. Wolensky

It’s also the story about the individuals who helped shape political history in Pennsylvania throughout much of the twentieth and the opening years of the twenty- first centuries. Pivotal Pennsylvania is much more than an insightful interpretation of election results and the factors that played a significant role. He analyzes results by parties, by rural and urban areas, and by voter turnout.

He follows the campaign trails in Pennsylvania from primaries through conventions to elections.

He organizes the book by decades, each of which is given a chapter - ”The Republicans Revitalize: the 1940s,” “The Competitive State: the 1960s,” and “The Democrats Take Control: the 1990s” - in which he probes the ways in which the Keystone State’s political leaders and its voters affected the elections. The author explores in great depth the presidential elections from 1932 to 2004, a period during which eight Republican candidates and eleven Democratic contenders won the votes of Pennsylvanians. The Great Depression and the New Deal profoundly affected politics in Pennsylvania.

The new Democrats included African Americans, especially in the urban areas of the North, who had been Republicans since Reconstruction. The popularity of FDR and his ambitious economic recovery measures prompted another realignment of millions of voters, this time to the Democratic Party. Considered a “realigning election,” McKinley forged a coalition of businessmen, professionals, skilled factory workers, and prosperous farmers. McKinley’s election is considered one of the most dramatic in American political history. The New Deal, according to the author, produced the most profound change in the nation’s politics since the 1896 election of Republican William McKinley, who defeated Democratic challenger William Jennings Bryan. Terry Madonna, one of Pennsylvania’s foremost political analysts, opens with an explanation of how the Democratic Party emerged in the throes of the Great Depression and how, following the 1932 election, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated his New Deal.

Pivotal Pennsylvania: Presidential Politics from FDR to the Twenty-First Century by G. Published by the Pennsylvania Historical Association, 2008 126 pages, paper, $14.95 Pivotal Pennsylvania: Presidential Politics from FDR to the Twenty-First Century

Tragedy At Avondale by Robert P. Wolensky