PREFACE，<br >~986<br >This story of rural and urban provincialism within the Democratic<br >party of the 192os is a critical look at regional and social clashes<br >in a time before the mass media has lessened differences within<br >most of American culture. I did not intend to be particularly hard<br >on either AI Smith s urban Democrats or the rural wing of the<br >party， looking to William Jennings Bryan and then to William<br >Gibbs McAdoo. But although The Politics of Provincialism is prob-<br >ably harsher on the McAdoo Democrats for their ties to the Ku<br >Klux Klan， prohibition， and anti-Catholicism， some academic lib-<br >erals said that the chapter called "The Brown Derby Campaign"<br >amounted to a demolition campaign against AI Smith--in the<br >style of Leslie Fiedler s "Hemingway in Ketchum" or Paul K.<br >Conkin s The New Deal， concerning FDR. Except for Lawrence<br >Levive s contemporaneous sympathetic study of Bryan s last de-<br >cade， Defender of the Faith (i965)， political histories had disdained<br >the Bryanites， perceiving them as bigoted persecutors of a more<br >vigorously and tolerantly democratic urban immigrant culture.<br >Many American historians had been raised on the liberal tradi-<br >tions of the New Deal that owe so much to urban voters in the<br >Democratic party. My unfavorable remarks about the hinterland<br >nativists therefore must have seemed no more or less than a dis-<br >passionate transcription of the truth， while my observations about<br >the big city were taken by some to be a gratuitous attack on social<br >forces that have rejuvenated and remade American society. I in-<br >tended no such attack. My own upbringing was upstate， rural，<br >and Protestant. But one component of that Protestantism was the<br ><br >