Penguin History of the United States of America (77 page)

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.
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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.’
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Such was the philosophy 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.

Yet it would be a mistake simply to dismiss the Mugwumps as a parcel of snobs. Their criticism of late-nineteenth-century politics was based on unrealistic moral absolutes; but so is the Bill of Rights. They were, in fact, the spokesmen of the American conscience in their time; and given the intensity of the politics of conscience in America – the tradition of the Puritans, the tradition of the Revolution, the tradition of the abolitionists and the Union cause, all fused with American nationalism into the self-righteous belief that the United States was the ‘last, best hope of earth’, as Abraham Lincoln had called it in his high-priest vein – it is not surprising that the Mugwumps, if they had little power, had a great deal of influence. President Cleveland, for example, a slow, solid, honest man who came to the White House without much in the way of a programme, gradually adopted many of the Mugwumps’ pet notions, identifying himself with such principles as further civil service reform and economy in government; and over the years he made himself the rallying-point of all those Democrats in New York state who were opposed to Tammany. Another Mugwump victory was the widespread, and eventually universal, adoption of the secret or ‘Australian’ ballot, which thirty-three states had introduced by 1892. Previously polling-stations had all too often, and not only in Philadelphia, been scenes of the most flagrant violence and bribery; the secret ballot forced the machines to be more discreet in their operations and overall greatly increased the purity of elections. Finally, Mugwumpery was to benefit from the fact that this was the great creative era of American education. A system of free public schools was spreading across the country, where children were taught to idolize the stars and stripes and other tenets of good citizenship; old universities, such as Harvard and Princeton, were being reformed, new, innovative ones (such as Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore) were being founded; in all of them the young were taught Mugwump principles, a blend of idealism, nationalism, middle-class morality and personal ambition that was to leave its deep mark on the next epoch of American history. Eventually the great machines were to pay a ruinous price for ignoring the claim of conscience in American politics. The agents by whom it was presented were to some extent self-serving and self-deceiving. That did not help the machines.

Meantime it seemed as if an effective challenge to the
status quo
was much more likely to come from one or other of the groups outside the consensus. Not from the blacks, to be sure: they were steadily losing ground to the Southern segregationists, and were not yet numerous enough in the North to exercise any counter-leverage through their votes in that section, where public opinion was abandoning their cause in favour of reconciliation with the Southern whites. The Supreme Court, going through its dimmest intellectual period, found barely plausible constitutional arguments for upholding the racist legislation of the Southern states (only Mr Justice John M. Harlan upheld the Court’s honour by recording vigorous dissents from the majority rulings) and in the decision of
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
(1896) adopted the principle of ‘separate but equal’ accommodations put forward as a
justification by the state of Louisiana for segregation of railway carriages. The Court explicitly stated that state governments would have fulfilled their educational obligations to the citizens if they operated ‘separate but equal’ schools. This doctrine was damaging in several ways. By allowing school segregation, a practice based solely on racial hostility and contempt, the Court was legitimizing the said hostility and contempt, was endorsing the view that black was inferior to white. It was also entering into a conspiracy to deny adequate education to the blacks, because the Southern states had no intention of giving blacks equal facilities, even if they were separate, and the Court had no intention of inquiring whether they had done so or not. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Southern states spent more than twice as much money per head on the education of white children as they did on that of blacks. (The precise proportion was $4.92 to $2.21.) The courts were carefully uninterested in such information, and the phrase ‘the equal protection of the laws’ in the Fourteenth Amendment was reduced almost to meaninglessness. Finally,
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
damaged the education of Southern white children, not only because the school system reflected the worst prejudices of their parents, but because the cost of running two parallel systems, even if one was done on the cheap, was so high that neither could have enough spent on it.

Treated with ever-increasing rigour in the South, thrust into menial work in the North and, which was worse, treated as if they were invisible – their deprivation a problem which their white fellow-citizens refused to notice – the Negroes turned in on themselves. They followed Booker T. Washington. Their churches throve. And once more a solace was found in music. The spirituals were giving birth to the blues; in the bars and brothels of New Orleans and other Southern cities the movement was beginning that would soon give the world ragtime and jazz.

Another group which was largely excluded from the enjoyments of American society at this period was the new industrial working class. The difficulty in this case was intricate and peculiar. Nothing in the dominant political tradition allowed for the emergence of such a class. Even as late as the eighties there were still many who perceived their society only in terms of a contrast with aristocratic Europe: the United States was a working man’s country in the sense that everyone there had to labour to achieve fortune and respect; capital was simply a special form of labour. Immigrant intellectuals and workers who dismissed this view as sophistry, and said instead that America was developing a class structure based on divisions of labour, wealth and ownership, exactly like the European model, simply confirmed the old-fashioned in their view, for these new arrivals were patently subversive, probably socialist, and anyway not to be trusted. Besides, had not Mr Jefferson denounced European cities and their large, propertyless populations as sinks of evil – precisely the sort of thing that must never be allowed to pollute America? It was woefully true that in spite of the best efforts of the right-minded, cities had arisen, but since they were
sordidly un-American nothing need be done about them. Most of their inhabitants were foreign, anyway.

Such were the liberal attitudes of all too many Americans of the old stock. They did not attract the workers, who by slow and painful stages had to train themselves in appropriate techniques for safeguarding their interests in the new age. Strikes were nothing new, and there had been attempts to organize working men’s parties as long ago as the 1830s; but it was only after the Civil War that a significant labour movement arose. Even then its progress was slow, irregular and uncertain, and must seem especially so to British eyes.

It is true that American workers were usually, in some important respects, better-off than their European fellows. Their wages were higher, their food was better; so was their clothing; so, frequently, was their shelter. And the American economy grew so rapidly in the period between the Civil War and the First World War, whether in population, production or consumption, that the demand for labour was buoyant, on the whole. In the late nineteenth century the deflation that followed the crash of 1873, coupled with rigidity of wages, which continued to be paid at traditional levels, meant that the workers’ real income steadily improved for about twenty years. As against these advantages must be set the diseases (smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid) which repeatedly swept the slums and factory districts; the appalling neglect of safety precautions in all the major industries; the total absence of any state-assisted insurance schemes against injury, old age or premature death; the determination of employers to get their labour as cheap as possible, which meant, in practice, the common use of under-paid women and under-age children; and general indifference to the problems of unemployment, for it was still the universal belief that in America there was always work, and the chance of bettering himself, for any willing man. A more subtle grievance was the slow degeneration of the working man’s status: as new wealth produced new classes the labourers felt that they were losing the dignity and influence, if not the power, which they had formerly enjoyed as equal American democrats. All these problems were real enough and grave enough to make the emergence of a strong union movement likely, and as time went on other problems were added to them. But the unions never, from beginning to end of the Age of Gold, came near to realizing their potential.