A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  1878:

  Bland-Allison Act; Knights of Labor formed

  1880:

  James A. Garfield elected president

  1881:

  Garfield assassinated; Chester A. Arthur becomes president

  1882:

  Chinese Exclusion Act

  1883:

  Pendleton Civil Service Act

  1884:

  Mugwumps split from the Republican Party; Grover Cleveland elected president

  1886:

  American Federation of Labor formed; Haymarket Riot

  1887:

  Veto of the seed corn bill; Congress passes the Dependent Pension Act; Interstate Commerce Act

  1888:

  Benjamin Harrison defeats Cleveland for the presidency

  1890:

  Sherman Silver Purchase Act and Sherman Antitrust Act passed; McKinley tariff passed

  1892:

  Cleveland defeats Harrison for the presidency; strong showing by the Populist Party

  1893:

  Panic of 1893 sets in; Sherman Silver Purchase Act repealed; Coxey’s Army marches on Washington

  1894:

  Pullman strike

  1895:

  J. P. Morgan lends U.S. government gold to stave off federal bankruptcy

  President Hayes

  Having survived the closest election in American history, Rutherford Hayes—“His Fraudulency,” his opponents labeled him—may not have had Reconstruction to deal with, but other issues soon consumed him. Hayes knew that federal intervention had reached its limits in the South, and other means would be required to change both its attitudes and reality. The nature of his own election meant that he was compromised, and he hoped that business revitalization and economic recovery might do for the freedmen what the government could not.

  Hayes and his wife, Lemonade Lucy (as she was referred to by reporters because of her nonalcoholic table habits), interested the press far more than his actual policies. Lucy Hayes, an attractive woman, captured public fancy and her religious stamp on the White House gave it a much different tone from that the Grants had set.1 Soon, however, attention turned to Hayes’s actions as president. He immediately summoned South Carolina Republican governor Daniel Chamberlain to a Washington meeting, where he reiterated his intention that the federal troops withdraw. Chamberlain, realizing the situation, agreed.

  When Hayes addressed reform of civil service, he was certain to anger many in his own party as well as in the Democratic House. Still, he set to it almost immediately, writing in April 1877, “Now for civil service reform. We must limit and narrow the area of patronage.”2 Through an executive order, Hayes prohibited federal officeholders from taking part “in the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns.”3 This seemed to defy logic. After all, many of the best practitioners of spoils asked, what other reason for winning office was there? Starting with an investigation of the New York customhouse and its excesses under Chester A. Arthur (whom Hayes removed in July 1878), Hayes sought to bring the patronage monster to heel. Both Arthur and a naval officer whom Hayes had also removed, Alonzo Cornell, were pets of New York’s Roscoe “Boss” Conkling, and the actions sparked a revolt among the spoilsmen in Congress against the president. Conkling held up confirmation of Hayes’s replacements in the Senate, one of whom (for Arthur’s spot) was Theodore Roosevelt Sr., but Hayes prevailed. The president attempted to institute a “new tone” when it came to spoils, instructing his fellow Republicans, “Let no man be put out because he is Mr. Arthur’s Friend, and no man be put in merely because he is our friend,” but the words rolled right over many in the party.4

  Still, on a variety of issues the Democratic-controlled House began to challenge or ignore the president outright, passing the Bland-Allison Act of 1878 (purchasing large quantities of silver) over his veto. At the same time, an indictment of two members of the Louisiana election board that had certified Hayes as the winner gave the Democrats the opening they needed to try to unseat him through the courts. A new spate of investigations into the 1876 fraudulent returns, sponsored by Democrats, backfired, unifying the deeply divided Republicans behind the president, who vowed to fight “rather than submit to removal by any means of the Constitutional process of impeachment.”5 He got little favorable treatment from the press, of which he disparagingly remarked that only two of God’s creatures could employ the term “We”: newspaper editors and men with tapeworms.6

  No sooner had Hayes reviewed the reports of his subordinates on civil service reform than the country was racked by a series of railroad strikes over pay cuts enacted by the B&O Railroad. From Baltimore to Pittsburgh, bloodshed ensued when strikers fought strikebreakers and state militia forces, and soon clashes occurred in Ohio and New York. Honing to a strictly legalistic line, Hayes instructed federal troops to protect U.S. property, but otherwise not to interfere on either side. By midsummer 1877, the strikes had subsided. A bill to restrict Chinese laborers passed Congress, but Hayes vetoed it, further angering the labor movement. Labor unrest, coupled with the Bland-Allison veto and Republican disunity, gave the Democrats both the House and the Senate in 1878. Still, by continually forcing Hayes to use the veto, recalcitrant Republicans and disaffected Democrats gave the president more power than he would have had otherwise, since he gained both notoriety and popularity from his veto pen. His patience and decorum restored some degree of respect to the presidency. Best of all (in the eyes of voters) Hayes had avoided “Grantism.” Hayes demilitarized the South, and introduced civil service reform—all remarkable achievements from a man who was a lame duck from the get-go!7

  Controlling the Spoils Beast

  The Hayes tenure ended with a string of vetoes. At the Republican convention, Hayes, like others, was surprised to see a dark horse, James A. Garfield, emerge with the nomination. Old spoilsmen, known as the Stalwarts, had hoped to get Grant a third term, whereas reformers, known as the Half Breeds, supported James G. Blaine, Maine’s perpetual-motion machine. Blaine was a big-picture thinker, uninterested in the details or tactics of process. Other than his commitment to reform (which was constantly under press suspicion because of his lavish lifestyle—well above his means—and his mountains of debt), Blaine had little to recommend him to the presidency. He had, for example, an empty legislative record. Hayes’s favorite, John Sherman of Ohio, also sliced away votes from the front-runners. But Sherman had no chance at the presidency either: his personality was dull; his voting record was consistent for his district, but lacked vision for the nation; and his rhetoric was uninspiring. Thus Garfield emerged from the pack as the natural compromise candidate. To offset the reformers and placate the Conkling/Stalwart wing, Chester A. Arthur received the vice presidential nomination—a personal affront to Hayes, who had dismissed him.

  Like Hayes, Garfield came from Ohio, where he had served as the president of Hiram College before being elected to the House of Representatives. Literate in several languages, Garfield had come from near poverty, and was the last president born in a log cabin. His father had abandoned the family while James was a toddler, so he began working at a young age, driving oxen and mule teams on Ohio’s canals. He had fought in the Civil War, advancing through the officer ranks to brigadier general, but Lincoln persuaded him to resign to run for Congress. In 1880, Garfield was elected to the Senate and worked to secure the presidential nomination for Sherman, but before he could even take his seat, he agreed to be the Republican nominee, winning after 36 ballots.

  The Democrats offered their own war hero, Winfield Scott Hancock, who had received wounds while fearlessly commanding Union troops from horseback on Cemetery Ridge. He lacked significant political experience, and during the campaign the Republicans published an elegantly bound large book called Record of the Statesmanship and Achievements of General Winfield Scott Hancock. It was filled with blank pages. The ex-soldier Hancock also managed to shoot himself in the foot by uttering words that all but sealed his doom, “The
tariff question is a local question.”8 Despite a close popular vote, Garfield won a decisive electoral college victory, 214 to 155.

  Arthur may have been Garfield’s sop to the Stalwarts, but Senator Conkling expected far more for his support, which had handed to Garfield the critical electoral votes of New York.9 He made clear that he expected the new president to meekly accept any nominations he put forward. Garfield had a reputation as a conciliator; he had no intention of allowing Boss Conkling to dictate federal patronage. After a power play in which Conkling resigned, New Yorkers had had enough, and the legislature retired him.

  Garfield’s nominations sailed through, including Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, whom Garfield appointed secretary of war.10 No one knows what Garfield’s tenure might have accomplished, since on July 2, 1881, he was shot in a Washington train station by a disgruntled office seeker, Charles Guiteau, who shouted the infamous phrase, “I am a Stalwart and Arthur is president now.” Guiteau had spent time in John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida community, where he enthusiastically welcomed the doctrine of free love, although, apparently, no one reciprocated, for his nickname was Charles Gitout. Broke and mentally unstable, Guiteau had demanded the consulship to Vienna in return for voting for Garfield.11 The assassin’s bullet did not immediately kill the president, though. Garfield lingered for weeks as doctors searched fruitlessly for the bullet; he died on September 19, 1881.

  That, indeed, as Guiteau had stated, made Arthur president, even though he had been the de facto president for several months. No one was more stunned at the administration of the new president than the Stalwarts, who had insisted on his vice presidency and who now paid a heavy price in the press. Editors blamed Stalwarts for creating the climate of animosity that could produce a Guiteau, and several Stalwarts observed that they could be instantly hanged in certain cities. Meanwhile, the man associated with corruption and patronage in New York ironically proved a paragon of character as president. He vetoed a rivers and harbors bill that was nothing more than political pork barreling; he prosecuted fraud; and in 1883 he signed what most considered the deathblow to spoils, the Pendleton Civil Service Act.12 “Elegant Arthur” was the son of a Baptist preacher from Vermont. His patronage positions had made him more a master of the actual details of government than either Hayes or Garfield. Moreover, Arthur had never personally participated in the graft, and had endeavored to make the New York custom house free of graft. But he also viewed patronage as the legitimate prerogative of elected officials and the lubricant of politics, and he wielded the appointment powers at his customs position liberally, if within the letter of the law. Thus, the charges of corruption against him technically never contained any basis in fact, but often gave Arthur the appearance of impropriety.

  What surprised Republicans as much as Arthur’s position on patronage was his rapid action to reduce the tariff in 1883, arguably making him the first in a long (though not uninterrupted) line of Republican tax cutters. He gained labor’s favor by backing the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). After learning he had Bright’s disease, which, at the time, was inevitably debilitating and fatal, he made clear that he would not run for reelection, thereby diminishing his political clout.

  Material Abundance, Social “Reform”

  While the nation struggled with Reconstruction, patronage, and Indian policy, the pace of industrial production and business enterprise had rapidly accelerated. Growing industries, increasing immigration, and the gradual replacement of the family farm with the new factory system as the chief form of economic organization brought new stresses. Perhaps because the factories were located generally in the North where the intellectuals were; perhaps because the “Negro problem” had proven more difficult to solve; and perhaps because Reconstruction itself in many ways reflected the political corruption that had characterized the Tweed Ring, eastern intellectuals, upper class philanthropists, and middle-class women all gradually abandoned the quest for equality of black Americans in order to focus on goals they could more easily achieve. Emphasizing legislation that regulated large businesses (the hated trusts), these activists pursued widespread social and economic changes under the umbrella of “reform.” They also embarked on a crusade to end private vices—mostly exhibited by the lower classes, particularly immigrants—including prostitution, pornography, drugs, and hard liquor.

  Another group who saw itself as victims of industry and powerful interests also clamored for change, largely through the direct intervention of the federal government. Agrarians, especially in the West and South, detected what they thought was a deliberate campaign to keep them living on the margin. Convinced that railroads, banks, and grain elevator owners were all conspiring to steal their earnings, reinforced by a government policy of subsidies and deflation, they, too, clamored for reform.

  The two groups—the intellectual reformers and the agrarians—had little in common, save that they both saw Uncle Sam as a combination moral evangelist and playground monitor. Whereas upper-class reformers sneered at the rural hicks who wanted to force the railroads to lower prices, they nevertheless saw the necessity to temporarily ally with them. It would be a long road to the ultimate fusion of the two groups in the Prohibition movement, and for the better part of the late nineteenth century they ran on roughly parallel rails without touching.

  Part of the affinity for government action had come from experience in the cities, where individuals could not repair their own streets or clear their own harbors. Cities had become exactly what Jefferson feared, pits of political patronage built largely on immigrants and maintained by graft and spoils. Political reform, however, had proved difficult to come by. In the first place, both parties played the spoils game. Second, individuals did benefit from the political largesse, and constituents could, to some degree, be bought off. To the reformers of the late 1800s, this circumstance was eminently correctable, mainly through the expansion of the franchise and through more open and frequent use of the machinery of democracy. Efforts to allow people to bring up their own legislation (with sufficient signatures on a petition), known as an initiative—which originated in rural, Populist circles but which quickly spread to the cities—or to vote on an act of the state legislature, known as a referendum, or even to remove a problem judge or a long-term elected official (a recall) were all discussed frequently.

  An equally important issue—and one the reformers thought easier to attain because they controlled the terms of the debate—involved public health. Public health, of course, is ultimately personal and not public at all, and, as the reformers found, addressing public health issues meant imposing one group’s standards of hygiene and behavior upon others with, or without, their consent. But the offensive began inoffensively enough, with threats taken seriously by all: safe water and prevention of fire.

  Two of the most serious enemies of safe cities in the 1800s, fire and disease, could be fought by the same weapon—water. At the end of the American Revolution, observers were struck by the cities’ “almost incredible absence of the most elementary sanitary provisions.”13 At that time in New York, columns of slaves belonging to the wealthiest families each evening carried tubs filled with feces and urine to the banks of the Hudson. Most people simply “disposed of excrement by flipping it through the handiest window.”14 Piles of feces remained where they landed until either Tuesday or Friday, when a city ordinance required they be pushed or swept into the streets. In winter, however, “it lay where it landed,” where it received the local appellation “corporate pudding.”15 Locals sank wells in the middle of streets, whereupon seepage drained into the drinking supply. Other sources of water included New York City’s Tea Water pump, fed by the seepage from Collect Pond, which by 1783 was filled with dead dogs, cats, rodents, and further seasoned with the laundry drippings of all the shantytown residents who lived on its banks.

  The United States trailed France and England in this respect. Paris had fourteen miles of sewers in 1808, and London began a massive sewer system that was substanti
ally completed by 1865, yet Philadelphia still depended heavily on its eighty-two thousand cesspools in 1877. Nevertheless, citywide water systems spread steadily, if slowly, during the century. The resulting improved sanitation was instantly reflected in plunging death rates. By midcentury, typhoid deaths had fallen in Boston and New York, and plummeted in New Orleans and Brooklyn.16 Digestive illness also dropped steadily. Where cholera once struck fear in the hearts of Jacksonian city dwellers, by the time of the Great Depression it had essentially been eliminated as a major public health threat. Such progress depended heavily on safe water systems.

  As late as the 1830s, most citywide water systems were privately constructed: in 1800 only 5.9 percent of waterworks were publicly financed, and in 1830 a full 80 percent of the existing water systems remained in private hands, although this percentage had fallen to only 50 percent by the 1880s.17 Chicago adopted a modified public system in which an owner of property had to show proof that he owned a lot before he could vote on any levy related to water assessments.18

  Brooklyn (1857), Chicago (1859), Providence (1869), New Haven (1872), Boston (1876), Cincinnati (1870), and Indianapolis (1870) all had citywide planned water systems, and Worchester, Massachusetts (1890), had the country’s first modern sewage disposal plant that employed chemicals to eliminate waste. By that time, nearly six hundred waterworks served more than 14.1 million urban residents. These systems, which used steam pumps, had become fairly sophisticated. Along with cast-iron pipes, these pumps provided effective protection against fire, especially when used in connection with hydrants, which were installed in New York in the early 1800s. By the middle of the century, major cities like Boston and Philadelphia had thousands of hydrants.19