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November 3 - November 3, 2020
Corruption, gunfights, and litigation pretty much defined New Mexican politics in the 1870s and 1880s, which repeatedly degenerated into a series of county “wars” that spawned, among other desperados, William Bonney, also known as Billy the Kid.
Even after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Indians retained their anomalous position under American law. They lived as semi-sovereign wards of the government with separate treaty rights in territory claimed by the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment did not make them citizens or initially grant them common Constitutional protections.
In a century of disasters for Indian peoples, the General Allotment Act ranked among the greatest. In 1881 Indians held 155 million acres of land; by 1890 the total had fallen to 104 million. By 1900, when Merrill E. Gates praised the act at the Lake Mohonk Conference as “a mighty pulverizing engine for breaking up the tribal mass,” the total was down to 77 million.43
By giving American silver an advantage, the tariff united mine owners and workers in its support, as did policies advocating free silver and those providing for Treasury purchases of silver. But the tariff benefited workers only if mine owners used higher prices to raise American wages. Mine owners instead cut wages and tried to take control over the conditions of work, thus making the mines bastions of unionism.
In the 1880s the market for copper both as a component of the common alloys of bronze and brass and, in its pure form, as wire exploded. Telegraph companies, electric utility companies, telephone companies, and trolley companies all demanded copper wire. American copper production increased fivefold from 378 million pounds in 1868 to 1.9 billion pounds in 1910.
A union between Western farmers and Southern farmers was not easily forged. Western farmers, though hardly racial egalitarians, did not subscribe to a white supremacy they associated with the Klan and a racial order embodied in emerging Jim Crow. Their largely Republican loyalties clashed with the Democratic loyalties of Southern farmers. The unity of farmers
By the 1880s the fear of softness and weakness among middle-class men provoked a movement to restore manliness, vigor, and strength—in a word, character. Not work but leisure would lead men back into nature, particularly Western nature;
The rehabilitation of sick and weak men turned into an unlikely secondary path for conservation and wilderness preservation. If nature and manly activities, particularly hunting, restored weak, effete, and exhausted men, then it became critical to preserve the nature and game animals critical to curing the neurasthenic. Civilization paradoxically demanded wilderness.
If extraordinary times demanded extraordinary men, American voters in 1888 could be excused for thinking they had wandered into the wrong election.1 The tariff took center stage in 1888.
The issue involved far more than duties on a bewildering set of commodities; it carried the burden of arguments over economic equity and morality. Both parties cast the election as a clear-cut choice between protection and tariff reform, but while using the tariff to emphasize the differences between the parties, both the Democrats and Republicans had to bridge the differences between their own antimonopolist and regular wings. The Democrats linked the tariff to special privilege and monopoly, unleashing the ferocious rhetoric of antimonopolist congressmen onto the campaign trail.
Republicans, for their part, framed the campaign as a battle for “industrial independence,” higher wages, and worker well-being to bridge their own deepening division between their antimonopolist wing and the regulars who sympathized with capital.
In 1888 the political system tipped, lost its balance, and would not right itself for nearly a decade. When it did recover, it would be different: less democratic, more centralized, and more dependent on corporate funding.
Grover Cleveland’s renomination was virtually ensured since he was the only successful Democratic presidential candidate since the Civil War. Benjamin Harrison’s nomination, however, depended on the reticence of James G. Blaine, who possessed much of Ulysses Grant’s popularity, many of his faults, and nowhere near his accomplishments.
Among his physicians was Dr. D. Hayes Agnew, who had also treated Garfield after he had been shot. Agnew did no better with Conkling.
Benjamin Harrison, born in Ohio but now of Indiana, won the Republican nomination on the eighth ballot. The Democrats rejoiced. He had, Alabama Sen. James L. Pugh said, “more ways to make people dislike him than any man I ever met in Congress.”
Benjamin Harrison did not lack talents. He was a formidable public speaker, and Rutherford B. Hayes, who advised him, thought him a man of ability.
Although the Democrats had launched the battle over the tariff, the Republicans put them on the defensive by equating tariff reform with the liberal nostrum of free trade that would remove all duties on imports. Cleveland mostly seemed confused, simultaneously attacking and retreating.
In November 1888 Cleveland took a majority of the popular vote, but Harrison carried the electoral vote 233–168. Turnouts exceeded 90 percent in the hotly contested states of Indiana, New York, and New Jersey. As usual, the election came down to Indiana and New York.
The Mugwumps largely deserted Cleveland, disappointed in what they regarded as his lukewarm actions on civil service. The Democrats attempted to carry the West by attacking the Chinese, but the Republicans were beating that horse just as hard.9 Accusations of fraud were rampant.
Southern fraud and violence ensured that every white vote in the South was worth two Northern votes in presidential elections.
As a result, by 1888 Southern white voters had a disproportionate representation not only in the Electoral College but also in the House of Representatives. Seven states of the Deep South—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—sent forty-five members to the House. Averaged together, this was a representative for every 19,200 voters. California, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Wisconsin had only thirty-three members, or an average of 47,200 voters per member.12
By turning the task of determining the popular will over to private organizations—the political parties—the United States had created both a means to integrate the politics of the nation and an open invitation for fraud and corruption.
By failing to provide a mechanism for funding and conducting the constant elections that the democracy demanded, the Constitution had created a vacuum that the parties had occupied.
Until the Pendleton Act of 1883, parties relied largely on money paid in by office holders and job seekers. The resulting system was both democratic—the United States conducted more elections and enfranchised more voters than any nation in the world—and incredibly corrupt.
Getting elected and deriving the necessary revenue for running and winning elections mattered much more to most politicians than any particular policy agenda.
Thomas Reed of Maine, soon to be dubbed Czar Reed by the Democrats, changed procedural rules and practices. Democrats had blocked action by refusing to vote, thus denying the Republicans a quorum, but Reed simply counted nonvoting Democrats as present to create the necessary quorum. He controlled committee assignments with an iron hand, punished rebellion, and rewarded loyalty. Maintaining party discipline, the Republicans pushed bills through the House.
Most were still vast expanses with few people, but the Republicans countered the Democrats’ structural advantage in the House, which came from disenfranchising black voters to create the Solid South, with their own ability to elect senators by the acre. Following Harrison’s victory, Cleveland and the lame duck Democrats recognized the inevitable and agreed to admit Montana, Washington, North Dakota, and South Dakota (1889) in the hope that Montana at least would vote Democratic.
Republicans got twelve new senators but, since these new states had few voters, only five new Republican representatives. In the West, as in the South, small numbers of voters elected a disproportionate number of representatives.
Henry Cabot Lodge had no patience with the nostalgic rewriting of the history of the Civil War. As he later said, “No good is ever done by falsifying the past. There was a right and a wrong in the Civil War… . The North was right and the right won.” Charles Hill of Illinois declared the Democrats’ suppression of the vote and fraud “a species of treason.”
By 1890 she was far more interested in extending the WCTU into the white South than in securing the rights of freedpeople, whom she consigned to the category of “ignorant” voters who were tools of the liquor interests. An ardent proponent of votes for women, she was not enthusiastic about universal suffrage and sought to limit the votes of black and immigrant men.
Unfortunately, given Harrison’s self-righteousness and a personality that Reed likened to being in the chill of a “dripping cave,” the more closely the president worked with party leaders, the more he alienated them.
Appointing Blaine secretary of state predictably offended the Mugwumps, and then Harrison went on to offend Blaine.31
They then convinced themselves that their victory meant Americans wanted dramatically higher tariffs and shaped their legislative agenda around that. In fashioning Congress into a comparatively well-honed and efficient piece of legislative machinery, the Republicans had no idea that they were creating a political suicide machine.
With both the McKinley Tariff and the Lodge Bill awaiting votes in the Senate, the fracturing of the Republican coalition became real. A fight over whether to put off a vote on the Lodge Bill until the next session badly split the Republicans.
To further ensure that literacy tests did not disenfranchise existing white voters, a grandfather clause exempted from the test all those whose grandfathers could vote. This included most whites and no blacks. Would the Lodge Bill change any of this? The bill’s advocates admitted it would not. It would protect only those already registered to vote from fraud and violence in federal elections. White Southerners were institutionalizing racial inequality, making fraud and violence less necessary, and the Supreme Court would validate their efforts in Williams v. Mississippi in 1898.
Indian policy gave the Harrison administration an opportunity to firm up its own fractured coalition by appealing to evangelicals, liberal reformers, Western antimonopolists, and boosters eager to break up Indian reservations.
In 1889, soon after taking office, Harrison signed an Indian appropriation bill declaring “Oklahoma”—located on the 98th meridian surrounding present-day Oklahoma City—part of the public domain and open for homesteading. To distribute the land, the government sanctioned one of the silliest ideas ever to pass an American Congress: on April 22, 1889, roughly fifty thousand people seeking land lined up on the borders of Oklahoma and raced to stake their claims.
The Oklahoma Land Rush stood as yet another monument to the vexing contradiction that the federal government commanded great power even as it lacked reliable administrative capacity. Stealing the land was relatively easy but distributing it was hard. Too few soldiers patrolled the borders of Oklahoma, and too many deputies.
In 1890 President Harrison broke the back of Cherokee resistance by ordering the eviction of white cattlemen from the Cherokee Outlet, thus threatening to bankrupt the Cherokee Nation. The chipping away of Indian Territory had begun.
Nevada in the 1880s appeared to be drying up and blowing away. A state stripped of white people might seem a good thing for Indians, but not if the Indians were working people and whites were their employers. They could not easily revert to old ways in an overgrazed and ravaged landscape in the midst of a drought.
The tariff alienated the Middle Border and West, where opening up Indian lands and the two Sherman acts proved too weak a tea to satisfy antimonopolist farmers. Although both parties again played the Sinophobia card, the Republicans held the weaker hand since Harrison had in 1882 initially opposed Chinese immigration restriction.
The 1890 elections brought 238 Democrats and 86 Republicans to the House of Representatives. The Republicans retained the Senate only because just a third of the seats in that body were up for election. It was the greatest midterm reversal in American history.
Bryan played up his antimonopolist credentials. He attacked trusts, the tariff, and the gold standard. Although a devout Presbyterian and evangelical, he learned from the Republican mistakes in neighboring Iowa. He kept his private temperance beliefs out of the election. He drank soda water but bought voters beer.
The Republicans had won in 1888 by taking advantage of Democrats’ miscalculations over the tariff. The Democrats had won in 1890 by taking advantage of Republican miscalculations about the tariff. They stood to win by an even larger margin in 1892. The tariff mattered in its own right, but it mattered mostly because it had become shorthand for the benefits and inequities of an industrial economy. The steel industry ranked among the foremost beneficiaries of the tariff, and Andrew Carnegie had clawed his way to the top of that industry. He became the face of the tariff, which would not prove
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Carnegie aspired to be a sage and not just a plutocrat. He collected intellectuals, particularly aging British liberals such as Herbert Spencer, William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, and the poet Edwin Arnold. Carnegie liked to pontificate, and as he grew older it became increasingly hard to shut him up; he could drive the British to distraction with his praise of the United States and its opportunities. He appears to have sincerely believed this even though he had for decades neglected to become an American citizen, doing so only in 1885 when he finally abandoned hope of becoming a British MP.
By the late 1880s Carnegie’s fortune ranked among the greatest. Like John D. Rockefeller, he had absorbed the lessons of the new industrial economy and ruthlessly eliminated competition, but where Rockefeller harbored the illusion that God had given him his money, Carnegie cultivated an even greater one: he thought his success was the product of evolution.
so Tom Scott made the early career of Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie learned that success in nineteenth-century America involved connections—what Americans would come to call pull.5 Thomson and Scott taught Carnegie how to make connections pay.
By then he was thirty-seven years old, affable, entertaining, and shrewd. Both he and steel making were advancing rapidly. The new Bessemer conversion process and similar techniques that purged the impurities from iron and turned it into its much stronger and less brittle form—steel—allowed manufacturers to produce the metal on a large scale.
When Congress imposed a $28 per ton tariff on steel, the British lost their price advantage. Carnegie later said that it was the tariff more than anything else that brought him into the steel business.
Carnegie brought the lessons of cost accounting, organization, and integration that he had learned from Scott and Thomson to manufacturing. Speed, lower unit costs, and volume translated into greater efficiency and potentially greater profit.
