<


6. AMERICA COMES OF AGE

NATIONAL POLITICS DURING THE LATE 1800s

CONTENTS

Economics overrides politics during the late 1800s

Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881)

James A. Garfield (1881)

Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885)

Grover Cleveland (1st term:  1885-1889)

Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893)

Grover Cleveland (2nd term:  1893-1897)

William McKinley (1897-1901) brings the 19th century to a close

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 167-172.
ECONOMICS OVERRIDES POLITICS DURING THE LATE 1800s

Two things stand out rather notably about America's national politics in the latter part of the 1800s.  First of all, with the Civil War and Reconstruction over with, there seemed to be little of importance that the federal government found itself doing.  The nation's serious dynamics were located in its economic realm, not part of the jurisdiction of the federal government – as the Constitution made very clear.  Rather, American economics was driven (as we have just seen) by private individuals, not government officials.

And secondly, this same free spirit driving a virtual economic revolution raised all kinds of new moral-ethical questions.  Most importantly, where exactly were the boundaries for the massive self-aggrandizement behind this dynamic?  The economic revolution was not only shaking the old American social order to its roots, its lack of any kind of refereeing was producing a huge culture of greed, and what those who still held on to old-fashioned Christian values viewed as sheer corruption.

It has already been noted that the social challenge of widespread corruption had started out in the days of Grant.  But the issue merely grew worse with the passing of time.  Who or what could be done to keep this economic game America was playing fair to all?

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES (1877-1881)

President Hayes attempted to address this problem of corruption, but stirred a lot of political opposition for himself in the process.  Ironically, one of his few successes seemed to be in removing Chester A. Arthur from the spoils job at the New York customs-house, infuriating New York boss Conkling in the process.  But overall, such anti-corruption action cost Hayes the loss of vital support when it was time for re-election (Grant was even trying again to get the 1880 Republican nomination).  And it took 36 ballots before the Republicans finally selected the relatively unknown James Garfield, who then – to the great shock of Hayes – chose Chester Arthur as his running mate (to get the vital support of boss Conkling)!

JAMES A. GARFIELD (1881)

But once in office, Garfield largely ignored the patronage dynamic and instead chose truly qualified individuals for government positions, pitting himself against Conkling, who actually overplayed his hand, turning many New Yorkers against Conkling.

But the patronage issue would soon come to end Garfield's presidency, when an irate office-seeker shot Garfield only a few months into his presidency, and he eventually died, having served only six months as president.  The nation was stunned.

CHESTER A. ARTHUR

And thus it was that Arthur became president, but ironically, one who would become one of the country's leading anti-corruption reformers!  Besides vetoing Congress's patronage bills, he signed into law (1883) the Pendleton Act, which turned an increasing number of civil service appointments over to a Civil Service Commission, charged with making government appointments solely on the basis of proven merit, not patronage.

And then, after finishing out this single term in office, Arthur chose simply to retire (he was suffering from poor health).

GROVER CLEVELAND (1st TERM: 1885-1889)

The election which brought the Democrat Cleveland to the presidency was fought largely over the issue of personal integrity of the candidates, the Republican James Blaine, unfortunately well known for his involvement in the railroad industry spoils system.   Cleveland was known as a man of great personal integrity, which the Republicans attempted to undercut with rumors about the unmarried Cleveland having once conceived a child out of wedlock!

In the end, the election was very close, coming down to the electoral vote of New York, when Cleveland had received only a little over a thousand vote majority out of the million votes cast there.  And behind that tiny Republican shortfall had been the Republican Mugwumps,[1] who simply could not bring themselves to support the corrupt Blaine.

And once in office Cleveland resisted as best he could the demand for spoils from fellow Democrats, even reducing the size of the bloated federal bureaucracy (and not just the opposition Republicans in the mix).  He moved to strengthen the navy by getting rid of inferior ships built by corrupt contractors.  He took back into federal hands western land that the railroads had made no progress in developing.  And he cut back government support of farmers and army veterans, which he understood as creating on the part of the recipients a state of dependency rather than personal and social health.

But a huge political issue facing Cleveland was one he could not bring to resolution:  the gold versus silver controversy.  Supposedly this was simply an economic issue, about which of the two, gold or silver, served best to back the strength of the U.S. dollar. If the matter had been simply that and nothing more, a reasonable policy could have been arrived at.  But actually, it really was not just about valuable metal.  It was also about the deep social tensions that hit the country as America moved into the industrial age.

Gold was very much less abundant than silver.  Being scarce, it was thus much more valuable, therefore a tougher standard supporting the value of the dollar.  Bankers and financial creditors, especially the big-money boys back East, pushed hard for the dollar to be based solely on the value of gold alone, requiring banks (including the federal banks) to hold gold as the backing for their printed dollars, making dollars themselves very scarce and thus very valuable.  Those supporting the gold standard were termed "Goldbugs."

Silver, on the other hand, was still flowing quite readily out of the West's many silver mines, and thus, ounce for ounce, very much less expensive than gold.  Dollars backed in value by abundant silver would themselves therefore be much more abundant.  And those that found themselves in debt to banks, such as farmers who lived off of bank loans until harvests came around – and also had financed much of their operations through bank-held mortgages – naturally wanted to repay those loans with the cheapest dollars possible.  Thus they were strong "Silverites."

But there was even more to this problem than the matter of the value of the dollar.  The gold-versus-silver matter was actually a symbolic or ideological matter[2] that served to align American politics into bitterly opposing groups.  The very wealth of America's rising financial class (mostly back East) was galling to America's struggling farmers, and their impoverished friends and relatives who had given up the struggle and taken poor-paying jobs in the newly developing industrial world.  This all seemed so un-American, especially after so many of those who had fought for the Union during the recent Civil War were finding American society seemingly so insensitive to their social plight.  It was just not fair.

Cleveland was forced to make his way through this matter, much as presidents before him had been forced to contend with the slavery issue.  But like Grant before him, Cleveland ultimately decided that gold served the interests of the nation best, in making for a very strong dollar.  He attempted to cut back the use of silver, which put Congressmen representing the Silverite world of the West, the rural Midwest and the South, in strong opposition to Cleveland.

Then, on top of this issue, there was the one of tariffs ... the U.S. government's primary source of income. Here Cleveland took the position in opposition to the high tariffs (over a third of the value of the product itself) that "protected" American industrial production from foreign goods, and was producing an embarrassing surplus in the government's budget.  Cleveland's attack on the nation's high tariffs now embittered the up-East side of the East-versus-West or rural-versus-industrial debate, further undercutting Cleveland's political position nationally.

And thus it was that Cleveland failed at his effort to be reelected in 1888. He actually won the popular vote, but narrowly lost the vote of the electoral college, solely by the vote of his home state of New York, which – because of the opposition of Tammany Hall – left him only 600 votes short of winning New York's vote, and thereby the presidential election.

[1]From an old Algonquin term meaning “a person of importance,” implying that those who bolted from the party were being ridiculously sanctimonious or morally condescending in refusing to support their party’s candidate, Blaine.

[2]Symbolic or ideological, much as the slavery issue had been earlier that century, even to Southerners who had owned no slaves and to Northerners who had no personal regard for America's Blacks.

BENJAMIN HARRISON (1889-1893)

And thus another Harrison (grandson of the president who died soon after his inauguration) took office in 1889.

Harrison reversed the direction taken by Cleveland on the gold-silver matter, working with Ohio Senator John Sherman to put the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 in place, committing the government to the purchase of a fixed amount of silver. This greatly pleased not only rural America but also the silver mining industry, which was suffering deeply from a sharp price loss because of the oversupply of silver.  But this policy would push America in an economic direction that would help produce yet another major economic crisis for the country.

At the same time, Harrison supported yet another effort by Senator Sherman, resulting in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.  It was designed to break up the huge financial trusts that controlled America's rail, steel, and financial industry.  But it would also be used to try to take down the organized labor movement, which was also on the rise at the time.

And to his great credit, Harrison attempted to extend civil rights protection to the American Blacks through the action of his Justice Department.  But White juries would simply not follow through by convicting those accused of committing civil rights violations against Blacks, and ultimately even Congress and the Supreme Court backed away from his effort.  The Blacks would have to wait – a very long time – to possess the civil rights that all Americans were supposedly entitled to.

Ultimately, what would bring Harrison to a single term as president was the economy, worsening as time went by.  One of the causes of a huge economic slowdown was the McKinley Tariff of 1890, sponsored by Ohio Senator (and future president) William McKinley, which raised tariff rates even further, almost up to half of the value of the goods produced, making foreign products virtually impossible to acquire.  The idea was that America's high tariff rates would not only protect American industry, but place in American hands the instruments able to force European countries to negotiate a reduction of their own high tariffs against American goods.   However the heightened tariffs also made American products so expensive for Americans themselves – including not just the average American consumer but even America's industrial companies – that the American economy began to decline under the load. And thus Harrison had to go into another national election, with Americans in a very grumpy mood.

GROVER CLEVELAD (2nd TERM: 1893-1897)

Thus Cleveland was returned to office, just in time for the Panic of 1893!  As with all such "panics," events were set off by rumors and then rapidly mounting fears, initiated this time by the failure of the deeply indebted Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company, which declared bankruptcy just as Cleveland took office.  This, combined with declining global wheat prices (a huge American income earner) caused cautious investors to demand the exchange of bonds they held, for gold, which neither private banks nor the federal treasury held in sufficient amounts.   Others, seeing such a move, tried to do the same, creating the full panic.

Cleveland succeeded in getting Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, supposing that this would bring strength back to the dollar ... and thus the economy.  But instead it merely collapsed the shaky silver industry, and soon much of the rest of American industry.[3]  In turn, the unemployment rate went from 3 percent in 1892 to nearly 12 percent in 1893, to over 18 percent in 1894, then in 1895-1898 hanging at the 14 percent figure.

This deepened labor unrest greatly in America, with Jacob Coxey even leading a march of the unemployed on Washington, and the Pullman Company undergoing a very violent strike by its workers (led by the American Socialist Eugene Debs) – which soon led to the spread of such strikes to other railroad companies.  By mid-1894, 125 thousand railroad workers were on strike, shutting down the country's vital rail network.  This forced Cleveland finally to send federal troops after the strikers, ultimately breaking up the strikes.

But Cleveland was helpless in the face of the broader panic.  And this is when in 1895 he finally (after first refusing) took the help of J.P. Morgan in purchasing those 3.5 million ounces of gold in exchange of thirty-year federal bonds.  This calmed the panic down somewhat.  But still left a lot of dark economic issues unresolved.

Thus it was in 1896, at the Democratic National Convention, Cleveland was pushed aside by a fast-rising William Jennings Bryan, who blasted Cleveland's gold policies by rousing the convention with his challenge:  "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!"  Thus it was that Cleveland quietly went off into political retirement as a trustee of Princeton University.

[3]Estimates are that 500 banks and 15 thousand businesses failed during the 1893-1898 years of the Panic.

WILLIAM McKINLEY (1897-1901) BRINGS THE 19th CENTURY TO A CLOSE

Despite Bryan's energetic campaigning around the country with his strong pro-silver platform (actually Bryan's Democratic Party was somewhat divided over the gold-silver issue), the Republicans found themselves led by former Congressman, then Ohio governor, McKinley, who "sat on his front porch" (literally!), while his friend, Mark Hanna, skillfully directed McKinley's campaign, employing all the modern electoral campaign tactics of a well-organized campaign committee conducting endless publicity and a lot of political negotiations with key political figures here and there.  And thus it was that McKinley went on to a rather large victory.

As president, McKinley followed the trail expected of him, holding America's high tariffs in place (the 1897 Dingley Tariff) and maintaining his pro-gold position (the 1900 Gold Standard Act).

It would be in the realm of imperialism that McKinley's presidency stood out.  But it was also the age of Western imperialism, driving strongly the expansionist urge of all major Western societies.   In 1898 he would direct American troops not only to Cuba to help the Cubans secure their independence from Spain, but he would extend that effort to neighboring Puerto Rico, and then all the way to Guam and the Philippines in Asia.  And along the way he would seize the Republic of Hawaii as a new U.S. territory.

McKinley would be reelected in the 1900 national election, but go on to serve only six months of that term – when a deranged anarchist shot McKinley at a presidential reception he was hosting at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.  This would bring forward to the American presidency his vice-president, Theodore ("Teddy") Roosevelt, an even more dynamic individual in both the socio-economic and foreign-policy realm.



Go on to the next section:  The Cultural-Political Challenges of the Industrial Age

  Miles H. Hodges