NATIONAL POLITICS IN THE GILDED AGE, 1877–1900
The expression Gilded Age, first used by Mark Twain in 1873 as the title of a book, referred to the superficial glitter of the new wealth so prominently displayed in the last years of the 19th century. The politics of the era is often criticized as mostly show with little substance. It was the era of “forgettable” presidents, none of whom served two consecutive terms, and of politicians who largely ignored problems arising from the growth of industry and cities. The two major parties in these years avoided taking a stand on controversial issues.
Causes of Stalemate
Factors accounting for the complacency and conservatism of the era in- cluded (1) the prevailing political ideology of the time, (2) campaign tactics of the two parties, and (3) party patronage.
Belief in limited government. The idea of “do-little” government was in tune with two other popular ideas of the time: laissez-faire economics and social Darwinism. Furthermore, the federal courts narrowly interpreted the government’s powers to regulate business, and this limited the impact of the few regulatory laws that Congress did pass.
Campaign strategy. The closeness of elections between 1876 and 1892 was one reason that Republicans and Democrats alike avoided taking strong positions on the issues. The Democrats won only two presidential contests in the electoral college (but four in the popular vote). They nevertheless controlled the House of Representatives after eight of the ten general elections. The result was divided government in Washington (except for two years of the Harrison administration, 1889–1891, when the Republicans were in control of both the presidency and the two houses of Congress). With elections so evenly matched, the objective was to get out the vote and not alienate voters on the issues.
Election campaigns of the time were characterized by brass bands, flags, campaign buttons, picnics, free beer, and crowd-pleasing oratory. Both parties had strong organization, the Republicans usually on the state level and the Democrats in the cities. The irony is that the issue-free campaigns brought out nearly 80 percent of the eligible voters for presidential elections, much higher than elections in the 20th century. The high turnout was a function of strong party identification and loyalty, often connected with the voters’ regional, religious, and ethnic ties.
Republican politicians kept memories of the Civil War alive during the Gilded Age by figuratively waving the “bloody shirt” in every campaign and reminding the millions of veterans of the Union army that their wounds had been caused by (southern) Democrats and that Abraham Lincoln had been murdered by a Democrat. The party of Lincoln, because of its antislavery past, kept the votes of reformers and African Americans. The core of Republican strength came from men in business and from middle-class, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Republicans remained rooted in their Whig past, supporting an economic program of high protective tariffs for business.
Democrats after 1877 could count upon winning every election in the former states of the Confederacy. The solid South was indeed solidly Democratic until the mid-20th century. In the North, Democratic strength came from big- city political machines and the immigrant vote. Democrats were often Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews who objected to temperance and prohibition crusades conducted by Protestant (and largely Republican) groups. Democrats of the Gilded Age continued to believe in states’ rights and limited powers for the federal government.
Party patronage. Since neither party had an active legislative agenda, politics in this era was chiefly a game of gaining office, holding office, and providing government jobs to the party faithful. In New York, for example, Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling became a powerful leader of his party by dictating who in the Republican ranks would be appointed to lucrative jobs in the New York Customs House. Conkling and his supporters were known as the Stalwarts, while their rivals for patronage were the Halfbreeds, led by James G. Blaine. Who got the patronage jobs within the party became a more important issue than anything else. Republicans who did not play the patronage game were ridiculed as the Mugwumps for sitting on the fence—their “mugs” on one side of the fence and “wumps” on the other. Historians generally consider this era a low point in American politics.
Presidential Politics
The administrations of presidents Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur reflected the political stalemate and patronage problems of the Gilded Age.
Rutherford B. Hayes. After being declared the winner of the disputed election of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes’ most significant act was to end Recon- struction by withdrawing the last federal troops from the South. President Hayes also attempted to reestablish honest government after the corrupt Grant administration. As temperance reformers, Hayes and his wife, “Lemonade Lucy,” cut off the flow of liquor in the White House. Hayes vetoed efforts to restrict Chinese immigration.
James Garfield. Republican politicians, more interested in spoils and patronage than reform, were happy to honor President Hayes’ pledge in 1877 to serve only one term. In the election of 1880, the Republicans compromised on the nomination of “Halfbreed” James A. Garfield of Ohio (a key swing state of the times), and “Stalwart” Chester A. Arthur of New York as vice president. The Democrats nominated Winfield S. Hancock, a former Union general who had been wounded at Gettysburg. The Garfield-Arthur ticket de- feated the Democratic war hero in a very close popular vote.
In his first weeks in office, Garfield was besieged in the White House by hordes of Republicans seeking some 100,000 federal jobs. Garfield’s choice of Halfbreeds for most offices provoked a bitter contest with Senator Conkling and his Stalwarts. While the president was preparing to board a train for a summer vacation in 1881, a deranged office seeker who identified with the Stalwarts shot Garfield in the back. After an 11-week struggle, the gunshot wound proved fatal. Chester A. Arthur then became president.
Chester A. Arthur. Arthur proved a much better president than people expected. He distanced himself from the Stalwarts, supported a bill reforming the civil service, and approved the development of a modern American navy. He also began to question the high protective tariff. His reward was denial of renomination by the Republican party in 1884.
Congressional Leaders
Weak presidents do not necessarily mean strong Congresses. Lawmakers of the Gilded Age typically had long but undistinguished careers. John Sherman, brother of the famous Civil War general, was in Congress from 1855 to 1898 but did little other than allow his name to be attached to a number of bills, including the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Thomas “Czar” Reed from Maine, a sharp-tongued bully, became Speaker of the House in 1890 and instituted an autocratic rule over the House that took years to break. Senator James G. Blaine, also from Maine, had the potential of being a great political leader and largely succeeded in reshaping the Republicans from an antislavery party into a well-organized, business-oriented party. Blaine’s reputation as the Plumed Knight was tarnished, however, by evidence of his connection with railroad scandals and other corrupt dealings.
The Election of 1884
In 1884 the Republicans nominated Blaine for president, but suspicions about Blaine’s honesty were enough for the reform-minded Mugwumps to switch allegiance and campaign for the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland. Unlike most Gilded Age politicians, Cleveland was honest, frugal, conscien- tious, and uncompromising. He had been an honest mayor of Buffalo and incorruptible governor of New York State. Republicans raised questions, how- ever, about the honest New Yorker’s private life, making much of the fact that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child. In one of the dirtiest election campaigns in history, the Democrats were labeled the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Catholic voters were offended by the phrase, and their votes in key states like New York may have been enough to ensure Cleveland’s victory as the first Democrat to be elected president since Buchanan in 1856.
Cleveland’s First Term
The Democratic president believed in frugal and limited government in the tradition of Jefferson. He implemented the new civil service system (see below) and vetoed hundreds of private pension bills for those falsely claiming to have served or been injured in the Civil War. He signed into law both (1) the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the federal government’s first effort to regulate business, and (2) the Dawes Act, which reformers hoped would benefit Native Americans. Cleveland’s administration also retrieved some 81 million acres of government land from cattle ranchers and the railroads.
Issues: Civil Service, Currency, and Tariffs
During the 1870s and 1880s, the Congresses in Washington were chiefly concerned with such issues as patronage, the money supply, and the tariff issue. They left the states and local governments to deal with the growing problems of the cities and industrialization.
Civil service reform. Public outrage over the assassination of President Garfield in 1881 pushed Congress to remove certain government jobs from the control of party patronage. The Pendleton Act of 1881 set up the Civil Service jobs would be selected on the basis of their scores on a competitive examination. The law also prohibited civil servants from making political contributions. At first, the law applied to only 10 percent of federal employees, but in later decades, the system was expanded until most federal jobs were classified (that is, taken out of the hands of politicians).
Politicians adapted to the reform by depending less on their armies of party workers and more on the rich to fund their campaigns. A hundred years later, social scientists still debate which approach is more harmful to demo- cratic government.
Money question. One of the most hotly debated issues of the era was whether or not to expand the money supply. The money question reflected the growing tension during the industrial age between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”
Debtors, farmers, and start-up businesses wanted more money in circula- tion, since this would enable them to (1) borrow money at lower interest rates and (2) pay off their loans more easily with inflated dollars. After the Panic of 1873, many Americans blamed the gold standard for restricting the money supply and causing the depression. To expand the supply of U.S. currency, easy- or “soft”-money advocates campaigned first for more paper money (greenbacks) and then for the unlimited minting of silver coins.
On the opposite side of the question, bankers, creditors, investors, and established businesses stood firm for sound, or hard, money—meaning currency backed by gold stored in government vaults. Dollars backed by gold would more likely hold their value against inflation. The big holders of money under- stood that as the U.S. economy and population grew, a limited number of gold- backed dollars would gain in value. In fact, as predicted, the dollar did increase in value by as much as 300 percent between 1865 and 1895.
Greenback party. Paper money not backed by specie (gold or silver) had been issued by the federal government in the 1860s as an emergency measure for financing the Civil War. Northern farmers, who received high prices during the war, associated the greenbacks with prosperity. On the other hand, creditors and investors attacked the use of paper money not backed by specie as a violation of natural law. Siding with the creditors, Congress in 1875 passed the Specie Resumption Act, which withdrew the last of the greenbacks from circulation.
Supporters of paper money formed a new political party, the Greenback party. In the congressional election of 1878, Greenback candidates received nearly 1 million votes, and 14 members were elected to Congress, including James B. Weaver of Iowa (a future leader of the Populist party). When the hard times of the 1870s ended, the Greenback party died out, but the goal of increasing the amount of money in circulation did not.
Demands for silver money. In addition to removing greenbacks, Con- gress in the 1870s also stopped the coining of silver (the Crime of 1873, as critics called it). Then silver discoveries in Nevada revived demands for the use of silver to expand the money supply. A compromise law, the Bland- Allison Act, was passed over Hayes’ veto in 1878. It allowed only a limited coinage of between $2 million and $4 million in silver each month at the standard silver-to-gold ratio of 16 to 1. Not satisfied, farmers, debtors, and western miners continued to press for the unlimited coinage of silver.
Tariff issue. Western farmers and eastern capitalists also disagreed on the question of whether tariff rates on foreign imports should be high or low. During the Civil War, the Republican Congress had enacted a high tariff to protect U.S. industry and also fund the Union government. After the war, southern Democrats as well as some northern Democrats objected to high tariffs because these taxes raised the prices on consumer goods. Another result of the protective tariff was that other nations retaliated by placing taxes of their own on U.S. farm products. American farmers lost a share of the overseas market, creating surpluses of corn and wheat and resulting in lower farm prices and profits. From a farmer’s point of view, industry seemed to be growing rich at the expense of rural America.
The Growth of Discontent, 1888–1896
The politics of stalemate and complacency would begin to lose their hold on the voters by the late 1880s. Discontent over government corruption, the money issue, tariffs, railroads, and trusts was growing. In response, politicians began to take small steps to respond to public concerns, but it would take a third party (the Populists) and a major depression in 1893 to shake the Democrats and the Republicans from their lethargy.
Harrison and the Billion-Dollar Congress
Toward the end of his first term, President Cleveland created a political storm by challenging the high protective tariff. He proposed that Congress set lower tariff rates, since there was a growing surplus in the federal treasury and the government did not need the added tax revenue.
The election of 1888. With the tariff question, Cleveland introduced a real issue, the first in years that truly divided Democrats and Republicans. In the election of 1888, Democrats campaigned for Cleveland and a lower tariff; Republicans campaigned for Benjamin Harrison (grandson of the former president, William Henry Harrison) and a high tariff. The Republicans argued that a lower tariff would wreck business prosperity. They played upon this fear to raise campaign funds from big business and to rally workers in the North, whose jobs depended on the success of U.S. industry. The Republicans also attacked Cleveland’s vetoes of pension bills to bring out the veteran vote. Clevelthan got more votes than Harrison, but ended up losing the election because Harrison’s sweep of the North gained the Republican ticket a majority of votes in the electoral college.
Billion-dollar Congress. For the next two years, Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress—unusual for this era of close elections. The new Congress was the most active in years, passing the first billion-dollar budget in U.S. history. It enacted the following:
Causes of Stalemate
Factors accounting for the complacency and conservatism of the era in- cluded (1) the prevailing political ideology of the time, (2) campaign tactics of the two parties, and (3) party patronage.
Belief in limited government. The idea of “do-little” government was in tune with two other popular ideas of the time: laissez-faire economics and social Darwinism. Furthermore, the federal courts narrowly interpreted the government’s powers to regulate business, and this limited the impact of the few regulatory laws that Congress did pass.
Campaign strategy. The closeness of elections between 1876 and 1892 was one reason that Republicans and Democrats alike avoided taking strong positions on the issues. The Democrats won only two presidential contests in the electoral college (but four in the popular vote). They nevertheless controlled the House of Representatives after eight of the ten general elections. The result was divided government in Washington (except for two years of the Harrison administration, 1889–1891, when the Republicans were in control of both the presidency and the two houses of Congress). With elections so evenly matched, the objective was to get out the vote and not alienate voters on the issues.
Election campaigns of the time were characterized by brass bands, flags, campaign buttons, picnics, free beer, and crowd-pleasing oratory. Both parties had strong organization, the Republicans usually on the state level and the Democrats in the cities. The irony is that the issue-free campaigns brought out nearly 80 percent of the eligible voters for presidential elections, much higher than elections in the 20th century. The high turnout was a function of strong party identification and loyalty, often connected with the voters’ regional, religious, and ethnic ties.
Republican politicians kept memories of the Civil War alive during the Gilded Age by figuratively waving the “bloody shirt” in every campaign and reminding the millions of veterans of the Union army that their wounds had been caused by (southern) Democrats and that Abraham Lincoln had been murdered by a Democrat. The party of Lincoln, because of its antislavery past, kept the votes of reformers and African Americans. The core of Republican strength came from men in business and from middle-class, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Republicans remained rooted in their Whig past, supporting an economic program of high protective tariffs for business.
Democrats after 1877 could count upon winning every election in the former states of the Confederacy. The solid South was indeed solidly Democratic until the mid-20th century. In the North, Democratic strength came from big- city political machines and the immigrant vote. Democrats were often Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews who objected to temperance and prohibition crusades conducted by Protestant (and largely Republican) groups. Democrats of the Gilded Age continued to believe in states’ rights and limited powers for the federal government.
Party patronage. Since neither party had an active legislative agenda, politics in this era was chiefly a game of gaining office, holding office, and providing government jobs to the party faithful. In New York, for example, Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling became a powerful leader of his party by dictating who in the Republican ranks would be appointed to lucrative jobs in the New York Customs House. Conkling and his supporters were known as the Stalwarts, while their rivals for patronage were the Halfbreeds, led by James G. Blaine. Who got the patronage jobs within the party became a more important issue than anything else. Republicans who did not play the patronage game were ridiculed as the Mugwumps for sitting on the fence—their “mugs” on one side of the fence and “wumps” on the other. Historians generally consider this era a low point in American politics.
Presidential Politics
The administrations of presidents Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur reflected the political stalemate and patronage problems of the Gilded Age.
Rutherford B. Hayes. After being declared the winner of the disputed election of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes’ most significant act was to end Recon- struction by withdrawing the last federal troops from the South. President Hayes also attempted to reestablish honest government after the corrupt Grant administration. As temperance reformers, Hayes and his wife, “Lemonade Lucy,” cut off the flow of liquor in the White House. Hayes vetoed efforts to restrict Chinese immigration.
James Garfield. Republican politicians, more interested in spoils and patronage than reform, were happy to honor President Hayes’ pledge in 1877 to serve only one term. In the election of 1880, the Republicans compromised on the nomination of “Halfbreed” James A. Garfield of Ohio (a key swing state of the times), and “Stalwart” Chester A. Arthur of New York as vice president. The Democrats nominated Winfield S. Hancock, a former Union general who had been wounded at Gettysburg. The Garfield-Arthur ticket de- feated the Democratic war hero in a very close popular vote.
In his first weeks in office, Garfield was besieged in the White House by hordes of Republicans seeking some 100,000 federal jobs. Garfield’s choice of Halfbreeds for most offices provoked a bitter contest with Senator Conkling and his Stalwarts. While the president was preparing to board a train for a summer vacation in 1881, a deranged office seeker who identified with the Stalwarts shot Garfield in the back. After an 11-week struggle, the gunshot wound proved fatal. Chester A. Arthur then became president.
Chester A. Arthur. Arthur proved a much better president than people expected. He distanced himself from the Stalwarts, supported a bill reforming the civil service, and approved the development of a modern American navy. He also began to question the high protective tariff. His reward was denial of renomination by the Republican party in 1884.
Congressional Leaders
Weak presidents do not necessarily mean strong Congresses. Lawmakers of the Gilded Age typically had long but undistinguished careers. John Sherman, brother of the famous Civil War general, was in Congress from 1855 to 1898 but did little other than allow his name to be attached to a number of bills, including the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Thomas “Czar” Reed from Maine, a sharp-tongued bully, became Speaker of the House in 1890 and instituted an autocratic rule over the House that took years to break. Senator James G. Blaine, also from Maine, had the potential of being a great political leader and largely succeeded in reshaping the Republicans from an antislavery party into a well-organized, business-oriented party. Blaine’s reputation as the Plumed Knight was tarnished, however, by evidence of his connection with railroad scandals and other corrupt dealings.
The Election of 1884
In 1884 the Republicans nominated Blaine for president, but suspicions about Blaine’s honesty were enough for the reform-minded Mugwumps to switch allegiance and campaign for the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland. Unlike most Gilded Age politicians, Cleveland was honest, frugal, conscien- tious, and uncompromising. He had been an honest mayor of Buffalo and incorruptible governor of New York State. Republicans raised questions, how- ever, about the honest New Yorker’s private life, making much of the fact that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child. In one of the dirtiest election campaigns in history, the Democrats were labeled the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Catholic voters were offended by the phrase, and their votes in key states like New York may have been enough to ensure Cleveland’s victory as the first Democrat to be elected president since Buchanan in 1856.
Cleveland’s First Term
The Democratic president believed in frugal and limited government in the tradition of Jefferson. He implemented the new civil service system (see below) and vetoed hundreds of private pension bills for those falsely claiming to have served or been injured in the Civil War. He signed into law both (1) the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the federal government’s first effort to regulate business, and (2) the Dawes Act, which reformers hoped would benefit Native Americans. Cleveland’s administration also retrieved some 81 million acres of government land from cattle ranchers and the railroads.
Issues: Civil Service, Currency, and Tariffs
During the 1870s and 1880s, the Congresses in Washington were chiefly concerned with such issues as patronage, the money supply, and the tariff issue. They left the states and local governments to deal with the growing problems of the cities and industrialization.
Civil service reform. Public outrage over the assassination of President Garfield in 1881 pushed Congress to remove certain government jobs from the control of party patronage. The Pendleton Act of 1881 set up the Civil Service jobs would be selected on the basis of their scores on a competitive examination. The law also prohibited civil servants from making political contributions. At first, the law applied to only 10 percent of federal employees, but in later decades, the system was expanded until most federal jobs were classified (that is, taken out of the hands of politicians).
Politicians adapted to the reform by depending less on their armies of party workers and more on the rich to fund their campaigns. A hundred years later, social scientists still debate which approach is more harmful to demo- cratic government.
Money question. One of the most hotly debated issues of the era was whether or not to expand the money supply. The money question reflected the growing tension during the industrial age between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”
Debtors, farmers, and start-up businesses wanted more money in circula- tion, since this would enable them to (1) borrow money at lower interest rates and (2) pay off their loans more easily with inflated dollars. After the Panic of 1873, many Americans blamed the gold standard for restricting the money supply and causing the depression. To expand the supply of U.S. currency, easy- or “soft”-money advocates campaigned first for more paper money (greenbacks) and then for the unlimited minting of silver coins.
On the opposite side of the question, bankers, creditors, investors, and established businesses stood firm for sound, or hard, money—meaning currency backed by gold stored in government vaults. Dollars backed by gold would more likely hold their value against inflation. The big holders of money under- stood that as the U.S. economy and population grew, a limited number of gold- backed dollars would gain in value. In fact, as predicted, the dollar did increase in value by as much as 300 percent between 1865 and 1895.
Greenback party. Paper money not backed by specie (gold or silver) had been issued by the federal government in the 1860s as an emergency measure for financing the Civil War. Northern farmers, who received high prices during the war, associated the greenbacks with prosperity. On the other hand, creditors and investors attacked the use of paper money not backed by specie as a violation of natural law. Siding with the creditors, Congress in 1875 passed the Specie Resumption Act, which withdrew the last of the greenbacks from circulation.
Supporters of paper money formed a new political party, the Greenback party. In the congressional election of 1878, Greenback candidates received nearly 1 million votes, and 14 members were elected to Congress, including James B. Weaver of Iowa (a future leader of the Populist party). When the hard times of the 1870s ended, the Greenback party died out, but the goal of increasing the amount of money in circulation did not.
Demands for silver money. In addition to removing greenbacks, Con- gress in the 1870s also stopped the coining of silver (the Crime of 1873, as critics called it). Then silver discoveries in Nevada revived demands for the use of silver to expand the money supply. A compromise law, the Bland- Allison Act, was passed over Hayes’ veto in 1878. It allowed only a limited coinage of between $2 million and $4 million in silver each month at the standard silver-to-gold ratio of 16 to 1. Not satisfied, farmers, debtors, and western miners continued to press for the unlimited coinage of silver.
Tariff issue. Western farmers and eastern capitalists also disagreed on the question of whether tariff rates on foreign imports should be high or low. During the Civil War, the Republican Congress had enacted a high tariff to protect U.S. industry and also fund the Union government. After the war, southern Democrats as well as some northern Democrats objected to high tariffs because these taxes raised the prices on consumer goods. Another result of the protective tariff was that other nations retaliated by placing taxes of their own on U.S. farm products. American farmers lost a share of the overseas market, creating surpluses of corn and wheat and resulting in lower farm prices and profits. From a farmer’s point of view, industry seemed to be growing rich at the expense of rural America.
The Growth of Discontent, 1888–1896
The politics of stalemate and complacency would begin to lose their hold on the voters by the late 1880s. Discontent over government corruption, the money issue, tariffs, railroads, and trusts was growing. In response, politicians began to take small steps to respond to public concerns, but it would take a third party (the Populists) and a major depression in 1893 to shake the Democrats and the Republicans from their lethargy.
Harrison and the Billion-Dollar Congress
Toward the end of his first term, President Cleveland created a political storm by challenging the high protective tariff. He proposed that Congress set lower tariff rates, since there was a growing surplus in the federal treasury and the government did not need the added tax revenue.
The election of 1888. With the tariff question, Cleveland introduced a real issue, the first in years that truly divided Democrats and Republicans. In the election of 1888, Democrats campaigned for Cleveland and a lower tariff; Republicans campaigned for Benjamin Harrison (grandson of the former president, William Henry Harrison) and a high tariff. The Republicans argued that a lower tariff would wreck business prosperity. They played upon this fear to raise campaign funds from big business and to rally workers in the North, whose jobs depended on the success of U.S. industry. The Republicans also attacked Cleveland’s vetoes of pension bills to bring out the veteran vote. Clevelthan got more votes than Harrison, but ended up losing the election because Harrison’s sweep of the North gained the Republican ticket a majority of votes in the electoral college.
Billion-dollar Congress. For the next two years, Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress—unusual for this era of close elections. The new Congress was the most active in years, passing the first billion-dollar budget in U.S. history. It enacted the following:
- The McKinley Tariff of 1890, which raised the tax on foreign products to a peacetime high of over 48 percent
- Increases in the monthly pensions to Civil War veterans, widows, and children
- The Sherman Antitrust Act, outlawing “combinations in restraint of trade” (see Chapter 17)
- The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which increased the coinage of silver, but in amounts too small to satisfy farmers and miners
- A bill to protect the voting rights of African Americans, passed by the House but defeated in the Senate