American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The Greenbackers’ frustrations pointed up an endemic problem of third parties—disunity. Composed of diverse elements, the foes of hard money fought over reform issues and in particular over the age-old dilemma for issue movements: go it alone as a separate party or coalesce with the less unattractive of the two major parties. The Prohibitionists had less trouble with the “fission or fusion” problem, since they had long set their faces hard against the intemperate major parties, but the Prohibition leadership was often divided over which strategy to pursue—whether to concentrate only on liquor or to broaden their credo to appeal to woman suffragists and other reformers.

  So the two big parties lumbered along, like two old stagecoaches, undaunted by guerrilla bands assailing them from right or left or threatening to cut them off at the pass. The net impact of third parties during this period may well have been to consolidate the major parties’ shoulder-to-shoulder position in the center of the political spectrum, for the “single-issue” parties isolated activists who might otherwise have agitated within the major parties and pushed them toward more programmatic politics. If any of the parties had been able to reach out into the two great untapped sectors of the potential electorate, the stable party gridlock might have been upset. But those untapped sectors still lay beyond the electoral pale —women and blacks.

  Proud of their vital Civil War roles both North and South, women had emerged from the War all the more prepared, they felt, for full participation in the American democracy. Hence they were all the more indignant that rights were extended to more men—blacks, of course, but also immigrants and others—but not women. Most woman suffragists strongly supported Negro enfranchisement—many had been ardent abolitionists—but even that veteran campaigner Elizabeth Cady Stanton was provoked into referring to “Sambo” and the enfranchisement of “Africans, Chinese, and all the ignorant foreigners the moment they touch our shores.” Another veteran campaigner, Frederick Douglass, answered her a few weeks later at a meeting:

  “When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts”—when their homes were burnt down over their heads, he went on, and their children torn from their arms—“then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot.”

  “Is that not all true about black women?” came a cry from the audience.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Douglass exclaimed, “it is true of the black woman, but not because she is a woman but because she is black.”

  Not only were many women rebels divided from blacks, but women suffragists were divided among themselves over priorities and tactics, and indeed split into the National Woman Suffrage Association, headed by such militants as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by those old redoubtables, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. The former group concentrated on gaining a woman suffrage amendment to the United States Constitution, the latter on efforts in the states, whose legislatures controlled voting rights. Anthony et al. published The Revolution in New York, Stone et al. the Woman’s Journal in Boston. Not for twenty years would this breach be healed.

  Neither farmers nor workers upset the equilibrium of the two stately parties after the Civil War. In the early seventies midwestern farmers, burdened by mortgages and angered by discriminatory policies of railroads, grain elevators, moneylenders, and other instruments of “corporate power,” converted the Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1867 to improve agriculture, into a political movement. For a time the “Grangers” seemed irresistible, as they routed the Republicans in Illinois and won key elections in Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and elsewhere under the banner of “Reform and Anti-Monopoly.” The farmers proved themselves skillful and sophisticated in working with, against, or between the state Republican and Democratic parties, but they paid a price for their opportunism, for they neither built lasting strength within a major party nor built a party of their own. By 1876, the farmers’ revolt had burned itself out and most of the activists were back in the major parties.

  Nor did organized workers have a major disruptive influence on the major parties. Influenced by the Horatio Algerism of the era, splintered into crafts that stressed business unionism, disenchanted by their experience with separatist movements in earlier days, constantly tempted toward expedient coalitions with the major parties in state and local elections, workers on the whole bolstered either the Democracy or what was already becoming the “Grand Old Party.” Labor scored a few striking victories over their major-party foes, only to see their gains washed away in the next recession or the next presidential election.

  Still, the major parties were not mere shapeless collections of interests, sections, and attitudes. Often powerful at the state and local levels, they also showed continuities of leadership and strategy in national elections. By nominating a string of New Yorkers for President—Horatio Seymour in 1868, Greeley in 1872, Tilden in 1876, and Grover Cleveland three times in a row—the Democrats focused their campaign efforts on the Empire State as the big bellwether in the East; the only exception, Winfield Hancock, came from neighboring Pennsylvania. That Seymour and Tilden and a host of its other national leaders had their political roots in the Albany Regency attested to the long-run political impact of Martin Van Buren and the other creative party builders of the 1830s and 1840s. That the Democracy turned to the Midwest—usually Missouri or Indiana—for vice-presidential candidates reflected its desire to carry balance-of-power states rather than recognize its electoral bastion in the South. By the same token, the Republicans typically balanced their string of Ohioans with running mates from the East.

  The more the parties played the politics of interest-group brokerage, sectional balance, issue compromise, and ideological rhetoric without substance, and the more political debate turned on secondary issues of financial corruption, patronage, personality, “honesty,” the more outcomes were influenced by chance, luck, and trivia. The contest of 1884 between Cleveland and Blaine marked a low point in this tendency. As usual, the Republicans charged that the Democracy was controlled by Tammany, even though Cleveland had made his political reputation by opposing it; as usual, the Democrats taxed their foes with using federal troops to run state elections, even though the GOP had long since abandoned the South. The Democrats charged, correctly, that Blaine had been involved in dubious dealings with railroad promoters, epitomized by his instruction to one correspondent, “Burn this letter”; and the Republicans charged, also correctly, that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child, which the New Yorker admitted. The campaign was thus enlivened by two taunts at rival party meetings:

  Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine,

  The continental liar from the State of Maine,

  Burn this letter!

  Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?

  Gone to the White House,

  Ha! Ha! Ha!

  Blaine had the worst of it. He managed to sit through a meeting of Protestant clergymen, all Republicans, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City, and was too weary to notice and later too slow to repudiate a pastor’s reference to “a party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” The Democrats adroitly exploited this gaffe, bringing some offended Catholics into their fold. And that very evening, the “Plumed Knight” attended a millionaires’ dinner at Delmonico’s, in the company of Jay Gould, Chauncey Depew, Astors, Vanderbilts, and the inevitable Evarts—a dinner that promptly was caricatured in the New York World as the “Royal Feast of Belshazzar Blaine and the Money Kings,” complete with a starving father, mother, and child begging for food.

  Cleveland’s razor-thin victory not only broke the Republicans’ twenty-year hold on the White House; it signified the new power of independent voters, for many of the old liberal and reformist Republicans, now called “Mugwumps,” had deserted the GOP, portending a future cleavage in that party. It put the Democracy, confined for twenty years to the hinterland but still essentially conservative, at the center of the nation’s councils. Its return to power was sym
bolized by one small fact hardly commented on at the time: when Grover Cleveland took the oath of office on March 4, 1885, it was the first occasion that this former mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York had visited Washington.

  The Poverty of Policy

  Perhaps it was understandable that the New York governor had never visited his nation’s capital, since Washington was neither a major tourist attraction nor a power center—and certainly not a dispenser of funds to desperate governors. Twenty years after the Civil War the city was more like a storm center without the storm. Compared to New York, wrote a correspondent, where everything throbbed “with the chase for the almighty dollar,” Washington tended to “deaden, rather than quicken you into activity.” Although full of energy, wrote an English visitor, “Washington ... is a city of rest and peace.” Virginia Grigsby, who had just taken a job in the dead-letter branch of the Post Office, wrote her brother, “We are fixed with every convenience, long desks, easy revolving chairs, footstools, plenty of servants and no specific work to be done.

  “There are all ladies in this room,” she added, “and therefore they do as they choose, most of them bring dressing sacques and put them on to work in. Some even take off their corsets. You know Mama never wears any at home, perhaps she may be able to do all this in the Land Office.”

  The White House in the mid-eighties was still a place where a job seeker could walk through the front door without being questioned, cross the big vestibule, climb a flight of winding stairs, present his card to a secretary, and expect to see the President. Lobbyists, cranks, deadbeats, pension lawyers, sightseers swarmed through the House of Representatives and crowded around the chamber itself, where members, their feet propped up on their desks and their pink-and-gold cuspidors at their side, conducted genial business in tobacco smoke so thick that ladies grew ill in the galleries above. Only a few elder senators took snuff, but they could still drink, even in the Capitol restaurant, where an order for tea, combined with a wink to the waiter, would produce a cup half filled with whiskey. Pennsylvania Avenue still connected—and separated—President and Congress. For years it was separated itself, by railroad tracks that cut across the Mall between the Capitol and the Treasury. Congress, which controlled the city government, time and again tried to compel the Pennsylvania Railroad to eliminate these grade crossings, without success. It seemed to Washington’s leading historian that the railroad controlled the public domain in the very heart of the nation’s capital.

  What then did these legislators do? The most visible continuing struggle in the post-Civil War years was over the tariff, though this struggle more often resembled a giant game of kick-the-ball in which bands of players, now teaming with one group and then another, kicked a number of balls over a variety of goalposts, while the spectators tried vainly to keep score. Despite thunderous declarations in party platforms, there were no clear divisions between Democrats and Republicans over actual policy. Rather, the tariff was thrown into an arena of contending interests. Of foreign-policy interests: the need of western farmers for overseas markets and the national interest in friendly relations abroad, balanced against workers’ fears of “pauper” competition, and such ethnic factors as Irish hatred of English “imperialists.” Of regional interests: in general North versus South, save for contrary interests within each section; thus Louisiana sugar growers favored a protective tariff. Of economic interests: broadly, producers versus consumers, but many workers acted on the basis of their concrete palpable stake in a particular industry rather than their thin general interest as consumers and on balance favored protection, while some manufacturers and many merchants opposed it. Of ideological or intellectual divisions: protection seemed to challenge some of the hoariest ideas in the American pantheon—notably individual economic liberty, laissez-faire government, decentralization—but the power of protectionist interests easily overrode such ideas, in part because the ideas were ambiguous and ambivalent. Editorial lions roared: such organs as the New York Evening Post and the Louisville Courier-Journal favored lower tariffs; many others, like the Philadelphia Press and the New York Tribune, championed protection.

  Amid the clash of rhetoric and the dust of battle the politicos of House and Senate calculated these contending interests almost with the accuracy of an apothecary’s scale. This was what they were good at. The result was a series of compromises, now skewed in certain directions, now in others, as senators, congressmen, and Presidents came and went. Both parties, according to Tom Terrill, promised “prosperity and social harmony without fundamentally altering the nation politically or economically.” The result was a series of “mongrel tariffs.”

  Some expected that Grover Cleveland would upset this equipoise following his presidential victory in 1884 on top of sweeping Democratic gains in Congress two years before. On the argument that “it is a condition which confronts us—not a theory,” he demanded sweeping tariff reduction. But Cleveland faced a political condition—the fact that a band of Democratic congressmen had persistently opposed major tariff reduction. The President finally managed to corral almost all the House Democrats, but the measure ran afoul of the Republican majority in the Senate, the presidential race of 1888, and Benjamin Harrison’s victory. This issue too would be projected into the turbulent nineties.

  Struggles over silver and gold also aroused great sound and fury, usually signifying little more than a free-for-all among a jumble of interests. After 1873, when Congress demonetized silver and left gold as the sole monetary standard, silverites began to denounce this “crime of ’73” as a gold conspiracy. Five years later agrarians opposed to deflation combined with silverites to pass over Hayes’s veto the Bland-Allison Act, which required the Secretary of the Treasury every month to buy between $2 million and $4 million worth of silver at the market price. In 1890, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act raised the purchase to 4.5 million ounces per month and authorized the Treasury to issue in payment legal tender Treasury notes redeemable in gold or silver by Treasury decision, but it did not provide for free silver.

  The rhetoric seemed to reflect a titanic struggle between rich and poor, easterner and westerner, upper class and lower class, debtor and creditor, farmer and financier, or some combination thereof. But the currency issue was not clear and sharp enough—or presented clearly or sharply enough—to pit mammoth interests against one another. Rather, the groups were divided among themselves—manufacturing interests against financial interests, big farmers against tenant farmers, hard-money businessmen against soft-money businessmen, New England textile interests against Pennsylvania iron and steel.

  It was the job of party leaders to disentangle these webs of interests and to seek popular majorities for group coalitions, but for some years after the Civil War the crosscutting forces were too hard to master. Instead of grand electoral battles, with clear winners and losers in the congressional struggle over policy, currency battles dissolved into numberless obscure skirmishes, and policy into weak compromises and even vacuity. A government of “intricate partisan maneuver and token legislation,” in Robert Wiebe’s words, “elevated certain types of leadership,” but the “apparent leaders were as much adrift as their followers. For lack of anything that made better sense of their world, people everywhere weighed, counted, and measured it.” What kind of force was necessary to reshape parties, interests, coalitions, and leadership in a way that would make possible a transcending conflict between moral principles, grand policy, clearly polarized leaderships?

  Certainly the railroad issue would not polarize party politicians, even though this issue sharpened in the seventies as farmers, workers, merchants, shippers, in varied ways and for varied reasons, attacked railroad monopolies, rate-making rebates and other discriminatory practices, corruption, and employment policies. By 1884, both national parties endorsed federal regulation. So did even a number of railroad men themselves, though most, including the likes of Jay Gould, opposed such governmental “interference.” Having accepted huge public grants
and subsidies from the start, railroad men could hardly escape the regulation that this would entail. Some railroad leaders welcomed moderate federal regulation in order to stave off “extremist” state controls. Their own efforts at self-policing—through rate agreements, pools, arbitration, and other forms of “cooperation”—had failed to work out practically and had aroused public hostility to boot.

  Such a consensus for railroad regulation had developed by the 1880s that the House of Representatives, under the leadership of a Texas congressman expert in railroad transportation, John H. Reagan, was strongly supporting federal regulation. The national consensus for regulation had such frail and mixed foundations, however, as to diffuse the policy-making process itself. The Senate and House passed bills so diverse as to tie the measures up in conference committee for months. The outcome in 1887, the Interstate Commerce Act, was a compromise measure that did not set freight and passenger tariffs and was vague in key aspects, but it did prohibit the granting of rebates, higher rates for shorter distances over the same line, and pooling agreements, and it established a five-man commission to monitor the railroads and enforce the law through prosecutions in the federal courts.