CHAPTER 8
Contemporary historian Henry Adams said of politics in the Gilded Age, “The period was poor in purpose and barren in results.” His verdict—“One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years 1870–1895 and find little but damaged reputations”—remains a popular one.
That the Gilded Age leaves an impression of political stagnation is largely due to its procession of conservative presidents. By comparison with Gladstone and Disraeli in England and Bismarck in Germany, Lincoln’s successors cut poor figures as statesmen. They thought of themselves as administrators rather than as party leaders. What authority they did have was based on political influence rather than popular appeal. Ulysses S. Grant (1869–77) was deceived by his associates, who took advantage of high office for financial gain. Rutherford B. Hayes (1877–81) tried to resuscitate the presidency and so fell out with his party. James Garfield (1881) was fatally wounded three months after taking office and dead after six. Chester A. Arthur (1881–85) abandoned the spoils system that had sustained him and was rejected by his party. Grover Cleveland (1885–89 and 1893–97) pursued personal prejudices rather than party principles and lost the election of 1888 by a fluke. Benjamin Harrison’s tenure of office (1889–93) was the nadir of presidential authority. Thus, in popular legend as well as in actuality these are the dud presidents: Grant, a president discredited; Hayes, a president defied; Garfield, a president defunct; Arthur, a president dismissed; Cleveland, a president denied; and Harrison, a president derided.
“15–14—13: The Great Presidential Puzzle.” A perplexed Senator Roscoe Conkling (1829-1888) of New York, autocratic boss of the Stalwart Republicans opposed to civil service reform, drawn with thistle hair and an intrusive, pointed nose, uses block heads of presidential aspirants to find a winner. Considering the controversial contenders, Grant, Blaine, Butler, and Sherman, Conkling does not know that the Republicans’ compromise and victorious candidate will turn out to be Congressman James Garfield (1831–1881) of Ohio. Garfield’s support for civil service reform prompted Conkling’s rash resignation from the Senate and ensured his political exile. Conkling eked out a few broken last years until he was lost in a terrible snowstorm in the harsh winter of 1888 and died of exposure. (Lithograph after Wales reproduced in Puck of March 17, 1880; Library of Congress.)
Politicians were dedicated to an American dream of opportunity from the exploitation of fabulous, unrealized natural resources. Yet their parties were imperfect vehicles for coordinating government and popular will. William Hazlitt’s description of Whigs and Tories in early nineteenth-century England is just as apt for Republicans and Democrats in late nineteenth-century America. According to Hazlitt, the two parties were like rival stagecoaches splashing one another with mud as they raced along the same road to the same destination. Republicans and Democrats were agencies intent on power. They were not parties committed to any philosophy besides the needs of their interest groups. Their task was not to make controversial issues part of political debate. Major problems were brought to the fore of politics by splinter groups, third parties, and nonpartisan organizations.
The Republican party was supposedly in control of government from 1861. It was the party of the respectable North. Launched to supersede the Whigs, who were disgraced for their successive compromises over slavery, it was also the party that had saved the Union. The Republican stronghold was New England and the path of settlement westward: northern New York and the Old Northwest. This was the area which had been most opposed to slavery. At first it was predominantly rural and Protestant. It was also a corn belt, and the new reign of King Corn was even more secure than that of Old King Cotton. From three pivotal states—Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio—the Republicans garnered the winners of eleven presidential campaigns: Lincoln, Grant, and McKinley twice; and Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, Taft, and Harding once.
To the politician the party was an end in itself. To industrialists, businessmen, unionists, and farmers it was a means to an end: their economic interests. The groups that supported the Republicans did not do so for nothing. Farmers gained land by the Homestead Acts. Veterans gained pensions. Manufacturers gained tariffs, import duties to protect new domestic industries against cheap foreign goods.
Astute politicians recognized the relationship between the tariff and the value of land and industry. If one rose, then so too would the other. Those who read the signs of the times clearly and interpreted them accurately could gain by promoting increased duties. They were rewarded by protected domestic producers whose prices and profits rose. Thus, John Sherman of Ohio, Justin Morrill of Vermont, James G. Blaine of Maine, and others introduced and supported measures to increase the tariff. They pretended to do so out of patriotism. But their real motives were obvious to all.
But the party of victory had a dent in its armor. The Republicans were beset by a series of factions: first Liberals against “Radicals,” then “Half Breeds” against “Stalwarts.” The party that had been invincible in war was, apparently, almost invisible in peace. At times there was so much bitterness that Donn Piatt, political commentator, said in the Cincinnati Commercial of June 9, 1870: “I am forced to say that there is no more cohesion, beyond mere office holding and public plunder, in the Republican party than there is in a rope of sand. . . . The Republican party in Congress is composed of factions in such deadly antagonisms to each other that the hate among them is more intense than that given the Democrats.” This tendency to faction led to the Republicans’ losing the presidential elections of 1884 and 1892 and, eventually, to their disruption in 1912.
In this period of Republican ascendancy the Democrats were not weak. They won a plurality or majority of the popular vote in four of the five presidential elections between 1876 and 1892. They succeeded in getting Grover Cleveland elected twice, in 1884 and 1892. They lost the elections of 1876 and 1888 only because they failed to secure a majority in the electoral college. They were powerful not only in the South but also the border states and along the southern path of migration to the West. In addition, they could hold northern cities. In the election of 1880 they achieved a narrow plurality of 24,000 votes in the twelve most populous cities and by 1892 had increased this lead to 145,000. In particular, they captured the allegiance of Irish Catholics. The Irish detested English immigrants, who were natural Republicans.
Nevertheless, the Republicans liked to think that theirs was the natural party of government even when the task was beyond them. “Why!” said a Republican governor of Illinois. “Why, the Democrats can’t run the government! It’s all us Republicans can do.” Neither party, however, dominated the federal government for any length of time, since neither could sustain working majorities. The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives in eight of the ten Congresses between 1874 and 1894, during which time the Senate was Republican seven times. Thus, only twice did a single party control both the presidency and the Congress: the Republicans from 1889 to 1891 and the Democrats from 1893 to 1895.
Presidents held official power for short periods. On the other hand, the party bosses who nominated them wielded absolute power for as long as a generation. State bosses might be governors or senators. If they were not, they nominated those who were. Their power base was either considerable financial or industrial interests or control of a crucial area of the civil service.
The American civil service was part of a spoils system in which federal patronage was dispensed by party bosses. Officeholders were selected on the basis of party loyalty, not administrative competence. It was standard practice for new administrations to nominate their own appointees. The distribution of spoils after an election victory was called by Matthew Quay of Philadelphia, “shaking the plum tree.” The climax came when Lincoln, who could make 1,639 places or remove appointments, dismissed 1,457 officeholders. By the early 1870s the civil service was made up of incompetent and demoralized party hacks. As A. C. McLaughlin explains in The Courts, the Constitution, and Parties (1912), because the spoils system “provided a means of financing party management, it furnished the sinews of war to party government.”
This was certainly what happened in New York State, which passed along a chain of command of Senators Thurlow Weed, Roscoe Con-kling, and Thomas Platt. Each dominated politics by his control of the New York Custom House. New York was the main port, controlling commerce and collecting revenue from imports. Thus, its Custom House afforded unequal opportunities for graft and extortion and was the very center of the spoils system. It employed 1,000 party workers.
One ruse to raise funds was to undervalue imports, then make an official discovery of the mistake. Under the law the entire value of an import that was falsely declared was forfeit. Half of the total then went to the head of the Custom House. Importers thus entangled were willing to settle out of court and bribe the officer in charge. In 1874 the metal importers Phelps, Dodge and Company paid a bribe of $50,000 to Conkling and his man there, the collector Chester A. Arthur, his surveyor Alonzo Cornell, and Senator Ben Butler of Massachusetts, rather than forfeit a whole shipment worth $1.75 million that had been falsely declared.
It was similar elsewhere, J. S. Clarkson, the newspaper boss, in Iowa; General (and later governor) Russell Alger, the Match King, in Michigan; Governor Joseph Foraker in Ohio; Senator Arthur Gorman of Maryland—all ran state machines on the same sort of lines as Conkling. In Pennsylvania there was a dynasty, Senators Simon and Don Cameron, father and son. The basis of the bosses’ authority in the 1870s was federal patronage. But in some states it was business that ran the political machine. The Anaconda Copper Corporation dominated Montana. Collis Huntington, railroad magnate, stood at the center of political life in California.
Stalwarts and Half Breeds
James G. Blaine, who entered Congress as representative for Maine in 1863, led the Republican faction opposed to continuing Reconstruction indefinitely, the Half Breeds. Tall but not handsome, his face conveyed his special character with its dark eyes and flashing smile. He was resourceful, charming, and humorous. His sense of timing was faultless, his memory infallible. Yet Blaine created such intense reactions that wits said men went insane over him in pairs, one for and one against.
At first he kept on good terms with all sections of his party and thus came to be elected speaker of the House in 1869. But Blaine’s critics had often suggested that he had obtained his moderate wealth by auctioneering immense land and railroad rights. And in the spring of 1876 he was accused of taking an advance of $64,000 from the Union Pacific Railroad against collateral of worthless bonds in the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad. Blaine and the Union Pacific denied the charges publicly on April 24. However, a House committee heard from a bookkeeper, James Mulligan, on May 31 that the story was true. Blaine sought and obtained a private interview with Mulligan, at which he purloined supposedly incriminating letters. From these he read extracts to Congress on June 5 in such a disingenuous way as 10 convince his audience of his innocence. In fact, he won by throwing sand in the eyes of his accusers.
The term “Stalwart” was first given by Blaine to his opponents in the party in a letter he wrote to the Boston Herald printed on April 10, 1877. His most bitter enemy was their leader, Senator Roscoe Conkling. Their bitter antagonism divided the party and did not ease the problems facing its nominal leaders, the presidents.
Rutherford B. Hayes was only the third Republican to win the presidency. Conkling, who had connived at his election, referred to him as “His Fraudulency the President.” This title was taken up by the very Democrats who had also helped to perpetrate the fraud. Critics were even less kind to his wife, the former Lucy Webb. She treated guests at the White House to ice cream in dishes shaped like Indian snowshoes. Because she wanted to raise the reputation of the White House after the alcoholic excesses of the Grant years, she gave them sarsaparilla instead of whiskey. This was too much for some guests, who complained that “the water flowed like wine.” To her detractors she was “Lemonade Lucy.” She certainly cut no figure in high society. James Blaine’s daughter referred to the president’s circle as “that nasty Hayes set.”
As it happened, though, Hayes’s cabinet was the best since Lincoln’s. William Evarts of New York, who had defended Andrew Johnson at his trial, became secretary of state, John Sherman of Ohio became secretary of the treasury, and Carl Schurz of Missouri became secretary of the interior. A Confederate officer, David McKendree Key of Tennessee, was, as promised, made postmaster general.
Republican senators set out to restrict the power of the president. To some he was no more than a figurehead, like the doge of Venice. They wanted to confine him to ceremonial dignity without real power. Hayes was not skillful at political maneuver and undermined his own position from the start. He said that he would neither seek nor accept a second term, and he even recommended to Congress a constitutional amendment providing for a single term of six years.
When it came to matters of currency in the Gilded Age, politicians discerned silver threads among the golden. Indeed, the conflict between gold and silver was the very warp and woof of politics between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century. Postwar administrations tried to restore the currency to hard money, based on gold. Between 1865 and 1878 the Treasury reduced the number of dollars in circulation from $1.08 billion to $773.37 million. Consequently, the per capita circulation decreased from $31.18 in 1865 to $16.25 in 1878. This reduction caused slow but grinding discomfort for masses of people, especially in a period when expanding commerce and industry increased the need for currency. A difficult situation was exacerbated by the fact that there were three kinds of dollars in circulation—gold, silver, and paper. Paper dollars, or greenbacks, were the principal medium. It was said that they were green because rogue financiers picked them before they were ripe. Their value fluctuated according to their number and business confidence in them. In general, prices rose with increases in the money supply and fell with decreases. What cost $1.00 in 1860 cost $2.24 in 1865 (when the money supply was at its greatest) and fell successively as the money supply was reduced to $1.56 in 1870 and then to 99 cents in 1878.
Because the currency was also composed of gold and silver, its fate was linked to the different fortunes of these metals. In 1861 American mines had yielded about $43 million in gold but only $2 million in silver. The traditional ratio between silver and gold, 15.98 to 1, undervalued silver. Therefore, silver was sold commercially, and only gold was minted for coins. But, after the war, prospectors discovered new veins of silver in the West. Thus in 1873, for the first time, the value of silver mined was equal to that of gold, at $36 million. In 1874 the value of silver fell below the legal ratio of 16 to 1. Therefore, investors gained more by selling their silver to government for coins at the official price than by selling it commercially at the lower market price. The government acted cautiously in buying overpriced silver. In the Coinage Act of 1873 Congress eliminated silver currency by omitting any provision for minting silver dollars. Silver interests said that they had been duped and called the act “the crime of ‘73.”
In 1877 the average American had only half as many dollars as he had had at the end of the war. After four years of depression, Congress concluded that the government could restore prosperity by increasing the money supply and encouraging inflation. If people had more money to spend, they would buy manufactured goods. This would stimulate the market, encourage a rise in prices, and increase business confidence. After the comparative failure of the Greenback or Independent National party in 1876, when it took only 81,737 votes, the torch of inflation passed to silver interests. The silverites wanted to expand the medium of currency on the basis that 16 ounces of silver were worth 1 ounce of gold. In fact, this was overvaluing silver, for the commercial price of silver had fallen way below this level. Thus, acceptance of this formula would have weakened the value of gold.
In November 1877 Representative Richard (“Silver Dick”) Bland of Missouri introduced a bill for the free and unlimited coinage of silver at 412½ grains per silver dollar. It was passed overwhelmingly with a clause repealing the Resumption Act of 1875. Even if Hayes were to veto the bill in the interests of hard money and national honor, it was clear his veto would be overridden, so sensitive was Congress to labor unrest. Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman worked ceaselessly to effect a compromise and found an ally in William Allison of Iowa, now chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Sherman and Allison together decided on a strategy of limited silver coinage, with $2 million a month as minimum and $4 million a month as maximum. By restricting the coinage of silver to the lower level the resumption program was saved.
In his efforts to build up American gold reserves Sherman was helped by a bumper crop of wheat in 1878, much of which was sold in exchange for gold to Europe, which had had a poor harvest. On January 2, 1879, the first day of business, no one claimed gold for government notes. No one doubted the government’s ability to pay. The dollar was again on a par with other gold currencies. The apparent success of their policy convinced conservatives that hard money was the best policy through thick and thin.
Civil Service Reform
Reform of the civil service was one of the few subjects on which both liberals and conservatives could agree. In the wake of new inventions, industry, and technology, it was becoming clear to most people that nothing short of professional expertise would do if the government were ever to govern a nation undergoing momentous industrial and economic transformation. The old spoils system would have to go. Congressman Thomas A. Jenckes of Rhode Island had begun to agitate for selection by competitive examination as early as 1865. After Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone’s reform of the civil service in England in 1870, the movement for reform in America gathered momentum.
Some politicians were genuinely opposed to a civil service selected on the basis of academic attainment rather than practical ability. To James B. Beck of Kentucky and others, the existing system represented a natural school of citizenship. As E. L. Godkin, editor of the Nation, observed, it was possible that a system of competitive examinations would discriminate against able men from poor backgrounds who could not afford to go to college. Thus, instead of weakening class prejudice it would have the opposite effect. A nonentity like Franklin Pierce could still become president while a genius from a disadvantaged background, like Lincoln, could not.
In 1876 both parties called for reform. Reform of the civil service was one means of reviving presidential power. John Jay of New York investigated the New York Custom House for Hayes and Schurz, and his report of May 24, 1877, substantiated widespread allegations of bribery and corruption. On the basis of such information Hayes issued an executive order on June 22, 1877, forbidding political intimidation of civil servants by state bosses. The danger of a government without a president had been averted in the spring. The embarrassment of a president without a party in the fall was not. There now followed a contest between the president and spoilsmen led by Roscoe Conkling. On instructions from Conkling, U.S. Navy Officer Alonzo Cornell defied Hayes by calling a New York State Republican Convention in Rochester on September 26, 1877. Their intention was to discredit Republican reformers and have them dropped from the party ticket. Conkling denounced reformers for their hypocrisy: “Their stock in trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Their real object is office and plunder. When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then-undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘Reform’!” Conkling’s candidates were nominated. His denunciation of “Snivel Service Reform” became the new slogan of the Stalwarts.
Carl Schurz (1829-1906), a German-American lawyer, newspaper editor, and reform politician, was one of a distinguished few who, by dint of speeches, writing, and personal commitment, kept alive the flame of reason and tolerance in the Gilded Age. A founding member of the Republican party, he made a survey of the postwar South for Andrew Johnson in 1865, recommending that voting rights be extended to African-Americans. A joint editor of the St. Louis Westliche Post (1867–1869), he served as senator for Missouri (1869-1875) and later as president of the National Civil Service Reform League (1892–1900). (Photograph from a glass negative in the Library of Congress.)
On October 15, 1877, Hayes sent Congress the names of the men he wanted to succeed Officers Alonzo Cornell and Chester A. Arthur in the New York Custom House. The Senate gave Conkling its support. It was a case of congressional solidarity against presidential authority. However, Hayes bided his time. He waited until the summer of 1878 when Congress was in recess. Then he replaced Arthur and Cornell with his own men. When Congress returned, Conkling was faced with a fait accompli. Conkling had inexhaustible reserves of hate, but the Senate did not and on February 3, 1879, gave way to the president’s nominees, General E. A. Meritt and L. B. Prince.
In revenge, Conkling and the Stalwarts proposed retired president Ulysses S. Grant as Republican nominee at the Republican National Convention of 1880 in Chicago. The Half Breeds, however, were prepared to meet the needs of the time and proposed their own leader, James G. Blaine, now senator. Since neither Grant nor Blaine could win, the convention chose a dark horse, congressional veteran James A. Garfield of Ohio. He was nominated on the thirty-sixth ballot with 399 votes to 306 for Grant. Garfield was handsome, large but graceful, with a leonine mane and a deep voice. To balance the ticket he took as his running mate the notorious spoilsman, Chester A. Arthur, formerly of the New York Custom House. Conkling was dismayed at Arthur’s elevation.
During the campaign the Democratic candidate, General Winfield Scott Hancock, seemed to stir little interest. In the election the popular vote was among the closest ever. In a total of 9 million votes cast only 39,000 separated winner from loser. It was the capture of three doubtful states, each with a large electoral vote, that gave Garfield a plurality of 214 electoral votes against 155 for Hancock. Garfield had taken Indiana by a tiny plurality of 6,625 votes in a vote of about 500,000. Behind the scenes, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller had supported him. No fewer than 500 Standard Oil agents were assigned to the Republican campaign. The implication was clear, and Vice President-elect Arthur alluded to poll fraud in Indiana at a banquet at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York on February 24, 1881.
Garfield was the last of the seven log cabin presidents beginning with Andrew Jackson. A self-taught scholar who could speak both German and French and write Latin with one hand and Greek with the other at the same time, he nevertheless found presidential duties beyond him. “My god! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get in it,” he exclaimed after a month in office. Garfield and Blaine had been friends since Blaine had protected Garfield from disgrace in the Credit Mobilier scandals of 1872. Now Garfield needed Blaine more than ever. He had been decisive in making Garfield president, and was stronger in the party. It was inevitable that he would take the leading cabinet post, secretary of state. Garfield was disposed to conciliate faction by compromise. Blaine wanted his rivals killed off.
The collectorship of the New York Custom House was the most important administrative post outside the cabinet. It now controlled 1,300 apointments. It was there that Garfield and Blaine struck first. Rather than propitiate the Stalwarts, Garfield affronted them by appointing W. H. Robertson as collector. Robertson was not only one of Blaine’s allies but also another adversary of Conkling. Conkling and his ally, Senator Tom Platt of New York, retaliated. At first they blocked Senate approval of Robertson and then on May 16, 1881, resigned their seats in protest at Garfield’s “perfidy without parallel.” Conkling and Platt confidently expected that the New York legislature at Albany would reappoint them. But the Half Breeds discovered Platt in an Albany hotel in the company of “an unspeakable female.” He was so embarrassed that he withdrew his candidacy. Conkling was not reelected. But on the very day the public was regaled with newspaper reports of Platt’s sex life, farce turned to tragedy.
On July 2, 1881, James Garfield had breakfast with the Blaines and left their house for the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Depot in Washington. He was bound for a college reunion at Williamstown, Massachusetts. But at the depot he was shot and fatally wounded by a disappointed office seeker, Charles Guiteau. As he fired his pistol into the president’s back he cried, “I am a Stalwart and Arthur is president now.” Garfield did not die immediately. His life hung in the balance, and he lingered for three months. The wound hardly bled and the doctors had great difficulty in locating the bullet, which had lodged in a muscle. Among those who tried unsuccessfully to do so was inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who used an electrical device. Ironically, it was not the bullet that killed the president but the efforts to save him. The inexperienced surgeons were clumsy, and their careless probes caused blood poisoning, from which Garfield died on September 19, 1881.
“Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability” was a cynical observation of Irish critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw. Indeed, the assassination of Garfield in 1881 brought the agitation for civil service reform to a head in much the same way as the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 gave momentum to the movement for civil rights. While Garfield’s life ebbed slowly away people became increasingly aware of the way quarrels over patronage had led to his assassination. They were not even distracted by morbid press accounts of the trial and the hanging of his assassin. On August 11, 1881, the National Civil Service Reform League was founded.
The new president surprised everyone. Chester A. Arthur astonished his admirers and angered his adversaries by abandoning the spoils system that had made him president. He vetoed lavish appropriations of $18.7 millions for a Rivers and Harbors bill in 1882 because it would have provided new opportunities for graft and corruption. And on May 15, 1882, he gave his assent to an act establishing a commission to report on tariff revision.
Arthur’s life in the demimonde had made him a good judge of character. His nights spent in smoke-filled rooms had been a political education in themselves. Unlike Grant, Arthur wore the pants in his own home. In fact, he was quite the dandy. He had eighty pairs of trousers. His taste was impeccable. It was the dude president who invited Associated Artists, the company of interior decorators founded by artist and glass designer Louis Comfort Tiffany, to refurbish the White House.
Arthur’s political resolve was strengthened by public indignation over two new scandals, the Star Route Frauds and Hubbel Hale’s campaign letter. In early 1881 Postmaster General Thomas L. James had the postal service investigated by James MacVeagh, who exposed malpractices in the western mail services. In the sparsely populated West, contracts for mail delivery were awarded to private firms that used stagecoaches and horseback riders to carry letters and packets, since train and steamboat were not available. These firms were supposed to deliver mail with “Certainty, Celerity, and Security,” the words emphasized on the contracts by three stars.
It was the duty of Thomas J. Brady, second assistant postmaster general from 1876, to administer the routes and award the contracts. MacVeagh discovered that Brady had not only given contracts in exchange for bribes but had also accepted outrageous charges from dishonest contractors. The total cost to the government was $4 million. Brady and his confederates were arraigned and tried. A first trial ended inconclusively on September 11, 1882, and a second in a surprising acquittal on June 14, 1883.
The second scandal cut to the heart of the matter of civil service reform, the need for a service independent of party. In May 1882 the chairman of the Republican congressional campaign committee, Jay A. Hubbel Hale, sent to civil servants the traditional circular letter asking them for “voluntary contributions” to the Republicans’ election campaign funds. According to the usual custom, campaign contributions were between 2 and 6 percent of salaries. In the atmosphere following Garfield’s death and the unsuccessful prosecution of the Star Route Frauds, the letter inflamed public opinion. Public hostility to the Republicans was registered in the election results of 1882. The Democrats carried both houses. They then promoted legislation to reform the civil service, sponsored by Senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio. Republicans had to prove to the electorate their willingness to support a cause for which a president had died if they wanted to remain in office.
The Pendleton Act, signed by Arthur on January 16, 1883, created a Civil Service Commission of three members appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate. Not more than two were to come from any one party. The commission was to appoint a corps of examiners and provide for competitive examinations for prospective federal employees. The examination regulations were to apply to government departments in Washington and to customhouses and post offices with more than 50 employees. The president could extend the provisions of the act to other offices. The solicitation of campaign contributions was forbidden. By the turn of the century almost 100,000 positions were on the classified list. It was not only fortunate but also essential that the merit principle was adopted and put into effect before the increased role of government in the twentieth century necessitated an expanded civil service. Without it the fundamental reforms of the progressives could not have been attempted.
Despite the hazards involved in defying public clamor for reform, the embittered Roscoe Conkling could not resist a further attempt to retain political power. Thus the conflict between reform and diehard Republicans was now to be played out to the death in New York State. Backed by the Republican party machine, Alonzo B. Cornell, Arthur’s former partner at the New York Custom House, was elected governor of New York in 1880. As governor, he earned a reputation for shrewdness and fairness, for appointing competent administrators, modernizing the state’s finances, and vetoing extravagant pork barrel legislation. In effect, he was accepting the honorable duties of the position and moving toward the Half Breeds. Yet Cornell’s principal contribution to the unfolding of state politics was as victim. He became estranged from Roscoe Conkling, whom he offended by twice vetoing legislation aimed at reducing taxes levied upon rogue financier Jay Gould’s elevated railways, for which Conkling was acting as legal counsel.
Conkling and Gould took their revenge at the next election by fielding an alternate Republican candidate for governor, William J. Folger, upon whom they could better rely to maintain their interests. To ensure Folger’s nomination as Republican candidate over Cornell, they removed state officials loyal to Cornell from various cities across the state and placed a temporary chairman loyal to them in charge of the Republican State Convention. Conkling was determined to maintain control of the state machine in readiness for the presidential contest of 1884—despite considerable public odium for his tactics against Cornell. The upshot was another split in the Republican party and one that directly benefited the Democrats, who nominated Grover Cleveland, the popular mayor of Buffalo. Cleveland won the gubernatorial election by an avalanche of almost 200,000 votes over Folger, thereby ending the political careers of Cornell and Conkling and solidifying Republican solidarity behind Half Breed leader James G. Blaine.
Agitation for civil service reform had signified much more than public discontent over political spoils. It represented a fundamental challenge to government by clique and cabal. In the long battle the public had learned much about political strategy and tactics. The prevailing oligarchy was visibly shaken. But the new plutocracy was not. And when the public turned its attention to trusts and robber barons in the contemporaneous chain of trust and railroad legislation, it was not assured of victory. For reform changed the nature of corruption rather than the nature of politics. During the 1880s it became ever more insidious. The professional politician was to be upstaged by the political businessman.
The Senate was soon known as the Millionaire’s Club. Owing to increasingly rigid party control over state legislatures by bosses, it became easy for wealthy men to pay whatever price was demanded and get themselves elected to the upper house. For example, Senator Thomas (“Me, too”) Platt, who was New York’s “Easy Boss” after Conkling’s death, rewarded loyal constituents with favors for services rendered.
The Senate, instead of representing geographical areas, came to represent economic units. Eastern magnates Donald Cameron of Pennsylvania, Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, and Stephen Elkins of West Virginia were joined in the late 1880s by Senators James McMillan and Francis Stockbridge, who represented lumber rather than Michigan. Calvin Brice represented banks and railroads; H. B. Payne, Standard Oil rather than Ohio. James Fair and John P. Jones represented silver rather than Nevada. George Hearst represented gold and newspaper rather than California; and Philetus Sawyer, appropriately, represented lumber rather than Wisconsin. The reputation of senators for helping themselves to fortunes at others’ expense led to a story about President Grover Cleveland being awakened by his wife with the news that there were burglars in the house. Cleveland denied it drowsily. “In the Senate maybe, but not in the House.” Several senators were corporation lawyers including John Spooner of Wisconsin, Arthur Gorman of Maryland, and Orville Platt of Connecticut. Platt had all the characteristics of a lawyer in politics and was well known for always hedging his bets. One story tells how in 1894 he was visiting his Connecticut constituents, including a farmer who commented on a flock of sheep coming along a crossroad: “Them sheep been shorn.” Platt, cautious as ever, opined, “‘Pears so,—at least on this side.”
To the new men party organization was a means to an end, not an end in itself as it had been to the old spoilsmen. English political scientist James Bryce understood how and why political and economic interests came to be mixed together in Congress. In his American Commonwealth (1893) he explained the difference between Congress and a European assembly: “Europeans think that the legislature ought to consist of the best men in the country, Americans that it should be a fair average sample of the country. Europeans think that it ought to lead the nation, Americans that it ought to follow the nation.”
Cleveland
James Blaine’s Republican opponents had been routed in the battle over patronage. He intended the Republican party to become the party of business quite openly with protection as its essential doctrine. Since they could no longer win elections by waving the bloody shirt, Republicans responded to Blaine’s call and turned to the tariff as a rallying flag. Arthur, who had achieved reform, had satisfied nobody. It was now Blaine’s turn to lead. He was duly nominated for president on the fourth ballot at the Republican National Convention in Chicago on June 5, 1884.
Blaine was the most formidable Republican leader between Lincoln and McKinley. Yet it was his candidacy that made possible the first election of a Democratic president in twenty-eight years: Grover Cleveland, the former mayor of Buffalo and present governor of New York. A lawyer by profession, Cleveland was considered ugly but honest. He acquired a national reputation not only as an opponent of Tammany Hall but also as a man of principle. He had vetoed a 5-cent fare proposed by the street railway of New York.
The elevated railroads in New York, still controlled by Jay Gould, were permitted to charge a fare of 10 cents except in rush hours, when the rate was 5 cents. Public opinion, stirred by Gould for his own ends, wanted the fare to be fixed at 5 cents for all hours. Cleveland vetoed a bill proposing this on the grounds that it violated a contract awarded by state charter. As a result of this action, he became a popular hero of the middle class, delighted at Gould’s discomfiture. In addition, he gained a reputation for thrift and being able to rise above partisan politics. Historian and journalist Dennis Tilden Lynch has described how skillful was Cleveland’s use of the common touch. He would campaign “in saloons with beer barrels and tables for his rostrum. There wasn’t a saloon kept by a Democrat, boasting a fair-sized back room, that he did not enter and harangue the thirst-slaking citizens after sharing a drink with them.” Reporter William Hudson condensed Cleveland’s political philosophy to “Public office is a public trust,” and this became the slogan of his campaign. It was generally supposed that Cleveland opposed the power of monopolies and corporations. Yet in his campaign of 1884 Cleveland was supported by big business. He received contributions amounting to a total of $453,000.
The actual campaign was about public morality. Like others on that subject—such as in 1952, 1972, and 1992—it was one of the dirtiest ever. Both sides concentrated on juicy subjects: fornication and fabrication. Cleveland, still a bachelor, had had a mistress in Buffalo, Maria Halpin, who had borne him an illegitimate child. The Republican press had a field day with insinuations about his indiscriminate son. It was said that as son of a former mayor he knew his oats. Blaine was no luckier. Not only were letters about Blaine’s dealings with railroads published in unexpurgated form but also a letter of April 18, 1876, which Blaine had written to Warren Fisher explaining his tactics. Blaine had betrayed more than he intended—his character. Thus, the Democratic campaign slogan was:
Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine,
The continental liar from the State of Maine.
Blaine was unacceptable to several influential Republicans who prized political morality over party loyalty. Celebrated reformer George W. Curtis summed up the choice offered the electorate thus:
We are told that Mr. Blaine has been delinquent in office, but blameless in private life, while Mr. Cleveland has been a model of official integrity, but culpable in his personal relations. We should therefore elect Mr. Cleveland to the public office which he is so well qualified to fill and remand Mr. Blaine to the private station which he is admirably fitted to adorn.
This was also the country’s verdict—but only by a small margin. Cleveland took 4,879,507 popular votes to Blaine’s 4,850,293 a plurality of only 29,214.
New York, then the most populous state, was pivotal in deciding the outcome. When members of the Prohibition party, founded in 1869, attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago to plead their case, they were snubbed, whereas brewers and distillers were welcomed. Their candidate, John P. St. John of Kansas, took 16,000 votes in New York away from Blaine. Cleveland carried New York by only 1,149 votes, and thus the Republican votes lost to St. John had given him victory there. Blaine did receive a delegation of Protestant clergymen in New York on October 29, 1884. One, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Bur-chard, openly disparaged the Democrats as the party of “Rum, roman-ism, and rebellion.” His remark was offensive to Irish Catholics, predominant in machine politics, as was Blaine’s attendance at a millionaires’ banquet at Delmonico’s the same day. Until then Blaine had enjoyed a strong following among Irish-Americans. Now it was entirely dissipated.
The election results were in doubt for several days. Rumors abounded that Jay Gould, Cleveland’s adversary over the rail fare, was delaying and falsifying returns by his control of telegraph wires. A mob surrounded the Western Union Building crying, “We’ll hang Jay Gould to a sour apple tree.” In fact, he was safe in his yacht on the Hudson River. To show that there were no hard feelings over old scores, Gould cabled his congratulations to Cleveland on November 7, 1884: “The vast business interests of the country will be entirely safe in your hands.” His prediction was entirely accurate.
Woodrow Wilson’s verdict on Cleveland as president was that he was not a Democrat but a conservative Republican. Despite momentary outbursts of temper, Cleveland had immense stamina and self-control. But he lacked imagination and compassion. He reflected the Democratic party’s nineteenth-century distrust of strong centralized government. Nevertheless, it was not party loyalty nor even public opinion that determined Cleveland’s policies—it was his personal prejudices. Cleveland was not ambitious for reform, nor could he have carried a controversial legislative program through Congress. The Republicans controlled the Senate throughout his first term, and the Democrats just barely retained their House majority in the midterm election of 1886. The highlight of Washington’s calendar in 1886 was a social, not a political event. In June, Cleveland married at the age of forty-nine. His bride was his ward, Frances Folsom, a girl of twenty-one.
Cleveland was consistent in wanting to cut down on government extravagance and waste. A particular problem was the high cost of veterans’ pensions. In 1876 one-tenth of the federal expenditure had been spent on pensions. By 1886 it was a quarter. The lists were endless. A particular abuse was the passage of special pension bills by the House in regular evening sessions. Cleveland refused to sign many of these. One rejected bill was to provide for a man who had never served in the army at all. On his way to enlist he had suffered a fall that had crippled him. Another bill was for the widow of an army captain who had died of apoplexy in 1883, which she attributed to a wartime hernia of 1863. A third was for the family of a man who had deserted and drowned while making his escape. Yet in 1887 Congress passed the Invalid Pension Act, which awarded pensions to all disabled veterans whether their disabilities had been incurred in the service or not. Cleveland vetoed it.
When promiscuous alcoholic Maria Halpin claimed her illegitimate son, Oscar, was the child of Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) in 1884, the Republican press had a field day, as this vicious cartoon by Frank Beard from Judge of September 2.7, 1884, suggests. (Library of Congress.)
Cleveland, Secretary of the Interior Lucius Lamar, and Land Commissioner W. A. J. Sparks also restored 81 million acres of public lands to the federal government that had been legally granted to railroads but never used for construction or that had been illegally appropriated by cattle farmers. But his determination to cut federal expenditure was more often turned against those sections of the community who most needed government aid. On February 16, 1887, he vetoed the Texas Seed bill with its modest appropriation of $10,000 for farmers in desperate need of seed grain. His message was pompous if not patronizing: “Though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” But he took a very different attitude to people with money for speculation. To induce investors to turn in their 4 percent federal bonds before they matured, Cleveland offered a premium of $28 above the face value of $100 on each.
However, Cleveland did risk his career by questioning the basic assumption of industry, that government would support it through thick and thin. He did so in his annual state of the Union message of December 6, 1887: “Our present tariff laws, the vicious, inequitable and illogical source of unnecessary taxation,” he said, “ought to be at once revised and amended.”
The Civil War tariffs had been conceived by the government as emergency measures to raise revenue. The most important, the Morrill Tariff of 1861, was also passed at the behest of a bloc representing New England textile and Middle Atlantic iron and steel interests. Thereafter, both new and established industries expected the government to protect them against cheap foreign goods. Critics of the tariff system argued that some manufacturers increased prices (and hence profits) in line with the tariff using the difference between cost of production and tariff rate as retail price. Thus prices rose but not wages, and exports were harmed as much as imports.
Cleveland was preoccupied with government surplus. Because of the tariff, a “Treasury Octopus” of revenue surplus above and beyond federal expenditure threatened financial stability. By 1888 the accumulated surplus would rise to $140 million—about a third of all the country’s circulating capital. In addition, the high tariff encouraged the development of trusts. As sugar magnate Henry Havemeyer said, “The Tariff is the mother of Trusts,” for every new tariff with increased duties led to increased speculation on combinations. Cleveland believed that the existing system was “a burden upon those with moderate means and the poor, the employed and unemployed, the sick and well, and the young and old.” The only proper course of action, he believed, was to reduce the tariff and balance the books. His decision was based on practical considerations rather than on theories about protection and free trade: “It is a condition which confronts us, not a theory.” But his words were political dynamite in an election year. They provided the two parties with their first genuine difference in a generation.
In line with Cleveland’s recommendation, the new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Roger Mills of Texas, was assigned the task of devising a new tariff. His original bill would have reduced the duty on manufactured goods by 7 percent while making certain raw materials duty free. By June 21, 1888, when it passed from House to Senate, it was already a compromise of different sectional interests. Disinterested philosophy had given way to political expedience. Even so, the Senate Finance Committee, composed of Aldrich, Allison, Morrill, and Sherman, refused to accept it. Neither Democratic House nor Republican Senate would yield. The issue went to the electorate.
What the Republicans needed in the election itself was a presidential nominee who could rally all discontented Democrats to their cause. Blaine declined to run. At the Republican National Convention in Chicago on June 25, 1888, Senator Benjamin Harrison of Indiana was nominated. A frigid Presbyterian deacon, he was no friend of labor. His only qualification for the presidency was his ancestry. His grandfather, William Henry Harrison, had been the ninth president.
Given his limitations, Harrison was lucky to have the astute Senator Matthew P. Quay of Pennsylvania as his campaign manager. Quay began his career as a city boss in Harrisburg and then became state boss of Pennsylvania. Tom Platt called him “the ablest politician this country has ever produced.” His aquiline nose, high cheek bones, and sharp chin showed that he was part Indian. As the result of a war wound, one of his eyes drooped, giving him a baleful expression. After a career as a lawyer, newspaper editor, and member of the Pennsylvania legislature, he became secretary of the Commonwealth and recorder of Philadelphia, and in 1879 chairman of the Republican state committee. His particular racket was diverting state funds, deposited in private banks, to private speculators. If these speculations failed, the state lost its money. When $400,000 were discovered to be missing, there was a great uproar. Quay had to retire for a few years. In 1885 he returned to take charge of the state treasury and in 1887 was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Matthew Quay’s campaign strategy in 1888 was to obtain considerable contributions from businessmen in exchange for promises of political factors in the future. He secured the cooperation of capitalists William Dudley, John Wanamaker, Mark Hanna, Thomas Dolan, and others. The Republicans admitted raising $1 million altogether in campaign contributions. This was four times the sum acknowledged by the Democrats. The New York World of November 25, 1888, reported allegations that the Republicans had raised an additional secret fund of $2 million. In return for this massive financial support from big business the Republicans promised to revise the whole system of internal taxation but to keep the protective system intact. Yet they also declared opposition to “all combinations of capital, organized in trusts or otherwise.”
In a close election Cleveland took a plurality of the popular vote, winning 5,537,857 votes to Harrison’s 5,447,129. But he lost three key states, Ohio, Indiana, and New York. With these he lost the election. In the electoral college he had only 168 votes to Harrison’s 233.
The national contest turned almost entirely on the tariff. In New York it devolved on ballot reform and prohibition. When a naturalized citizen born in England asked the foolish British minister to the United States, Sir Lionel Sackville-West, how he should vote to serve England, West advised him in writing to vote for the Democrats. His reply was published, and his advice was highly offensive to Irish Democrats who deserted Cleveland for Harrison.
Rather than see prohibitionists determine the outcome of the presidential election, as they had boasted of doing in 1884, regular Republicans and Democrats struck a deal with one another in New York State. Harrison was acceptable to the liquor interests. If the wet Democrats would vote for him, then the wet Republicans would vote for the reelection of David B. Hill, Democratic governor. Hill was reelected governor of New York by 19,000 votes, whereas Cleveland lost the state by 9,529. According to reports in the Nation of November 29, 1888, and March 7, 1889, the Republicans paid $150,000 for three Democratic political clubs in New York State each having between 10,000 and 30,000 votes.
An Interregnum
As president Harrison proved a cipher, and a cold one at that. It was said that he bestowed favor in such a frigid fashion that he turned a friend into a foe for life. His handshake was compared to a wilted petunia. He was so taciturn when he met people that it was not generally known that his first language was English. Even his political allies derided Harrison’s small stature and glacial manners in an anecdote about a visitor to the White House who was refused an audience with the president by a secretary who insisted, “I’m sorry, sir, but the president cannot be seen.”
“Can’t be seen!” was the retort. “My God! Has he got as small as that?”
Authority drifted from White House to Capitol. In the House there were just 165 Republicans to 154 Democrats. It was now the turn of the Democrats to play fast and loose with the rules. The minority could outmaneuver the majority. The Democrats demanded a quorum call and then refused to answer their names. The lower house would comprise a sizable number and yet remain technically without a quorum. However, the new speaker, Thomas B. (“Czar”) Reed, was master of the situation. On January 29, 1890, Reed instructed the clerk to record members as present even if they refused to respond to the quorum call. By doing so he precipitated a debate about obstruction in which such tactics were outlawed.
With such a supine president at the helm it was no wonder that Congress returned to the gross extravagance of the Grant period. The significant difference was that now political venality was perfectly legal. Congress passed a Dependent Veterans’ Pension bill in 1890, which was to double the lists of pensioners within four years. Veterans of ninety days’ service suffering physical or mental disability (whatever the cause) and their widows were to receive a pension, provided that they had no other source of support. Harrison defended such provisions in 1892. “It was,” he said, “no time to be weighing the claims of old soldiers with apothecary’s scales.”
Since the Republicans had campaigned for increased protection in 1888, they also proposed a new tariff in October 1890. In keeping with Cleveland’s pledge, it was officially entitled “An Act to Reduce the Revenue”; but it was generally known by the names of its sponsors, Representative William McKinley of Ohio and Senator Nelson W. Aid-rich of Rhode Island. Their intentions were, of course, very different from Cleveland’s. McKinley remonstrated against the very idea that poor people needed cheaper goods: “Cheap is not a word of hope; it is not a word of inspiration! It is the badge of poverty; it is the signal of distress.” Both this tariff and the Dingley Tariff of 1897 awarded prizes to all allies of the tariff bloc.
The McKinley tariff raised the general levels from 38 to 50 percent. But the increases on textiles and metal goods were so high that people stopped buying these imports. Refined sugar was taxed at one cent a pound to the benefit of Henry O. Havemeyer and the Sugar Trust. To gain support of sugar-producing states American growers were to be paid a bounty of two cents a pound. Coffee, hides, acorns, and beeswax were put on the free list. The tax on tobacco was lowered, making it possible for the American Tobacco Company to sell more cigarettes. The removal of all duties on raw sugar and molasses alone cut federal income by $50 million a year. Thus, by the time Cleveland returned to office in 1893, the surplus that had so appalled him in 1887 had been turned into a deficit. Even Republicans were dissatisfied. For instance, Secretary of State James G. Blaine was incensed that the McKinley Tariff ran counter to his proposed tariff concessions to Latin America. McKinley took first the acclaim for the decisions and then the blame when he was defeated in the midterm elections of 1890.
The Gilded Age held out promise of gold for all. But there was not enough for everyone, and in 1890 the movement for the coinage of silver revived. In part this was due to a catastrophic fall in the prices of wheat, cotton, and corn, and consequently it brought about renewed calls for inflationary policy from the farmers. But these renewed calls now had extra weight. In 1889 four new states entered the Union, North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington; in 1890 two more, Idaho and Wyoming. They were western states, part of the silver bloc. As territories they had been just as interested in silver, but as states they each had two senators to press their case and make the silver bloc a sizable minority in the upper house. It now comprised seventeen Republicans and one Democrat who held up passage of the McKinley Tariff until they had forced Congress to accept the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. It required the secretary of the treasury to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver a month.
Speaker Thomas B. (“Czar”) Reed (1839–1902) was much criticized in the Democratic press for his dictatorial conduct of House affairs in the 1890s, especially when it seemed congressional business was more than ever subject to the dictates of big business and high finance. (Library of Congress.)
Those who put their trust in silver got as much as they deserved. During these years the production of silver increased, and gold became more scarce and more expensive. Inevitably, the gold value of a silver dollar fell to 67 cents. Worse, by 1892 the Treasury had less than the minimum gold reserve, $100 million.
The unpopularity of the McKinley tariff led to numerous Republican defeats in the midterm elections of 1890. Only 88 Republicans were elected to the new House against 235 Democrats and 9 Populists. It was said the Democrats owed their victory to a revolt of consumers from the Republican standard. They wanted to pocket the prizes but not pay the bill. They were sickened not only by higher prices but also by the lavish spending of the retiring Fifty-first Congress. Its appropriations came to the then-unprecedented sum of $989 million. When reproached with the extravagance of the “billion-dollar Congress,” Speaker Reed remonstrated that it was justified: the United States was a billion-dollar country.
It was inevitable that Cleveland and Harrison would be pitted against one another in the election of 1892. During the interregnum Cleveland had worked as a corporation lawyer in New York City. The action replay ended in decisive victory for Cleveland, who received 5,555,426 votes to Harrison’s 5,182,690 and carried a group of pivotal states. He took 277 electoral votes to Harrison’s 145. Cleveland had given the Democrats their greatest victory in forty years. But his popular vote was only 3 percent higher than his rival’s. A significant feature of the election was the considerable advance made by a new third party, the People’s party, or Populists, of the South and West.
The Return of Cleveland
No sooner had Cleveland’s second term begun than economic disaster struck. As had been the case in 1873, the first signs of industrial crisis came with railroad collapse. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad failed ten days before Cleveland took office. It was followed by the Erie in July, and then by the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Santa Fe in the late summer. The panic of 1893 caused the collapse of a quarter of the railroads representing $2.5 billion of capital and over 40,000 miles of track.
Another factor in the ensuing depression was the weakness of the banking structure. Banking had become increasingly concentrated in New York. Disturbances in Wall Street extended to the rest of the country. The New York Stock Exchange was convulsed in its greatest selling spree. Banks asked for their loans to be paid, and those individuals and firms who could not repay went bankrupt. More than 15,000 businesses failed in 1893. Rural banks collapsed. Of 158 bank failures, 153 were in the West and South. The depression was the worst experienced in America to that time. No one really knew how many people were unemployed. Estimates vary from 2.5 million to 4 million, at least one worker in five of the labor force.
As conscientious as before, Cleveland was now firmly committed to the capitalist point of view. Ike Hoover, head usher at the White House, attests to the change in the man who once had the common touch: “Of his company he was very choosey and he seemed to prefer moneyed people. Looking over the list one might term it a ‘millionaire’s crowd.’” He certainly had little sympathy with those who were dispossessed. He once came upon a beggar eating grass on the White House lawn who confessed, “I’m hungry.” Cleveland advised him, “The grass is longer in the backyard.” Appropriately, one of the most popular new songs of 1894 was/Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard (“If you won’t be good to me”).
Cleveland was out of touch with public opinion and confused by disturbing social trends. But overseas events forced him to take action and try and raise the depression. On June 26, 1893, India joined European countries and abandoned bimetallism. That day the value of the American silver dollar fell from 67 cents to below 60 cents in gold. Attributing the panic to monetary uncertainty, Cleveland believed that there was just one remedy, a drastic one—repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. On June 30 he summoned a special session of Congress for August 8 to “put beyond all doubt or mistake the intention and the ability of the Government to fulfill its pecuniary obligations in money universally recognized by all civilized countries.” America would return to the gold standard. Cleveland recognized that his proposal would split the Democratic party. But he was not deterred. He had immense stamina. The day after he called Congress into special session Cleveland underwent a dangerous operation to remove a cancerous growth in the roof of his mouth. It was performed in the utmost secrecy on a yacht in New York’s East River. Part of his jaw was removed and replaced with an artificial jaw made of vulcanized rubber.
By selective manipulation of patronage Cleveland ensured enough Democratic votes to help Republicans repeal the discredited Silver Purchase Act of 1890. Repeal passed the House by 239 votes to 108 on August 18, 1893. Two months later it passed the Senate by 43 votes to 37. Among those who spoke against repeal was Congressman William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. A most eloquent orator with a sonorous voice, he soon abandoned his written notes and held the House engrossed in his arguments for three hours. The substance of his appeal was faith in the simple people of America. To Bryan the conflict between gold and silver represented a clash of wills between capitalists and ordinary people.
On the one side stand the corporate interests of the United States, the moneyed interests, aggregated wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless. On the other hand stand an unnumbered throng, those who gave to the Democratic party a name, and for whom it has assumed to speak. Work-worn and dust-begrimed, they make their mute appeal, and too often their cry for help beats in vain against the outer walls, while others, less deserving, gain access to legislative halls.
This one plangent speech turned an almost unknown politician from an obscure state into a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896.
The economic results of repeal were not decisive. But politically it was disastrous. Not since slavery and secession had there been such a divisive issue as silver. Moreover, repeal roused public suspicions about the financial probity of the government. Instead of stopping holders of silver certificates from requesting redemption in gold, repeal swelled the tide. It dawned on the president and his cabinet that the government might not be able to meet its legal obligations in gold. Cleveland decided to sell government bonds for gold. But he required the financial assurance of some independent agency in order to convince the public that his strategy was sound. He turned to banker J. P. Morgan, who could assemble a syndicate of financiers to assure the bonds. However, this insurance starved the financial appetite that it was intended to feed. Clients who bought bonds first drew from the Treasury the gold they needed to pay for them. Thus, as soon as one drain was closed another opened. In the winter of 1895 the gold reserve fell to $42 million. Cleveland compounded the problems by seeking two further sales of bonds, again guaranteed by the banks that provided the Treasury with gold to cover withdrawals. They bought bonds at 104½ and sold them at 118. In 1896 the Treasury issued $100 million in bonds supported by public subscription. This fourth measure succeeded in damming the tide and the crisis passed. No single act by the administration aroused as much censure as Cleveland’s contract with Morgan. It seemed to ordinary people that this was another tightfisted bargain in which wicked capitalists had profited from a national crisis. Furthermore, the deal had failed to ease the depression, whereas generous public response to the fourth issue of 1896 had saved the situation.
Cleveland also tried to persuade Congress to reduce the tariff, but the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894, which passed over his veto, involved 634 changes from the original bill, most of them upward. Cleveland denounced it as “party perfidy and party dishonor.” However, because Congress recognized the very real financial problems facing the administration, it included a provision for a tax of two percent on incomes of $4,000 or more. This was a most controversial measure. Congressman J. H. Walker of Massachusetts stated, “The income tax takes from the wealth of the thrifty and the enterprising and gives to the shifty and the sluggard.” Senator John Sherman of Ohio declared, “This attempt to array the rich against the poor . . . is socialism, communism, devilism.” And in a widely publicized test case of 1895, Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan and Trust Company, the Supreme Court decided by a 5–4 vote that income tax was unconstitutional. The case against the tax was that because it was direct it must be apportioned among the states according to population. However, this would not be practicable. Therefore, the Court decided that the act must fall.
“General” Jacob S. Coxey, a quarry owner of Massillon, Ohio, had a different solution for the depression. He proposed a bill allowing any town or county ready to undertake public improvements such as road building to issue bonds without interest, to be held with the secretary of the treasury in exchange for legal tender notes. Public improvements financed in this way would give men employment at a minimum wage of $1.50 for an eight-hour day. Coxey decided to press his claim. Starting on Easter Sunday 1894, Coxey, accompanied by his wife and infant son, Legal Tender Coxey, led a march of unemployed men from Ohio to Washington. This was a “petition on boots” intended to stir the stern countenances of congressmen. Only 500 broken veterans arrived exhausted in Washington on May Day. Coxey was arrested for trespass on Capitol Hill, and his followers were dispersed by the police. In the melee some fifty people were beaten up or trampled upon. In 1894 seventeen industrial armies altogether marched on Washington, scaring the administration into thinking that they represented incipient rebellion across the country.
In the midterm elections of 1894 the Democrats lost the support of urban voters. Two decades of congressional equilibrium between the parties ended as the Republicans recaptured both houses. They were to retain control for the next sixteen years. Silver Democrats had already joined forces with Populists in the West, where it was sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. However, silver interests had not yet given up hope of tying the Democrats to their cause.
When Cleveland left the presidency in 1897 his party was divided, defeated, and demoralized. Cleveland’s wife remarried after his death in 1908 and lived until 1947. When she met General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the future thirty-fourth president, she told him how much she missed Washington. “Really,” he asked, “where did you live?”
Foreign Policy
During the 1860s and 1870s few Americans were interested in foreign policy. The swelling tide of immigrants seeking refuge confirmed them in their traditional suspicions about Europe. However, it became clear to Secretaries of State William H. Seward (1861–69) and Hamilton Fish (1869–77) that, because of its expanding network of communications, its industry and trade, the United States could not afford to ignore its interests in world affairs. Business and industry put pressure on congressmen to secure or challenge particular policies that did or did not suit their interests. The policies of Seward and Fish reflected these conflicts and confusions. If their policies lacked a sense of grand design, it was also because they had to work without adequate administrative staff. There were only thirty-one clerks in the State Department in 1869.
Seward’s policy was expansionist but subject to immense frustration and lost on politicians obsessed with Reconstruction. The collapse of the Spanish attempt to colonize the Dominican Republic, or Santo Domingo, and Spain’s subsequent withdrawal from the island in 1865 were attributed to his diplomatic efforts. In 1867 Seward also put military pressure on Napoleon III to withdraw from his attempt to install the emperor Maximilian in Mexico. Seward’s most famous act, however, was the purchase of Alaska from Russia. He signed the treaty in the middle of a game of whist at four o’clock in the morning on March 30, 1867. Hence the purchase was called “a dark deed done in the night.” Although the Senate approved the purchase on April 6, Congress did not appropriate the purchase money of $7.5 million until 1870, and then only after the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckel, had spent some of it in advance to bribe influential Republicans in the House. What use, they wondered, was this “Walrussia” or “Seward’s Folly” with its frozen wastes? The Nation spoke for many when it declared that if the nation was in peril it was not for lack of territory but because of an excess of it.
On July 28, 1868, Seward signed the Seward-Burlingame Treaty of commerce and friendship with China. The Senate, however, rejected his treaty of October 24, 1867, to buy the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, and St. John from Denmark for $7.5 million. On August 28, 1867, Seward annexed the unoccupied Midway Islands west of Hawaii, and on June 21, 1867, he acquired American right of transit in Nicaragua for cutting a canal across the isthmus at a later date.
Most controversial of all were the protracted negotiations with Britain over the Alabama claims. On January 14, 1869, the Senate rejected the treaty negotiated by the United States minister to England, Reverdy Johnson, to settle the Alabama dispute. It contained not one word of regret for the wartime damage caused by the Alabama and the other confederate vessels, the Shenandoah and the Florida, which had been built or fitted in British ports. Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged that Britain should bear half the total cost of the war, $2.12 billion, for having aided the South and prolonged the war. Sumner really wanted the cession of Canada in payment. On May 8, 1871, a joint Anglo-American commission settled the score by establishing a judicial commission of five members to adjudicate the claims of the United States. On September 14, 1872, the new commission reported that Britain had been negligent in allowing the Alabama and the other cruisers to participate in the war. It awarded the United States compensation of $15.5 million.
On the advice of his private secretary, Orville Babcock, President Ulysses S. Grant revived one of Seward’s schemes for the annexation of Santo Domingo. In submitting a treaty of annexation for ratification by the Senate, the president was disclosing that he was the tool of predatory businessmen and politicians, including Ben Butler and John A. Rawlins. The Senate rejected the treaty on November 29, 1869. Relations between Spain and the United States deteriorated to a very low ebb over the Virginius affair of 1873. The Virginius was a ship carrying arms to Cuban rebels against Spain under the American flag. It was seized at sea by a Spanish gunboat, and fifty-three of the crew, including eight Americans, were executed for piracy. The situation was saved by the discovery that the ship was not registered in the United States, and Spain subsequently paid an indemnity for the loss of American lives.
Between the Virginius affair of 1873 and the Hawaiian crisis of 1891 foreign relations were comparatively untroubled. However, during Chester A. Arthur’s administration politicians showed greater interest in foreign policy and called for an expanded navy to demonstrate American willingness to back it up with force when necessary. A nation without a navy, they argued, could make little headway in world affairs in an age of sea power.
The navy was then not only small but also in poor repair. Representative John D. Long of Massachusetts described it as “an alphabet of floating washtubs.” In The Canterville Ghost Oscar Wilde has this exchange between the English aristocratic ghost and the pert American girl:
“I don’t think I should like America.”
“I suppose because we have no ruins and no curiosities,” said Virginia satirically.
“No ruins! No curiosities!” answered the Ghost; “you have your navy and your manners.”
The most famous advocate of naval expansion was former naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan first propounded his ideas for a larger navy and the acquisition of naval bases in the Pacific and Caribbean in lectures at the new Naval War College in 1886 and then published them as The Influence of Sea Tower upon History in 1890. He reflected rather than provoked a changing mood in public opinion, but his ideas were most welcome to advocates of expansion, such as the rising politicians Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge. Congress set about repairing and improving the navy. In 1883 it commissioned three cruisers and in 1886 two battleships, the Maine and the Texas. The Naval Act of 1890 authorized the building of three more powerful battleships, the Indiana, the Massachusetts, and the Oregon. Whereas in 1880 the American navy was twelfth in the world, by 1900 it was third with seventeen battleships and six armored cruisers.
A few statesmen and some businessmen favored commercial expansion. On the traditional assumption that the best means of defense is attack, they argued that the United States had to acquire territory to preserve its traditional commercial and strategic rights. They were contemptuous of the European contest for imperial possessions but caught the same mania themselves. They held certain assumptions about America’s role in world affairs. They considered the United States to be both a stabilizing and a liberalizing influence on European diplomacy. They liked to think that its own emphasis on material progress and on individual freedom was an inspiration to emerging nations. Thus, politicians confused duty, interests, and power. They could not conceive why in the 1890s movements for national independence in underdeveloped colonies refused to distinguish between conventional European imperialism and American economic expansion.
Emerging nations were not likely to be propitiated by conventional American claims when they were propounded by such advocates of Social Darwinism and Manifest Destiny as Josiah Strong. In Our Country, Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885) he declared:
This race of unequalled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it—the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization,—having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. If I read not amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the survival of the fittest?
From the 1880s American politicians expressed particular interest first in Latin America and then in the Pacific. President James Garfield needed James G. Blaine as secretary of state to conceive foreign policy as well as to make the Republican party more liberal. Blaine’s policy was a mixture of capitalist self-interest, bourgeois morality, and liberal faith in economic progress. He believed that if the United States encouraged favorable conditions for political stability and economic growth in Latin America it would gain a double advantage: permission to extract natural resources from developing Latin American economies in need of U.S. investment, and the sale of American industrial goods in their markets. To make the New World truly free for the United States he favored a common system of coins, weights, and measures; free trade and unrestricted travel; and a series of hemispheric conferences to educate statesmen and businessmen politically and economically.
Blaine’s early initiatives died with Garfield. Chester A. Arthur was reluctant to support such an innovative policy and one, moreover, that was being advanced by a political opponent. Frustrated, Blaine resigned in December 1881.
On his return to power as secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison, Blaine persuaded Congress to incorporate a clause in the McKinley Tariff of 1890, whereby the president was empowered to penalize imports from Latin American countries that did not afford reciprocal treatment to American exports. At this time 87 percent of exports from Latin America entered the United States free of duty. Tariff reciprocity was an instrument of diplomacy and one that worked all the better for not attracting domestic comment and confrontation. The outgoing president, Grover Cleveland, had revived the idea of a conference for nations in the Western Hemisphere, and under Harrison the conference of eighteen countries convened in Washington on October 2, 1889. Sitting until April 19, 1890, it resulted in the founding of the Commercial Union of American States but produced no tangible economic advantages.
Although Blaine was called “Jingo Jim,” he exercised a moderating influence on foreign policy. On October 18, 1891, a party of rowdy sailors from the cruiser Baltimore went on shore leave in Valparaiso, Chile, where they were attacked by a mob of Chileans who killed two and wounded seventeen others. There was great moral outrage and much saber rattling in the United States. The world press took much pleasure in criticizing “Yankee imperialism.” But Blaine defused the situation, and the crisis passed on January 28, 1892, after Chile capitulated to American demands for an indemnity.
Hawaii and Samoa
Between America and Asia two groups of islands had special strategic importance, Hawaii in the North Pacific and Samoa in the South Pacific.
The Hawaiian, or Sandwich, Islands, discovered by Captain Cook in 1778, lay 2,300 miles southwest of California and served as a merchant base between America and Asia. By 1840 the capital, Honolulu, was an established port of call for American merchant ships and whalers. On January 30, 1875, Hamilton Fish concluded a treaty of friendship with Hawaii in which each nation gave the other exclusive trading privileges and the United States guaranteed Hawaiian independence. On January 20, 1887, the Senate agreed to the renewed and expanded form of the 1875 treaty of friendship with Hawaii negotiated by Secretary of State Thomas F. Bayard (1885–89). Bayard had secured a new concession, permission to establish a naval base at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu.
The treaties of 1875 and 1887 encouraged the production of sugar fivefold. In 1890, 99 percent of Hawaiian sugar exports went to the United States. Hawaiians believed that increasing American involvement would end in annexation. They disliked increasing Hawaiian economic dependence on the United States. The McKinley Tariff of 1890, which raised the duty on sugar by two cents a pound, devastated the Hawaiian economy. The price of its sugar fell from $100 to $60 a ton. Sugar plantations lost their former value. American planters and investors now concluded that annexation was absolutely essential. Turning Hawaii into a territory would give its sugar the status of American sugar and restore it to its former place in the American market.
In 1887 the dissolute old king of Hawaii, Kalakua, had been prevailed upon to accept a reform constitution restricting his power and making both cabinet and assembly more responsible. But on January 29, 1891, he was succeeded by his sister, Liliuokalani, who was determined to reassert the monarchy. Her policy prompted a counterrevolution by American expatriates supported by the American minister, John L. Stevens, and achieved by marines from the USS Boston. A committee of safety, consisting largely of the planter sons of American missionaries, deposed Liliuokalani on January 17, 1893, and established a provisional government under Chief Justice Sanford B. Dole. He opened negotiations for annexation with John Stevens, and President Benjamin Harrison accepted his terms on February 14, 1893.
However, on his return to office, Grover Cleveland would not countenance annexation. “I mistake the Americans,” he declared, “if they favor the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality; that there is one law for a strong nation and another for a weak one.” He withdrew the treaty from the Senate on March 9, 1893, and dispatched to Hawaii a special commissioner, James H. Blount, who reported on July 17, 1893, that Stevens had instigated the revolution on behalf of American businessmen. Thinking that the provisional government would fall, Cleveland renounced American interests. But he could not remove the provisional government and was eventually obliged to recognize the Republic of Hawaii on August 17, 1894. Cleveland’s successor as president, William McKinley, had no qualms about annexation, especially since the rising power of Japan was a potential threat to American interests in the Pacific. Because supporters of annexation could not muster a vote of two-thirds in the Senate, they and the president agreed to a joint resolution requiring only a simple majority in both houses. On August 12, 1898, Hawaii became part of the United States, and on April 20, 1900, it was awarded full territorial status.
On January 17, 1878, the Samoan, or Navigators’, Islands, located 4,100 miles from the coast of California, granted the United States trading rights and permission to build a coaling station at Pago Pago on the island of Tutuila. This concession made Britain and Germany jealous. For ten years the three powers competed for superior concessions, each supporting rival chieftains who were expected to promote the special interests of their sponsor state. German intentions of taking the islands with a force of seven warships were destroyed when a hurricane in Apia Harbor sank six of their ships on March 15 and 16, 1889.
On June 14, 1889, the United States entered into a tripartite protectorate with Britain and Germany over the Samoan Islands, ratified by the Senate on February 4, 1890. The powers agreed to regulate the arms and liquor traffic and the sale of land. Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham (1893–95) observed later that this apparently insignificant treaty represented “the first departure from our traditional and well-established policy of avoiding entangling alliances with foreign powers in relation to objects remote from this hemisphere.”
In the past the United States, Britain, and Germany, for their own ends, had each promoted rival claimants to the throne of Samoa. Their discredited strategy now caught up with them as their former royal clients continued to quarrel despite the new tripartite protectorate. The upshot was a prolonged civil war. The three great powers eventually realized they could only secure lasting peace in Samoa if they ended the joint protectorate. They now decided to partition the island outright. The United States and Germany divided the islands between them on December 2, 1899 (ratified on January 16, 1900). Britain was compensated by the acquisition of the Solomon Islands.
Anglo-American relations were no more settled in the Gilded Age than they had been in the Civil War. On February 29, 1892, Britain agreed to accept arbitration in a fisheries dispute between Canada and the United States over extermination of the seal, hunted for its fur in Alaskan waters. A tribunal found legally in favor of Canada but morally in favor of Blaine’s attempt to save the seal from extinction.
In 1895 a long-standing dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the boundary of British Guiana came to a head after the discovery of gold in both Latin American countries. Britain had previously refused to accept American arbitration; and Cleveland, supported by Congress, made it clear in a message of December 17, 1895, that if Britain would not accept arbitration voluntarily he himself would define and enforce the boundary. Venezuela’s claim was based on historical grounds and was supported by an American syndicate, which it proposed to reward with a lucrative concession. Cleveland’s ultimatum was a deliberate ploy to distract the American electorate from divisions in the Democratic ranks and was recognized as such by commentators, who referred to it as another case of “twisting the lion’s tail.” This message provoked more saber rattling in the United States. However, a catastrophic fall in American stocks on world markets chastened the American plutocracy. Britain and Venezuela agreed in a treaty signed in Washington on February 2, 1897, to accept arbitration by an independent commission. On October 3, 1899, it upheld most of the British claims.