Credit Mobilier erupted into a scandal in September 1872 when someone discovered a railroad company notebook with congressmen’s names alongside the amount of stock each would receive. Credit Mobilier, however, was the product of decades of intimate relationships between government and railroads. The arrangements uncovered by the investigation broke no laws. It was doubtful whether the Pacific railroad would have been completed without close ties between legislators and directors. Still, the lawmakers’ supplemental income shocked many Americans. Mark Twain, in the preface to the London edition of The Gilded Age, hoped the book would illuminate America’s “all-pervading speculativeness” and “the shameful corruption which lately crept into our politics, and in a handful of years has spread until the pollution has affected some portion of every State and Territory in the Union.”14
When the smoke cleared from these financial shenanigans in 1873, Jay Gould stood atop the Pacific railroad’s organizational chart. Within a decade he ran much of the country’s rail system. Gould also controlled New York City’s rapid transportation system, several newspapers, and Western Union, the nation’s leading telegraph operator. Conspiracy theories about Gould abounded to such a degree that even the New York Times saw humor in the situation. “But straightaway we are assured that ‘JAY GOULD’ is at the bottom of the whole affair, as he is said to be at the bottom of everything that goes on nowadays. We strongly suspect that he will yet be found to … have had something to do with the hard Winter, frozen water-pipes, and plumbers’ extravagant bills.”15
The reformers were not amused. Gould represented the Gospel of Money run amok, the rogue individual who could buy a Congress and seize the nation’s key transportation and communication networks. In 1869, Gould and his partner “Diamond” Jim Fisk sought to wrest control of the Erie Railroad from Cornelius Vanderbilt by printing bogus stock. Gould showed up at the New York State legislature in Albany, hoping to convince the lawmakers to legalize the stock and thereby gain control of the road. Vanderbilt and Gould conducted a bidding war, paying off legislators to vote their way. Both entrepreneurs had suites in the same hotel, trunks full of cash, and a parade of lawmakers coming and going. Gould gave away $600,000, sufficient to gain a 101-to-5 vote in the legislature to legitimize his stock.16
Gould set up a five-man executive committee to run the Erie Railroad. Two of the five spots went to Boss Tweed and Brains Sweeny, ensuring there would be no future challenges to the Erie empire. The Empire State, indeed. Nor was New York an isolated case. One journalist described the government of New Jersey as “a lobby containing a State Legislature.” Nor was New York City the only metropolis where such financial hi-jinks occurred. Washington, D.C., went bankrupt in 1870 after a spending spree grading streets and paying off black voters to elect the Republican ticket. That ended democracy in the nation’s capital; Congress took control of the city. Cleveland city councilmen concocted a system in which each city contract let out would let in a given amount to each member.17
The collective apoplexy over Gould and his ilk was out of proportion to their alleged crimes. The Pacific railroad finished ahead of schedule and under budget. Conflict of interest, shocking in our day, was business as usual in theirs. And corruption was hardly an invention of the Grant administration. The scale of it, the intense competition among the press for a juicy story, and the general insecurity at a time of great economic and urban transformation fueled fears that the country had taken the Gospel of Money too far. Under ordinary circumstances, such reformist tantrums would eventually dissipate. In the context of continued unrest in the South, disorder in northern cities, and an impending presidential election, the advocates of pure government and pure electorates persisted. They did not end corruption, but they succeeded in ending the hopes of black Americans to become equal citizens.
The most serious charge against official corruption was that it corroded democracy by cheating the public of wealth and elevating unfit individuals to power. Walt Whitman lamented in 1871, “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.” Governments, put into power by an incompetent electorate, condoned and participated in the “depravity.” The productive middle classes were the main victims of these activities. Whitman worried about the “appalling dangers of universal suffrage” that enabled the brigands to function unrestrained. The stories of greed and graft crowding the columns of the major dailies proved too much for Whitman, who vowed to close his ears and eyes to such news. He could no longer hear America singing:
Nay, tell me not to-day the publish’d shame,
Read not to-day the journal’s crowded page,
The merciless reports still branding forehead after forehead,
The guilty column following guilty column,
To-day to me the tale refusing,
Turning from it—from the white capitol turning.18
For Whitman and many other Americans, the fire of war should have cleansed the body politic. That evidence abounded to the contrary was a matter of great heartbreak. America may have been reborn, but its new incarnation was hardly a state of grace. Preparing a new edition of Leaves of Grass in 1871, Whitman tellingly inserted this addition to his poem “Respondez!” originally written in 1856:
Stifled, O days! O lands! in every public and private corruption!
Smother’d in thievery, impotence, shamelessness, mountain-high;
Brazen effrontery, scheming, rolling like ocean’s waves around and upon you, Oh my days! my lands!
For not even those thunderstorms, nor fiercest lightnings of the war have purified the atmosphere.19
Mark Twain shared Whitman’s concerns about untrammeled democracy. In The Gilded Age, there is no mawkish sentimentality about the common man. The people on the western frontier are “animals” and “cattle.” They spend their time gossiping, spitting, and whittling. New York is hardly better. Surveying a jury, Twain and Warner wrote, “Low foreheads and heavy faces they all had; some had a look of animal cunning, while the most were only stupid.” Washington lawmakers reflected their constituents, both in morals and physiognomy. Twain quipped in a banquet speech, “There is a Congressman—I mean a son of a bitch—But why do I repeat myself?” A dinner companion noted Twain’s agitation on the subject, inveighing against “this wicked ungodly suffrage, where the vote of a man who knew nothing was as good as the vote of a man of education and industry; this endeavor to equalize what God has made unequal was a wrong and a shame.” In an Atlantic article in 1875, Twain wrote, only half in jest, that instead of contracting the suffrage, the country should expand it so that “men of education, property, and achievement would receive five or even ten votes each.”20
The ethically challenged governments elected by immigrants and poor laborers in the North and black men in the South gave many Americans pause in the 1870s, hardening their views toward blacks, whose aspirations now seemed more like pretensions, while white southerners’ violence looked more like self-defense. Soon there would be widespread approbation concerning the use of police and federal troops against immigrant workers. What concerned Twain, Whitman, and many others was that unrestricted suffrage could, ironically, threaten democracy itself. It might be prudent to restrict democracy in order to save it. Of the immigrants to the cities, one observer wrote that they “follow blindly leaders of their own race, are not moved by discussion, exercise no judgment of their own.” They “are not fit for the suffrage.” These were the arguments white southerners put forward concerning the freedmen. Eventually, an immoral equivalency emerged: two regions of the country with similar problems with similar inferior peoples.21
A consensus formed in the early 1870s that democracy was a privilege, not a right. Americans did not need to draw on the experience of the failed European revolutions of 1848 to see the dangers of too much democracy. The Paris Commune of 1871 provided a more immediate example, and many who questioned the expansion of the franchise cited the Commune as the logical out
come of “bottom-side up” government.22
The Paris Commune, the name of the city’s governing body between late March and late May 1871, arose after France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Consisting of mostly workers and some professionals, many of whom were socialists or anarchists, the Commune challenged the authority of the central government. During its brief tenure, the Commune enacted a series of measures separating church and state, extending debt relief, granting pensions to unmarried companions, abolishing night work, and remitting rents. The French army marched into Paris and attacked the Commune’s barricades. In what became known as la semaine sanglante (the blood-soaked week), the military put an end to the Commune, killing 30,000 communards while losing 7,500 troops. By comparison, during a year and a half of the French Revolution from 1789–90, the death toll stood at 19,000. Both the Commune’s revolutionary programs and the bloody battles that followed repelled many Americans, who attributed the violence to the radicalism of the communards.
The Commune debacle resulted from unqualified citizens—workers, anarchists, and socialists—participating in government. Americans in 1871 saw a similar danger in the daily reports of violence in the South, labor unrest in the cities of the North, and corrupt governments put in place by a largely uneducated electorate. The Chicago Tribune made this connection explicitly: “New York is abandoned by her property-owners to the rule of one set of adventurous carpet-baggers and vagabonds.… South Carolina is ruled by carpet-baggers and irresponsible non-property-holders for other reasons.” When the New York branch of the International Workingmen’s Association, which included socialists, anarchists, and various women’s rights groups, marched through the city to promote the eight-hour workday in September 1871, just as the Tweed scandal broke, the connection seemed obvious. Reports of the march noted the ominous presence of “a group of negro workers,” and members carrying “the red flag and a banner with the French slogan, ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.’” Suffragist Victoria Woodhull, a member of the IWA, passed out flyers advocating “free-love, anarchy, and every extreme doctrine that appealed to their speculative fancy.”23
Northerners questioned the legitimacy of their governments, much as white southerners denied the legitimacy of the Republican regimes in their states. The “bogus state governments” of the South and the degraded “Celtocracy” of New York City were two examples of the same problem. The Nation identified South Carolina as the breeding ground of “a swarm of little Tweeds.” Up until the early 1870s, the national trend moved toward expanding the suffrage, first of non-property-holders, then of naturalized immigrants, and finally of African Americans. Then it stopped, and courts and states began to circumscribe the franchise and remove some offices from the electorate and others from politicians’ appointive powers. The corruption and violence, north and south, provided the context for this democratic contraction.24
Susan B. Anthony also questioned the legitimacy of her government. The culprits in her interpretation were not unqualified workers, blacks, or immigrants but white men in power. Police arrested Anthony and several other suffragists as they attempted to vote in the 1872 presidential election. After her conviction, Anthony proclaimed, “This government is not a democracy.… It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex” that placed “father, brothers, husbands, sons … over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household.” At a time when the concept of universal suffrage came under attack, Anthony reminded Americans that suffrage was hardly universal. Her cause, however, was lost in an era when many sought means to narrow rather than to expand the franchise.25
The northern evangelical churches that had been in the forefront of antebellum reform upheld the status quo. Evangelicals were less scolds than cheerleaders, as Conwell’s sermon indicated. Walt Whitman was concerned that everyone pursued everything except the collective good, and the churches encouraged such behavior. “Genuine belief seems to have left us.… The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout.… A lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasm I know, usurp the name of religion.”26
“The Ignorant Vote—Honors are Easy,” 1876. Many white northerners drew parallels between the corruption and inefficiency of their local and state governments, supported by immigrant and working-class votes, with similar problems in southern states where African Americans voted. Thomas Nast, who, in earlier years, had championed civil rights for the freedmen, confirms that connection with an unflattering portrayal of a black voter and an Irish voter. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Evangelicals built sturdy churches in the great cities, and their ministers mingled with leading entrepreneurs and politicians. They withdrew their blessings from the Republican governments in the South, curtailing or ending their funding of missionaries and schools, and they would support the use of force against unruly strikers during the economic downturn following the Panic of 1873. Northern Presbyterians pulled out of missionary efforts to the freedmen in 1871 to avoid “all unpleasant collisions with the Southern churches.” The American Missionary Association, which had supplied hundreds of teachers to the former slaves, disavowed that it had ever endorsed the idea that the races were equal and cut funding to the missions. Northern evangelicals harbored futile hopes that their orthodoxy on race and politics could win the favor of their southern brethren. Northern Methodists, hoping for a reunion, joined southern Methodists in prohibiting “mixed Conferences, mixed congregations, and mixed schools.” They explained candidly, “The [Church] south must be appeased.” To what end? A Presbyterian minister in North Carolina summarized the feeling among many southern churchmen: “You may put me down as one of the number that will never, no never, consent to a union with the Yankees. I hope that this is the sentiment of every Presbyterian.”27
The crusades of northern churches in the postwar era focused on outlawing behavioral sins and on symbolic acts that filled their coffers but not their faith. Efforts to enact another “Christian amendment” to the Constitution failed, as did campaigns to prohibit the consumption of alcohol. Evangelicals managed to convince Congress to outlaw obscenity and Mormon polygamy. Those pale victories testified to their waning influence.28
One old crusade survived the transition to postwar America, and it reinforced the decline of northern evangelicals. Like a favorite threadbare blanket, the Roman Catholic Church comforted evangelicals in its traditional role as a menace to American civilization. The fact that Tweed’s minions were mostly Irish, and many of the new immigrants were Catholic, enabled evangelicals to join with secular bigots to appear relevant. Thomas Nast’s monkey-like caricatures of the Irish were a well-known signature for the artist. His cartoons attacking Catholics for threatening the separation of church and state and depicting foreign prelates slithering ashore to lure young children to God-knows-what were widely circulated in the early 1870s. Abolitionist stalwarts among the evangelicals, many of whom had harbored almost as much disdain for Catholics as for slaveholders, now honed their religious bigotry. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s daughter, Hatty, writing from Chicago, informed her mother, “Mary Neugent who used to live with us … brought her oldest boy with her to see us—And you have no idea what a nice pretty refined looking little fellow he is—you would never in the world take him to be the child of Irish parents.” Mom understood. In her novel celebrating the small-town, homogeneous New England of her youth, Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives (1878), Stowe wrote, “Such were our New England villages in the days when its people were of our own blood and race, and the pauper population of Europe had not as yet been landed upon our shores.”29
While evangelicals both north and south harked back to a halcyon and irrelevant past, the nation turned to a new faith, science. Activist governments upset the natural evolution of the economy and society. Cities were inefficient because experts and professionals were either closed out or turned off by a corrupt political process. States in the South and cities in the North
were ill governed because unqualified electorates ruled. Science had predicted these problems.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had an enormous impact on American thought and practice in the post–Civil War era. Darwin’s theory of natural selection transferred power from God to nature. Scientific laws governed the universe, and as natural and social scientists discovered those laws, people could act in harmony with nature. People once sought faith to uncover truth; now they pursued the scientific method. Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University, announced his institution would “afford an asylum for Science [often capitalized]—where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake, where it shall not be the main purpose of the Faculty to stretch or cut sciences exactly to fit ‘Revealed Religion.’”30
Empirical research in America’s Age of Reason would save America from itself. As the evangelicals believed man could attain perfectibility by following God, the acolytes of science asserted that man would attain perfectibility through research. Science was a marvelous recipe for doing nothing, at least until all the data were in. As economist Lyman Atwater put it, “Legislation cannot alter the laws of nature, of man, of political economics.” Mankind’s dominion over nature and society would occur once scientists unlocked the secrets of the universe. Here was America’s new millennial vision. It was a philosophy of innocence as much as the evangelical promise of a heaven on earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson described the process: “Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to Paradise.”31
Darwin’s theory came as a revelation even to those steeped in evangelical theology. In November 1865, Charles Francis Adams Jr. was convalescing from what we would today describe as post-traumatic stress disorder. He came across an essay by the positivist August Comte, and it “revolutionized” his “whole mental attitude. I emerged from the theological stage, in which I had been nurtured, and passed into the scientific. I had up to that time never heard of Darwin.… From reading [Comte] I date a changed intellectual and moral being.”32
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