Kennedy-Chapter 23

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PART FOUR

FORGING ANINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

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1865–1899

Anation of farmers fought the Civil War in the1860s. By the time the Spanish-American War

broke out in 1898, America was an industrial nation.For generations Americans had plunged into thewilderness and plowed their fields. Now they settledin cities and toiled in factories. Between the CivilWar and the century’s end, economic and techno-logical change came so swiftly and massively that itseemed to many Americans that a whole new civi-lization had emerged.

In some ways it had. The sheer scale of the newindustrial civilization was dazzling. Transcontinen-tal railroads knit the country together from sea tosea. New industries like oil and steel grew to stag-gering size—and made megamillionaires out ofentrepreneurs like oilman John D. Rockefeller andsteel maker Andrew Carnegie.

Drawn by the allure of industrial employment,Americans moved to the city. In 1860 only about 20percent of the population were city dwellers. By1900 that proportion doubled, as rural Americansand European immigrants alike flocked to mill townand metropolis in search of steady jobs.

These sweeping changes challenged the spirit ofindividualism that Americans had celebrated sincethe seventeenth century. Even on the western frontier,that historic bastion of rugged loners, the hand of gov-ernment was increasingly felt, as large armies weredispatched to subdue the Plains Indians and federal

authority was invoked to regulate the use of naturalresources. The rise of powerful monopolies called intoquestion the government’s traditional hands-off pol-icy toward business, and a growing band of reformersincreasingly clamored for government regulation ofprivate enterprise. The mushrooming cities, with theirneeds for transport systems, schools, hospitals, sani-tation, and fire and police protection, required biggergovernments and budgets than an earlier generationcould have imagined. As never before, Americansstruggled to adapt old ideals of private autonomy tothe new realities of industrial civilization.

With economic change came social and politi-cal turmoil. Labor violence brought bloodshed toplaces such as Chicago and Homestead, Pennsylva-nia. Small farmers, squeezed by debt and foreigncompetition, rallied behind the People’s, or “Pop-ulist,” party, a radical movement of the 1880s and1890s that attacked the power of Wall Street, bigbusiness, and the banks. Anti-immigrant sentimentswelled. Bitter disputes over tariffs and monetarypolicy deeply divided the country, setting debtorsagainst lenders, farmers against manufacturers, theWest and South against the Northeast. And in thisunfamiliar era of big money and expanding govern-ment, corruption flourished, from town hall to Con-gress, fueling loud cries for political reform.

The bloodiest conflict of all pitted Plains Indi-ans against the relentless push of westward expan-

sion. As railroads drove their iron arrows throughthe heart of the West, the Indians lost their land andlife-sustaining buffalo herds. By the 1890s, afterthree decades of fierce fighting with the U.S. Army,the Indians who had once roamed across the vastrolling prairies were struggling to preserve their shat-tered cultures within the confinement of reservations.

The South remained the one region largelyuntouched by the Industrial Revolution sweepingthe rest of America. A few sleepy southern hamletsdid become boomtowns, but for the most part, theSouth’s rural way of life and its peculiar system ofrace relations were largely unperturbed by thechanges happening elsewhere. On African-Ameri-cans, the vast majority of whom continued to live inthe Old South, the post-emancipation era inflictednew forms of racial injustice. State legislatures sys-tematically deprived black Americans of their politi-

cal rights, including the right to vote. Segregation ofschools, housing, and all kinds of public facilitiesmade a mockery of African-Americans’ Reconstruc-tion-era hopes for equality before the law.

The new wealth and power of industrial Americanurtured a growing sense of national self-confi-dence. Literature flowered, and a golden age of phil-anthropy dawned. The reform spirit spread. So did arestless appetite for overseas expansion. In a briefwar against Spain in 1898, the United States, born ina revolutionary war of independence and long thechampion of colonial peoples yearning to breathefree, seized control of the Philippines and itselfbecame an imperial power. Uncle Sam’s venture intoempire touched off a bitter national debate aboutAmerica’s role in the world and ushered in a longperiod of argument over the responsibilities, athome as well as abroad, of a modern industrial state.

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Political Paralysisin the Gilded Age

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1869–1896

Grant . . . had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages.. . . That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius

Caesar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually andtruly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, madeevolution ludicrous. . . . The progress of evolution, from PresidentWashington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upsetDarwin. . . . Grant . . . should have lived in a cave and worn skins.

HENRY ADAMS, THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS, 1907

The population of the post–Civil War Republic con-tinued to vault upward by vigorous leaps, despite

the awful bloodletting in both Union and Confederateranks. Census takers reported over 39 million peoplein 1870, a gain of 26.6 percent over the precedingdecade, as the immigrant tide surged again. TheUnited States was now the third largest nation in theWestern world, ranking behind Russia and France.

But the civic health of the United States did notkeep pace with its physical growth. The Civil Warand its aftermath spawned waste, extravagance,speculation, and graft. Disillusionment ran deepamong idealistic Americans in the postwar era. Theyhad spilled their blood for the Union, emancipation,and Abraham Lincoln, who had promised “a newbirth of freedom.” Instead they got a bitter dose of

corruption and political stalemate—beginning withUlysses S. Grant, a great soldier but an utterly ineptpolitician.

The “Bloody Shirt” Elects Grant

Wrangling between Congress and President AndrewJohnson had soured the people on professionalpoliticians in the Reconstruction era, and the notionstill prevailed that a good general would make agood president. Stubbily bearded General Grant wasby far the most popular Northern hero to emergefrom the war. Grateful citizens of Philadelphia,Washington, and his hometown of Galena, Illinois,

502

passed the hat around and in each place presentedhim with a house. New Yorkers tendered him acheck for $105,000. The general, silently puffing onhis cigar, unapologetically accepted these gifts ashis just deserts for having rescued the Union.

Grant was a hapless greenhorn in the politicalarena. His one presidential vote had been cast forthe Democratic ticket in 1856. A better judge ofhorseflesh than of humans, his cultural backgroundwas breathtakingly narrow. He once reportedlyremarked that Venice (Italy) would be a fine city ifonly it were drained.

The Republicans, freed from the Union partycoalition of war days, enthusiastically nominatedGrant for the presidency in 1868. The party’s platformsounded a clarion call for continued Reconstructionof the South under the glinting steel of federal bayo-nets. Yet Grant, always a man of few words, struck ahighly popular note in his letter of acceptance whenhe said, “Let us have peace.” This noble sentimentbecame a leading campaign slogan and was laterengraved on his tomb beside the Hudson River.

Expectant Democrats, meeting in their ownnominating convention, denounced military Re-construction but could agree on little else. Wealthyeastern delegates demanded a plank promising thatfederal war bonds be redeemed in gold—eventhough many of the bonds had been purchased withbadly depreciated paper greenbacks. Poorer mid-western delegates answered with the “Ohio Idea,”which called for redemption in greenbacks. Debt-burdened agrarian Democrats thus hoped to keepmore money in circulation and keep interest rateslower. This dispute introduced a bitter contest overmonetary policy that continued to convulse theRepublic until the century’s end.

Midwestern delegates got the platform but notthe candidate. The nominee, former New York gover-nor Horatio Seymour, scuttled the Democrats’ fainthope for success by repudiating the Ohio Idea.Republicans whipped up enthusiasm for Grant byenergetically “waving the bloody shirt”—that is, reviv-ing gory memories of the Civil War—which becamefor the first time a prominent feature of a presidentialcampaign.* “Vote as You Shot” was a powerful Repub-lican slogan aimed at Union army veterans.

Grant won, with 214 electoral votes to 80 forSeymour. But despite his great popularity, the for-mer general scored a majority of only 300,000 in thepopular vote (3,013,421 to 2,706,829). Most whitevoters apparently supported Seymour, and the bal-lots of three still-unreconstructed southern states(Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia) were not countedat all. An estimated 500,000 former slaves gaveGrant his margin of victory. To remain in power, theRepublican party somehow had to continue to con-trol the South—and to keep the ballot in the handsof the grateful freedmen. Republicans could nottake future victories “for Granted.”

The Era of Good Stealings

A few skunks can pollute a large area. Although thegreat majority of businesspeople and governmentofficials continued to conduct their affairs withdecency and honor, the whole postwar atmospherewas fetid. The Man in the Moon, it was said, had tohold his nose when passing over America. Free-wheeling railroad promoters sometimes left gulliblebond buyers with only “two streaks of rust and aright of way.” Unscrupulous stock-market manipu-lators were a cinder in the public eye. Too manyjudges and legislators put their power up for hire.Cynics defined an honest politician as one who,when bought, would stay bought.

Notorious in the financial world were two mil-lionaire partners, “Jubilee Jim” Fisk and Jay Gould.The corpulent and unscrupulous Fisk provided the“brass,” while the undersized and cunning Gouldprovided the brains. The crafty pair concocted a plotin 1869 to corner the gold market. Their slipperygame would work only if the federal Treasuryrefrained from selling gold. The conspiratorsworked on President Grant directly and alsothrough his brother-in-law, who received $25,000for his complicity. On “Black Friday” (September 24,1869), Fisk and Gould madly bid the price of goldskyward, while scores of honest businesspeoplewere driven to the wall. The bubble finally brokewhen the Treasury, contrary to Grant’s supposedassurances, was compelled to release gold. A con-gressional probe concluded that Grant had donenothing crooked, though he had acted stupidly andindiscreetly.

The Stain of Corruption 503

*The expression is said to have derived from a speech byRepresentative Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, whoallegedly waved before the House the bloodstained nightshirtof a Klan-flogged carpetbagger.

The infamous Tweed Ring in New York Cityvividly displayed the ethics (or lack of ethics) typicalof the age. Burly “Boss” Tweed—240 pounds of ras-cality—employed bribery, graft, and fraudulentelections to milk the metropolis of as much as $200million. Honest citizens were cowed into silence.Protesters found their tax assessments raised.

Tweed’s luck finally ran out. The New York Timessecured damning evidence in 1871 and coura-geously published it, though offered $5 million notto do so. Gifted cartoonist Thomas Nast pilloriedTweed mercilessly, after spurning a heavy bribe todesist. The portly thief reportedly complained thathis illiterate followers could not help seeing “themdamn pictures.” New York attorney Samuel J. Tilden

headed the prosecution, gaining fame that laterpaved the path to his presidential nomination.Unbailed and unwept, Tweed died behind bars.

A Carnival of Corruption

More serious than Boss Tweed’s peccadilloes werethe misdeeds of the federal government. PresidentGrant’s cabinet was a rodent’s nest of grafters andincompetents. Favor seekers haunted the WhiteHouse, plying Grant himself with cigars, wines, andhorses. His election was a godsend to his in-laws ofthe Dent family, several dozen of whom attachedthemselves to the public payroll.

The easygoing Grant was first tarred by theCrédit Mobilier scandal, which erupted in 1872.Union Pacific Railroad insiders had formed theCrédit Mobilier construction company and thencleverly hired themselves at inflated prices to buildthe railroad line, earning dividends as high as 348percent. Fearing that Congress might blow thewhistle, the company furtively distributed sharesof its valuable stock to key congressmen. A news-paper exposé and congressional investigation ofthe scandal led to the formal censure of two con-gressmen and the revelation that the vice presidentof the United States had accepted payments fromCrédit Mobilier.

The breath of scandal in Washington alsoreeked of alcohol. In 1874–1875 the sprawlingWhiskey Ring robbed the Treasury of millions inexcise-tax revenues. “Let no guilty man escape,”declared President Grant. But when his own privatesecretary turned up among the culprits, he volun-teered a written statement to the jury that helpedexonerate the thief. Further rottenness in the Grantadministration came to light in 1876, forcing Secre-tary of War William Belknap to resign after pocket-ing bribes from suppliers to the Indian reservations.Grant, ever loyal to his crooked cronies, acceptedBelknap’s resignation “with great regret.”

The Liberal Republican Revolt of 1872

By 1872 a powerful wave of disgust with Grantismwas beginning to build up throughout the nation,even before some of the worst scandals had been

504 CHAPTER 23 Political Paralysis in the Gilded Age, 1869–1896

exposed. Reform-minded citizens banded togetherto form the Liberal Republican party. Voicing theslogan “Turn the Rascals Out,” they urged purifica-tion of the Washington administration as well as anend to military Reconstruction.

The Liberal Republicans muffed their chancewhen their Cincinnati nominating conventionastounded the country by nominating the brilliantbut erratic Horace Greeley for the presidency.Although Greeley was the fearless editor of the NewYork Tribune, he was dogmatic, emotional, petulant,and notoriously unsound in his political judgments.

More astonishing still was the action of theoffice-hungry Democrats, who foolishly proceededto endorse Greeley’s candidacy. In swallowing Gree-ley the Democrats “ate crow” in large gulps, for theeccentric editor had long blasted them as traitors,slave shippers, saloon keepers, horse thieves, andidiots. Yet Greeley pleased the Democrats, Northand South, when he pleaded for clasping handsacross “the bloody chasm.” The Republicans duti-fully renominated Grant. The voters were thus pre-sented with a choice between two candidates whohad made their careers in fields other than politicsand who were both eminently unqualified, by tem-perament and lifelong training, for high politicaloffice.

The Stirrings of Reform 505

In a famous series of newspaper interviews in1905, George Washington Plunkitt(1842–1924), a political “boss” in the sameTammany Hall Democratic political“machine” that had spawned William Marcy(“Boss”) Tweed, candidly described his ethicaland political principles:

“Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tam-many men growin’ rich on graft, but nobodythinks of drawin’ the distinction betweenhonest graft and dishonest graft. There’s allthe difference in the world between the two.Yes, many of our men have grown rich inpolitics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortuneout of the game, and I’m gettin’ richer everyday, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest graft—blackmailin’ gamblers, saloonkeepers,disorderly people, etc.—and neither has any ofthe men who have made big fortunes inpolitics.

“There’s an honest graft, and I’m an ex-ample of how it works. I might sum up thewhole thing by sayin’: ‘I seen my opportunitiesand I took ’em.’

“Just let me explain by examples. Myparty’s in power in the city, and it’s goin’ toundertake a lot of public improvements. Well,I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to layout a new park at a certain place.

“I see my opportunity and I take it. I go tothat place and I buy up all the land I can inthe neighborhood. Then the board of this orthat makes its plan public, and there is a rushto get my land, which nobody cared particularfor before.

“Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a goodprice and make a profit on my investment andforesight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honestgraft.”

In the mud-spattered campaign that followed,regular Republicans denounced Greeley as an athe-ist, a communist, a free-lover, a vegetarian, a brown-bread eater, and a cosigner of Jefferson Davis’s bailbond. Democrats derided Grant as an ignoramus, adrunkard, and a swindler. But the regular Republi-cans, chanting “Grant us another term,” pulled thepresident through. The count in the electoral col-umn was 286 to 66, in the popular column 3,596,745to 2,843,446.

Liberal Republican agitation frightened the reg-ular Republicans into cleaning their own housebefore they were thrown out of it. The RepublicanCongress in 1872 passed a general amnesty act,removing political disabilities from all but some five hundred former Confederate leaders. Congressalso moved to reduce high Civil War tariffs and tofumigate the Grant administration with mild civil-service reform. Like many American third parties,the Liberal Republicans left some enduring foot-prints, even in defeat.

Depression, Deflation, and Inflation

Grant’s woes deepened in the paralyzing economicpanic that broke in 1873. Bursting with startlingrapidity, the crash was one of those periodic plum-mets that roller-coastered the economy in this ageof unbridled capitalist expansion. Overreachingpromoters had laid more railroad track, sunk moremines, erected more factories, and sowed moregrainfields than existing markets could bear.Bankers, in turn, had made too many imprudentloans to finance those enterprises. When profitsfailed to materialize, loans went unpaid, and thewhole credit-based house of cards fluttered down.

Boom times became gloom times as more thanfifteen thousand businesses went bankrupt. In NewYork City, an army of unemployed riotously battledpolice. Black Americans were hard hit. The Freed-man’s Savings and Trust Company had made unse-cured loans to several companies that went under.Black depositors who had entrusted over $7 millionto the bank lost their savings, and black economicdevelopment and black confidence in savings insti-tutions went down with it.

Hard times inflicted the worst punishment ondebtors, who intensified their clamor for inflation-ary policies. Proponents of inflation breathed new

life into the issue of greenbacks. During the war$450 million of the “folding money” had beenissued, but it had depreciated under a cloud of pop-ular mistrust and dubious legality.* By 1868 theTreasury had already withdrawn $100 million of the“battle-born currency” from circulation, and “hard-money” people everywhere looked forward to itscomplete disappearance. But now afflicted agrarianand debtor groups—“cheap-money” supporters—clamored for a reissuance of the greenbacks. With acrude but essentially accurate grasp of monetarytheory, they reasoned that more money meantcheaper money and, hence, rising prices and easier-to-pay debts. Creditors, of course, reasoning fromthe same premises, advocated precisely the oppo-site policy. They had no desire to see the money theyhad loaned repaid in depreciated dollars. Theywanted deflation, not inflation.

The “hard-money” advocates carried the day. In1874 they persuaded a confused Grant to veto a billto print more paper money. They scored anothervictory in the Resumption Act of 1875, whichpledged the government to the further withdrawalof greenbacks from circulation and to the redemp-tion of all paper currency in gold at face value,beginning in 1879.

Down but not out, debtors now looked for reliefto another precious metal, silver. The “sacred whitemetal,” they claimed, had received a raw deal. In theearly 1870s, the Treasury stubbornly and unrealisti-cally maintained that an ounce of silver was worthonly one-sixteenth as much as an ounce of gold,though open-market prices for silver were higher.Silver miners thus stopped offering their shinyproduct for sale to the federal mints. With no silverflowing into the federal coffers, Congress formallydropped the coinage of silver dollars in 1873. Fatethen played a sly joke when new silver discoverieslater in the 1870s shot production up and forced sil-ver prices down. Westerners from silver-miningstates joined with debtors in assailing the “Crime of’73,” demanding a return to the “Dollar of Our Dad-dies.” Like the demand for more greenbacks, thedemand for the coinage of more silver was nothing


*The Supreme Court in 1870 declared the Civil War Legal TenderAct unconstitutional. With the concurrence of the Senate,Grant thereupon added to the bench two justices who couldbe counted on to help reverse that decision, which happenedin 1871. This is how the Court grew to its current size of ninejustices.

more nor less than another scheme to promoteinflation.

Hard-money Republicans resisted this schemeand counted on Grant to hold the line against it. Hedid not disappoint them. The Treasury began toaccumulate gold stocks against the appointed dayfor resumption of metallic-money payments. Cou-pled with the reduction of greenbacks, this policywas called “contraction.” It had a noticeable defla-tionary effect—the amount of money per capita incirculation actually decreased between 1870 and1880, from $19.42 to $19.37. Contraction probablyworsened the impact of the depression. But the newpolicy did restore the government’s credit rating,and it brought the embattled greenbacks up to theirfull face value. When Redemption Day came in 1879,few greenback holders bothered to exchange thelighter and more convenient bills for gold.

Republican hard-money policy had a politicalbacklash. It helped elect a Democratic House ofRepresentatives in 1874, and in 1878 it spawned theGreenback Labor party, which polled over a millionvotes and elected fourteen members of Congress.The contest over monetary policy was far from over.

Pallid Politics in the Gilded Age

The political seesaw was delicately balancedthroughout most of the Gilded Age (a sarcasticname given to the three-decade-long post–Civil Warera by Mark Twain in 1873). Even a slight nudgecould tip the teeter-totter to the advantage of theopposition party. Every presidential election was a squeaker, and the majority party in the House ofRepresentatives switched six times in the elevensessions between 1869 and 1891. In only three ses-sions did the same party control the House, the Sen-ate, and the White House. Wobbling in such shakyequilibrium, politicians tiptoed timidly, producing apolitical record that was often trivial and petty.

Few significant economic issues separated themajor parties. Democrats and Republicans saw verynearly eye-to-eye on questions like the tariff andcivil-service reform, and majorities in both partiessubstantially agreed even on the much-debatedcurrency question. Yet despite their rough agree-ment on these national matters, the two partieswere ferociously competitive with each other. Theywere tightly and efficiently organized, and they

commanded fierce loyalty from their members.Voter turnouts reached heights unmatched before orsince. Nearly 80 percent of eligible voters cast theirballots in presidential elections in the three decadesafter the Civil War. On election days droves of theparty faithful tramped behind marching bands tothe polling places, and “ticket splitting,” or failing tovote the straight party line, was as rare as a silverdollar.

How can this apparent paradox of political con-sensus and partisan fervor be explained? Theanswer lies in the sharp ethnic and cultural differ-ences in the membership of the two parties—in distinctions of style and tone, and especially of reli-gious sentiment. Republican voters tended toadhere to those creeds that traced their lineage toPuritanism. They stressed strict codes of personalmorality and believed that government should playa role in regulating both the economic and themoral affairs of society. Democrats, among whomimmigrant Lutherans and Roman Catholics figuredheavily, were more likely to adhere to faiths thattook a less stern view of human weakness. Their reli-gions professed toleration of differences in animperfect world, and they spurned governmentefforts to impose a single moral standard on theentire society. These differences in temperamentand religious values often produced raucous politi-cal contests at the local level, where issues like pro-hibition and education loomed large.

Democrats had a solid electoral base in theSouth and in the northern industrial cities, teemingwith immigrants and controlled by well-oiled politi-cal machines. Republican strength lay largely in theMidwest and the rural and small-town Northeast.Grateful freedmen in the South continued to voteRepublican in significant numbers. Another impor-tant bloc of Republican ballots came from the mem-bers of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR)—apolitically potent fraternal organization of severalhundred thousand Union veterans of the Civil War.

The lifeblood of both parties was patronage—disbursing jobs by the bucketful in return for votes,kickbacks, and party service. Boisterous infightingover patronage beset the Republican party in the1870s and 1880s. A “Stalwart” faction, led by thehandsome and imperious Roscoe (“Lord Roscoe”)Conkling, U.S. senator from New York, unblushinglyembraced the time-honored system of swappingcivil-service jobs for votes. Opposed to the Conk-lingites were the so-called Half-Breeds, who flirted

The Demand for Inflation 507

coyly with civil-service reform, but whose real quar-rel with the Stalwarts was over who should grasp theladle that dished out the spoils. The champion ofthe Half-Breeds was James G. Blaine of Maine, aradiantly personable congressman with an elasticconscience. But despite the color of their person-alities, Conkling and Blaine succeeded only instalemating each other and deadlocking their party.

The Hayes-Tilden Standoff, 1876

Hangers-on around Grant, like fleas urging their ail-ing dog to live, begged the “Old Man” to try for athird term in 1876. The general, blind to his ownineptitudes, showed a disquieting willingness. Butthe House, by a lopsided bipartisan vote of 233 to18, derailed the third-term bandwagon. It passed aresolution that sternly reminded the country—andGrant—of the antidictator implications of the two-term tradition.

With Grant out of the running and with theConklingites and Blaineites neutralizing each other,the Republicans turned to a compromise candidate,Rutherford B. Hayes, who was obscure enough to bedubbed “The Great Unknown.” His foremost qualifi-cation was the fact that he hailed from the elec-torally doubtful but potent state of Ohio, where hehad served three terms as governor. So crucial werethe “swing” votes of Ohio in the cliffhanging presi-dential contests of the day that the state produced

more than its share of presidential candidates. Apolitical saying of the 1870s paraphrased Shake-speare:

Some are born great,Some achieve greatness,And some are born in Ohio.

Pitted against the humdrum Hayes was theDemocratic nominee, Samuel J. Tilden, who hadrisen to fame as the man who bagged Boss Tweed inNew York. Campaigning against Republican scan-dal, Tilden racked up 184 electoral votes of theneeded 185, with 20 votes in four states—three ofthem in the South—doubtful because of irregularreturns (see the map below). Surely Tilden couldpick up at least one of these, especially in view of thefact that he had polled 247,448 more popular votesthan Hayes, 4,284,020 to 4,036,572.

Both parties scurried to send “visiting states-men” to the contested southern states of Louisiana,South Carolina, and Florida. All three disputedstates submitted two sets of returns, one Demo-cratic and one Republican. As the weeks drifted by,the paralysis tightened, generating a dramatic con-stitutional crisis. The Constitution merely specifiesthat the electoral returns from the states shall besent to Congress, and in the presence of the Houseand Senate, they shall be opened by the president ofthe Senate (see the Twelfth Amendment). But whoshould count them? On this point the Constitutionwas silent. If counted by the president of the Senate(a Republican), the Republican returns would be


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WASH.TERR.

ORE.2 1

CALIF.6

NEV.3

IDAHOTERR.

MONTANATERR.

WYOMINGTERR.

UTAHTERR. COLO.

3

ARIZONATERR.

INDIANTERR.

DAKOTATERR.

KANSAS5

MICH.11

N.Y.35

MINN.5

IOWA11NEBR.

3

MO.15

ARK.6

LA.8

TEXAS8

NEW MEXICOTERR.

MISS.8

ALA.10 GA.

11

FLA.4

TENN. 12N.C.10

S.C.7

VA.11

W.VA.5

PA.29

OHIO22IND.

15ILL.21

WISC.10

KY 12

ME.7

N.H.5

VT.5

MASS.13

R.I. 4CONN. 6

N.J. 9DEL. 3MD. 8

�Hayes—RepublicanTiden—DemocraticDisputed

Hayes-Tilden Disputed Election of 1876(with electoral vote by state) Nineteenof the twenty disputed votes composedthe total electoral count of Louisiana,South Carolina, and Florida. The twentiethwas one of Oregon’s three votes, cast byan elector who turned out to be ineligiblebecause he was a federal officeholder (apostmaster), contrary to the Constitution(see Art. II, Sec. I, para. 2).

selected. If counted by the Speaker of the House (aDemocrat), the Democratic returns would be chosen.How could the impasse be resolved?

The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction

Clash or compromise was the stark choice. The dan-ger loomed that there would be no president onInauguration Day, March 4, 1877. “Tilden or Blood!”cried Democratic hotheads, and some of their“Minute Men” began to drill with arms. But behindthe scenes, frantically laboring statesmen graduallyhammered out an agreement in the Henry Clay tra-dition—the Compromise of 1877.

The election deadlock itself was to be broken bythe Electoral Count Act, which passed Congressearly in 1877. It set up an electoral commission con-sisting of fifteen men selected from the Senate, theHouse, and the Supreme Court.

In February 1877, about a month before Inau-guration Day, the Senate and House met together inan electric atmosphere to settle the dispute. The rollof the states was tolled off alphabetically. WhenFlorida was reached—the first of the three southernstates with two sets of returns—the disputed docu-ments were referred to the electoral commission,which sat in a nearby chamber. After prolonged dis-cussion the members agreed, by the partisan vote ofeight Republicans to seven Democrats, to accept theRepublican returns. Outraged Democrats in Con-gress, smelling defeat, undertook to launch a fili-buster “until hell froze over.”

Renewed deadlock was avoided by the rest ofthe complex Compromise of 1877, already partiallyconcluded behind closed doors. The Democrats

reluctantly agreed that Hayes might take office inreturn for his withdrawing intimidating federaltroops from the two states in which they remained,Louisiana and South Carolina. Among various con-cessions, the Republicans assured the Democrats aplace at the presidential patronage trough and sup-port for a bill subsidizing the Texas and Pacific Rail-road’s construction of a southern transcontinentalline. Not all of these promises were kept in lateryears, including the Texas and Pacific subsidy. Butthe deal held together long enough to break thedangerous electoral standoff. The Democrats per-mitted Hayes to receive the remainder of the dis-puted returns—all by the partisan vote of 8 to 7. Soclose was the margin of safety that the explosiveissue was settled only three days before the newpresident was officially sworn into office. The nationbreathed a collective sigh of relief.

The compromise bought peace at a price. Vio-lence was averted by sacrificing the black freedmenin the South. With the Hayes-Tilden deal, theRepublican party quietly abandoned its commit-ment to racial equality. That commitment had beenweakening in any case. The Civil Rights Act of 1875was in a sense the last feeble gasp of the congres-sional radical Republicans. The act supposedlyguaranteed equal accommodations in public placesand prohibited racial discrimination in jury selec-tion, but the law was born toothless and stayed thatway for nearly a century. The Supreme Court pro-nounced much of the act unconstitutional in theCivil Rights Cases (1883). The Court declared thatthe Fourteenth Amendment prohibited only govern-ment violations of civil rights, not the denial of civilrights by individuals. Hayes clinched the bargain by withdrawing the last federal troops that werepropping up carpetbag governments. The bayonet-backed Republican regimes collapsed as the blue-clad soldiers departed.

The Birth of Jim Crow in thePost-Reconstruction South

The Democratic South speedily solidified andswiftly suppressed the now-friendless blacks.Reconstruction, for better or worse, was officiallyended. Shamelessly relying on fraud and intimi-dation, white Democrats (“Redeemers”) resumedpolitical power in the South and exercised it ruth-

The Compromise of 1877 509

Composition of the Electoral Commission, 1877

Members Republicans Democrats

Senate (Republican majority) 3 3

House (Democratic majority) 2 3

Supreme Court 3 2

TOTAL 8 7

lessly. Blacks who tried to assert their rights facedunemployment, eviction, and physical harm.

Blacks (as well as poor whites) were forced intosharecropping and tenant farming. Former slavesoften found themselves at the mercy of former masters who were now their landlords and credi-tors. Through the “crop-lien” system, storekeepersextended credit to small farmers for food and sup-plies and in return took a lien on their harvests.Shrewd merchants manipulated the system so that

farmers remained perpetually in debt to them. Forgenerations to come, southern blacks were con-demned to eke out a threadbare living under condi-tions scarcely better than slavery.

With white southerners back in the politicalsaddle, daily discrimination against blacks grewincreasingly oppressive. What had started as theinformal separation of blacks and whites in theimmediate postwar years developed by the 1890sinto systematic state-level legal codes of segregation


known as Jim Crow laws. Southern states alsoenacted literacy requirements, voter-registrationlaws, and poll taxes to ensure full-scale disfran-chisement of the South’s black population. TheSupreme Court validated the South’s segregationistsocial order in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Itruled that “separate but equal” facilities were con-stitutional under the “equal protection” clause ofthe Fourteenth Amendment.

But in reality the quality of African-Americanlife was grotesquely unequal to that of whites. Seg-regated in inferior schools and separated fromwhites in virtually all public facilities, including rail-road cars, theaters, and even restrooms, blacks wereassaulted daily by galling reminders of their second-class citizenship. To ensure the stability of this polit-ical and economic “new order,” southern whitesdealt harshly with any black who dared to violatethe South’s racial code of conduct. A record numberof blacks were lynched during the 1890s, most oftenfor the “crime” of asserting themselves as equals(see the table below). It would take a second Recon-struction, nearly a century later, to redress the racistimbalance of southern society.

Class Conflicts and Ethnic Clashes

The year 1877 marked more than the end of Recon-struction. As the curtains officially closed onregional warfare, they opened on scenes of classwarfare. The explosive atmosphere was largely a by-product of the long years of depression and defla-tion following the panic of 1873. Railroad workersfaced particularly hard times. When the presidents ofthe nation’s four largest railroads collectivelydecided in 1877 to cut employees’ wages by 10 per-cent, the workers struck back. President Hayes’sdecision to call in federal troops to quell the unrestbrought the striking laborers an outpouring of work-ing-class support. Work stoppages spread like wild-fire in cities from Baltimore to St. Louis. When thebattling between workers and soldiers ended afterseveral weeks, over one hundred people were dead.

The failure of the great railroad strike exposedthe weakness of the labor movement. Racial and eth-nic fissures among workers everywhere fracturedlabor unity and were particularly acute between theIrish and the Chinese in California (see “Makers ofAmerica: The Chinese,” pp. 512–513). By 1880 theGolden State counted seventy-five thousand Asiannewcomers, about 9 percent of its entire population.Mostly poor, uneducated, single males, they derivedpredominantly from the Taishan district of K’uang-t’ung (Guangdong) province in southern China. Theyhad originally come to America to dig in the gold-fields and to sledgehammer the tracks of thetranscontinental railroads across the West. When thegold supply petered out and the tracks were laid,many—perhaps half of those who arrived before the1880s—returned home to China with their meagersavings.

Those who remained in America faced extraor-dinary hardships. They worked at the most menialjobs, often as cooks, laundrymen, or domestic servants. Without women or families, they weremarooned in a land where they neither were wantednor wanted to be. They lived lonely lives, bereft ofthe children who in other immigrant communitieseased their parents’ assimilation through theirexposure to the English language and Americancustoms in school. The phrase “not a Chinaman’schance” emerged in this era to describe the daunt-ing odds against which they struggled.

In San Francisco Irish-born demagogue DenisKearney incited his followers to violent abuse of the

The Emergence of Jim Crow 511

Persons in United States Lynched [by race],1882–1970*

Year Whites Blacks Total

1882 64 49 1131885 110 74 1841890 11 85 961895 66 113 1791900 9 106 1151905 5 57 621910 9 67 761915 13 56 691920 8 53 611925 0 17 171930 1 20 211935 2 18 201940 1 4 51945 0 1 11950 1 1 21965 0 0 0

*There were no lynchings in 1965–1970. In every year from1882 (when records were first kept) to 1964, the number oflynchings corresponded roughly to the figures given here. The worst year was 1892, when 161 blacks and 69 whites werelynched (total 230); the next worst was 1884, when 164 whitesand 51 blacks were lynched (total 215).

The Chinese

In the late nineteenth century, the burgeoningindustries and booming frontier towns of the

United States’ Pacific coast hungered for laborers towrench minerals from stubborn rock, to lay downrailroad track through untamed wastelands, and totransform dry expanses into fertile fields of fruit andvegetables. In faraway Asia the Chinese answeredthe call. Contributing their muscle to the building ofthe West, they dug in the gold mines and helped tolay the transcontinental railroads that stitchedtogether the American nation.

The first Chinese had arrived in Spanish Amer-ica as early as 1565. But few followed those earliestpioneers until the 1848 discovery of gold in Califor-nia attracted people from all over the world toAmerica’s Pacific coast. Among them were manyfortune-hungry Chinese who sailed into San Fran-cisco, which Chinese immigrants named the“golden mountain.”

The California boom coincided with the culmi-nation of years of tumult and suffering in China.The once great Chinese Empire was disintegrating,while a few ruthless landlords, like looters, grabbedcontrol of nearly every acre of farmland. In destruc-tive complement to this internal disarray, the Euro-pean imperial powers forced their way into theunstable country, seeking to unlock the riches of a nation that had been closed to outsiders for centuries.

Faced with economic hardship and politicalturmoil, more than 2 million Chinese left theirhomeland between 1840 and 1900, for destinationsas diverse as Southeast Asia, Peru, Hawaii, andCuba, with more than 300,000 entering the UnitedStates. Although their numbers included a few mer-chants and artisans, most were unskilled countryfolk. In some cases families pooled their money tosend out a son, but most travelers, desperately poor,obtained their passage through Chinese middle-men, who advanced them ship fare in return for theemigrants’ promise to work off their debts after theylanded. This contracting sometimes led to condi-tions so cruel that the practice was ignominiouslycalled pig selling.

The Chinese-America of the late-nineteenth-century West was overwhelmingly a bachelor soci-ety. Women of good repute rarely made the passage.Of the very few Chinese women who ventured toCalifornia at this time, most became prostitutes.Many of them had been deceived by the falsepromise of honest jobs.

Although a stream of workers returned to theirhomeland, many Chinese stayed. “Chinatowns”sprang up wherever economic opportunities pre-sented themselves—in railroad towns, farming vil-lages, and cities. Chinese in these settlements spoketheir own language, enjoyed the fellowship of theirown compatriots, and sought safety from prejudiceand violence, never rare in American society. Many

512

immigrant clubs, American adaptations of Chinesetraditions of loyalty to clan or region, were estab-lished in these communities. Rivaling such clubsand associations were the secret societies known astongs. The word tong—literally, “meeting hall”—acquired a sinister reputation among non-Chinese,for the tongs counted the poorest and shadiestimmigrants among their members. These were peo-ple without ties to a clan, those individuals mostalienated from traditional Chinese organizationsand from American society as well.

After 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act barrednearly all Chinese from the United States for sixdecades. Many of the bachelors who had made the

long journey to America died or returned home.Slowly, however, those men and the few womenwho remained raised families and reared a new gen-eration of Chinese Americans. Like their immigrant parents, this second generation suffered from dis-crimination. They had to eke out a living in jobsdespised by Caucasian laborers or take dauntingrisks in small entrepreneurial ventures. Yet manyhard-working Chinese did manage to open theirown restaurants, laundries, and other small busi-nesses. The enterprises formed a solid economicfoundation for their small community and remain asource of livelihood for many Chinese-Americanseven today.

513

Chinese Population in the Continental United States, 1850–1900

Total ChineseMales per Percentage Immigrants in

Year Population One Female U.S.-Born Preceding Decade*

1850 4,018† — — —1860 34,933 19 — 41,3971870 63,199 13 1 64,3011880 105,465 21 1 123,2011890 107,488 27 3 61,7111900 89,863 19 10 14,799

*Includes Chinese immigrants in Hawaii after 1898.†Estimated.

hapless Chinese. The Kearneyites, many of whomwere recently arrived immigrants from Europe,hotly resented the competition of cheap labor fromthe still more recently arrived Chinese. The beef-eater, they claimed, had no chance against the rice-eater in a life-and-death struggle for jobs and wages.The present tens of thousands of Chinese “coolies”were regarded as a menace, the prospective millionsas a calamity. Taking to the streets, gangs of Kear-neyites terrorized the Chinese by shearing off theirprecious pigtails. Some victims were murdered outright.

Congress finally slammed the door on Chineseimmigrant laborers when it passed the ChineseExclusion Act in 1882, prohibiting all further immi-gration from China. The door stayed shut until 1943.Some exclusionists even tried to strip native-bornChinese-Americans of their citizenship, but the

Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark in1898 that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteedcitizenship to all persons born in the United States.This doctrine of “birthright citizenship” (or jus soli,the “right of the soil,” as contrasted with jus sangui-nis, the “right of blood-tie,” which based citizenshipon the parents’ nationality) provided important pro-tections to Chinese-Americans as well as to otherimmigrant communities.

Garfield and Arthur

As the presidential campaign of 1880 approached,“Rutherfraud” Hayes was a man without a party,denounced and repudiated by the Republican OldGuard. The Republican party sought a new standard-bearer for 1880 and finally settled on a “dark-horse”candidate, James A. Garfield, from the electorallypowerful state of Ohio. His vice-presidential runningmate was a notorious Stalwart henchman, Chester A.Arthur of New York.

Energetically waving the bloody shirt, Garfieldbarely squeaked out a victory over the Democraticcandidate and Civil War hero, Winfield Scott Han-cock. He polled only 39,213 more votes than Han-cock—4,453,295 to 4,414,082—but his margin in theelectoral column was a comfortable 214 to 155.

The new president was energetic and able, buthe was immediately ensnared in a political conflictbetween his secretary of state, James G. Blaine, andBlaine’s Stalwart nemesis, Senator Roscoe Conkling.Then, as the Republican factions dueled, tragedystruck. A disappointed and mentally derangedoffice seeker, Charles J. Guiteau, shot PresidentGarfield in the back in a Washington railroad sta-tion. Garfield lingered in agony for eleven weeksand died on September 19, 1881. Guiteau, whenseized, reportedly cried, “I am a Stalwart. Arthur isnow President of the United States.” The implicationwas that now the Conklingites would all get goodjobs. Guiteau’s attorneys argued that he was notguilty because of his incapacity to distinguish rightfrom wrong—an early instance of the “insanitydefense.” The defendant himself demonstrated hisweak grip on reality when he asked all those whohad benefited politically by the assassination tocontribute to his defense fund. These tactics availedlittle. Guiteau was found guilty of murder andhanged.


Garfield’s death had one positive outcome: itshocked politicians into reforming the shamefulspoils system. The unlikely instrument of reformwas Chester Arthur. Observers at first underesti-mated him. His record of cronyism and his fondnessfor fine wines and elegant clothing (including eightypairs of trousers) suggested that he was little morethan a foppish dandy. But Arthur surprised his crit-ics by prosecuting several fraud cases and giving hisformer Stalwart pals the cold shoulder.

Disgust with Garfield’s murder gave the Repub-lican party itself a previously undetected taste forreform. The medicine finally applied to the long-suffering federal government was the Pendleton Actof 1883—the so-called Magna Carta of civil-service

reform. It made compulsory campaign contribu-tions from federal employees illegal, and it estab-lished the Civil Service Commission to makeappointments to federal jobs on the basis of com-petitive examinations rather than “pull.”

Although at first covering only about 10 percentof federal jobs, civil-service reform did rein in themost blatant abuses. Yet like many well-intentionedreforms, it bred unintended problems of its own.With the “plum” federal posts now beyond their

The Assassination of Garfield 515

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), an ardentcivil-service reformer, condemned thepatronage system as

“tending to degrade American politics. . . .The men who are in office only for what theycan make out of it are thoroughlyunwholesome citizens, and their activity inpolitics is simply noxious. . . . Decent privatecitizens must inevitably be driven out ofpolitics if it is suffered to become a mereselfish scramble for plunder, where victoryrests with the most greedy, the mostcunning, the most brazen. The wholepatronage system is inimical to Americaninstitutions; it forms one of the gravestproblems with which democratic andrepublican government has to grapple.’’

New York political “boss” Roscoe Conkling(1829–1888) denounced the civil-servicereformers in the New York World (1877):

“[The reformers’] vocation and ministry is tolament the sins of other people. Their stockin trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness.They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Theirreal object is office and plunder. When Dr.Johnson defined patriotism as the lastrefuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious ofthe then undeveloped capabilities and usesof the word ‘Reform.’”

reach, politicians were forced to look elsewhere formoney, “the mother’s milk of politics.” Increasingly,they turned to the bulging coffers of the big corpo-rations. A new breed of “boss” emerged—less skilledat mobilizing small armies of immigrants and othervoters on election day, but more adept at milkingdollars from manufacturers and lobbyists. ThePendleton Act partially divorced politics frompatronage, but it helped drive politicians into “mar-riages of convenience” with big-business leaders.

President Arthur’s surprising display of integrityoffended too many powerful Republicans. Hisungrateful party turned him out to pasture, and in1886 he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

The Blaine-Cleveland Mudslingers of 1884

James G. Blaine’s persistence in pursuit of his party’spresidential nomination finally paid off in 1884. Thedashing Maine politician, blessed with almost everypolitical asset except a reputation for honesty, wasthe clear choice of the Republican convention inChicago. But many reform-minded Republicansgagged on Blaine’s candidacy. Blaine’s enemies pub-licized the fishy-smelling “Mulligan letters,” writtenby Blaine to a Boston businessman and linking thepowerful politician to a corrupt deal involving fed-eral favors to a southern railroad. At least one of the

damning documents ended with the furtive warn-ing “Burn this letter.” Some reformers, unable toswallow Blaine, bolted to the Democrats. They weresneeringly dubbed Mugwumps, a word of Indianderivation meant to suggest that they were “sancti-monious” or “holier-than-thou.”*

Victory-starved Democrats turned enthusiasti-cally to a noted reformer, Grover Cleveland. A burlybachelor with a soup-straining mustache and ataste for chewing tobacco, Cleveland was a solid butnot brilliant lawyer of forty-seven. He had rocketedfrom the mayor’s office in Buffalo to the governor-ship of New York and the presidential nomination inthree short years. Known as “Grover the Good” heenjoyed a well-deserved reputation for probity inoffice.

But Cleveland’s admirers soon got a shock. Res-olute Republicans, digging for dirt in the past ofbachelor Cleveland, unearthed the report that hehad been involved in an amorous affair with a Buf-falo widow. She had an illegitimate son, now eightyears old, for whom Cleveland had made financialprovision. Democratic elders were demoralized.They hurried to Cleveland and urged him to lie likea gentleman, but their ruggedly honest candidateinsisted, “Tell the truth.”


13,780 officesout of 131,208




2,278,446 officesout of 2,603,267

2,393,000 officesout of 2,645,000

1,694,000 officesout of 2,940,000

PRESIDENT ARTHUR1884

McKINLEY1901

WILSON1920

ROOSEVELT1939

TRUMAN1952

NIXON1970

BUSH1990

10%

41%

71%

72%

87%

90%

1,351,072 officesout of 2,734,338

CLINTON2000

49%

57%

Growth of Classified Civil Service(subject to competitive requirements)The most recent numbers reflect thechanges mandated by the PostalReorganization Act of 1971, which moved U.S. Postal Service employeesfrom competitive to excepted service.

*Latter-day punsters gibed that the Mugwumps were priggishpoliticians who sat on the fence with their “mugs” on one sideand their “wumps” on the other.

The campaign of 1884 sank to perhaps the low-est level in American experience, as the two partiesgrunted and shoved for the hog trough of office. Fewfundamental differences separated them. Even thebloody shirt had faded to a pale pink.* Personalities,not principles, claimed the headlines. Crowds ofDemocrats surged through city streets, chanting—to the rhythm of left, left, left, right, left—“Burn,burn, burn this letter!” Republicans taunted inreturn, “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” Defiant Demo-crats shouted back, “Gone to the White House, ha,ha, ha!”

The contest hinged on the state of New York,where Blaine blundered badly in the closing days of the campaign. A witless Republican clergymandamned the Democrats in a speech as the party of“Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”—insulting withone swift stroke the race, the faith, and the patrio-tism of New York’s numerous Irish-American voters.Blaine was present at the time but lacked the pres-ence of mind to repudiate the statement immedi-ately. The pungent phrase, shortened to “RRR,”stung and stuck. Blaine’s silence seemed to giveassent, and the wavering Irishmen who deserted his

camp helped account for Cleveland’s paper-thinplurality of about a thousand votes in New YorkState, enough to give him the presidency. Clevelandswept the solid South and squeaked into office with219 to 182 electoral votes and 4,879,507 to 4,850,93popular votes.

The Election of 1884 517

*Neither candidate had served in the Civil War. Cleveland hadhired a substitute to go in his stead while he supported hiswidowed mother and two sisters. Blaine was the only Republi-can presidential candidate from Grant through McKinley(1868 to 1900) who had not been a Civil War officer.

“Old Grover” Takes Over

Bull-necked Cleveland in 1885 was the first Demo-crat to take the oath of presidential office sinceBuchanan, twenty-eight years earlier. Huge questionmarks hung over his ample frame (5 feet 11 inches,250 pounds). Could the “party of disunion” be trustedto govern the Union? Would desperate Democrats,ravenously hungry after twenty-four years of exile,trample the frail sprouts of civil-service reform in astampede to the patronage trough? Could Clevelandrestore a measure of respect and power to themaligned and enfeebled presidency?

Cleveland was a man of principles, most of themsafely orthodox by the standards of his day. Astaunch apostle of the hands-off creed of laissez-faire, the new president caused the hearts of busi-nesspeople and bankers to throb with contentment.He summed up his political philosophy in 1887when he vetoed a bill to provide seeds for drought-ravaged Texas farmers. “Though the people supportthe government,” he declared, “the governmentshould not support the people.” As tactless as a mir-ror and as direct as a bulldozer, he was outspoken,unbending, and profanely hot-tempered.

At the outset Cleveland narrowed the North-South chasm by naming to his cabinet two formerConfederates. As for the civil service, Cleveland waswhipsawed between the demands of the Demo-cratic faithful for jobs and the demands of the Mug-

wumps, who had helped elect him, for reform.Believing in the merit system, Cleveland at firstfavored the cause of the reformers, but he eventu-ally caved in to the carpings of Democratic bossesand fired almost two-thirds of the 120,000 federalemployees, including 40,000 incumbent (Repub-lican) postmasters, to make room for “deservingDemocrats.”

Military pensions gave Cleveland some of hismost painful political headaches. The politicallypowerful Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) rou-tinely lobbied hundreds of private pension billsthrough a compliant Congress. Benefits weregranted to deserters, to bounty jumpers, to menwho never served, and to former soldiers who inlater years had incurred disabilities in no way con-nected with war service. A Democrat and a nonvet-eran, Cleveland was in an awkward position when it came to fighting the pension-grabbers. But theconscience-driven president read each bill care-fully, vetoed several hundred of them, and thenlaboriously penned individual veto messages forCongress.

Cleveland Battles for a Lower Tariff

Cleveland also risked his political neck by proddingthe hornet’s nest of the tariff issue. During the CivilWar, tariff schedules had been jacked up to new


WASH.TERR.

ORE.3

CALIF.8

NEV.3

IDAHOTERR.

MONTANATERR.

WYOMINGTERR.

UTAHTERR. COLO.

3

ARIZONATERR.

INDIANTERR.

DAKOTATERR.

KANSAS9

MICH.13

N.Y.36

MINN.7

IOWA13NEBR.

5

MO.16

ARK.7

LA.8

TEXAS13

NEW MEXICOTERR.

MISS.9

ALA.10 GA.

12

FLA.4

TENN. 12N.C.11

S.C.9

VA.12

W.VA.6

PA.30

OHIO23IND.

15ILL.22

WISC.11

KY 13

ME.6

N.H.4

VT.4

MASS.14

R.I. 4CONN. 6

N.J. 9DEL. 3MD. 8

Cleveland—DemocraticBlaine—Republican

Presidential Election of 1884(with electoral vote by state)

high levels, partly to raise revenues for the insatiablemilitary machine. American industry, which waspreponderantly in Republican hands, had profitedfrom this protection and hated to see the shelteringbenefits reduced in peacetime. But the high dutiescontinued to pile up revenue at the customshouses,and by 1881 the Treasury was running an annualsurplus amounting to an embarrassing $145 mil-lion. Most of the government’s income, in thosepre–income tax days, came from the tariff.

Congress could reduce the vexatious surplus intwo ways. One was to squander it on pensions and“pork-barrel” bills and thus curry favor with veter-ans and other self-seeking groups. The other was tolower the tariff—something the big industrialistsvehemently opposed. Grover Cleveland, the rusticBuffalo attorney, had known little and cared lessabout the tariff before entering the White House.But as he studied the subject, he was muchimpressed by the arguments for downward revisionof the tariff schedules. Lower barriers would meanlower prices for consumers and less protection formonopolies. Most important, they would mean anend to the Treasury surplus, a standing mockery ofCleveland’s professed belief in fiscal orthodoxy andsmall-government frugality. After much hesitationCleveland saw his duty and overdid it.

With his characteristic bluntness, Clevelandtossed an appeal for lower tariffs like a bombshell

into the lap of Congress in late 1887. The responsewas electric. Cleveland succeeded admirably insmoking the issue out into the open. Democratswere deeply depressed at the obstinacy of theirchief. Republicans rejoiced at his apparent reckless-ness. The old warrior Blaine gloated, “There’s onemore President for us in [tariff ] protection.” For thefirst time in years, a real issue divided the two par-ties as the 1888 presidential election loomed.

Cleveland and Tariff Reform 519

Dismayed Democrats, seeing no alternative,somewhat dejectedly nominated Grover Clevelandin their St. Louis convention. Eager Republicansturned to Benjamin Harrison, whose grandfatherwas former president William Henry (“Tippecanoe”)Harrison. The tariff was the prime issue. The twoparties flooded the country with some 10 millionpamphlets on the subject.

The specter of a lowered tariff spurred theRepublicans to frantic action. In an impressivedemonstration of the post–Pendleton Act politics ofalliances with big business, they raised a war chestof some $3 million—the heftiest yet—largely by “fry-ing the fat” out of nervous industrialists. The moneywas widely used to line up corrupt “voting cattle”known as “repeaters” and “floaters.” In Indiana,always a crucial “swing” state, votes were shame-lessly purchased for as much as $20 each.

On election day Harrison nosed out Cleveland,233 to 168 electoral votes. A change of about 7,000ballots in New York would have reversed the out-come. Cleveland actually polled more popularvotes, 5,537,857 to 5,447,129, but he neverthelessbecame the first sitting president to be voted out ofhis chair since Martin Van Buren in 1840.

The Billion-Dollar Congress

After a four-year famine, the Republicans underHarrison licked their lips hungrily for the bounty offederal offices. They yearned to lavish upon the

party faithful the fat surpluses produced by the hightariffs. But in the House of Representatives, they hadonly three more votes than the necessary quorum of163 members, and the Democrats were preparing toobstruct all House business by refusing to answerroll calls, demanding roll calls to determine thepresence of a quorum, and employing other delay-ing tactics.

Into this tense cockpit stepped the new Repub-lican Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed ofMaine. A hulking figure who towered six feet threeinches, he was renowned as a master debater. Hespoke with a harsh nasal drawl and wielded a verbalharpoon of sarcasm. To one congressman whoquoted Henry Clay that he would “rather be rightthan be president,” Reed caustically retorted that he“would never be either.” Opponents cringed at thecrack of his quip.

Reed soon bent the intimidated House to hisimperious will. He counted as present Democratswho had not answered the roll and who, rule bookin hand, furiously denied that they were legallythere. By such tactics “Czar” Reed utterly dominatedthe “Billion-Dollar” Congress—the first in history to


On the night before the inauguration ofHarrison, a crowd of jubilant Republicanstauntingly serenaded the darkened WhiteHouse with a popular campaign dittydirected at Grover Cleveland:

Down in the cornfieldHear that mournful sound;All the Democrats are weeping—Grover’s in the cold, cold ground!

But Grover was to rise again and serve as pres-ident for a second term of four more years.

Populist Protest 521

appropriate that sum. Congress showered pensionson Civil War veterans and increased governmentpurchases of silver. To keep the revenues flowingin—and to protect Republican industrialists fromforeign competition—the Billion-Dollar Congressalso passed the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, boostingrates to their highest peacetime level ever (an aver-age of 48.4 percent on dutiable goods).

Sponsored in the House by rising Republicanstar William McKinley of Ohio, the new tariff actbrought fresh woes to farmers. Debt-burdenedfarmers had no choice but to buy manufacturedgoods from high-priced protected American in-dustrialists, but were compelled to sell their ownagricultural products into highly competitive,unprotected world markets. Mounting discontentagainst the McKinley Tariff caused many rural vot-ers to rise in wrath. In the congressional elections of1890, the Republicans lost their precarious majorityand were reduced to just 88 seats, as compared with235 Democrats. Even the much-touted McKinleywent down to defeat. Ominously for conservatives,the new Congress also included nine members of

the Farmers’ Alliance, a militant organization ofsouthern and western farmers.

The Drumbeat of Discontent

Politics was no longer “as usual” in 1892, when thenewly formed People’s Party, or “Populists,” burstupon the scene. Rooted in the Farmers’ Alliance offrustrated farmers in the great agricultural belts ofthe West and South, the Populists met in Omahaand adopted a scorching platform that denounced“the prolific womb of governmental injustice.” Theydemanded inflation through free and unlimitedcoinage of silver at the rate of sixteen ounces of sil-ver to one ounce of gold. They further called for agraduated income tax; government ownership ofthe railroads, telegraph, and telephone; the directelection of U.S. senators; a one-term limit on thepresidency; the adoption of the initiative and refer-endum to allow citizens to shape legislation moredirectly; a shorter workday; and immigration

restriction. As their presidential candidate, the Pop-ulists uproariously nominated the eloquent oldGreenbacker, General James B. Weaver.

An epidemic of nationwide strikes in the sum-mer of 1892 raised the prospect that the Populists

could weld together a coalition of aggrieved work-ers and indebted farmers in a revolutionary jointassault on the capitalist order. At Andrew Carnegie’sHomestead steel plant near Pittsburgh, companyofficials called in three hundred armed Pinkertondetectives in July to crush a strike by steelworkersangry over pay cuts. Defiant strikers, armed withrifles and dynamite, forced their assailants to sur-render after a vicious battle that left ten people deadand some sixty wounded. Troops were eventuallysummoned, and both the strike and the union werebroken. That same month, federal troops bloodilysmashed a strike among silver miners in Idaho’sfabled Coeur d’Alene district.

The Populists made a remarkable showing in the1892 presidential election. Singing “Good-by, PartyBosses,” they rolled up 1,029,846 popular votes and22 electoral votes for General Weaver. They thusbecame one of the few third parties in U.S. history tobreak into the electoral column. But they fell far shortof an electoral majority. Industrial laborers, especiallyin the urban East, did not rally to the Populist bannerin appreciable numbers. Populist electoral votescame from only six midwestern and western states,four of which (Kansas, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada)fell completely into the Populist basket.

The South, although a hotbed of agrarian agita-tion, proved especially unwilling to throw in its lotwith the new party. Race was the reason. The morethan one million southern black farmers organizedin the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance shared ahost of complaints with poor white farmers, and fora time their common economic goals promised toovercome their racial differences. Recognizing thecrucial edge that black votes could give them in theSouth, Populist leaders like Georgia’s Tom Watsonreached out to the black community. Watson was awiry redhead who could “talk like the thrust of aBowie knife.” He declared, “There is no reason whythe black man should not understand that the lawthat hurts me, as a farmer, hurts him, as a farmer.”Many blacks were disillusioned enough with theRepublican party to respond. Alarmed, the conserv-ative white “Bourbon” elite in the South played cyni-cally upon historic racial antagonisms to counterthe Populists’ appeal for interracial solidarity andwoo back poor whites.

Southern blacks were heavy losers. The Pop-ulist-inspired reminder of potential black politicalstrength led to the near-total extinction of what little


A popular protest song of the 1890s amongwestern farmers was titled “The Hayseed.”One stanza ran,

I once was a tool of oppression,And as green as a sucker could be,And monopolies banded togetherTo beat a poor hayseed like me.

African-American suffrage remained in the South.White southerners more aggressively than ever usedliteracy tests and poll taxes to deny blacks the bal-lot. The notorious “grandfather clause” exemptedfrom those requirements anyone whose forebear

had voted in 1860—when, of course, black slaveshad not voted at all. More than half a century wouldpass before southern blacks could again vote inconsiderable numbers. Accompanying this dis-franchisement were more severe Jim Crow laws,

The Election of 1892 523

Cleveland—Democratic

Harrison—Republican

Weaver—Populist

No returns, unsettled, etc.

Presidential Election of 1892(showing vote by county)Note the concentration of Populiststrength in the semiarid farmingregions of the western half of the country. (Compare this with theannual precipitation map on p. 606).

designed to enforce racial segregation in publicplaces, including hotels and restaurants, andbacked up by atrocious lynchings and other formsof intimidation.

The conservative crusade to eliminate the blackvote also had dire consequences for the Populistparty itself. Even Tom Watson abandoned his inter-racial appeals and, in time, became a vociferousracist himself. After 1896 the Populist party lapsed

increasingly into vile racism and staunchly advo-cated black disfranchisement. Such were the bitterlyironic fruits of the Populist campaign in the South.

Cleveland and Depression

With the Populists divided and the Republicans dis-credited, Grover Cleveland took office once again in1893, the only president ever reelected after defeat.He was the same old bull-necked and bull-headedCleveland, with a little more weight, polish, conser-vatism, and self-assertiveness.

But though it was the same old Cleveland, it wasnot the same old country. Debtors were up in arms,workers were restless, and the advance shadows ofpanic were falling. Hardly had Cleveland seatedhimself in the presidential chair when the devastat-ing depression of 1893 burst about his burly frame.Lasting for about four years, it was the most punish-ing economic downturn of the nineteenth century.Contributing causes were the splurge of overbuild-ing and speculation, labor disorders, and the ongo-ing agricultural depression. Free-silver agitationhad also damaged American credit abroad, and theusual pinch on American finances had come whenEuropean banking houses began to call in loansfrom the United States.

Distress ran deep and far. About eight thousandAmerican businesses collapsed in six months.Dozens of railroad lines went into the hands ofreceivers. Soup kitchens fed the unemployed, whilegangs of hoboes (“tramps”) wandered aimlesslyabout the country. Local charities did their feeblebest, but the federal government, bound by the let-nature-take-its-course philosophy of the times, sawno legitimate way to relieve the suffering masses.

Cleveland, who had earlier been bothered by a surplus, was now burdened with a deepeningdeficit. The Treasury was required to issue legal ten-der notes for the silver bullion that it bought. Own-ers of the paper currency would then present it forgold, and by law the notes had to be reissued. Newholders would repeat the process, thus drainingaway precious gold in an “endless-chain” operation.

Alarmingly, the gold reserve in the Treasurydropped below $100 million, which was popularlyregarded as the safe minimum for supporting about


$350 million in outstanding paper money. Cleve-land saw no alternative but to halt the bleedingaway of gold by engineering a repeal of the ShermanSilver Purchase Act of 1890. For this purpose hesummoned Congress into an extra session in thesummer of 1893.

Unknown to the country, complications threat-ened from another quarter. A malignant growth haddeveloped on the roof of Cleveland’s mouth, and ithad to be removed on a private yacht with extremesecrecy. If the president had died under the sur-geon’s knife, his place would have been taken by the“soft-money” vice president, Adlai E. Stevenson—an eventuality that would have deepened the crisis.

In Congress the debate over the repeal of the sil-ver act was meanwhile running its heated course. A silver-tongued young Democratic congressmanfrom Nebraska, thirty-three-year-old William Jen-nings Bryan, held the galleries spellbound for threehours as he championed the cause of free silver. Thefriends of silver announced that “hell would freezeover” before Congress would pass the repeal mea-sure. But an angered Cleveland used his job-granting power to break the filibuster in the Senate.He thus alienated the Democratic silverites likeBryan and disrupted his party at the very outset ofhis administration.

Repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act onlypartially stopped the hemorrhaging of gold from theTreasury. In February 1894 the gold reserve sank to adismaying $41 million. The United States was nowin grave danger of going off the gold standard—amove that would render the nation’s currencyvolatile and unreliable as a measure of value andthat would also mortally cripple America’s interna-tional trade. Cleveland floated two Treasury bondissues in 1894, totaling over $100 million, but the“endless-chain” operations continued relentlessly.

Early in 1895 Cleveland turned in desperationto J. P. Morgan, “the bankers’ banker” and the headof a Wall Street syndicate. After tense negotiations atthe White House, the bankers agreed to lend thegovernment $65 million in gold. They were obvi-ously in business for profit, so they charged a com-mission amounting to about $7 million. But theydid make a significant concession when they agreedto obtain one-half of the gold abroad and take thenecessary steps to dam it up in the leaky Treasury.The loan, at least temporarily, helped restore confi-dence in the nation’s finances.

Cleveland Breeds a Backlash

The bond deal stirred up a storm. The Wall Streetogre, especially in the eyes of the silverites and otherdebtors, symbolized all that was wicked and grasp-ing in American politics. President Cleveland’ssecretive dealings with the mighty “Jupiter” Morganwere savagely condemned as a “sellout” of thenational government. But Cleveland was certainthat he had done no wrong. Sarcastically denyingthat he was “Morgan’s errand boy,” Clevelandasserted, “Without shame and without repentance Iconfess my share of the guilt.”

Cleveland suffered further embarrassment withthe passage of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff in 1894.The Democrats had pledged to lower tariffs, but bythe time their tariff bill made it through Congress, ithad been so loaded with special-interest protectionthat it made scarcely a dent in the high McKinleyTariff rates. An outraged Cleveland grudginglyallowed the bill, which also contained a 2 percenttax on incomes over $4,000, to become law withouthis signature. When the Supreme Court struck downthe income-tax provision in 1895,* the Populists andother disaffected groups found proof that the courtswere only the tools of the plutocrats.

Democratic political fortunes naturally sufferedin the face of these several setbacks. The tariff dyna-mite that had blasted the Republicans out of theHouse in 1890 now dislodged the Democrats, with astrong helping hand from the depression. The revi-talized Republicans, singing “Times Are MightyHard,” won the congressional elections of 1894 in alandslide—244 seats to 105 for the Democrats. TheRepublicans began to look forward to the presiden-tial race of 1896 with unconcealed glee.

Despite his gruff integrity and occasionalcourage, Grover Cleveland failed utterly to copewith the serious economic crisis that befell thecountry in 1893. He was tied down in office by thesame threads that held all the politicians of the dayto Lilliputian levels. Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur,Harrison, and Cleveland are often referred to as the

The Return of Cleveland 525

*It violated the “direct tax” clause. See Art. I, Sec. IX, para. 4 inthe Appendix. The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution,adopted in 1913, permitted an income tax.

“forgettable presidents.” Bewhiskered and bland inperson, they left mostly blanks—or blots—on thenation’s political record, as issues like the tariff, themoney question, and the rights of labor continuedto fester. What little political vitality existed inGilded Age America was to be found in local settings

or in Congress, which overshadowed the WhiteHouse for most of this period. But before the cen-tury ended, down-and-out debtors and disgruntledworkers would make one last titanic effort to wringreform out of the political system—in the momen-tous election of 1896.


Chronology

1868 Grant defeats Seymour for the presidency

1869 Fisk and Gould corner the gold market

1871 Tweed scandal in New York

1872 Crédit Mobilier scandal exposedLiberal Republicans break with GrantGrant defeats Greeley for the presidency

1873 Panic of 1873

1875 Whiskey Ring scandalCivil Rights Act of 1875Resumption Act passed

1876 Hayes-Tilden election standoff and crisis

1877 Compromise of 1877Reconstruction ends Railroad strikes paralyze nation

1880 Garfield defeats Hancock for presidency

1881 Garfield assassinated; Arthur assumes presidency

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

1883 Civil Rights CasesPendleton Act sets up Civil Service

Commission

1884 Cleveland defeats Blaine for presidency

1888 Harrison defeats Cleveland for presidency

1889 Thomas B. “Czar” Reed becomes Speaker of the House of Representatives

1890 “Billion-Dollar” CongressMcKinley Tariff ActSherman Silver Purchase Act (repealed 1893)

1892 Homestead steel strikeCoeur d’Alene (Idaho) silver miners’ strikePeople’s party candidate James B. Weaver wins

twenty-two electoral votesCleveland defeats Harrison and Weaver to

regain presidency

1893 Depression of 1893 begins

1894 Wilson-Gorman Tariff (contains income-tax provision, declared unconstitutional 1895)

Republicans regain House of Representatives

1895 J. P. Morgan’s banking syndicate loans $65million in gold to federal government

1896 Plessy v. Ferguson legitimizes “separate but equal” doctrine

Varying Viewpoints 527

VARYING VIEWPOINTS

The Populists: Radicals or Reactionaries?

Taking their cue from contemporary satiricalcommentaries like Mark Twain and Charles Dud-

ley Warner’s The Gilded Age (1873), the first histori-ans who wrote about the post–Civil War era judgedit harshly. They condemned its politicians as pettyand corrupt, lamented the emergence of a new plu-tocratic class, and railed against the arrogance ofcorporate power. Such a view is conspicuous inCharles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civi-lization (4 vols., 1927–1942), perhaps the most influ-ential American history textbook ever written. It isequally evident in Vernon Louis Parrington’s classicliterary history, Main Currents of American Thought(3 vols., 1927–1930), in which the entire post–CivilWar period is contemptuously dismissed as the timeof “the great barbecue.”

The Beards and Parrington were leaders of theso-called progressive school of historical writingthat flourished in the early years of the twentiethcentury. Progressive historians, many of whom grewup in the Gilded Age, shared in a widespread disillu-sionment that the Civil War had failed to generate arebirth of American idealism. Their political sympa-thies were chillingly antibusiness and warmly pro-labor, pro-farmer, and pro-reform.

Historians of the progressive persuasion identi-fied Populism as virtually the only organized oppo-sition to the social, economic, and political orderthat took shape in the last decades of the nineteenthcentury. The Populists thus became heroes to sev-eral generations of writers who bemoaned thatorder and looked back longingly at Americans’agrarian past. John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt(1931), is the classic portrayal of the Populists asembattled farmers hurling defiance at Wall Streetand the robber barons in a last-ditch defense oftheir simple, honest way of life. Bowed but unbro-ken by the defeat of their great champion, WilliamJennings Bryan, in the presidential election of 1896,

the Populists, Hicks claimed, left a reforming legacythat flourished again in the progressive era and theNew Deal.

Hicks’s point of view was the dominant oneuntil the 1950s, when it was sharply criticized by Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform (1955).Hofstadter charged that the progressive historianshad romanticized the Populists, who were bestunderstood not as picturesque protesters, but as“harassed little country businessmen” bristling withprovincial prejudices. The city-born-and-bred Hof-stadter argued that the Populist revolt was aimednot just at big business and the money power but also somewhat irrationally at urbanism, immi-grants, the East, and modernity itself. Hofstadterthus exposed a “dark side” of Populism, which con-tained elements of backwoods anti-intellectualism,paranoia, and even anti-Semitism.

In the 1960s several scholars, inspired by thework of C. Vann Woodward, as well as by sympathywith the protest movements of that turbulentdecade, began to rehabilitate the Populists asauthentic reformers with genuine grievances. Espe-cially notable in this vein was Lawrence Goodwyn’sDemocratic Promise: The Populist Movement inAmerica (1976). Goodwyn depicted the Populists asreasonable radicals who were justifiably resentful oftheir eclipse by urban industrialism and financecapitalism. He also portrayed Populism as the lastgasp of popular political participation, a democratic“moment” in American history that expired with thePopulists’ absorption into the Democratic party.

Two subsequent works, Edward L. Ayers’sPromise of the New South (1992) and Robert C.McMath’s American Populism (1993), synthesizedmany of the older perspectives and presented a bal-anced view of the Populists as radical in many waysbut also limited by their nostalgia for a lost agrarianpast.

For further reading, see page A16 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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