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The Politics of Equilibrium • The most striking feature of the late 19th century party system was its remarkable stability, the electorate was divided almost precisely evenly between Democrats and Republicans, 16 states Republican - generally controlled the Senate, 14 states Democratic - most of them in the south, generally controlled the House, only 5 states in doubt and usually determined the election (NY and Ohio), genuinely mass-based politics, 78% voter turn out.
The Politics of Equilibrium • Party identification was more a reflection of cultural inclinations than a calculation of economic interest
The Politics of Equilibrium • To white Southerners loyalty to the Democratic Party was a matter of unquestioned faith, religious and ethnic differences shaped party loyalties
The Politics of Equilibrium • Democratsattracted most of the Catholic voters, recent immigrants, and poorer workers
The Politics of Equilibrium • Republicans appealed to northern Protestants, citizens of old stock, much of the middle class - tended to support measures restricting immigration and to favor temperance legislation
The Politics of Equilibrium • Federal government did relatively little - delivered mail, maintained national security, conducted foreign policy, collected tariffs and taxes - few other responsibilities
The Politics of Equilibrium • Federal Government's support of economic development gave subsidies to railroads, grants and federal land, protected capitalists from challenges from their workers, administered annual pensions to Union Civil War Vets
The Politics of Equilibrium • Most powerful political institutions were the two political parties and the federal courts - national leaders were more concerned with office and winning elections, controlling patronage than with policy
The Politics of Equilibrium • Two groups were competing for control of the Republican party and threatening to split it, the Stalwartswereled by Roscoe Conkling (NY) and favored traditional professional machine politics, the Half-Breeds wereled by James G. Blaine (ME) and favored reform
The Politics of Equilibrium • This battle over patronage (getting a larger slice of the pie) overshadowed all else during Hayes unhappy presidency
The Politics of Equilibrium • Republicans nominated James Garfield (Half-breed) for President and Chester Arthur (Stalwart) for Vice President, the Democrats nominated Winfield Scott Hancock in the Election of 1880
The Politics of Equilibrium • Republicans won the election and captured both houses of Congress, benefiting from the end of the recession and the return of economic prosperity
The Politics of Equilibrium • James Garfieldsupported civil service reform and got into a public quarrel with the Stalwarts and Conkling, he was shot and killed by a deranged gunman (“I am a Stalwart and Arthur is President now”)
The Politics of Equilibrium • Chester Arthurkept most of Garfield's appointments and supported civil service reform, which resulted in the passage of the Pendleton Act of 1883 by Congress which required that some federal jobs be filled by competitive written examinations rather than by patronage
The Politics of Equilibrium • In the Election of 1884 the Republican candidate was James Blaine to thousands of Americans a symbol of seamy party politics, Liberal Republicans (Mugwumps) announced they would bolt the party and support an honest Democrat, the Democratic nominee was Grover Cleveland who had a reputation as an enemy of corruption and was well liked for his opposition to political graft, he was known as the “veto governor”
The Politics of Equilibrium • Democrats spread news that Blaine had tolerated a slander on the Catholic Church, based on the fact that an associate had referred to the Democratic Party as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion”
The Politics of Equilibrium • Grover Cleveland won the election of 1884 by a narrow margin created by an unusually high turnout of Catholic voters in New York
The Politics of Equilibrium • In 1887 President Cleveland (the first Democratic president since before the Civil War) asked Congress to reduce the protective tariff rates (he believed that the high tariff was contributing to the federal government’s surplus and resulted in graft)
The Politics of Equilibrium • Democrats passed the bill in the House but the Republicans in the Senate defiantly passed a bill of their own actually raising the rates, this deadlock made the tariff an issue in the election of 1888
The Politics of Equilibrium • In the election of 1888, the Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland and supported tariff reductions, the Republicans settled on former senator Benjamin Harrison and endorsed protection of the American economy through tariffs
The Politics of Equilibrium • Benjamin Harrison won the election in the Electoral College by a vote of 233 to 168, but lost the popular vote to Cleveland by over 100,000 votes
The Politics of Equilibrium • Benjamin Harrison had few visible convictions and made no effort to influence Congress, as a result his record was little better than his grandfather (William Henry Harrison – 1840) who only served for one month
The Politics of Equilibrium • Sentiment began to swell in the U.S. to curb the power of the trusts, by the mid 1880's 15 southern and western states had adopted laws prohibiting combinations that restrained competition, but Corporations found it easy to escape limitations by incorporating in states such as New Jersey and Delaware
The Politics of Equilibrium • In order to effectively regulate the trusts, legislation would have to be passed by the national government, both houses of Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)
The Politics of Equilibrium • Most members of Congress saw the legislation as a largely symbolic measure that would deflect criticism but not likely to have any real effect on corporate power, the act was indifferently enforced and steadily weakened by courts – had virtually no impact in the decade after its passage, by 1901 the Justice Department had used the act many times against unions, but only 14 times against business combinations
The Politics of Equilibrium • McKinley Tariff – Republicans drafted the highest protective tariff measure ever proposed to Congress - passed in 1890 but the Republican Party lost the House and had its majority in the Senate slashed to 8 seats in the 1890 Congressional elections
The Politics of Equilibrium • In the election of 1892, the Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland who opposed the McKinley Tariff and the Republicans nominated Benjamin Harrison who supported the tariff, a third party candidate, James Weaver of the People’s Party also entered the race
The Politics of Equilibrium • Cleveland won the election of 1892 by a comfortable margin, he was devoted to minimal government intervention and hostile to active efforts to deal with social or economic problems, supported tariff reduction but did not effectively lower the tariff (Wilson-Gorman Tariff)
The Politics of Equilibrium • Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway Co v. Illinois (The Wabash Case) Supreme Court ruled one of the Granger Laws unconstitutional – the law was an attempt to control interstate commerce and thus infringed on the executive power of Congress, the Court would even later limit the power of the states to regulate commerce even within their own boundaries
The Politics of Equilibrium • Congress responded to public pressure with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 which banned discrimination in rates between long and short hauls, required that railroads publish their rate schedules and file them with the government, and declared that all interstate rail rates must be “reasonable and just”
The Politics of Equilibrium • A 5 person Interstate Commerce Commission was to administer the act and regulate business practices but did so without much practical effect, it was haphazardly enforced and narrowly interpreted by the courts
The Agrarian Revolt • Popular myth held that American farmers were the most individualistic of citizens and the least likely to join together in a cooperative economic or political movement, in reality farmers had been attempting to organize since the 1860’s
The Agrarian Revolt • The Grange was the first major farm organization, designed to be a social and self-help association, Oliver H. Kelley was appalled by what he considered the isolation and drabness of rural life so he founded the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry which attempted to bring farmers together to learn new scientific agricultural techniques, hoped to create a feeling of community to relieve the loneliness of rural life
The Agrarian Revolt • Membership in the Grange rapidly increased after the Depression of 1873 caused farm prices to drop, it was strongest in the South and Midwest, as membership grew the goals changed, began to attempt to organize marketing cooperatives to allow farmers to circumvent the middlemen, urged cooperative political action to curb the monopolies of the railroads and warehouses
The Agrarian Revolt • Farmers Declaration of Independence: proclaimed that the time had come for farmers suffering from long continued systems of oppression and abuse to rouse themselves from indifference of their own interests, vowed that farmers would use all lawful and peaceful means to free themselves from tyranny of monopolies
The Agrarian Revolt • Montgomery Ward and Company emerged as a mail-order business to specifically meet the needs of the farmers
The Agrarian Revolt • Grangers worked to elect state legislatures and usually operated through existing parties, occasionally ran a candidate under such labels as "antimonopoly" and "reform"
The Agrarian Revolt • Granger Laws – states imposed strict regulations on railroad rates and practices, struck down by the Supreme Court in the Wabash case
The Agrarian Revolt • Decline of the Grangers caused by new regulations being destroyed, political inexperience, temporary agricultural prosperity in the late 1870s
The Agrarian Revolt • Starting in the 1870’s farmers began to band together in Farmers Alliances, these were principally concerned with local problems, they formed cooperatives and marketing mechanisms, established stores, banks, processing plants to free from dependence on the hated furnishing merchants, argued for a sense of mutual, neighborly responsibility that would enable farmers to resist oppressive outside forces - promoted cooperation as an alternative economic system to competition
The Agrarian Revolt • Women were full voting members in most local Alliances (Mary E. Lease) and the issue of temperance became prominent “Raise less corn and more hell!” Mary Lease
The Agrarian Revolt • Problems of Alliances – cooperatives did not always work well, market forces against them were too strong, cooperatives in many cases were mismanaged, the Alliances then decided to create a national political organization, in 1889 the Southern and Northwestern Alliances agreed to a loose merger
The Agrarian Revolt • Ocala Demands – a party platform run on by candidates for Congress in the 1890 congressional elections, won partial or complete control of the legislatures in 12 states, 6 governorships and 3 seats in the US Senate, 50 in the House
The Agrarian Revolt • In Omaha, Nebraska (1892) 1,300 delegates proclaimed the creation of the new People's Party (populists), in the election of 1892 the Populist candidate was James B. Weaver who earned over 1 million votes (8.5%) and 22 electoral votes from six Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states
The Agrarian Revolt • Populism appealed principally to farmers, particularly small farmers with little economic security, engaged in a farming that was less viable to face the new, mechanized commercial agriculture, geographically isolated farmers, but never attracted significant labor support since the interests of labor and interests of farmers were at odds, in the Rocky Mountain states miners bought in to the Populist platform
The Agrarian Revolt • Free Silver was the idea of permitting silver to become the basis of currency so as to expand the money supply
The Agrarian Revolt • White Populists struggled with the race question, Colored Alliances in the South numbered over 1.25 million members by 1890, the interracial character of the movement faded when southern conservatives began attacking Populists for undermining white supremacy
The Agrarian Revolt • Populist leaders were often members of the rural middle class, professional people, lawyers or editors, few were marginal farmers, almost all Protestant, some were somber others were rabble-rousers, gave rise to the “southern demagogue” who would arouse the resentment of the poor farmer against the planter aristocracy
The Agrarian Revolt • Omaha Platform of 1892 proposed a system of subtreasuries which would strengthen the cooperatives, the government would establish a network of warehouses where farmers would deposit their crops, using those crops as collateral growers could then borrow money from the government at low rates and wait for the price of their goods to go up before selling them.
The Agrarian Revolt • Also called for the abolition of national banks, the end of absentee ownership of land, called for regulation and government ownership of railroads, telephones and telegraphs, demanded a system of government operated postal savings banks, a graduated income tax, the inflation of currency and remonetization of silver
