During his second term, while presiding over the most severe economic downturn of the nineteenth century, he worried mainly about the danger of government paternalism, walking backward into the future undoing what the Republicans had done. He pushed the repeal of election laws protecting black voters. He tried to reform the McKinley Tariff. Nearly everything that had seemed a virtue to his supporters during his first term became a vice or a sign of hypocrisy in his second.
