A.P.
U.S. History Notes
Chapter 23: “Politics in the Gilded Age”
~
1869 – 1889 ~
I.
The
“Bloody Shirt” Elects Grant
1.
The
Republicans nominated Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, who was a
great soldier but had no political experience.
i.
The
Democrats could only denounce military Reconstruction but couldn’t agree on
anything else, and thus, were unorganized.
2.
The
Republicans got Grant elected (barely) by “waving the bloody shirt,” or
reliving his war victories, and used his popularity to elect him, though his
popular vote was only ahead of rival Horatio Seymour, the Democratic
candidate who didn’t accept a redemption-of-greenbacks-for-maximum-value
platform, and thus doomed his party.
3.
However,
due to the still-close nature of the election, Republicans could not take
future victories for granted.
II.
The
Era of Good Stealings
1.
Despite
the Civil War, population still mushroomed, due to incoming immigration, but
during this time, politics became very corrupted.
i.
Railroad
promoters cheated gullible customers.
ii.
Stock-market
investors were a cinder in the public eye.
iii.
Too
many judges and legislators put their power up for hire.
2.
Two
notorious millionaires were Jim Fisk and Jay Gould.
i.
In
1869, the pair concocted a plot to corner the gold market that would only work
if the treasury stopped selling gold, so they worked on President Grant
directly and through his brother-in-law, but their plan failed when the
treasury sold gold.
3.
The
infamous Tweed ring of NYC, headed by “Boss” Tweed, employed bribery,
graft, and fake elections to cheat the city of as much as $200 million.
i.
Tweed
was finally caught when The New York Times secured evidence of his
misdeeds, and Tweed, despite being defended by future presidential candidate Samuel
J. Tilden, was convicted and imprisoned.
III.
A
Carnival of Corruption
1.
Grant,
an easy-going fellow, apparently failed to see the corruption going on, even
though many of his friends wanted offices and his cabinet was totally corrupt
(except for Secretary of State Hamilton Fish), and his in-laws, the Dent
family, were especially terrible.
2.
The
Credit Mobilier, a railroad construction company that paid itself huge
sums of money for small railroad construction, tarred Grant.
i.
A
New York newspaper finally busted it, and two members of Congress were formally
censured (the company had given some of its stock to Congressmen) and the Vice
President himself was shown to have accepted 20 shares of stock.
3.
In
1875, the public learned that the Whiskey Ring had robbed the Treasury
of millions of dollars, and when Grant’s own private secretary was shown to be
one of the criminals, Grant retracted his earlier statement of “Let no guilty
man escape.”
i.
Later,
in 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap was shown to have pocketed
some $24,000 by selling junk to Indians.
IV.
The
Liberal Republican Revolt of 1872
1.
By
1872, a power wave of disgust at Grant’s administration was building, despite
the worst of the scandals not having been revealed yet, and reformers organized
the Liberal Republican Party and nominated the dogmatic Horace
Greeley.
i.
The
Democratic Party also supported Greeley, even though he had blasted them
repeatedly in his newspaper (the New York Tribune), but he pleased them
because he called for a clasping of hands between the North and South and an
end to Reconstruction.
2.
The
campaign was filled with more mudslinging (as usual), as Greeley was called an
atheist, a communist, a vegetarian, and a signer of Jefferson Davis’s
bail bond (that part was true) while Grant was called an ignoramus, a drunkard,
and a swindler.
i.
Still,
Grant crushed Greeley in the Electoral and in the popular vote was well.
3.
In
1872, the Republican Congress passed a general amnesty act that removed
political disabilities from all but some five hundred former Confederate
leaders.
V.
Depression,
Deflation, and Inflation
1.
In
1873, a paralyzing panic broke out, caused by too many railroads and factories
being formed than existing markets could bear and the over-loaning of banks to
those projects.
i.
It
first started with the failure of the New York banking firm Jay Cooke &
Company, which was headed by the rich Jay Cooke (duh), a financier
of the Civil War.
2.
Before,
the greenbacks that had been issued in the Civil War were being recalled, but
now, during the panic, the “cheap-money” supporters wanted it back.
3.
However,
supporters of hard-money (actually gold and silver) persuaded Grant to veto a
bill that would print more paper money, and the Resumption Act of 1875
pledged the government to further withdraw greenbacks and made all further
redemption of paper money in gold at face value, starting in 1879.
4.
Debtors
now cried that silver was under-valued (another call for inflation), but Grant
refused coin more silver dollars, which had been stopped in 1873, and besides,
new silver discoveries in the later 1870s shot the price of silver way down.
i.
Grant’s
name remained fused to sound money, though not sound government.
ii.
As
greenbacks regained their value, few greenback holders bothered to exchange
their more convenient bills for gold when Redemption Day came in 1879.
5.
In
1878, the Bland-Allison Act instructed the Treasury to buy and coin
between $2 million and $4 million worth of silver bullion each month.
6.
The
Republican hard-money policy, unfortunately for it, led to the election of a
Democratic House of Representatives in 1874 and spawned the Greenback Labor
Party in 1878.
VI.
Pallid
Politics in the Gilded Age
1.
The
Gilded Age, a term coined by Mark Twain, was filled with
corruption and presidential election squeakers, and even though Democrats and
Republicans had similar ideas on economic issues, they disagreed.
i.
Republicans
traced their lineage to Puritanism.
ii.
Democrats
were more like Lutherans and Roman Catholics.
2.
Democrats
had strong support in the South.
3.
Republicans
had strong votes in the North and the West, and from the Grand Army of the
Republic, an organization made up of former Union veterans.
4.
In
the 1870s and the 1880s, Republican infighting was led by rivals Roscoe
Conkling and James G. Blaine, who bickered and deadlocked their
party.
VII.
The
Hayes-Tilden Standoff, 1876
1.
Grant
almost ran for a third term before the House derailed that proposal, so the
Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, dubbed the “Great Unknown”
because no one knew much about him, while the Democrats ran Samuel Tilden.
i.
The
election was very close, with Tilden getting 184 votes out of a needed 185 in
the Electoral College, but votes in four states, Louisiana, South Carolina,
Florida, and part of Oregon, were unsure and disputed.
ii.
The
disputed states had sent in two sets of returns, one Democrat, one Republican.
VIII.
The
Compromise of 1877 the End of Reconstruction and the Birth of Jim Crow
1.
The
Electoral Count Act, passed in 1877, set up an electoral commission that
consisted of 15 men selected from the Senate the House, and the Supreme Court,
which would count the votes (the 15th man was to be an independent, David
Davis, but at the last moment, he resigned).
2.
In
February of 1877, the Senate and the House met to settle the dispute, and
eventually, Hayes became president as a part of the rest of the Compromise
of 1877: he could become president if he agreed to remove troops from the
remaining two Southern states where Union troops remained (Louisiana and South
Carolina), and also, a bill would subsidize the Texas and Pacific Rail-line.
i.
Not
all of the promises were kept, but the deal held on long enough to get Hayes
elected as president.
3.
The
Compromise of 1877 abandoned the Blacks in the South by withdrawing troops, and
their last attempt at protection of Black rights was the Civil Rights Act
of 1875, which was mostly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the
1883 case Civil Rights Cases.
4.
As
Reconstruction ended, Whites once again discriminated against Blacks, forcing
them into low-wage labor and restricting their rights.
5.
In
1896, the Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, that
“separate but equal” facilities were constitutional.
IX.
Class
Conflicts and Ethnic Clashes
1.
In
1877, the presidents of the nation’s four largest railroads decided to cut
wages by 10%, and workers struck back, stopping work, and when President Hayes
sent troops to stop this, violence erupted, and more than 100 people died in
the several weeks of chaos.
2.
The
failure of the railroad strike showed the weakness of the labor movement, but
this was partly caused by friction between races, especially between the Irish
and the Chinese.
3.
In
San Francisco, Irish-born Denis Kearney incited his followers to
terrorize the Chinese.
4.
In
1879, Congress passed a bill severely restricting the influx of Chinese
immigrants (most of whom were males who had come to California to work on the
railroads), but Hayes vetoed the bill on grounds that it violated an existing
treaty with China.
i.
After
Hayes left office, the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, was
passed, barring any Chinese from entering the United States.
5.
Hayes
entering office accused of securing the presidency through fraud, and his
declaration of being a single-termer probably saved his reputation, since he
wouldn’t have been renominated.
X.
Garfield and Arthur
1.
In
1880, the Republicans nominated James A. Garfield, a man from Ohio who
had risen the rank of major general in the Civil War, and as his running mate,
a notorious Stalwart (supporter of Roscoe Conkling) was chosen: Chester
A. Arthur of New York.
2.
The
Democrats chose Winfield S. Hancock, a Civil War general who appealed to
the South due to his fair treatment of it during Reconstruction and a veteran
who had been wounded at Gettysburg, and thus appealed to veterans.
3.
The
campaign once again avoided touchy issues, and Garfield squeaked by in the
popular vote (the Electoral count was better: 214 to 155).
i.
Garfield
was a good person, but he hated to hurt people’s feelings and say “no.”
4.
Garfield
named James G. Blaine to the position of Secretary of the State, and he did
other anti-Stalwart acts, but on September 19, 1881, Garfield died after having
been shot in the head by a crazy but disappointed office seeker, Charles J.
Guiteau, who, after being capture, used an early version of the “insanity defense”
to avoid conviction (he was hung anyway).
5.
Chester
Arthur didn’t seem to be fit for the presidency, but he surprised many by
giving the cold shoulder to Stalwarts, his chief supporters, and by calling for
reform, a call heeded by the Republican party as it began to show newly found
enthusiasm for reform.
6.
The
Pendleton Act of 1883, the so-called Magna Cart of civil-service reform,
prohibited financial assessments on jobholders, including lowly scrubwomen, and
established a merit system of making appointments to office on the basis of
aptitude rather than “pull.”
i.
It
also set up a Civil Service Commission, charged with administering open
competitive serve, and offices not “classified” by the president remained the
fought-over footballs of politics.
ii.
Luckily,
Arthur cooperated, and by 1884, he had classified nearly 10% of all federal
offices, or nearly 14,000 of them.
7.
The
Pendleton Act partially divided politics from patronage, but it drove
politicians into “marriages of convenience” with business leaders.
XI.
The
Blaine-Cleveland Mudslingers of 1884
1.
James
G. Blaine became the Republican candidate, but some Republican reformers,
unable to stomach this, switched to the Democratic Party and were called Mugwumps.
2.
The
Democrats chose Grover Cleveland as their candidate but received a shock
when it was revealed that he might have been the father of an illegitimate
child.
i.
The
campaign of 1884 was filled with perhaps the lowest mudslinging in history.
ii.
The
contest depended on how New York chose, but unfortunately, one idiotic
Republican insulted the race, faith, and patriotism of New York’s heavy Irish
population, and as a result, New York voted for Cleveland; that was the
difference.
XII.
“Old
Grover” Takes Over
1.
Portly
Grover Cleveland was the first Democratic president since James Buchanan, and
as a supporter of laissez-faire, he delighted business owners and
bankers.
2.
Cleveland
named two former Confederates to his cabinet, and at first tried to adhere to
the merit system (but eventually gave in to his party and fired almost 2/3 of
the 120,000 federal employees), but he had his problems.
i.
Military
pensions plagued Cleveland; these bills were given to Civil War veterans to
help them, but they were used fraudulently to give money to all sorts of
people.
ii.
However,
Cleveland showed that he was ready to take on the corrupt distributors of
military pensions when he vetoed a bill that would add several hundred thousand
new people on the pension list.
XIII.
Cleveland
Battles for a Lower Tariff
1.
By
1881, the Treasury had a surplus of $145 million, most of it having come from
the high tariff, and there was lots of clamor for lowering the tariff, though
big industrialists opposed it.
2.
Cleveland
wasn’t really interested in the subject at first, but as he researched it, he
became inclined towards lowering the tariff, so in late 1887, Cleveland openly
tossed the appeal for lower tariffs into the lap of Congress.
i.
Democrats
were upset at the obstinacy of their chief while Republicans gloated at his
apparently reckless act.
XIV. The Billion Dollar Congress and Benjamin Harrison
1.
With
no other choice, the Democrats renominated Cleveland, and Republicans chose
Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of William H. Harrison, as their candidate.
2.
More
“waving the bloody shirt” occurred, and more of Cleveland’s private life was
revealed, but what caused Cleveland to lose was when a British diplomat
announced that a vote for Cleveland was like a vote for England; this angered the
Irish voters, and it helped Harrison win.
3.
Cleveland
wasn’t a great president, but compared to those around him, he was excellent.
4.
One
reason to why the best men were no longer in politics is because by that time,
politics was full of corruption, and no one in his right mind wanted to
associate with such filth and dirt.
5. Cleveland also passed the Dawes Act (to control the Indians) and the Interstate Commerce Act (designed to curb railroads), both of which were passed in 1887.
6.
New
president Benjamin Harrison was inaugurated on a rainy March 4, 1889.
i.
He
was brusque and abrupt, but also honest and earnest.
7.
After
four years out of the White House, the Republicans were eager to return to
power, especially those seeking political rewards.
i.
James G. Blaine became the secretary of state.
ii.
Theodore Roosevelt was named to the Civil Service Commission.
8.
However,
the Republicans had troubles, for they only had three more members than was
necessary for a quorum, and Democrats could simply not answer to the roll and
easily keep Congress from working.
9.
The
new Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, was a large, tall man, a masterful
debater, and very critical and quick man.
i.
To
solve the problem of reaching quorum in Congress, Reed counted the Democrats
who were present but didn’t answer to the roll call, and after three days of
such chaos, he finally prevailed, opening the 51st, or “Billion
Dollar” Congress—one that legislated a lot of expensive projects, etc…
XV.
Political
Gravy for All
1.
Harrison,
a former Civil War general, appointed a Civil War amputee as
commissioner of pensions, and that man practically used up the federal surplus
to give out pensions.
i.
The
Pension Act of 1890 gave pensions to all Union Civil War veterans who
had served at least 90 days in the army and could not do manual labor now.
ii.
Thus,
from 1891 to 1895, the bill for pensions rose from $81 million to $135 million.
a.
This
gained the Republican support of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR),
whose members were grateful to the GOP (Grand Old Party) for its
handouts.
2.
The
Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890, was a pioneering but weak law
that tried to deter the new corporations and monopolies that existed.
3.
The
Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 appealed to those who had hated the
old Bland-Allison Law of 1878 because it allowed the Treasury to buy 4.5
million ounces of silver monthly and pay for it in notes redeemable in silver
OR gold
4.
The
McKinley Tariff Bill of 1890 boosted rates up to 48.4%—the highest level
yet.
i.
The
farmers lost the most from this tariff, as tin peddlers in the Midwest
dishonestly cited rising prices due to Republicans; as a result, in the election
of 1890, Democratic seats in the House rose to 235, while Republicans only had
88 representatives.
ii. Nine members of the Farmers’ Alliance, an organization of southern and western farms, were also elected to the House of Representatives.
XVII.
“Old
Grover” Cleveland Again
1.
Grover
Cleveland won, but no sooner than he had stepped into the presidency did the Depression
of 1893 break out; it was the first such panic in the new urban and
industrial age, and it caused much outrage and hardships.
2.
About
8000 American business houses collapsed in six months, and dozens of railroad
lines went into the hands of receivers.
i.
Now
Cleveland had a deficit, for the Treasury had to issue gold for the notes that
it had paid in the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and according to law, those
notes had to be reissued, thus causing a steady drain on gold in the
Treasury—the level alarmingly dropped below $100 million at one point!
3.
Meanwhile,
Grover Cleveland had developed a malignant growth under the roof of his mouth,
and it had to be secretly removed in a surgery that took place aboard his private
yacht; had he died, Adlai E. Stevenson, a “soft money” (paper money)
man, would have caused massive chaos with inflation.
4.
Also,
33 year-old William Jennings Bryan was advocating “free silver,” and
gaining support for his beliefs, but an angry Cleveland used his executive
power to break the filibuster in the Senate—thus alienating the
silver-supporting Democrats.
XVIII.
Gold
Shortages and Job Shortages
1.
Finally,
the U.S. repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, but this only partially
stopped the problem, and by 1894, the gold reserve sank to only $41 million!
i.
The
U.S. was in danger of going off the gold standard, sinking into financial
turmoil, and ruining its international trade.
2.
Finally,
Cleveland turned to J.P. Morgan, the “banker’s banker,” who agreed to
have Wall Street loan the government $65 million in gold, obtain half of
the gold from abroad, and take the needed steps to dam up the leaky Treasury.
i.
This
caused an outrage, for silverites saw only corruption and badness in
Cleveland’s dealings with the “evil ‘Jupiter’” Morgan.
3.
Meanwhile,
the unemployed, led by men like “General” Jacob S. Coxey, a wealthy Ohio
quarry owner, demonstrated for much-needed help.
i.
He
and his “Commonweal Army” of Coxeyites marched to Washington D.C., but upon
reaching there, he and his “lieutenants” were arrested for walking on the
grass, while the other people accounted for lots of disorder and pillage.
XIX.
Cleveland
Crushes the Pullman Strike
1.
In
Chicago, the infamous Pullman Strike, led by American Railway Union
leader Eugene V. Debs, was a violent flare-up but just one of the many
that occurred.
i.
The
Pullman Palace Car Company had been hit hard by the depression had been
forced to cut wages about one-third.
ii.
In
the opinion of Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, who had pardoned the
Haymarket Riot anarchists the year before, the riot was serious but not
out of hand.
iii.
However,
Attorney General Richard Olney felt that the strikers were interfering
with U.S. mail delivery to Chicago, and he ordered federal troops to crush the
strike…leading to controversy.
2.
Labor
unions began to think that employers and even the U.S. government were out to
shut the unions down, and were incensed.
XX.
Democratic
Tariff Tinkering
1.
The
Democrats took to revising the existing tariff into one that would follow their
campaign promises by providing moderate protection and adequate revenue.
i.
This
new bill even included a tax of 2% on $4000+ incomes.
ii.
However,
upon reaching the Senate, the opposition of big business forced the Wilson-Gorman
Bill to be amended 630 times, including a scandalous insertion of $20
million a year to itself by the sugar trust.
iii.
Thus,
this bill fell quite short of providing a low tariff, though it was lowered
down to 41.3% on dutiable goods.
iv.
In
1895, though, the Supreme Court struck down the graduated income tax
portion—the most popular one—of the Wilson-Gorman Bill.
2.
As
a result of the unpopular tariff, the Democrats lost a LOT of seats in the
House in 1894, and the Republicans regained control.
3.
Discontented
debtors were turning to free silver as a cure-all, as such pamphlets as Coin’s
Financial School, written by William Hope Harvey, influenced
many toward the free silver cause.
