American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Even crusty Henry Adams confessed a hope for the future. After sardonic old Baron Jacobi in Democracy called the United States the most corrupt society he had known, one Nathan Gore, Massachusetts historian, burst out:

  “I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it.” Democracy, he went on, “asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to higher intelligence than formerly.” He granted it was an experiment, but “it was the only direction that society can take that is worth taking.”

  “And supposing your experiment fails,” said Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, “suppose society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and communism.”

  “I have faith,” Gore exclaimed, “not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest.…”

  The Ohioans: Leaders as Brokers

  Crosby’s Opera House, Chicago, May 21, 1868.

  The President: “Is the convention ready? I await your pleasure.”

  A hush falls over the hall. The Republicans have gathered to choose Andrew Johnson’s successor.

  Mr. Logan of Illinois: “Is it the decision of the Chair that nominations are now in order?”

  The President: “They are.”

  Mr. Logan: “Then, sir, in the name of the loyal citizens, soldiers and sailors of this great Republic of the United States of America; in the name of loyalty, of liberty, of humanity, of justice; in the name of the National Union Republican party; I nominate, as candidate for the Chief Magistracy of this nation, Ulysses S. Grant.”

  The hall erupts in a roar of cheers, shouts, whistles. Delegates flutter handkerchiefs and wave standards; some weep as the band plays “Hail to the Chief.”

  The Secretary: “Alabama!”

  The chairman of the Alabama delegation: “Mr. President, Alabama, through the chairman of her delegation, casts eighteen votes for U.S. Grant.”

  The Secretary: “The State of Connecticut!”

  “Mr. President, Connecticut unconditionally surrenders her twelve votes for Ulysses S. Grant….”

  The Secretary: “The State of Ohio!”

  “Mr. President, Ohio has the honor of being the mother of our great Captain. Ohio is in line, and on that line Ohio proposes following this great Captain, that never knew defeat; to fight it out through the summer, and in the autumn, at the end of the great contest, and to be first in storming the entrenchments, until victory shall be secured, and all the stars that glitter in the firmament of our glorious constellation shall again be restored to their proper order, and all the sons of freedom throughout the whole earth shall shout for joy. Ohio gives forty-two votes for U.S. Grant.”

  Amid the red, white, and blue bunting, the perfervid oratory, the heat and sweat of the Chicago convention hall, the Republicans nominated for President the “fittest” man of the time, their Civil War hero, Ulysses S. Grant. Five more times in the next three decades a stentorian orator would successfully offer an Ohioan for “the next President of the United States”; Grant again in 1872, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, James A. Garfield in 1880, William McKinley in 1896 and again in 1900. Ohio would supply two more Presidents in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and during the whole period several Chief Justices and a host of second-cadre leaders—cabinet members, congressional leaders, military and civilian officers.

  Thus rose the Ohio dynasty, successor to the Albany Regency earlier in the century and the brilliant Virginia leadership of the Founding period. How account for the dominance of the Ohioans? people wondered. Was it chance or—asked a journalist, tongue in cheek—a conspiracy? The explanation could be found less in smoke-filled rooms than in the nature of Ohio itself, in its history and makeup. Before the Civil War, Ohio, with its mix of militant abolitionists and Southern sympathizers, had been a microcosm of sectional politics. The great contrasts and divisions in the state mirrored the diversity of the Union. “The Ohioans,” Rollin Hartt observed, “are the United States in vertical section.”

  Still the most striking division in Ohio after the Civil War was north versus south. The Western Reserve, where the winters blew in cold off the Great Lakes, had been settled largely by New Englanders, and the area still retained a Yankee flavor. Elm trees, colleges, and blue laws flourished in the northern tier of the state. Ohio’s “south” lay along the Ohio River and in the Appalachian counties of the southwest, where the southern counties were populated by transplanted Kentuckians, Virginians, and Carolinians. A river culture existed along the Ohio—life was warm, slow, agrarian. Travelers noticed the drawling accents, the sprawling plantation houses along the river, the crawling mosses on the cypress trees. In between lay a broad plain of farmland having more in common with the rest of the Midwest than with the rest of Ohio. The pace of the center counties was set by Columbus, “a neighborly place … flat as a hayfield,” whose quiet seemed to be broken only by the rumble of farm wagons. North, South, Midwest—Ohio “boxed the American compass.”

  Other divisions cut across and softened the old geographic boundaries. Ohioans subscribed to a welter of religious persuasions—not just Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, but also Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Campbellite, Dunkard, Mormon. More important was the diversity of economic pursuits. “Northerners” were divided between farmers, merchants, gas drillers, the sailors and fishermen who lived off the Great Lakes. The railroads invaded the central plains, bringing manufacturing, competition for markets, and new crop patterns. While “Southerners” along the river farmed in much the same way as those along the Mississippi, their brethren in the Appalachian counties mined coal and iron, or scraped a meager living from the foothills.

  Symbol and source of much of the change redrawing Ohio were the growing cities—“inchoate, restless, surging.” Walter Havighurst saw them as becoming the essence of Ohio. Cleveland and Cincinnati were heading toward populations of a quarter million people each by 1890, Columbus and Toledo toward a hundred thousand, while another sixteen cities would pass the 10,000 mark. The cities brought a new richness and variety to Ohio life. Cincinnati, “the Paris of America,” hosted an accomplished music academy and nationally acclaimed music festival, and nourished the writer Lafcadio Hearn, painter Frank Duveneck, sculptors Clement Barnhorn and Charles Niehaus. More prosaic Cleveland was mother to artists, but also to a baseball nine that won an invitation to the White House from Ohio’s own President Grant. The cities helped Ohio to sustain an educational system that was the envy of the nation—wide in variety, broad in reach to the populace, and foremost in experiments with coeducation.

  Industry was the signature of the cities—and each was unique, both complementing and competing with her sisters. Sandusky on Lake Erie was a shipping point for lumber, limestone, and fish, as well as a maker of oars and wheels. Youngstown produced steel; Toledo, glass, pig iron, machinery, and—as the century ended—motorcars; Dayton, rubber. Findlay, center of the northern natural gas fields, celebrated its new prosperity with a Gas Jubilee, where 30,000 flaming jets lighted the city from end to end. In the Appalachian coal mines of the Hocking Valley, technology marched on; first mechanical buckets replaced wheelbarrows for bringing coal up from the shafts, and then bulky car-dumping machines appeared to empty and refill railroad coal carriers. The railroads, with some 10,000 miles of track laid by 1890, brought welcome changes, doubling farmers’ prices for flour, wheat, and corn during years when farmers in the South and West faced bankruptcy.

  The growing industries brought hints of things to come. The winding Cuyahoga River was stained brown by the oil tanks, blast furnaces, sawmills, and coal bunkers that lined its marshy banks. Blazing oil slicks reached into Lake Erie, and a pall of smoke settled over Cleveland and other towns. But Hartt found Clevelanders willing to endure the outpouring of the smokestacks: “smoke means business, business means money, and money is the principal thing.”

  The thriving cities acted as a magnet for Ohio’s blacks. By 1890, thr
ee-quarters of the state’s Negro population of 87,000 were city dwellers, a proportion almost exactly the opposite of that for the rest of the country. Most of the black immigrants came from the Ohio countryside, where the increasing costs and mechanization of farming were eroding chances for land ownership or even tenant labor by blacks. But little of the prosperity of the cities trickled down to the new black residents. Excluded from many industrial jobs by employer hostility and union suspicion, the urban-dwelling blacks were largely confined to menial day labor, domestic service, and “Negro” trades like barbering.

  Ohio’s diversity made for change and conflict, which in turn made for a vigorous political leadership. The metamorphosis of the old Northwestern frontier—a “civilization resting on family, land and community”—to a society of feverish production and commerce threw up a new set of leaders closely in tune with the political and social flux of their state, and capable of dealing with change and conflict on the national level as well.

  A number of common bonds drew these new Ohio leaders together. They were all young: the seven men who would dominate Republican politics on the state scene for a generation after the Civil War—Garfield, Hayes, Jacob Cox, Isaac Sherwood, Warren Keifer, Aaron Perry, and Edward Noyes—had averaged thirty-three years old in 1865. All of them had served as Union officers in the war, returning with habits of organization and command they could apply to the strife of commerce and politics. They were men on the make—college-educated, trained professionals in law or journalism, successful men attracted to the dynamism of Ohio’s cities. The economic takeoff of the 1850s had first opened doors for them; then the chaos of Civil War had propelled them early to dizzying heights of power over other men. They had, in Felice Bonadio’s view, a new faith “which was to be found in cities, in factories, in railroads.” That faith would be translated into political doctrine—and into political power.

  Ohio provided economic leadership too. Jay Cooke shook up the nation’s finances; John D. Rockefeller reorganized industries; Thomas Edison transformed the world with his tinkering. But the attraction of politics proved too great for others. John Hay left a promising academic career to become a respected civil servant and, eventually, Secretary of State to an Ohio President. Whitelaw Reid evolved from historian to editor to party chieftain to diplomat over the course of thirty years. As in other states, politics and the law were intimately intertwined. Alphonso B. Taft won appointment as Attorney General while his son, William Howard, was becoming a popular young lawyer; William McKinley of Canton began dabbling in politics under the tutelage of Republican boss Mark Hanna; and, from a previous generation of leaders, Salmon P. Chase still sat as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And topping them all were three lawyer-politicians who dominated the councils of the GOP for nearly twenty years—Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, and John Sherman.

  With war and industrialization producing a set of new young leaders in every Northern state, perhaps it was only luck that the men from Ohio consistently came to the fore on the national scene. Perhaps it was the unique nature of the economic change in Ohio: the dynamic balance between agricultural boom and urban growth, the vast array of natural resources exploited and manufactures produced. Ohio was like none of her neighbors, yet she had tangible economic and social interests in common with all of them. Or perhaps the answer lay in Ohio’s politics, “dynamic, complicated, and treacherous” as one historian found them to be. In a state so evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and with deep fissures weakening both parties from within, only the ablest political leaders could hope to survive. “It is utterly impossible to detect any nucleus of opinion,” despaired Jacob Cox. “It is every man for himself.” The men who climbed out of the thickets of Ohio politics were thus peculiarly suited to lead their colleagues through the jungles of Washington.

  James Garfield exemplified the partisan skills of Ohioans. Although raised in straitened circumstances by his widowed mother, Garfield was able to earn enough money to get through the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute and Williams College. The hefty, bearded schoolteacher studied law on the side, ran for the Ohio Senate in 1859, and did yeoman service in raising troops when the Civil War began. At the end of 1863 he left the army to represent Ohio’s 19th District in Congress. He found Ohio Republicans, like those elsewhere in the North, still divided between ex-Whigs and ex-Democrats. The issue of slavery had brought them together to form the new party in the 1850s, but with slavery dead there was a very real danger that they would split again. Ohio Democrats, themselves badly factionalized, played skillfully on the former ties of the older Republicans.

  Garfield and his younger colleagues, however, had no past loyalties to appeal to. Mobilized by the cause of preserving the Union, they had entered politics for the first time as Republicans, just before or during the war. Building on this base of support, Garfield moved quickly to check the disintegration of his party. If there was no “nucleus of opinion” among Ohio Republicans, he would replace it with a nucleus of organization. In the 19th District, Garfield built a tight hierarchy of local citizens’ committees, campaign workers, and elected officials. Up the hierarchy flowed money and votes; down from the top flowed patronage jobs and favors for the district from Columbus and Washington. Binding the entire structure was a growing party loyalty. Garfield too bound himself to party loyalty, stumping for fellow Republicans at home and in Washington with such fervor that he soon won a national reputation for glib bombast. It was a military model of organization that Garfield applied to politics—rigid structure, firm command, and mutual loyalty—and it served him well.

  For several years Garfield crossed political swords with John Sherman, Ohio’s powerful Republican senator. Eventually, however, the two managed to work out an uneasy alliance, to the benefit of both themselves and the state party. While Garfield’s influence in the House slowly increased, Sherman used his seat on the Senate’s Committee on Finance to become the foremost representative of the Republican party’s new orientation toward economic rather than racial issues. In the Finance Committee he grappled with vexing questions of currency and tariffs, working to balance the inflationary interests of his Ohio constituents with a more conservative policy suited to what he perceived as the nation’s larger economic needs. Sherman strove to identify the Republicans in the public eye with business expansion and general prosperity; race relations he viewed as potentially fatal to party unity and public support.

  The man whom Sherman and Garfield came to support for the governorship of their home state was of a somewhat different stamp. Rutherford B. Hayes tended not to become excited about partisan politics; he saved his passion for reform. A Harvard-trained lawyer and wounded veteran, Hayes was sent by the Republicans to Columbus in 1867 for the first of an unprecedented three terms as governor. “Not too much hard work, plenty of time to read, good society, etc.” was his self-effacing evaluation of the gubernatorial post, but in fact he pushed strenuously for asylum and prison reform, regulation of railroad abuses, lower taxes, and an end to “the appointment of unfit men on partisan or personal grounds.” Election to a third term, with the solid support of the entire Ohio GOP leadership, opened to Hayes the dizzying prospect of ascending to the presidency.

  The Republican party desperately needed a candidate with strong reform credentials, for the mounting scandals of the Grant Administration threatened to swamp the GOP as 1876 drew near. “Grantism” had become synonymous with a degree of corruption and malfeasance unprecedented even by the relaxed standards of nineteenth-century American politics. Some of the scandals were mundane: the Secretary of War resigned when evidence surfaced that he had been involved in selling government contracts, and the Interior Secretary faced similar charges. Other gaffes were intercontinental: U.S. Minister to Paris Dan Sickles conducted an adulterous affair with the former Queen of Spain, Ambassador Robert Schenck lent his name to bogus western stocks being sold in London, and another political appointee enlivened his consulship in Egypt with
duels, drunkenness, and dancing girls. Still other scandals reached right into the White House, as a presidential aide was found to be involved in covering up the bribery of Treasury agents by whiskey manufacturers.

  Grantism threatened to soil even the “ermine of the Supreme Court.” When Chief Justice Chase died in 1873, Grant nominated his Attorney General to fill the center chair, only to see him charged with misusing Justice Department funds and selling immunity from prosecution. The President spent weeks seeking a more acceptable nominee. After several more missteps he settled on Morrison R. Waite, a relatively obscure Toledo attorney of limited political experience. Waite nonetheless won Senate approval, and, with scandals breaking all around him, ascended unscathed to the High Court. There he would preside, for fourteen years, over issues not of petty corruption but of fundamental rights for large groups of Americans.

  The kind of leadership that Ohio produced in the late nineteenth century typified that of Northern Republicanism as a whole. It was a transactional leadership of barter and brokerage, both reflecting and shaping the competitive worlds of industry, finance, and commerce. As the political process was retooled following the war, the old ideological leaders, who had brought about a military and then a constitutional transformation of the nation, gave way to vigorous young politicos who operated within the constraints of the federal check-and-balance system. The young attorney Rutherford Hayes had written from Cincinnati: “Push, labor, shove—these words are of great power in a city like this.” The essence of politics indeed was to push and shove in a giant game of King of the Rock—but always in the end to compromise so that the game could go on another day. All this was closer to Whitman’s competition and “low cunning” than the experiment in a higher intelligence and the faith in democracy that Adams’s Mr. Gore called for. It was the survival of the fittest—but who were the fittest? And for what?