Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  Never before or since has the Presidency counted for so little as it did in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Undistinguished Presidents followed one another (Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison and again Cleveland) without making much of a mark. The hero of Vicksburg and Appomattox was at a loss in the White House. It was never shown that he himself was dishonest, but members of his family certainly took every possible advantage of his position to enrich themselves, and members of his administration, at every level, including his private secretary, were thoroughly corrupt. The most noticeable thing about Grant’s successor, President Hayes (apart from the circumstances of his election), was that his wife, ‘Lemonade Lucy’, refused to serve any alcoholic drinks in the White House. The most noticeable thing about President Garfield was that he was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed office-seeker. His Vice-President and successor, Chester A. Arthur, a veteran spoilsman, pleasantly surprised everyone by his dignified performance as President, but that was all. And so it went on for more than twenty years.

  Never before or since have the great barons of Congress loomed so large. The ascendancy over the government which the struggle with Andrew Johnson had given them was not lightly relinquished, nor was the control of the spoils system, although in 1883 public opinion, aroused by the murder of Garfield, compelled the passage of the Pendleton Act, the first attempt to reform the civil service by introducing competitive exams to be taken by candidates for places in the bureaucracy. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, an autocrat in that chamber, bulked larger in political life, most of the time, than any President. Senators like Roscoe Conkling of New York and James G. Blaine of Maine exploited their influence with entire selfishness, caring about nothing but their own desires and ambitions. To them, business corporations existed to subsidize politicians; politics was simply the means to bully businessmen; either way, the faction leaders – ‘Half-Breeds’ or ‘Stalwarts’ in the slang of the time – got richer. It was small wonder that politics stank in the nostrils of the fastidious; or that one chapter in the classical work on America in this period is entitled ‘Why the Best Men Do Not Go into Politics’.1

  Never has the two-party system been more rigid or more triumphant or more entirely a battle for office between the Ins and the Outs. There were still deep divisions within the nation, of course, and more were developing, but they were not of a kind to keep practical men from the ‘wheeling and dealing’, the realistic division of the spoils, the fixing of elections and the hoodwinking of voters which were to them the very stuff of politics. Never have the states been left more entirely to their own devices.

  The result was a caricature of the Jeffersonian system. The federal government once more accepted strict limitations, and the principles of republicanism were proclaimed from every stump; but the spirit – greedy, selfish and short-sighted – was everything that Jefferson would have deplored. And since the age saw the collapse of every social structure which the Jeffersonians had held dear, it was peculiar that Jeffersonian political shibboleths should still be affirmed.

  Various explanations might be offered for this paradox of an old politics and a new society. Some would argue that it was a tribute to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, whose Constitution was sufficiently flexible to contain the revolutionary forces of the Age of Gold without too much creaking. Others might as plausibly argue that the same story proved the essential weakness of the Constitutional political system; having shown itself impotent to end slavery peacefully, it was now equally incapable of ordering the industrialization of America humanely. Others again would point to the frightful shocks which the system had endured since 1852. Apart from the central horror, of Americans killing each other in battle, one President had been murdered, another impeached; three great political parties had split (the Whigs in 1852, the Democrats in 1860, the Republicans in 1872) and one, the Whigs, had vanished entirely. Federalism had proved impotent to contain the sectional conflict, and the Union itself had nearly succumbed. Small wonder that when eventually the dust settled there was a determined effort to restore what all thought of as normality. The Supreme Court led the way. It had suffered grievously in its authority during the war, when, for example, Lincoln had defied its fiat and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. From the moment the war was over the Court did all it could, by the direction and detail of its decisions, to cut down the growth of constitutional innovations and to restore its own authority and the autonomous power of the states, even if it meant watering down the effect of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Dred Scott decision, with its severe restrictions on the power of the federal government, could not actually be revived, but the Court went further in that direction than would have seemed imaginable at the height of Radical Reconstruction, and the country acquiesced. It was a later generation, recovering from a later war, which invented the awful word ‘normalcy’, but the craving for a quiet life after the storm was the same in 1877 as in 1920.

  It ought also to be borne in mind that although the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution were rapid and profound, they were not as yet so widespread as to engulf the whole of America, or anything like it. Most native Americans had been born in the countryside, indeed most of them still lived there. A political system which had been designed to suit a republic of farmers was therefore not so out of date as it might seem. Besides, to the precise extent that it reflected what was becoming a past distribution of power, it was unlikely to change: rural politicians had the usual professional fondness for gerrymanders and were not willing to sacrifice any of the advantages the old system gave them, whatever the injustice. Not for a very long time indeed, not until 1962, would the courts be ready to impose the rule of absolute equality between voters on all elections, state, municipal and national. Until then the rural interests would be over-represented in Congress and the other chambers of power, and they took every care to keep it that way.

  The most important consideration was probably the sheer intractability of the case. Perhaps the political system needed wholesale reform (women were claiming the right to vote); but no one ever had leisure to ponder the problem and make comprehensive suggestions. There was always a new election coming up, or a new distribution of the spoils to be undertaken in the wake of an electoral victory. The political system had been carried on even during the war, when a third of the states were out of the Union and a large portion of the main opposition party was tainted with treason. Office-holders and candidates had entangled themselves in commitments which could not be evaded in peace. Sudden emergencies, such as the crash of 1873, demanded all one’s attention. Reform, if it was to come, would have to come piecemeal, and was slow on the road because of the mere complexity of life. The case is not unusual.

  Meantime it could be said that the old system was not doing too badly by the country. There were some frightful scandals, to be sure. In 1869 Jay Gould and Jim Fisk took advantage of President Grant’s gullibility to try to corner the gold supply, an operation which, to succeed, required the co-operation of the US Treasury. Since the project would wreck the money market, such co-operation could be got only by bribery; fortunately at the last moment the administration realized what was happening and, by selling gold in enormous quantities, broke the price and the Gould-Fisk ‘corner’. The affair created a great stir; it was the first in a series of episodes which eventually discredited Grant and the Republican Congress of which he had made himself the obedient servant. The Democrats carried the House of Representatives in the election of 1874 and, as we have seen, made an almost successful bid for the Presidency in 1876; but they were not very convincing embodiments of the reforming principle. Their chief objection to the extravagance and alleged corruption of the Reconstruction governments in the South was that the freedmen were the chief beneficiaries; elsewhere their aim was to get a hand in the game themselves. Samuel Tilden, their candidate, had fought Tammany Hall a few years before, when it was dominated by the notorio
us boss Tweed, whose depredations cost New York city 8100 million or more; but after all Tweed (who died in jail in 1878) was a Democrat too. It became generally accepted that the morals of politicians of either party were a joke. ‘If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?’ inquired Henry Adams cynically (this latest twig on the old tree was too fastidious, or perhaps just too curmudgeonly, to be a politician, so he became a wit and a historian instead). In another saying of the age, an honest man (voter or politician) was defined as one who, when bought, stays bought. Some wag, defending the Pennsylvania state legislature against its enemies, said that it was the finest body of men that money could buy. The millionaires took the hint: until at least the turn of the century the state government was owned by Carnegie (steel), Frick (coal), Rockefeller (oil) and the Pennsylvania Railroad, which united their interests. Henry Demarest Lloyd said that Standard Oil could do anything with the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it.

  Yet it would be wrong to imagine that all the politicians and millionaires either were, or saw themselves as being, mere rogues. The capitalists were well aware of the enormous profits they might make, but they knew also that they ran enormous risks. They remembered the great Railway Mania in England in the forties, which had wiped out the savings of a generation. They competed mercilessly with each other, for in the totally unregulated market of the day the slightest trace of scruple was a weakness, laying you open to lethal attack, as Commodore Vanderbilt had found in his struggle with Jay Gould. The operation of laying railroads across America was on a vastly larger scale than anything ever attempted in Europe: no one could say when, if ever, it would show a profit. To succeed in the task, or at any rate to get a guarantee against failure, the capitalists needed the assistance of Congress. And if, to get adequate land grants, it proved necessary to bribe Congressmen, why not? The Congressmen and Senators themselves had seen to it that bribery was the only way of doing business with them. Frequently they would introduce bills so bothersome to business that they would be offered handsome sums to withdraw them. The money would be accepted, since obtaining it was the only point of the enterprise, and the bill would be dropped. This technique was known as ‘the Strike’. Others would call it extortion.

  Naturally the politicians did not take a severe view of themselves. Their patriotism was indisputable; many Congressmen had fought in the Civil War or had played their part as war Governors, Senators or Congressmen. If not exactly godly men, they were at least thorough Protestants. They believed in the glorious future of their country, and said so at every opportunity. They had never pretended to be disinterested; they were in politics to make a living and, if possible, get rich: it was the American way, and only while such benefits seemed likely would enough able recruits be found to fill the innumerable posts which the federal system created. Above all they were loyal to their parties and the principles which these stood for. To the outsider the differences between the parties might seem to be more geographical than ideological, and party principles might not seem to be worth all the emphasis that was placed on them; but to Republicans and Democrats these were all serious matters. They might indeed have argued that it was precisely the fusion between geography and political principles that gave the parties their value. A Republican from Pennsylvania, for example, with his strong commitment to protective tariffs and free enterprise, was obviously the man to represent a state whose prosperity depended, or at least was thought by the majority of its voters to depend, on just these arrangements. If he showed any sign of weakening in his support of them he could and would be quickly replaced. The minority interests of the state would equally readily turn to the Democrats, with their long-standing commitment to freer trade. Other issues, such as bribery and corruption, were of secondary importance to the voters, and everyone knew it.

  It was just this genial acceptance of human weakness and greed which alienated the Mugwumps. They were one of the first groups of citizens to make their dissent matter. They were named by their opponents, who could not take seriously fine-drawn ladies and gentlemen who believed that politics, in America at any rate, ought to be something nobler than the arts of shabby compromise and raiding the public purse. The typical Mugwump was a member in good standing of the middle class, a citizen of the old Anglo-American stock, and (except in New York, where opposition to Tammany Hall cut across party divisions) a Republican: probably one of the former Liberal Republicans, who opposed Grant’s re-election in 1872, possibly a former abolitionist, although the abolitionist temperament was usually too radical to be satisfied with any form of conventional politics, and after the death of slavery found, in many cases, new causes, either in the rising labour movement, of which Wendell Phillips became a powerful supporter, or in that for women’s suffrage (a transition brilliantly depicted by Henry James in his novel The Bostonians, in 1886). As their enemies quickly realized, the Mugwumps’ essential weakness was not their dislike of getting their own hands dirty, but their inability to recognize that others might have good reasons for being less squeamish. For instance, the city government of Philadelphia was notoriously corrupt: the ruling Republicans saw and seized all the opportunities for graft that new municipal necessities entailed. In 1841 a Gas Trust had been set up to bring coal gas, for light and heating, to Philadelphia. The Trust had been deliberately set up to be legally safe from political interference; but those who had designed it had not realized what would happen when one of the trustees was himself a politician. James McManes, an Irish immigrant, used his position on the Gas Trust to become the Boss of Philadelphia. He controlled the Public Buildings Commission, he controlled the schools and, sheltered by the legal immunity of the Gas Trust, he was able to conceal his financial dealings from the inquisitive. Soon thousands of workmen were dependent on McManes for their jobs, and of course voted as he told them on election day. Many, indeed, were expected to do more: they had to subscribe to the boss’s campaign chest and work on their neighbours to get them to the polls (where, because the secret ballot had not yet been introduced, it was easy to make sure that they did the right thing, the more so as the police were under McManes’s control too). Favoured contractors paid large sums to the politicians who employed them to lay gas-pipes or build schools, and recouped themselves out of charges to consumers and to the city authorities. Philadelphia’s debt soared; when the respectable protested they found that gas was unaccountably slow in arriving in their neighbourhoods; and it was much the same with street paving, street lighting, public transport and sewage disposal. It was necessary to build a new City Hall; but perhaps it was not necessary to use the most expensive materials on the most magnificent scale (its tower is taller than the Great Pyramid and St Peter’s in the Vatican), the cost of which (met by the taxpayers) of course included a cut for politicians. It was calculated that the Gas Ring had stolen some $8 million. So it is not surprising that the Democrats, proclaiming themselves as the party of reform, swept the city elections in 1876. Once in power they started cutting down on public works expenditure, which earned them the gratitude of the Mugwumps; but as they thereby also threw large numbers of manual labourers out of work the voters as a whole were less pleased and soon brought the Republicans back to power. Not until the early eighties was a typical Mugwump alliance of dissident Republicans and Democrats able to break the Gas Ring and give Philadelphia some semblance of efficient, honest government; and even that achievement was limited. According to James Bryce, it was but substituting a state boss for a city one.2

  The true Mugwump never learned the obvious lesson from such stories: that somehow or other the poorer classes must be provided for, if only because they had votes. Political bosses might be, and often were, cold-hearted, coarse, narrow, greedy men, with no undue respect for the law; but they did have the priceless virtue of looking after their own people. ‘I think that there’s got to be in every ward a guy that any bloke can go to when he’s in trouble and get help – not justice and the law, but help, no matter what he’s done.’3 Such was the p
hilosophy of the bosses. Their whole influence depended on their helpfulness and reliability. If they made promises they kept them (which is partly why so many notorious scoundrels were known as ‘Honest John’ or ‘Honest Bill’) and in return they could depend on carrying a large and faithful following to the polls. To the beauty of all this the Mugwumps were blind; which explains why Plunkitt called them ‘morning glories’: they never discovered a means of keeping their followers true until the afternoon, even though they occasionally swept state or city elections after especially noisome scandals came to light. They never posed a serious threat to the practical politicians at any level, nation, state or city; and though their desertion helped to defeat the Republican Presidential candidate, James G. Blaine, in 1884 (‘Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine! The continental liar from the state of Maine…!’) he owed his narrow defeat at least as much to the indiscretion of a clerical supporter, who announced to all the world, in the candidate’s unprotesting presence, that the Democrats were the party of ‘Rum, Romanism and Rebellion!’. Nothing could have been better calculated to rally the opposition, and the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, was elected President by a majority of 29,000 votes. Blaine was unlucky, and did not, perhaps, fully deserve the constant obloquy that was heaped on him by Democrats, party rivals and political cartoonists; but his defeat gave every good Mugwump deep satisfaction, which was just as well, for Mugwumpery never did so well again.