Penguin History of the United States of America (76 page)

Yet it would be a struggle to maintain them. The immigrants came to a country where social evolution had always proceeded very rapidly, under an incessant series of new stimuli: the Revolution, the opening of the West, the Civil War, industrialism, immigration itself. The ground was never still: America had institutionalized the earthquake. In no other respect was it more clearly the first of modern nations. The transformation proceeded at such speed, with such leaps and bounds, and so entirely regardless of the capacity of society to absorb and profit from it, that it is not surprising that there were repeated crises of adjustment, or that many ordinary Americans found the whole thing too much to be borne. The immigrant question was not the only one to agitate them during the Age of Gold; nor even, as the next two chapters will show, the most distressing.

Public office is a public trust.

Grover Cleveland

We voted with our party no matter where it went.
We voted with our party till we haven’t got a cent.

Populist song, 1890

The federal government did nothing to check and little to modify the most notable tendencies of post-bellum American society, whether good or bad. It would have been futile to oppose the energies which were making America over, and undemocratic too, since the great majority of the people shared the outlook and values of the new capitalists. What is perhaps surprising is the extent to which the politicians were able to make themselves useful in the new age without noticeably altering their old procedures and institutions. No amendment to the Constitution was passed between 1870 and 1913, and the Reconstruction amendments were ignored or re-interpreted as much as possible, so that they might not stand in the way of a return to the old system. The Civil War could not be forgotten, but at times it seemed as if there were a conspiracy to pretend that it had not happened. Slavery had polarized and dramatized pre-Civil War politics. Its extinction made the pretence all the easier to sustain. For the slavery issue had cut across all party and institutional lines, had sharply limited the possibility of compromise between sections, states and individuals, and in the end, by bringing on a revolutionary war, had profoundly altered the relations of the executive with the legislature and the judiciary, and of the national government with the states. Now the war was over, slavery was dead and the work of Abraham Lincoln was quickly undone. At times it seemed as if the politicians were trying to undo the work of Andrew Jackson too.

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 notorious 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.