A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (87 page)

Another more popular option, which appealed to miners as well as farmers, called for inflation by expanding the money supply through the augmentation of the existing gold coins with silver coins. Coinage would occur at a ratio of sixteen to one (sixteen ounces of silver for an ounce of gold, or roughly sixteen silver dollars to a gold dollar), which was problematic, since silver at the time was only worth seventeen to one (that is, it would take seventeen silver dollars to exchange for one gold dollar). The “silverites” therefore wanted to force the government to purchase silver at artificially high prices—at taxpayer expense. Silverite objectives suffered a setback when, in 1873, Congress refused to monetize silver, an action that caused the prosilver factions to explode, calling it the Crime of ’73.
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Alongside monetary policy reforms, farmers sought to create a federal regulatory agency to set railroad rates (again, more specifically, “to set them artificially low”). They rightly complained that federally subsidized railroad owners of the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific railroads gave lower rates to high-production agribusinessmen. Lost in the debate was the issue of whether those railroads should have been subsidized by the government in the first place; but once funded, the railroads, to some degree, owed their existence to Washington.
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Populism was born from this stiff opposition to gold and railroads, evolving from organizations such as the Grange (1867) and the Greenbacker Party (1876), then launched as a national political campaign in the 1890s. Both a southern and western agrarian political crusade, Populism gained special strength west of the Mississippi River. The Populist Party formed around a nucleus of southern and western farmers, but also enjoyed the support of ranchers, miners (especially silver miners), and townspeople and businessmen whose livelihoods were connected to agriculture. Although Populists courted the urban workingman voters, they never succeeded in stretching beyond their rural base. Socialists in the WFM and IWW thought Populists far too moderate (and religious) to create lasting change and, at root, hated the private enterprise system that the Populists merely sought to reform.

In the 1892 presidential election, Populist candidate James K. Weaver garnered 1 million popular votes, 22 electoral votes, and helped elect 12 Populist congressmen and three governors. On this base, Populists soon successfully infiltrated the Democrat Party.
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With “Free Silver” as their rallying cry, in 1896, Populists and Democrats united to nominate William Jennings Bryan, a fiery, thirty-six-year-old Nebraska congressman, for president. Bryan roused the Populist movement to new heights when he angrily proclaimed:

 

You come and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon the broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again, as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country…. Having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world…the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: “You shall not press upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!
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Yet stirring oratory never reversed a major American demographic and political shift, and the Populists simply failed to grasp the fact that in the course of the last half of the nineteenth century, political power had markedly moved from the farm to the city. This dynamic, with the farmers steadily losing clout at the polls and the marketplace, produced an angst that exaggerated the plight of the agrarians, a phenomena called psychic insecurity by historian Richard Hofstadter.
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Although Bryan carried nearly every state in the agricultural South and the West, William McKinley still defeated him handily, 271 electoral votes to 176. The frontier had, indeed, come to an end.

Despite defeat, the Populists bequeathed a disturbing legacy to American politics and economics. Their late nineteenth-century cry for governmental regulation of the economy and monetary inflation did not vanish, but translated into a more urban-based reform movement of the early twentieth century—Progressivism.

Life After Reconstruction

W
ith reconstruction essentially over, the nation shifted its attention from the plight of the freedmen toward other issues: settling the West, the rise of large-scale enterprise, political corruption, and the growth of large cities.

Chief among the new concerns was the corrupt spoils system. Newspapers loved graft and corruption because these topics are easy to write about, and they provided reporters with clear villains and strong morality plays. Patronage also dominated public discourse because of an aggressive wing of the Republican Party dedicated to overthrowing what it saw as vestiges of Jacksonianism. Moreover, the spoils issue and political corruption spilled over into almost all other aspects of American life: it affected the transcontinental railroads through the Crédit Mobilier scandal; it had reached into city administration in the reign of Boss Tweed; and it plagued the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its network of dishonest agencies. Large-scale businesses became targets of reformers because, in part, through their political influence they were seen as buying legislation. Rutherford B. Hayes inherited this continuing debate over spoils, and when he left the presidency, the issue had not been resolved.

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.
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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.”
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Through an executive order, Hayes prohibited federal officeholders from taking part “in the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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!
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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”