There exists a great deal of academic work on American political institutions in the late nineteenth century and an equally rich body of literature on partisan gerrymandering. Surprisingly, there is very little written on the highly charged partisan gerrymandering controversies that frequently dominated state-level politics during the Gilded Age. In Representation and Inequality in Late Nineteenth-Century America, Peter Argersinger presents a wonderfully detailed, state-by-state account of the redistricting battles that played out between 1870 and 1898 in the American Mid-west.

Unlike redistricting in a post-Baker v. Carr (1962) world, state legislatures of the late nineteenth century had much more freedom to disregard federal law mandating that Congressional districts be as equal as is practicable. So, in the 1880s and early 1890s, when the Democratic Party won control of the redistricting apparatus in several Mid-western states, they drafted district plans that gave them electoral advantages equal in magnitude to the ones enacted by Republicans during Reconstruction. As a result, the partisan bias of a state's Congressional districts swung wildly from one party to the other following a change in partisan control. In 1890 Ohio, for instance, Democrats pushed through a plan which, based on the 1888 vote, would have given them fourteen of twenty-one districts, as opposed to the seven seats they had actually won under the Republican plan that was in place at the time (p. 46).

Unable to block such apportionment plans from becoming law, beginning with the 1892 landmark decision in Wisconsin, Republicans were successful in getting several of these Democratic gerrymanders invalidated by state supreme courts. Most of these decisions were made by courts composed of majorities that were appointed by, elected as, or more closely aligned with members of the Republican Party. And many of the decisions were made on party-line votes, which often added additional fuel to the partisan feud over redistricting; they also gave rise to further popular dissatisfaction with the apportionment process.

Throughout the book (and in the appendices), Argersinger dutifully reports partisan bias and inequality statistics for the various redistricting plans. He also discusses the technical grounds on which the courts upheld or overturned each of the redistricting plans. But it is his excellent use of the newspaper coverage of the unfolding political, legislative, and judicial disputes, and of the archived personal papers of several of the primary actors from those disputes, that makes this study so enjoyable to read. Argersinger spins these accounts into thrilling narratives of the hard-fought efforts to push apportionment bills through closely divided state legislatures and then defeat or defend them in court.

The book is also laced with several keen observations, such as Argersinger's assessment that the catastrophic Democratic defeats in the 1894 Congressional elections were due not solely to a popular backlash against hard economic times and inept governing, as historians have often suggested, but the magnitude of the losses were greatly exacerbated by the Democrats’ aggressive redistricting plans, which put too many of their own seats at risk in hopes of increasing their numbers in Congress (270).

At times, it does seem that the author is overselling the case that most of these efforts to gain a partisan electoral advantage are at the expense of equality and fairness in representation. For instance, while many of the court decisions do appear to be the actions of “activist” courts voting largely on party lines to undo district plans enacted by the opposing party, these decisions also appear to have gone a long way towards correcting a significant malapportionment problem, at least temporarily. Further, the Republican effort to overturn the Miner Law in Michigan, which awarded delegates to presidential candidates by district, rather than winner-take-all, is described as an effort to repeal a law that “assured a more equitable system of popular representation in presidential elections” (142). It's unclear, though, that even if all states awarded electors by district the results would have been more equitable in the 1890s, and it certainly would not be true today. Barack Obama, for instance, won the popular vote by three percentage points in 2012, but lost in 226 of the 435 Congressional districts. Even with DC and the two additional statewide electors for each state, had the 2012 elections taken place under the principle of the Miner Law, Mitt Romney would be the current American President.

This, however, is a minor quibble of a very well-researched and fascinating book. The work makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of American politics in the late nineteenth century and of the nature and extent of partisan gerrymandering in periods prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s. It is a must-read for scholars and students alike.