American Experiment (188 page)

Ohio Republicans continued to boast of their leadership, organization, and principles. Older leaders recruited younger ones; in the 1880s Governor Joseph B. Foraker encouraged a blossoming young lawyer named William Howard Taft, who would flower in the next century. Civil War memories still inspirited the Ohio GOP, as its convention orators declaimed that the Grand Old Party would never “break up its battle formations” or “bury its wagon trains,” no matter how deep the “scars of battle.” The leaders still spoke for the black people, and some Negro politicians rose in its ranks. George A. Myers, the chief of barbers at Cleveland’s grand political hotel, became one of the most astute and literate Republican leaders, in part because he was at the hub of a political network. But the great commitment to black rights was slowly waning, giving way to the defense of property rights.

The Democrats too were highly pluralistic, ranging from old moderate elements still voting the “politics of nostalgia” from the 1850s, through Douglas and McClellan Democrats, to elements of a strange new organization of “Night Hawks” and “Grand Dragons” and “Grand Wizards,” calling itself the Ku Klux Klan and arising out of a Southland bent on “redemption.” Like the GOP, the Democracy was increasingly tending toward its own brand of economic conservatism, especially under the impact of leaders like Grover Cleveland.

Given the narrow front on which the two major parties contended, it was
inevitable that third parties would rise to press for cherished ideas. One of the first of these in the postwar years, the Liberal Republicans, was quite remarkable. Deeply alienated from the Grant Administration because of its corruption, its spoils, its cronyism with big business, its all-round mediocrity, independent-minded Republicans joined with defecting Democrats and others to rout the regulars. The movement attracted a diversity of followers—in the words of John Sproat, “free traders and protectionists, conservative New England patricians and agrarian radicals, civil service reformers and unvarnished spoilsmen, advocates of Negro rights and Southern redeemers,” united only by their hatred of Grantism. The leaders were a diverse lot too—among them the Radical Republican and Missouri senator Carl Schurz, the Massachusetts blueblood and former diplomat Charles Francis Adams, the aged poet William Cullen Bryant, a host of editors, including notably Edwin Godkin of the
Nation
and Horace Greeley of the New York
Tribune.

At an 1872 Cincinnati conclave sober in both speech and drink, the Liberal Republicans chose Greeley himself for President. Many reformers were as aghast as regulars were amused. With his big bald head and neck whiskers, his drooping spectacles and rumpled clothes, his high-pitched voice and awkward ways, the outspoken old editor was the delight of opposition cartoonists; even more, he had embraced so many causes, waxed hot and cold on so many issues, denounced so many leaders including Lincoln himself, that he was bound to antagonize more voters than he attracted. And so he did, dragging down not only the Liberal Republicans but the Democratic party, which, at the nadir of its own leadership, adopted him as its own candidate.

Still, the Liberal Republicans’ main problem was not Greeley but liberalism itself. Skeptical if not contemptuous of the mass public, conservative in economic policy, compromising on Negro rights; moralistic but not always moral, amateurish and dilettantish in political mechanics, the movement virtually caricatured the liberal tendency toward disunity, as leaders divided over the tariff, Reconstruction, women’s rights, and election strategy. With their narrow definition of liberty as economic and political individualism, their distaste in general for social egalitarianism or economic “leveling,” their antipathy toward centralized government, their half-hidden disdain for the “masses,” the Liberals both reflected and abetted the dominant ideology of Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Badly beaten by Grant in 1872, the Liberal Republicans’ party faded away—though not their causes.

Other minor parties too were as impotent at the polls as they were vocal in protest. Rising out of wide grass-roots agitation over deflation, lack of capital, and the working conditions of labor, and galvanized by the panic
of 1873 and resultant hardships, farm spokesmen, labor reformers, frustrated entrepreneurs, and assorted inflationists established the Greenback (or Greenback Labor) party. Its orators and platforms denounced hard-money policies and demanded that greenbacks be given full legal tender status and be issued freely. The party gained only a scattering of votes in 1876 with its candidate, the New York philanthropist Peter Cooper; won over a million votes in the off-year elections two years later; but fared badly at the polls in 1880 with General James B. Weaver at the head of the ticket, and faded away.

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 symbolized 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.

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.