Congress

In the division of power among Congress, the president, and the SUPREME CoURT, Congress had the largest share throughout the late 19th century. The ebb and flow of power within the federal government is the product of the times, personalities, and traditions. The Civil War (186165) required President Abraham Lincoln to enhance the power of the executive, but the policies and behavior of his inept successor Andrew Johnson (1865-69) eroded presidential prestige and enabled Congress to dominate the Reconstruction process. By 1870, although President Ulysses S. Grant was very popular, Congress had reoccupied its traditional position as the maker of laws and the president was, once again, primarily the administrator of those laws. Presidents did address problems and call for legislation in their annual messages to Congress, but Congress responded to those pleas in its own way or not at all.

Congressional power, in large part, depended on congressional dominance of the political process. Presidents, presidential nominees, and national committees were only nominally at the head of their political parties. The national parties were loose alliances of highly organized state and local parties that were, for the most part, firmly in control of senators and congressmen. In playing their dual roles as legislators and party leaders, they tended to emphasize organization rather than issues. To staff their political machines they relied on civil servants (postmasters, customhouse officers, internal revenue collectors, and so on) in their states and districts. Civil service appointments, nominally in the hands of the president and heads of departments, were actually made—especially outside Washington—on the recommendation of senators and representatives. CiViL SERVICE REFORM was anathema to virtually all of them, since appointments on the basis of competitive examinations open to all would result in a politically neutral civil service and destroy their machines.

The outstanding political leaders of the late 19th century were often found in Congress but were rarely identified with a cause or a principle. The most prominent Republican of that era was not a president, but was James

G. Blaine, who spent 20 years in Congress, was nominated for the presidency (and lost), and was a two-time secretary of state. Blaine actually did embrace some issues (protective tariff, Pan-Americanism, IMPERIALISM), but he was idolized by Republican regulars as a party organization man. Most members of the House of Representatives served only a few two-year terms before moving on to the Senate, like Roscoe Conkling, or to a governorship, like Rutherford B. Hayes. Senators, in contrast, served for much longer periods because they were elected for six-year terms by state legislatures, which as heads of state parties they dominated. Conkling, a Republican senator from New York (1867-81), was perhaps the most prominent member of the Senate in the 1870s, but he is identified with no issue, bill, or act of Congress and is remembered for resigning the Senate in a petulant rage after being denied the patronage of the New York customhouse. Conkling is an extreme example, but virtually all senators and representatives paid close attention to patronage matters.

Organization remained important, but the trend in the 1880s and especially in the 1890s was toward the embracing of issues. Rapid industrial and urban growth and economic depressions spawned problems and pressures that could not be ignored. In addition, civil service reform legislation (1883) reduced the patronage and dried up the flow of cash from civil servants into party coffers. At the same time, industrialists increased their contributions and, as a consequence, their influence in politics. Senator Nelson Aldrich, a Rhode Island Republican who served from 1881 to 1911, championed the interests of big business in general and the protective tariff in particular while a loan from the American Sugar Refining Company enabled him to build his personal fortune. Along with Aldrich, Representative William McKinley was a major influence on the 1890 McKinley Tariff, and although the latter’s identification with that measure led to an initial defeat, it also led to his ultimate nomination and election as president in 1896. On the other hand, the plight of America’s farmers led William Jennings Bryan, who in the 1890s served briefly in the House, to advocate Free Silver (see Free Silver movement), which in 1896 secured for him the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

Congress, while moving to embrace issues in the 1880s and 1890s, was not particularly influenced by the presidency. Congress legislated but did so under pressure from constituents. Presidents played little or no role in formulating, and at times opposed, major legislation. Responding to demands for currency expansion, Congress in 1874 passed a mildly inflationary bill, which President Grant vetoed. In 1878 Congress passed the Bland-Allison act—providing for the coinage of 2 million to 4 million silver dollars monthly—over Hayes’s veto. Under the lash of public opinion, Congress adopted the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which was written by Dorman B. Eaton of the New York Civil Service Reform Association. Although he did not like it, President Chester A.

Arthur felt compelled to sign it into law. President Grover Cleveland approved the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) but had nothing to do with either its form or its passage. After the Supreme Court declared state regulation of interstate commerce unconstitutional, public opinion again forced Congress to act.

Congress, reflecting local business interests, all but ignored presidential pleas when constructing tariff legislation. Arthur’s call for a 20 percent reduction resulted in minor reductions in the Mongrel Tariff (1883), and Cleveland’s calls for reductions were either ignored (Mills Bill, 1888) or decimated (Wilson-Gorman Tariff, 1894). The reciprocity feature of the 1890 McKinley Tariff reflected Secretary of State Blaine’s views, but its high rates and the even greater protectionism of the 1897 Dingley Tariff were the creations of Congress.

By 1900 Congress remained the paramount branch of the federal government, but it was more disciplined than in 1870, and an economic crisis and a war in the 1890s had by 1900 enhanced the power of the presidency. Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed (1889-91, 1895-99) forced the adoption of rules that expedited legislation, and the Senate by the late 1890s was led by Aldrich and a few other longterm Republican cohorts. But while Congress became more focused, the modern presidency, exploiting issues and rallying public opinion, began to emerge with William McKinley and would flower with Theodore Roosevelt and other 20th-century presidents who would dominate Congress.

Further reading: George B. Galloway, History of the House of Representatives, 2d. rev. ed. (New York: Crowell, 1976); Ronald M. Peters Jr., The American Speakership: The Office in Historical Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990); David J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1869-1901 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966).

Conkling, Roscoe (1829-1888) politician Although he served in both houses of Congress, Roscoe Conkling’s renown is not as a legislator but as the quintessential spoilsman of the Gilded Age, the political boss of New York. Born in Albany, New York, on October 30, 1829, Conkling was the son of Alfred Conkling, a federal district judge (1825-52) and minister to Mexico (1852-53). Roscoe Conkling studied law in Utica, New York, passed the bar examination in 1850, entered politics as a Whig, joined the Republicans with the demise of the Whig Party, and became mayor of Utica. In 1858 Conkling was elected to Congress, serving in the House (1859-63, 1865-67) and the Senate (1867-81).

Although regarded as a leader of the Senate during the 1870s, Conkling is not associated with any acts of Congress

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Or even bills before it. Handsome, vain, and arrogant, he was a skilled debater and an eloquent orator, but he was more inspired by politics than by issues. His speech opposing the Legal Tender Act of 1862 (Conkling consistently opposed currency inflation) was exceptional; the speeches his auditors remembered to their dying day, and which are still quoted, were made at political conventions. At the 1877 New York State Republican Convention, for example, Conkling vehemently attacked the editor and civil service reformer George William Curtis, lecturing him “that parties are not built up by deportment, or by ladies’ magazines, or gush” and sneering that “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 was infuriated with Curtis, reformers, and especially President Rutherford B. Hayes because they threatened his control of the New York Republican Party, which was based on his control of the New York customhouse, post office, and other federal patronage plums awarded him by President Ulysses S. Grant, with whom Conkling was closely allied. In 1877 Hayes had not only banned political assessments of civil servants and ordered them to cease their management of political conventions and campaigns, but he had also moved to fire Conkling’s lieutenant, Chester A. Arthur, as head of the New York customhouse. Conkling fought back, arguing “senatorial courtesy” (the established practice of allowing senators to designate appointees to field offices in their states), and for a time he prevented Senate confirmation of a successor to Arthur, but Hayes ultimately prevailed and, to Conkling’s chagrin, made the customhouse a showcase for CiViL SERVICE reform.

Conkling, however, hoped to regain control of the customhouse with the next administration. He and fellow Stalwarts worked mightily to secure Grant’s nomination for a third term in 1880 (Conkling’s nominating speech was perhaps the greatest of his career) but failed. Although disappointed with the Republican nominee, James A. Garfield (and not at all happy that Arthur accepted the second place on the ticket), Conkling and his followers, after initially sitting on their hands, campaigned and Garfield triumphed. The Stalwarts were activated by what they took to be the promise of patronage—specifically the New York customhouse—but President Garfield awarded the customhouse to a lieutenant of Conkling’s arch enemy, James G. Blaine. Conkling once again appealed to senatorial courtesy and once again went down to defeat. He resigned his seat, expecting the New York state legislature to reelect and vindicate him, but it failed to do so.

Out of politics and practicing law in New York City, Conkling ironically had a greater influence on policy (as distinct from politics) than he had had as a senator. In 1882 he argued before the Supreme Court that the due process clause should apply to corporations as well as to individuals, an interpretation the Court subsequently adopted. Conkling died in New York City on April 18, 1888.

Further reading: David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling of New York: Voice in the Senate (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971).