ABSTRACT
Committee members turned to the sergeant-at-arms, a leader of the Grant faction, for a ruling on their authority to depose a chairman. The sergeant-at-arms ruled that it was within the national committee’s power to remove its chairman. Factional conflict was indeed formalizing the prerogatives of the chairman and the operations of the committee. By the 1960s, the basic organizational functions and duties of the Democratic and Republican national committees, chairmen, and headquarters were fairly well defined and stabilized. By 1948, a century after the first Democratic national committee had been created, the party’s national committee, national chairmanship, and national headquarters were at last institutionalized as permanent features of the party structure. The formalization process had produced both a representative national committee and a bureaucratic headquarters. Factional conflict was indeed formalizing the prerogatives of the chairman and the operations of the committee.
