What were the major features of American politics during the Gilded Age?
What were the major issues in politics during this period?
What were the main problems facing farmers in the South and the Midwest after the Civil War?
How and why did farmers become politicized?
What was significant about the election of 1896?
How did African American leaders respond to the spread of segregation in the South?
N 1873, the writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner created an enduring label for the post-Civil War era when they collaborated on a novel titled The Gilded Age, a colorful depiction of the widespread political corruption and corporate greed that characterized the period. Generations of political scientists and historians have since reinforced the two novelists’ judgment. As a young college graduate in 1879, future president Woodrow Wilson described the state of the political system after the Civil War: “No leaders, no principles; no principles, no parties.” Indeed, the real movers and shakers of the Gilded Age were not the men who sat in the White House or Congress but the captains of industry who crisscrossed the continent with railroads and adorned its cities with plumed smokestacks and gaudy mansions.
Paradoxical Politics
Political life in the Gilded Age, the thirty-five years between the end of the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, had several distinctive elements. Perhaps the most important feature Gilded Age politics was its localism. Unlike today, the federal government in the nineteenth century was an insignificant force in the lives of Americans, in part because it was so small. In 1871 the entire federal workforce totaled 51,000 civilians (most of them postal workers), and only 6,000 of them actually worked in Washington, D. C. Not until the twentieth century did the federal government begin to overshadow the importance of local and state governments. By 1914, for example, there would be 401,000 federal civilian employees.
Most Americans were far more engaged in local politics. In cities crowded with waves of new immigrants, the political scene was usually controlled by “rings”—small groups of powerful political insiders who managed the nomination and election of candidates, conducted primaries, and influenced policy. Each ring typically had a powerful “boss” who ran things, using his “machine”—a network of neighborhood activists and officials—to govern the town or city. Bosses organized loyal neighborhood voters into wards or precincts, and staged torchlight election parades, fireworks displays, and free banquets—and alcoholic beverages—for voters. They also mediated disputes, helped the needy, and distributed patronage (municipal jobs and contracts) to loyal followers and corporate contributors. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, almost every governmental job—local, state, and federal—was subject to the latest election results. This meant that whichever political party was in power expected government employees to become campaign workers doing the bidding of the party bosses during important elections.
NATIONAL politics Several factors gave national politics during the Gilded Age its distinctive texture. First, like the urban political machines, the national political parties during the Gilded Age were much more dominant forces than they are today. Party loyalty was intense, often extending over several generations in Irish and Italian families in cities such as Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, New York City, Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.
A second distinctive element of Gilded Age politics was the close division between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, which created the sense of a stalemated political system. Both parties avoided controversial issues or bold initiatives because neither gained dominant power. Voters of the time nonetheless thought politics was very important, making widespread political participation the third distinctive element of post-Civil War politics. Voter turnout during the Gilded Age was commonly about 70 to 80 percent, even in the South, where the disenfranchisement of African Americans was not yet complete. (By contrast, the turnout for the 2008 presidential election was almost 57 percent.)
The paradox of such a high rate of voter participation in the face of the inertia at the national political level raises an obvious question: How was it that elected officials who failed to address the “real issues” of the day presided over the most highly organized and politically active electorate in U. S. history? The answer is partly that the politicians and the voters believed that they were dealing with crucial issues: tariff rates, the regulation of corporations, monetary policy, indian disputes, civil service reform, and immigration. But the answer also reflects the extreme partisanship of the times and the essentially local nature of political culture during the Gilded Age. Politics was then the most popular form of local entertainment.
PARTISAN POLITICS Americans after the Civil War were intensely loyal to one of the two major parties, Democratic or Republican. Most voters cast their ballots for the same party, year after year, generation after generation. Loyalty to a party was often an emotional choice. During the 1870s and 1880s, for example, people continued to fight the Civil War using highly charged political rhetoric as their weapon. Republicans regularly “waved the bloody shirt” in election campaigns, meaning that they reminded voters that the Democratic Party was the party of “secession and civil war” while their party, the party of Lincoln and Grant, had abolished slavery and saved the Union. Democrats, especially in the South, responded by reminding voters that they were the party of white supremacy and states’ rights. Blacks in the South, by contrast, voted Republican (before they were disenfranchised) because it was the “party of Lincoln,” the “Great Emancipator.” Third parties, such as the Greenbackers, Populists, and Prohibitionists, appealed to particular interests and issues, such as currency inflation or temperance legislation.
Political parties also gave people an organizational anchor in an unstable world. Local party officials took care of those who voted their way and distributed appointive public offices and other favors to party loyalists. The city political machines used patronage and favoritism to keep the loyalty of business supporters while providing jobs or food or fuel to working-class voters who had fallen on hard times. Politics was also a form of popular entertainment. The party faithful eagerly took part in rallies and picnics and avidly read newspaper coverage of political issues. Members of political parties developed an intense camaraderie.
Party loyalties and voter turnout in the late nineteenth century reflected religious and ethnic divisions as well as geographic differences. The Republican party attracted mainly Protestants of British descent. The party was dominant in New England, New York, and the upper Midwest. The Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, could also rely upon the votes of African Americans and Union veterans of the Civil War.
The Democrats, by contrast, tended to be a heterogeneous, often unruly coalition embracing southern whites, northern immigrants, Roman Catholics living in the northern states, Jews, freethinkers, and all those repelled by the “party of morality.” As one Chicago Democrat explained, “A Republican is a man who wants you t’ go t’ church every Sunday. A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer on Sunday he can have it.”
Republicans also promoted what were called nativist policies, which imposed restrictions on immigration and the employment of foreigners. Efforts to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages revived along with nativism in the 1880s. Among the immigrants who crowded into the growing cities were many Irish, Germans, and Italians, all of whom tended to enjoy wine and beer on a daily basis. The mostly rural Republican Protestant moralists increasingly saw saloons as the central social evil around which all others revolved, including vice, crime, political corruption, and neglect of families, and they associated these problems with the ethnic groups that frequented saloons. The feisty Carry Nation, a militant member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) who was known for attacking saloons with a hatchet, charged that saloons stripped women of everything by seducing working men: “Her husband is torn from her, she is robbed of her sons, her home, her food, and her virtue.”
POLITICAL STALEMATE Between 1869 and 1913, from the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant through that of William Howard Taft, Republicans monopolized the White House except for the two nonconsecutive terms of the conservative New York Democrat Grover Cleveland, but otherwise national politics was remarkably balanced between the two major parties. Between 1872 and 1896 no president won a majority of the popular vote. In each of those presidential elections, sixteen states invariably voted Republican and fourteen voted Democratic, leaving a pivotal six states whose results determined the outcome. The important swing-vote role played by two of those states, New York and Ohio, helps explain the election of eight presidents from those states from 1872 to 1908.
No chief executive between Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt could be described as a “strong” president. None challenged the prevailing view that Congress, not the White House, should formulate policy. Senator John Sherman of Ohio expressed the widely held notion that the legislative branch should predominate in a republic: “The President should merely obey and enforce the law.”
Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats controlled the House during the Gilded Age. Only during 1881 to 1883 and 1889 to 1891 did a Republican president coincide with a Republican Congress, and only between 1893 and 1895 did a Democratic president enjoy a Democratic majority in Congress. On the important questions of the currency, regulation of big business, farm problems, civil service reform, and immigration, the parties differed very little. As a result, they primarily became vehicles for seeking office and dispensing “patronage” in the form of government jobs and contracts.
STATE AND LOCAL INITIATIVES Americans during the Gilded Age expected little direct support from the federal government; most significant political activity occurred at the state and local levels. Only 40 percent of government spending and taxing occurred at the federal level. Then, unlike today, the large cities spent far more on local services than did the federal government, and three fourths of all public employees worked for state and local governments. Local issues generated far more excitement than complex national debates over tariffs and monetary policies. It was the state and local governments that first sought to curb the power and restrain the abuses of corporate interests.
Corruption and Reform: Hayes to Harrison
After the Civil War, a close alliance developed between business and political leaders at every level. As a leading congressman, for example, James Gillespie Blaine of Maine saw nothing wrong in his accepting gifts of stock from an Arkansas railroad after helping it win a land grant from Congress. Free railroad tickets, free entertainment, and a host of other favors were regularly provided to politicians, newspaper editors, and other leaders in positions to influence public opinion or affect legislation.
Both Republican and Democratic leaders also squabbled over the “spoils” of office, the appointive political positions at the local and the national levels. After each election it was expected that the victorious party would replace the defeated party’s government appointees with its own. The patronage system of awarding government jobs to supporters invited corruption. It also was so
“The Bosses of the Senate”
This 1889 cartoon bitingly portrays the period’s corrupt alliance between big business and politics.
Time-consuming that it distracted elected officials from more important issues. Yet George Washington Plunkitt, a Democratic boss in New York City, spoke for many Gilded Age politicians when he explained that “you can’t keep an organization together without patronage. Men ain’t in politics for nothin’ They want to get somethin’ out of it.” Each party had its share of corrupt officials willing to buy and sell government appointments or congressional votes, yet each also witnessed the emergence of factions promoting honesty in government. The struggle for “cleaner” government soon became one of the foremost issues of the day.
HAYES AND CIVIL SERVICE REFORM President Rutherford B. Hayes brought to the White House in 1877 a new style of uprightness, in sharp contrast to the graft and corruption practiced by members of the Grant administration. The son of an Ohio farmer, Hayes was wounded four times in the Civil War and was promoted to the rank of major general. Elected governor of Ohio in 1867, he served three terms.
Hayes’s own party, the Republicans, was split between so-called Stalwarts and Half-Breeds, led respectively by Senators Roscoe Conkling of New York
And James Gillespie Blaine of Maine. The Stalwarts had been “stalwart” in their support of President Grant during the furor over the misbehavior of his cabinet members. They had also promoted Radical Reconstruction of the defeated South and benefited from the “spoils system” of distributing federal political jobs to party loyalists. The Half-Breeds acquired their name because they were only half-loyal to Grant and half-committed to reform of the spoils system. For the most part, the two Republican factions were loose alliances designed to advance the careers of Conkling and Blaine.
To his credit, Hayes aligned himself with the growing public discontent over political corruption. American leaders were just learning about the “merit system” for hiring government employees, which was long established in the bureaucracies of France and Germany, and the new British practice in which civil service jobs were filled by competitive written tests rather than awarded as political favors.
On the economic issues of the day, Hayes held to a conservative line that would guide his successors for the rest of the century. His solution to labor troubles, demonstrated in his response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, was to send in federal troops to break the strike. His answer to demands for an expansion of the currency was to veto the 1878 Bland-Allison Act, which provided for a limited increase in the supply of silver coins. The act passed anyway when Congress overrode Hayes’s veto. A bruised president confided in his diary that he had lost the support of his own party. In 1879, with a year still left in his term, Hayes was ready to leave the White House. “I am now in my last year of the Presidency,” he wrote a friend, “and look forward to its close as a schoolboy longs for the coming vacation.”
THE 1880 ELECTION With President Hayes out of the running for a second term, the Republicans nominated the dark-horse Ohio candidate, James A. Garfield. A native of Ohio and an early foe of slavery, Garfield, like Hayes and Grant, had distinguished himself during the Civil War and retired from the army as a major general before being elected to Congress in 1863, where he had become one of the outstanding leaders in the House. Now he was the Republican nominee for president. The convention named Chester A. Arthur, the deposed head of the New York Customhouse, as the candidate for vice president.
The Democrats in 1880 selected retired Union general Winfield Scott Hancock to counterbalance the Republicans’ “bloody-shirt” attacks on Democrats as the party of secessionism and the Confederacy. Former Confederates nevertheless advised their constituents to “vote as you shot”—that is, against the Republicans. In an election characterized by widespread bribery, Garfield eked out a plurality of only 39,000 votes, or 48.5 percent of the vote, but with a comfortable margin of 214 to 155 in the Electoral College. In his inaugural address, President Garfield confirmed that the Republicans had ended efforts to reconstruct the former Confederacy and stamp out its racist heritage. He declared that southern blacks had been “surrendered to their own guardianship.”
Garfield showed great potential as a new president, but never had a chance to prove it. On July 2, 1881, after only four months in office, he was walking through the Washington, D. C., railroad station when Charles Gui-teau, a deranged man who had been turned down for a federal job, shot the president twice. As a policeman wrestled the assassin to the ground, Guiteau shouted: “Yes! I have killed Garfield! [Chester] Arthur is President of the United States. I am a Stalwart!”—a statement that would greatly embarrass the Stalwart Republicans. On September 19 Garfield died of complications resulting from his inept medical care. At his sensational ten-week-long trial, Charles Guiteau explained that God had ordered him to kill the president. The jury refused to believe that he was insane and pronounced him guilty of murder. On June 30, 1882, Guiteau was hanged; an autopsy revealed that his brain was diseased.
Chester Arthur proved to be a surprisingly competent president. He distanced himself from the Stalwarts and established a genuine independence, even becoming a civil service and tariff reformer. The assassin Guiteau had unwittingly stimulated widespread public support for reforming the distribution of government jobs. In 1883 a reform bill sponsored by “Gentleman George” H. Pendleton, a Democratic senator from Ohio, set up a three-member federal Civil Service Commission, the first federal regulatory agency established on a permanent basis. A growing percentage of all federal jobs would now be filled on the basis of competitive examinations rather than political favoritism. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was thus the vital step in a new approach to government administration that valued merit over partisanship.
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1884 Chester Arthur’s presidential record might have attracted voters, but it did not please leaders of his party. So in 1884 the Republicans dumped Arthur and turned to the glamorous senator James Gillespie Blaine of Maine, longtime leader of the Republican Half-Breeds. Blaine was the consummate politician. He inspired the party faithful with his oratory, and at the same time he knew how to wheel and deal in the backrooms, sometimes evading the law in the process. Newspapers turned up evidence of his corruption. Based on references in the “Mulligan letters,” they revealed that Blaine was in the pocket of the railroad barons. While serving as Speaker of the House, he had sold his votes on measures favorable to their interests. Nobody ever proved that Blaine had committed any crimes, but the circumstantial evidence was powerful: his mansion in Washington, D. C., could not have been built on his senatorial salary alone, nor could his palatial home in Augusta, Maine (which has since become the state’s governor’s mansion).
Senator James Gillespie Blaine of Maine
The Republican candidate in 1884.
During the campaign, more letters surfaced with disclosures embarrassing to Blaine. For the reform element of the Republican party, this was too much, and prominent leaders and supporters of the party refused to endorse Blaine’s candidacy. Party regulars scorned them as “goo-goos”—the good-government crowd, who ignored partisan realities. The editor of the New York Sun jokingly called the anti-Blaine Republicans Mugwumps, after an Algonquian Indian word for a self-important chieftain. The Mugwumps were a self-conscious political elite dedicated to promoting the pulic welfare. They were centered in the large cities and major universities of the northeast. Mostly educators, writers, or editors, they included the most famous American of all, Mark Twain. The Mugwumps generally opposed tariffs and championed free trade. They opposed the regulation of railroads as well as efforts to inflate the money supply by coining more silver. Their foremost goal was to expand civil service reform by making all federal jobs non-partisan. Their break with the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, testified to the depth of their convictions.
The rise of the Mugwumps influenced the Democrats to nominate the New Yorker Grover Cleveland, a minister’s son, as a reform candidate. He had first attracted national attention when, in 1881, he was elected as the anticorruption mayor of Buffalo. In 1882 he was elected governor of New York, and he continued to build a reform record by fighting New York City’s corrupt Tammany Hall ring. As mayor and as governor, he repeatedly vetoed bills serving selfish interests. He supported civil-service reform, opposed expanding the money supply, and preferred free trade rather than high tariffs.
A stocky 270-pound man, Cleveland provided a sharp contrast to the Republican Blaine. He possessed little charisma but impressed the public with his stubborn integrity. A juicy scandal erupted when the Buffalo Evening Telegraph revealed that as a bachelor,
As president, Cleveland made the issue of tariff reform central to the politics of the late 1880s.
Grover Cleveland
Cleveland had befriended an attractive Buffalo widow who later named him the father of a baby born to her in 1874. Cleveland had since provided financial support for the child. The respective escapades of Blaine and Cleveland provided some of the most colorful battle cries in political history: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine,
The continental liar from the state of Maine,” Democrats chanted; Republicans countered with “Ma, ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!” Near the end of the toxic campaign, Blaine and his supporters committed two fateful blunders. The first occurred at New York City’s fashionable Del-monico’s restaurant, where Blaine went to a private dinner with several millionaire bigwigs to discuss campaign finances. Accounts of the event appeared in the opposition press for days. The second fiasco occurred when one member of a delegation of Protestant ministers visiting Republican headquarters in New York referred to the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Blaine, who was present, let pass the implied insult to Catholics—a fatal oversight, since he had always cultivated Irish American support with his anti-English talk and public reminders that his mother was Catholic. Democrats spread the word that Blaine was at heart anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. The two incidents may have tipped the 1884 presidential election. The electoral vote, in Cleveland’s favor, stood at 219 to 182, but the popular vote ran far closer: Cleveland’s plurality was fewer than 30,000 votes. Cleveland won the key state of New York by the razor-thin margin of 1,149 votes out of the 1,167,169 cast.
CLEVELAND AND THE SPECIAL INTERESTS President Cleveland was an unusual president in that he opposed any federal government favors to big business. “A public office is a public trust” was one of his favorite mottoes. He held to a strictly limited view of government’s role in both economic and social matters, a rigid philosophy illustrated by his 1887 veto of a congressional effort to provide desperate Texas farmers with seeds in the aftermath of a devastating drought that had parched the western states, summer after summer, for five years between 1887 and 1892. “Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people,” Cleveland asserted.
Cleveland urged Congress to adopt an important new policy: federal regulation of interstate railroads. Since the late 1860s, states had adopted laws regulating railroads, but in 1886 a supreme Court decision in the case of Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois, the justices denied the right of any state to regulate rates charged by railroads engaged in interstate traffic. Cleveland thereupon urged Congress to take the lead in regulating the rail industry.
Congress followed through, and in 1887 Cleveland signed into law an act creating the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). The law empowered the ICC’s five members to ensure that freight rates had to be “reasonable and just.” The commission’s actual powers proved to be weak, however, when tested in the courts, in large part because of the vagueness of the phrase “reasonable and just.”
TENSIONS OVER THE TARIFF President Cleveland’s most dramatic challenge to the power of Big Business focused on tariff reform. During the late nineteenth century, critics charged that government tariff policies had fostered big business at the expense of small producers and retailers by effectively shutting out foreign imports, thereby enabling U. S. corporations to dominate their American markets and charge higher prices for their products. Cleveland agreed that tariff rates were too high and often inequitable. Congress, Cleveland argued, should reduce the tariff rates. The stage was set for the election of 1888 to highlight a difference between the major parties on an issue of substance.
THE ELECTION OF 1888 Cleveland was the obvious nominee of his party for reelection. The Republicans, now calling themselves the GOP (Grand Old Party) to emphasize their party’s longevity, turned to the obscure Benjamin Harrison, whose greatest attribute was his availability. The grandson of President William Henry Harrison, he resided in Indiana, a pivotal state, and had a good war record. There was little in his political record to offend any voter. He had lost a race for governor and served one term in the Senate (1881-1887). The Republican platform accepted Cleveland’s challenge to make the tariff the chief issue. The Republicans enjoyed a huge advantage over the Democrats in funding and organization. To fend off
Cleveland’s efforts to reduce the tariff, business executives contributed over $3 million to the Republican campaign. Still, the outcome was incredibly close. Cleveland won the popular vote by 5,538,000 to 5,447,000, but Harrison carried the Electoral College by 233 to 168.
“King of the World”
Reformers targeted the growing power of monopolies, such as that of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.
REPUBLICAN REFORM UNDER HARRISON As president, Benjamin Harrison was a competent figurehead overshadowed by his flamboyant secretary of state, James Gillespie Blaine. Harrison owed a heavy debt to Union Civil War veterans, which he discharged by signing the Dependent Pension Act, substantially the same measure that Cleveland had vetoed. The number of veterans receiving federal pensions almost doubled between 1889 and 1893.
During the first two years of Harrison’s term, the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress for only the second time since 1875. In 1890, they passed a cluster of significant legislation. In addition to the Dependent Pension Act, Congress and the president approved the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the McKinley Tariff Act, and the admission of Idaho and Wyoming as new states, which followed the admission of the Dakotas, Montana, and Washington in 1889.
Both parties had pledged to do something about the growing power of big businesses to fix prices and control markets. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, named for Ohio senator John Sherman, prohibited companies from conspiring to establish monopolies. Its passage turned out to be largely symbolic, however. During the next decade successive administrations rarely enforced the new law. From 1890 to 1901, only eighteen lawsuits were instituted, and four of those were against labor unions rather than corporations.
INADEQUATE CURRENCY Complex monetary issues dominated the political arena during the Gilded Age. The fact that several farm organizations organized the Greenback Party in 1876 illustrated the money issue’s significance to voters. The nation’s money supply in the late nineteenth century lacked the flexibility to grow along with the expanding economy. From 1865 to 1890, the amount of currency in circulation decreased about 10 percent. Such currency deflation raised the cost of borrowing money, as a shrinking money supply caused bankers to hike interest rates on loans.
In 1873, the Republican-controlled Congress declared that silver could no longer be used for coins, only gold. This gold-only decision occurred just when silver production in the western states had begun to increase. Debt-ridden farmers and laborers who advocated currency inflation through the coinage of silver denounced the “crime of ’73,” arguing that bankers and merchants had conspired to stop coining silver so as to ensure a nationwide scarcity of money. The Bland-Allison Act of 1878 and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 provided for some silver coinage, but too little in each case to offset the overall contraction of the currency as the population and the economy grew.
Hard-pressed farmers in the West and South demanded increased coinage of silver to inflate the currency and raise commodity prices, making it easier for them to earn the money they needed to pay their debts. The farmers found allies among legislators representing the new western states. All six of the states admitted to the Union in 1889 and 1890 had substantial silver mines, and their new congressional delegations—largely Republican— wanted the federal government to mint more silver. The “silver delegates” shifted the balance in Congress enough to pass the Sherman Silver Purchase Act (1890), which required the Treasury to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver each month with new paper money. Yet eastern business and financial groups viewed the inflationary act as a threat, setting the stage for the currency issue to eclipse all others during the financial panic that would sweep the country three years later.
Republicans viewed their victory over Grover Cleveland and the Democrats in 1888 as a mandate not just to maintain the high tariffs insulating American companies from foreign competition but to raise them even higher. Piloted through Congress by Ohio representative William McKinley, the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 raised duties on manufactured goods to their highest level ever, so high that the threat of foreign competition diminished, encouraging many businesses to charge higher prices. Voters rebelled. In the 1890 midterm elections, citizens repudiated the McKinley Tariff with a landslide of Democratic votes. In the new House, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by almost three to one; in the Senate the Republican majority was reduced to eight. One of the election casualties was Congressman McKinley himself.
The Farm Problem and Agrarian Protest Movements
The 1890 congressional elections also revealed a deep-seated unrest in the farming communities of the South and on the plains of Kansas and Nebraska, as well as in the mining towns of the Rocky Mountain region. People used the term “revolution” to describe the swelling grassroots support for the Populists, a new third party focused on addressing the needs of small farmers, many of whom did not own the land they worked. In drought-devastated Kansas, Populists took over five Republican congressional seats. In Washington, D. C., the newly elected Populists and Democrats took control of Congress just as an acute economic crisis appeared on the horizon: farmers’ debts were mounting as crop prices plummeted.
“I Feed You All!”
This 1875 poster shows the farmer at the center of society.
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS Since the end of the Civil War, farmers in the South and the plains states suffered from worsening economic and social conditions. The source of their problems was a long decline in commodity prices, from 1870 to 1898, caused by overproduction and growing international competition for world markets. The vast new land brought under cultivation in the West poured an ever-increasing supply of farm products into the market, driving prices down. Considerations of abstract economic forces puzzled many farmers, however. How could one speak of overproduction when so many remained in need? instead, they reasoned, there must be a screw loose somewhere in the system.
Struggling farmers targeted the railroads and the food processors who handled the farmers’ and ranchers’ products as the prime villains. Farmers resented the high railroad freight rates that prevailed in farm regions with no alternative forms of transportation. High tariffs on imported goods also operated to farmers’ disadvantage, because the tariffs deterred foreign competition, allowing U. S. companies to raise the prices of manufactured goods upon which farmers depended. Farmers, however, had to sell their wheat, cotton, and other staples in foreign markets, where competition lowered prices. Debt, too, had been a perennial problem of agriculture. After the Civil War, farmers had become ever more enmeshed in debts owed to local banks or merchants. As commodity prices dropped, the burden of debt grew because farmers had to cultivate more wheat or cotton to raise the same amount of money; and by growing more, they furthered the vicious cycle of commodity surpluses and price declines.
THE GRANGER MOVEMENT When the U. S. Department of Agriculture sent Oliver H. Kelley on a tour of the South in 1866, it was the isolation of people living on farms that most impressed him. To address the problem, Kelley and some government clerks in 1867 founded the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange (an old word for granary), as each chapter was called. In the next few years the Grange mushroomed, reaching a membership as high as 1.5 million by 1874. The Grange started as a social and educational response to the farmers’ isolation, but as it grew, it began to promote farmer-owned cooperatives for the buying and selling of crops. The Grangers’ long-range ideal was to free themselves from the high fees charged by grain-elevator operators and food processors.
The Grange soon became indirectly involved in politics, through independent third parties, especially in the Midwest during the early 1870s. The Grange’s chief political goal was to regulate the rates charged by railroads and warehouses. In five states, Grangers brought about the passage of “Granger laws," which at first proved relatively ineffective but laid a foundation for stronger legislation. Owners subject to their regulation challenged the laws in the “Granger cases" that soon advanced to the Supreme Court, where they claimed to have been deprived of property without due process of law. In a key case involving warehouse regulation, Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Supreme Court ruled that the state, according to its “police powers,” had the right to regulate property that was clothed in a public interest. If regulatory power were abused, the ruling said, “the people must resort to the polls, not the courts.” Later, however, the courts would severely restrict state regulatory powers.
The Granger movement gradually declined as members directed their energies into both farm cooperatives, many of which failed, and political action. In 1875, out of the independent political movements, grew a third political party calling itself the Independent National party, more commonly known as the Greenback party because of its emphasis on the virtues of paper money. In the 1878 congressional elections the Greenbacks party polled over 1 million votes and elected fifteen congressmen. But in 1880, the party’s fortunes declined, and it disintegrated after 1884.
Farmers’ alliances As the Grange lost energy, other farm organizations, known as Farmers’ Alliances, grew in size and significance. Like the Grange, the Farmers’ Alliances (Northern and Southern) organized social and recreational activities, but they also emphasized political action. Struggling farmers throughout the South and Midwest, where tenancy rates were highest, rushed to join the Alliance movement as a means of addressing the hardships created by chronic indebtedness, declining crop prices, and devastating droughts. Yet unlike the Grange, which was a national organization that tended to attract more prosperous farmers, the Alliances were grassroots organizations that would become the largest and most dynamic farmers’ movement in history.
The Alliance movement swept across the cotton belt in the South and established strong support in Kansas and the Dakotas. In 1886 a white minister in Texas responded to the appeals of African American farmers by organizing the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance. The white leadership of the Alliance movement in Texas endorsed this development because the Colored Alliance stressed that its objective was economic justice, not social equality. By 1890, the Alliance movement had members from New York to California, numbering about 1.5 million, and the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance claimed over 1 million members.
The Alliance movement sponsored some 1,000 rural newspapers to spread the word about the farm problem. It also recruited 40,000 lecturers, who fanned out across the countryside to help people understand the “tyrannical” forces arrayed against the farm sector: bankers and creditors, Wall Street financiers, railroads, and corporate giants who controlled both the markets and the political process. Unlike the Grange, however, the Alliance proposed an elaborate economic reform program. In 1890, Alliance agencies and exchanges in some eighteen states claimed a business of $10 million, but they soon went the way of the Granger cooperatives, victims of discrimination by wholesalers, manufacturers, railroads, and bankers—as well as their own inexperienced management and overextended credit.
FARM POLITICS In the farm states west of the Mississippi River, hard times had descended after the blizzards of 1887, which killed most of the cattle and hogs across the northern plains. Two years later a prolonged drought destroyed millions of acres of corn, wheat, and oats. Distressed farmers lashed out against what they considered to be a powerful conspiracy of eastern financial and industrial interests, which they variously called “monopolies,” “the money power,” “Wall Street,” or “organized wealth.” Desperate for assistance, they agitated for third-party political action to address their economic concerns. In Colorado in 1890, farm radicals joined with miners and railroad workers to form the Independent party. That same year, Nebraska farmers formed the People’s Independent party. Across the South, however, white Alliance members hesitated to bolt the Democratic party, seeking instead to influence or control it. Both approaches gained startling success. New third parties under various names upset the political balance in western states, almost electing a governor under the banner of the new People’s party (also known as the Populist party) in Kansas (where a Populist was elected governor in 1892) and taking control of one house of the state legislature there and both houses in Nebraska. In South Dakota and Minnesota, Populists gained a balance of power in the state legislatures, and Kansas sent a Populist to the U. S. Senate. The Populist party claimed to represent small farmers and wage laborers, blacks and poor whites, in their fight against greedy banks and railroads, corporate monopolies, and corrupt politics. They called for more rather than less government intervention in the economy, for only government was capable of expanding the money supply, counterbalancing the power of big business, and providing efficient national transportation networks to support the needs of agribusiness.
The farm protest movement produced colorful leaders, especially in Kansas, where Mary Elizabeth Lease emerged as a fiery speaker. Born in Pennsylvania, Lease migrated to Kansas, taught school, raised a family, and failed at farming in the mid-1880s. She then studied law, “pinning sheets of notes above her wash tub,” and became one of the state’s first female attorneys. At the same time, she took up public speaking on behalf of various causes, including freedom for her ancestral Ireland, temperance, and women’s suffrage. By the end of the 1880s, Lease had joined the Alliance as well as the Knights of Labor, and she soon applied her considerable oratorical gifts to the cause of currency inflation, arguing for the coining of massive amounts of silver. A tall, proud, and imposing woman, Lease drew attentive audiences. “The people are at bay,” she warned in 1894; “let the bloodhounds of money beware.” She urged angry
Mary Elizabeth Lease, 1890
A charismatic leader in the farm protest movement.
Farmers to obtain their goals “with the ballot if possible, but if not that way then with the bayonet.” Like so many of the Populists, Lease viewed the urban-industrial East as the enemy of the working classes. “The great common people of this country,” she shouted, “are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East.”
In the South, the Alliance forced Democrats to nominate candidates pledged to their program. The southern states elected four pro-Alliance governors, seven pro-Alliance legislatures, forty-four pro-Alliance congressmen, and several senators. Among the most respected of the southern Alliance leaders was Thomas E. Watson of Georgia. The son of prosperous slaveholders who had lost everything after the Civil War, Watson became a successful lawyer and orator on behalf of the Alliance cause. He took the lead in urging African American tenant farmers and sharecroppers to join with their white counterparts in ousting the white political elite. “You are kept apart,” he told black and white farmers, “that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.”
THE POPULIST PARTY AND THE ELECTION OF 1892 The
Success of the Alliances led to the formation of a third political party on the national level. In 1892, a gathering of Alliance leaders in St. Louis called for a national convention of the People’s Party at Omaha, Nebraska, to adopt a platform and choose candidates. The Populist Convention opened on July 4, 1892. Delegates drafted a platform that included the subtreasury plan, unlimited coinage of silver, an income tax whose rates would rise with personal income levels, and federal control of the railroads. The Populists also called for the government to reclaim from railroads and other corporations lands “in excess of their actual needs” and to forbid land ownership by immigrants who had not gained citizenship. Finally, the platform endorsed the eight-hour workday (rather than ten or twelve hours) and restriction of immigration. The party took these last positions in an effort to win support from urban factory workers, whom Populists looked upon as fellow “producers.” The party’s platform turned out to be more exciting than its candidate. Iowa’s James B. Weaver, an able, prudent man, carried the stigma of his defeat on the Greenback ticket twelve years before. To attract southern voters who might be distanced by Weaver’s service as a Union general, the party named a former Confederate general for vice president.
The Populist party was the startling new feature of the 1892 campaign. The major parties renominated the same candidates who had run in 1888: Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican Benjamin Harrison. The tariff issue monopolized their attention. Both major candidates polled over 5 million votes, but Cleveland carried a plurality of the popular votes and a majority of the Electoral College. The Populist Weaver polled over 1 million votes and carried Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, and Idaho, for a total of twenty-two electoral votes. Alabama was the banner Populist state of the South, with 37 percent of its vote going to Weaver.
The Economy and the Silver Solution
THE depression OF 1893 While the farmers were funneling their discontent into politics during the fall of 1892, a fundamental weakness in the economy was about to cause a major collapse and a social rebellion. Just ten days before Grover Cleveland started his second term, in the winter of 1893, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad declared bankruptcy, setting off a national financial panic that mushroomed into the worst depression the nation had ever experienced. Other overextended railroads collapsed, taking many banks with them. A quarter of unskilled urban workers lost their jobs, and by the fall of 1893 over six hundred banks had closed and fifteen thousand businesses had failed. Entire farm regions in the South and West were also devastated by the spreading depression that brought unprecedented suffering. Farm foreclosures soared. Between 1890 and 1894 more than eleven thousand farm mortgages were foreclosed in Kansas alone.
In fifteen rural Kansas counties, three quarters of the people lost their farms. Residents grimly said: “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.” By 1900, a third of all farmers were tenants rather than owners.
National panic
The New York Stock Exchange on the morning of Friday, May 5, 1893.
By 1894, the nation’s economy had reached bottom. The catastrophic depression lasted another four years, with unemployment hovering at 20 percent and hunger stalking the streets of many cities. In New York City some 35 percent were unemployed, and twenty thousand homeless people camped out at police stations and other makeshift shelters. President Cleveland’s response to the economic catastrophe was to convince Congress to return the nation’s money supply to a gold standard by repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, a move that worsened rather than improved the financial situation. The
Economy needed more money in circulation, not less. Unemployment and labor unrest only increased as investors rushed to exchange their silver for gold, thus further constricting the money supply. Violent labor strikes at Pullman, Illinois, and at the Homestead Works outside Pittsburgh symbolized the fracturing of the social order. In 1894 some 750,000 workers went on strike; railroad construction workers, laid off in the West, began tramping east and talked of marching on Washington, D. C. The devastating depression of the 1890s was reshaping America’s economic and political landscape.
The 1894 congressional elections, taking place amid this climate of mushrooming anxiety, produced a severe setback for the Democrats, who paid politically for the economic downturn, and the Republicans were the chief beneficiaries. The Republicans gained 121 seats in the House, the largest increase ever. Only in the “Solid South” did the Democrats retain their advantage. The third-party Populists emerged with six senators and seven representatives. They polled 1.5 million votes for their congressional candidates and expected the festering discontent in rural areas to carry them to national power in 1896.
SILVERITES VERSUS GOLDBUGS The course of events would dash that hope, however. In the mid-1890s, radical efforts to address the ravages of the depression focused on the currency issue. President Cleveland convinced Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and created an irreparable division in his own party. One embittered pro-silver Democrat labeled the president a traitor.
The western states with large silver deposits now escalated their demands for the “unlimited” coinage of silver, presenting a strategic dilemma for Populists: Should the party promote the long list of varied reforms it had originally advocated, or should it try to ride the silver issue into power? The latter seemed the practical choice. Although the coinage of silver would not have provided the economic panacea its advocates claimed, the “free silver” crusade took on powerful symbolic overtones. Just as Andrew Jackson mobilized a transformation of the Democratic party based on his moral outrage at the national bank, silverites also reshaped the political landscape. The Populist leaders decided, over the protests of more radical members, to hold their 1896 nominating convention after the two major party conventions, confident that the Republicans and Democrats would at best straddle the silver issue, enabling the Populists to lure away silverite Republicans and Democrats.
THE REMARKABLE ELECTION OF 1896 Contrary to those expectations, the major parties took opposite positions on the currency issue. The Republicans, as expected, nominated William McKinley on a gold standard-only platform. McKinley, a former congressman and governor of Ohio, symbolized the mainstream Republican values that had served the party well during the Gilded Age. After the convention, a friend told McKinley that the “money question” would determine the election. The Republican candidate dismissed that notion, insisting that the tariff would continue to govern national political campaigns. But one of McKinley’s advisers disagreed. “In my opinion,” said Judge William Day of Ohio, “in thirty days you won’t hear of anything else” but the money question. He was right.
The Democratic nominating convention in the Chicago Coliseum, the largest building in the world, was one of the great turning points in American political history. The pro-silver, largely rural forces surprised the party leadership and the “Gold Democrats” by capturing the convention for their inflationary crusade. Thirty-six-year-old William Jennings Bryan from Nebraska gave the convention’s final speech before the balloting began.
And what a speech it was. A fervent evangelical moralist, Bryan was a two-term congressman who had been defeated in the Senate race in 1894, when
Democrats were swept out of office by the dozens. In the months before the 1896 Democratic convention, he had traveled throughout the South and the West, speaking passionately for the unlimited coinage of silver and against President Cleveland’s “do-nothing” response to the depression. Bryan was the first major candidate since Andrew Jackson to champion the poor, the discontented, and the oppressed against the financial and industrial titans. And he was the first leader of a major party to call for the expansion of the federal government to promote the welfare of the working and middle classes by providing subsidies for farmers, legalizing labor strikes, regulating railroads, taxing the rich, and breaking up “trusts” (financial and industrial monopolies).
William Jennings Bryan
His “cross of gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention roused the delegates and secured him the party’s presidential nomination.
Bryan was a magnetic public speaker with a booming voice, a crusading minister in the role of a politician, self-infatuated and self-dramatizing. At the 1896 Democratic Convention, Bryan was a “dark horse” candidate in a field of more prominent competitors for the presidential nomination. So he had to take a calculated risk: he would be intentionally provocative and disruptive. Bryan claimed to speak for the “producing masses of this nation” against the eastern “financial magnates” who enslaved them by constricting the money supply to ensure high interest rates for mortgages and loans. He reminded the delegates that the “man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer.” As his melodramatic twenty-minute speech reached a crescendo, Bryan fused Christian imagery with Populist anger:
I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty— the cause of humanity. . . . We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!
The messianic Bryan then stretched his fingers across his forehead and reached his dramatic conclusion: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” Bryan extended his arms straight out from his sides, posing as if being crucified. It was a riveting performance. As Bryan strode triumphantly off the stage, the delegates erupted in a frenzy of wild applause verging on adulation. “Everybody seemed to go mad at once,” reported the New York World. It was pure theater, but it worked better than even Bryan had anticipated. Republicans were not amused. A partisan newspaper observed that no political movement had “ever before spawned such hideous and repulsive vipers.”
The day after his riveting speech, the unlikely but righteous Bryan won the presidential nomination on the fifth ballot, but in the process the Democratic party was fractured. Disappointed pro-gold, pro-Cleveland Democrats dismissed Bryan as a fanatic and a socialist. They were so alienated by Bryan’s inflationary crusade and populist rhetoric that they walked out of the convention and nominated their own candidate, Senator John M. Palmer of Illinois. “Fellow Democrats,” Palmer announced, “I will not consider it any great fault if you decide to cast your vote for [the Republican] William McKinley.”
When the Populists gathered in St. Louis for their own presidential nominating convention two weeks later, they faced an impossible choice. They could name their own candidate and divide the silver vote with the Democrats, or they could endorse Bryan and probably lose their identity as an independent party. In the end they backed Bryan, the “matchless champion of the people,” but chose their own vice-presidential candidate, former congressman Thomas E. Watson of Georgia, and invited the Democrats to drop their vice-presidential nominee. Bryan refused the request.
The election of 1896 was one of the most dramatic in American history, in part because of the striking contrast between the candidates, and in part because the severity of the depression made the stakes so high. William Jennings Bryan, the nominee of both the Democrats and the Populists, tirelessly crisscrossed the country like a man on a mission, delivering impassioned speeches on behalf of “the struggling masses” of workers, farmers, and small-business owners. At every stop he promised that the unlimited coinage of silver would solve the nation’s economic problems. In his self-appointed role as a champion of “the people,” Bryan stressed that politics should be a moral enterprise. He was the first major-party leader, a “godly hero,” to advocate the expansion of federal powers to promote the welfare of ordinary Americans. He said that strikes by labor unions should be legalized, farmers should be given federal subsidies, the rich should be taxed, corporate campaign contributions should be banned, and liquor should be outlawed. Bryan’s populist crusade was for whites only, however. Like so many otherwise progressive Democratic leaders, he never challenged the pattern of racial segregation and violence against blacks in the solid Democratic South.
McKinley, meanwhile, stayed at home during the campaign. He knew he could not compete with Bryan as an orator, so he conducted a traditional “front-porch campaign,” receiving select delegations of Republican supporters at his home in Canton, Ohio, and giving only prepared responses to the press. McKinley’s brilliant campaign manager, Marcus “Mark” Hanna, a wealthy business executive, shrewdly portrayed Bryan as a “Popocrat,” a radical whose “communistic spirit” would ruin the capitalist system and create a class war. Hanna convinced the Republican Party to proclaim that it was “unreservedly for sound money.” Theodore Roosevelt, a rising star among the Republicans, was aghast at the thought of Bryan becoming president. “The silver craze surpasses belief,” he wrote a friend. “Bryan’s election would be a great calamity.”
By preying upon such fears, the McKinley campaign raised vast sums of money from corporations and wealthy donors to finance an army of 1,400 Republican speakers who traveled the country in his support. It was the most sophisticated—and expensive—presidential campaign up to that point in history. McKinley promoted himself as the “advance agent of prosperity” who would provide workers with a “full dinner pail.” In the end, Bryan and the Democratic-Populist-silverite candidates were overwhelmed by the better-organized Republican campaign. McKinley won the popular vote by 7.1 million to 6.5 million and the Electoral College vote by 271 to 176. Two million more voters cast their ballot than in 1892.
Bryan carried most of the West and the South but found little support in the metropolitan centers east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio and Potomac Rivers. In the critical Midwest, from Minnesota and Iowa eastward to Ohio, Bryan carried not a single state. Bryan’s evangelical Protestantism repelled many Catholic voters, who were normally drawn to the Democrats. Farmers in the Northeast, moreover, were less attracted to agrarian radicalism than were farmers in the wheat and cotton belts of the West and South, where there were higher rates of tenancy. Among factory workers in the cities, Bryan aroused little support. Wage laborers found it easier to identify with McKinley’s pledge to restore the industrial economy than with Bryan’s free-silver evangelism. Although Bryan had lost, he had begun the process of transforming the Democratic party from being a bulwark of pro-business conservatism and fiscal restraint to the twentieth-century party of liberal reform. The Populist Party virtually disintegrated. Having garnered a million votes in 1896, it collected only fifty thousand votes in
1900. Conversely, McKinley’s victory climaxed a generation-long struggle for the political control of industrializing America. The Republicans were dominant—for a while.
Race Relations during the 1890s
The turbulence in American life during the 1890s also affected race relations—for the worse. Civil rights fell victim to the complex social, economic, political, and cultural forces unleashed by America’s rapid growth. Even the supposedly radical William Jennings Bryan was not willing to support the human rights of African Americans.
DISENFRANCHISING AFRICAN AMERICANS Race relations were in part a victim of the terrible depression of the 1890s. At the end of the nineteenth century a violent “Negrophobia” swept across the South and much of the nation. In part, the new wave of racism was spurred by the revival in the United States and Europe of the old idea that the Anglo-Saxon “race” was genetically and culturally superior to the other races. Another reason for the intensification of racism was that many whites had come to resent any signs of African American economic success and political influence in the midst of the decade’s economic downturn. An Alabama newspaper editor declared that “our blood boils when the educated Negro asserts himself politically.” By the 1890s a new generation of African Americans born and educated since the end of the Civil War was determined to gain true equality. This younger generation was more assertive and less patient than their parents. “We are not the Negro from whom the chains of slavery fell a quarter century ago, most assuredly not,” a black editor announced. A growing number of young white adults, however, were equally determined to keep “Negroes in their place.”
Racial violence and repression escalated dramatically during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Ruling whites ruthlessly exercised their will over all areas of black life, imposing racial subjugation and segregation by preventing blacks from voting and by enacting “Jim Crow” laws mandating separation of the races in various public places. The phrase “Jim Crow” derived from “Jump Jim Crow,” an old song-and-dance caricature of African Americans performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface during the 1830s. Thereafter, the term “Jim Crow” had become a pejorative expression meaning “Negro.” The renewal of statutory racial segregation resulted from a calculated campaign by white elites and racist thugs to limit African American political, economic, and social participation at the end of the nineteenth century.
World History
