data/pretrain/en_article_tail500.txt

contract to work in specified mines and mills. There seemed to be no
limit to the factories, forges, refineries, and railways that could be
built, to the multitudes that could be employed in conquering a
continent. As for the future, that was in the hands of Providence!

=Business Theories of Politics.=--As the statesmen of Hamilton's school
and the planters of Calhoun's had their theories of government and
politics, so the leaders in business enterprise had theirs. It was
simple and easily stated. "It is the duty of the government," they
urged, "to protect American industry against foreign competition by
means of high tariffs on imported goods, to aid railways by generous
grants of land, to sell mineral and timber lands at low prices to
energetic men ready to develop them, and then to leave the rest to the
initiative and drive of individuals and companies." All government
interference with the management, prices, rates, charges, and conduct of
private business they held to be either wholly pernicious or intolerably
impertinent. Judging from their speeches and writings, they conceived
the nation as a great collection of individuals, companies, and labor
unions all struggling for profits or high wages and held together by a
government whose principal duty was to keep the peace among them and
protect industry against the foreign manufacturer. Such was the
political theory of business during the generation that followed the
Civil War.


THE SUPREMACY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY (1861-85)

=Business Men and Republican Policies.=--Most of the leaders in industry
gravitated to the Republican ranks. They worked in the North and the
Republican party was essentially Northern. It was moreover--at least so
far as the majority of its members were concerned--committed to
protective tariffs, a sound monetary and banking system, the promotion
of railways and industry by land grants, and the development of internal
improvements. It was furthermore generous in its immigration policy. It
proclaimed America to be an asylum for the oppressed of all countries
and flung wide the doors for immigrants eager to fill the factories, man
the mines, and settle upon Western lands. In a word the Republicans
stood for all those specific measures which favored the enlargement and
prosperity of business. At the same time they resisted government
interference with private enterprise. They did not regulate railway
rates, prosecute trusts for forming combinations, or prevent railway
companies from giving lower rates to some shippers than to others. To
sum it up, the political theories of the Republican party for three
decades after the Civil War were the theories of American
business--prosperous and profitable industries for the owners and "the
full dinner pail" for the workmen. Naturally a large portion of those
who flourished under its policies gave their support to it, voted for
its candidates, and subscribed to its campaign funds.

=Sources of Republican Strength in the North.=--The Republican party was
in fact a political organization of singular power. It originated in a
wave of moral enthusiasm, having attracted to itself, if not the
abolitionists, certainly all those idealists, like James Russell Lowell
and George William Curtis, who had opposed slavery when opposition was
neither safe nor popular. To moral principles it added practical
considerations. Business men had confidence in it. Workingmen, who
longed for the independence of the farmer, owed to its indulgent land
policy the opportunity of securing free homesteads in the West. The
immigrant, landing penniless on these shores, as a result of the same
beneficent system, often found himself in a little while with an estate
as large as many a baronial domain in the Old World. Under a Republican
administration, the union had been saved. To it the veterans of the war
could turn with confidence for those rewards of service which the
government could bestow: pensions surpassing in liberality anything that
the world had ever seen. Under a Republican administration also the
great debt had been created in the defense of the union, and to the
Republican party every investor in government bonds could look for the
full and honorable discharge of the interest and principal. The spoils
system, inaugurated by Jacksonian Democracy, in turn placed all the
federal offices in Republican hands, furnishing an army of party workers
to be counted on for loyal service in every campaign.

Of all these things Republican leaders made full and vigorous use,
sometimes ascribing to the party, in accordance with ancient political
usage, merits and achievements not wholly its own. Particularly was this
true in the case of saving the union. "When in the economy of
Providence, this land was to be purged of human slavery ... the
Republican party came into power," ran a declaration in one platform.
"The Republican party suppressed a gigantic rebellion, emancipated four
million slaves, decreed the equal citizenship of all, and established
universal suffrage," ran another. As for the aid rendered by the
millions of Northern Democrats who stood by the union and the tens of
thousands of them who actually fought in the union army, the Republicans
in their zeal were inclined to be oblivious. They repeatedly charged the
Democratic party "with being the same in character and spirit as when it
sympathized with treason."

=Republican Control of the South.=--To the strength enjoyed in the
North, the Republicans for a long time added the advantages that came
from control over the former Confederate states where the newly
enfranchised negroes, under white leadership, gave a grateful support to
the party responsible for their freedom. In this branch of politics,
motives were so mixed that no historian can hope to appraise them all at
their proper values. On the one side of the ledger must be set the
vigorous efforts of the honest and sincere friends of the freedmen to
win for them complete civil and political equality, wiping out not only
slavery but all its badges of misery and servitude. On the same side
must be placed the labor of those who had valiantly fought in forum and
field to save the union and who regarded continued Republican supremacy
after the war as absolutely necessary to prevent the former leaders in
secession from coming back to power. At the same time there were
undoubtedly some men of the baser sort who looked on politics as a game
and who made use of "carpet-bagging" in the South to win the spoils that
might result from it. At all events, both by laws and presidential acts,
the Republicans for many years kept a keen eye upon the maintenance of
their dominion in the South. Their declaration that neither the law nor
its administration should admit any discrimination in respect of
citizens by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude
appealed to idealists and brought results in elections. Even South
Carolina, where reposed the ashes of John C. Calhoun, went Republican in
1872 by a vote of three to one!

Republican control was made easy by the force bills described in a
previous chapter--measures which vested the supervision of elections in
federal officers appointed by Republican Presidents. These drastic
measures, departing from American tradition, the Republican authors
urged, were necessary to safeguard the purity of the ballot, not merely
in the South where the timid freedman might readily be frightened from
using it; but also in the North, particularly in New York City, where it
was claimed that fraud was regularly practiced by Democratic leaders.

The Democrats, on their side, indignantly denied the charges, replying
that the force bills were nothing but devices created by the Republicans
for the purpose of securing their continued rule through systematic
interference with elections. Even the measures of reconstruction were
deemed by Democratic leaders as thinly veiled schemes to establish
Republican power throughout the country. "Nor is there the slightest
doubt," exclaimed Samuel J. Tilden, spokesman of the Democrats in New
York and candidate for President in 1876, "that the paramount object and
motive of the Republican party is by these means to secure itself
against a reaction of opinion adverse to it in our great populous
Northern commonwealths.... When the Republican party resolved to
establish negro supremacy in the ten states in order to gain to itself
the representation of those states in Congress, it had to begin by
governing the people of those states by the sword.... The next was the
creation of new electoral bodies for those ten states, in which, by
exclusions, by disfranchisements and proscriptions, by control over
registration, by applying test oaths ... by intimidation and by every
form of influence, three million negroes are made to predominate over
four and a half million whites."

=The War as a Campaign Issue.=--Even the repeal of force bills could not
allay the sectional feelings engendered by the war. The Republicans
could not forgive the men who had so recently been in arms against the
union and insisted on calling them "traitors" and "rebels." The
Southerners, smarting under the reconstruction acts, could regard the
Republicans only as political oppressors. The passions of the war had
been too strong; the distress too deep to be soon forgotten. The
generation that went through it all remembered it all. For twenty
years, the Republicans, in their speeches and platforms, made "a
straight appeal to the patriotism of the Northern voters." They
maintained that their party, which had saved the union and emancipated
the slaves, was alone worthy of protecting the union and uplifting the
freedmen.

Though the Democrats, especially in the North, resented this policy and
dubbed it with the expressive but inelegant phrase, "waving the bloody
shirt," the Republicans refused to surrender a slogan which made such a
ready popular appeal. As late as 1884, a leader expressed the hope that
they might "wring one more President from the bloody shirt." They
refused to let the country forget that the Democratic candidate, Grover
Cleveland, had escaped military service by hiring a substitute; and they
made political capital out of the fact that he had "insulted the
veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic" by going fishing on
Decoration Day.

=Three Republican Presidents.=--Fortified by all these elements of
strength, the Republicans held the presidency from 1869 to 1885. The
three Presidents elected in this period, Grant, Hayes, and Garfield, had
certain striking characteristics in common. They were all of origin
humble enough to please the most exacting Jacksonian Democrat. They had
been generals in the union army. Grant, next to Lincoln, was regarded as
the savior of the Constitution. Hayes and Garfield, though lesser lights
in the military firmament, had honorable records duly appreciated by
veterans of the war, now thoroughly organized into the Grand Army of the
Republic. It is true that Grant was not a politician and had never voted
the Republican ticket; but this was readily overlooked. Hayes and
Garfield on the other hand were loyal party men. The former had served
in Congress and for three terms as governor of his state. The latter had
long been a member of the House of Representatives and was Senator-elect
when he received the nomination for President.

All of them possessed, moreover, another important asset, which was not
forgotten by the astute managers who led in selecting candidates. All
of them were from Ohio--though Grant had been in Illinois when the
summons to military duties came--and Ohio was a strategic state. It lay
between the manufacturing East and the agrarian country to the West.
Having growing industries and wool to sell it benefited from the
protective tariff. Yet being mainly agricultural still, it was not

without sympathy for the farmers who showed low tariff or free trade
tendencies. Whatever share the East had in shaping laws and framing
policies, it was clear that the West was to have the candidates. This
division in privileges--not uncommon in political management--was always
accompanied by a judicious selection of the candidate for Vice
President. With Garfield, for example, was associated a prominent New
York politician, Chester A. Arthur, who, as fate decreed, was destined
to more than three years' service as chief magistrate, on the
assassination of his superior in office.

=The Disputed Election of 1876.=--While taking note of the long years of
Republican supremacy, it must be recorded that grave doubts exist in the
minds of many historians as to whether one of the three Presidents,
Hayes, was actually the victor in 1876 or not. His Democratic opponent,
Samuel J. Tilden, received a popular plurality of a quarter of a million
and had a plausible claim to a majority of the electoral vote. At all
events, four states sent in double returns, one set for Tilden and
another for Hayes; and a deadlock ensued. Both parties vehemently
claimed the election and the passions ran so high that sober men did not
shrink from speaking of civil war again. Fortunately, in the end, the
counsels of peace prevailed. Congress provided for an electoral
commission of fifteen men to review the contested returns. The
Democrats, inspired by Tilden's moderation, accepted the judgment in
favor of Hayes even though they were not convinced that he was really
entitled to the office.


THE GROWTH OF OPPOSITION TO REPUBLICAN RULE

=Abuses in American Political Life.=--During their long tenure of
office, the Republicans could not escape the inevitable consequences of
power; that is, evil practices and corrupt conduct on the part of some
who found shelter within the party. For that matter neither did the
Democrats manage to avoid such difficulties in those states and cities
where they had the majority. In New York City, for instance, the local
Democratic organization, known as Tammany Hall, passed under the sway of
a group of politicians headed by "Boss" Tweed. He plundered the city
treasury until public-spirited citizens, supported by Samuel J. Tilden,
the Democratic leader of the state, rose in revolt, drove the ringleader
from power, and sent him to jail. In Philadelphia, the local Republican
bosses were guilty of offenses as odious as those committed by New York
politicians. Indeed, the decade that followed the Civil War was marred
by so many scandals in public life that one acute editor was moved to
inquire: "Are not all the great communities of the Western World growing
more corrupt as they grow in wealth?"

In the sphere of national politics, where the opportunities were
greater, betrayals of public trust were even more flagrant. One
revelation after another showed officers, high and low, possessed with
the spirit of peculation. Members of Congress, it was found, accepted
railway stock in exchange for votes in favor of land grants and other
concessions to the companies. In the administration as well as the
legislature the disease was rife. Revenue officers permitted whisky
distillers to evade their taxes and received heavy bribes in return. A
probe into the post-office department revealed the malodorous "star
route frauds"--the deliberate overpayment of certain mail carriers whose
lines were indicated in the official record by asterisks or stars. Even
cabinet officers did not escape suspicion, for the trail of the serpent
led straight to the door of one of them.

In the lower ranges of official life, the spoils system became more
virulent as the number of federal employees increased. The holders of
offices and the seekers after them constituted a veritable political
army. They crowded into Republican councils, for the Republicans, being
in power, could alone dispense federal favors. They filled positions in
the party ranging from the lowest township committee to the national
convention. They helped to nominate candidates and draft platforms and
elbowed to one side the busy citizen, not conversant with party
intrigues, who could only give an occasional day to political matters.
Even the Civil Service Act of 1883, wrung from a reluctant Congress two
years after the assassination of Garfield, made little change for a long
time. It took away from the spoilsmen a few thousand government
positions, but it formed no check on the practice of rewarding party
workers from the public treasury.

On viewing this state of affairs, many a distinguished citizen became
profoundly discouraged. James Russell Lowell, for example, thought he
saw a steady decline in public morals. In 1865, hearing of Lee's
surrender, he had exclaimed: "There is something magnificent in having a
country to love!" Ten years later, when asked to write an ode for the
centennial at Philadelphia in 1876, he could think only of a biting
satire on the nation:

    "Show your state legislatures; show your Rings;
     And challenge Europe to produce such things
     As high officials sitting half in sight
     To share the plunder and fix things right.
     If that don't fetch her, why, you need only
     To show your latest style in martyrs,--Tweed:
     She'll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears
     At such advance in one poor hundred years."

When his critics condemned him for this "attack upon his native land,"
Lowell replied in sadness: "These fellows have no notion of what love of
country means. It was in my very blood and bones. If I am not an
American who ever was?... What fills me with doubt and dismay is the
degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of democracy?
Is ours a 'government of the people, by the people, for the people,' or
a Kakistocracy [a government of the worst], rather for the benefit of
knaves at the cost of fools?"

=The Reform Movement in Republican Ranks.=--The sentiments expressed by
Lowell, himself a Republican and for a time American ambassador to
England, were shared by many men in his party. Very soon after the close
of the Civil War some of them began to protest vigorously against the
policies and conduct of their leaders. In 1872, the dissenters, calling
themselves Liberal Republicans, broke away altogether, nominated a
candidate of their own, Horace Greeley, and put forward a platform
indicting the Republican President fiercely enough to please the most
uncompromising Democrat. They accused Grant of using "the powers and
opportunities of his high office for the promotion of personal ends."
They charged him with retaining "notoriously corrupt and unworthy men in
places of power and responsibility." They alleged that the Republican
party kept "alive the passions and resentments of the late civil war to
use them for their own advantages," and employed the "public service of
the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence."

It was not apparent, however, from the ensuing election that any
considerable number of Republicans accepted the views of the Liberals.
Greeley, though indorsed by the Democrats, was utterly routed and died
of a broken heart. The lesson of his discomfiture seemed to be that
independent action was futile. So, at least, it was regarded by most men
of the rising generation like Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, and
Theodore Roosevelt, of New York. Profiting by the experience of Greeley
they insisted in season and out that reformers who desired to rid the
party of abuses should remain loyal to it and do their work "on the
inside."

=The Mugwumps and Cleveland Democracy in 1884.=--Though aided by
Republican dissensions, the Democrats were slow in making headway
against the political current. They were deprived of the energetic and
capable leadership once afforded by the planters, like Calhoun, Davis,
and Toombs; they were saddled by their opponents with responsibility for
secession; and they were stripped of the support of the prostrate
South. Not until the last Southern state was restored to the union, not
until a general amnesty was wrung from Congress, not until white
supremacy was established at the polls, and the last federal soldier
withdrawn from Southern capitals did they succeed in capturing the
presidency.

The opportune moment for them came in 1884 when a number of
circumstances favored their aspirations. The Republicans, leaving the
Ohio Valley in their search for a candidate, nominated James G. Blaine
of Maine, a vigorous and popular leader but a man under fire from the
reformers in his own party. The Democrats on their side were able to
find at this juncture an able candidate who had no political enemies in
the sphere of national politics, Grover Cleveland, then governor of New
York and widely celebrated as a man of "sterling honesty." At the same
time a number of dissatisfied Republicans openly espoused the Democratic
cause,--among them Carl Schurz, George William Curtis, Henry Ward
Beecher, and William Everett, men of fine ideals and undoubted
integrity. Though the "regular" Republicans called them "Mugwumps" and
laughed at them as the "men milliners, the dilettanti, and carpet
knights of politics," they had a following that was not to be despised.

The campaign which took place that year was one of the most savage in
American history. Issues were thrust into the background. The tariff,
though mentioned, was not taken seriously. Abuse of the opposition was
the favorite resource of party orators. The Democrats insisted that "the
Republican party so far as principle is concerned is a reminiscence. In
practice it is an organization for enriching those who control its
machinery." For the Republican candidate, Blaine, they could hardly find
words to express their contempt. The Republicans retaliated in kind.
They praised their own good works, as of old, in saving the union, and
denounced the "fraud and violence practiced by the Democracy in the
Southern states." Seeing little objectionable in the public record of
Cleveland as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York, they attacked
his personal character. Perhaps never in the history of political
campaigns did the discussions on the platform and in the press sink to
so low a level. Decent people were sickened. Even hot partisans shrank
from their own words when, after the election, they had time to reflect
on their heedless passions. Moreover, nothing was decided by the
balloting. Cleveland was elected, but his victory was a narrow one. A
change of a few hundred votes in New York would have sent his opponent
to the White House instead.

=Changing Political Fortunes (1888-96).=--After the Democrats had
settled down to the enjoyment of their hard-earned victory, President
Cleveland in his message of 1887 attacked the tariff as "vicious,
inequitable, and illogical"; as a system of taxation that laid a burden
upon "every consumer in the land for the benefit of our manufacturers."
Business enterprise was thoroughly alarmed. The Republicans
characterized the tariff message as a free-trade assault upon the
industries of the country. Mainly on that issue they elected in 1888
Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, a shrewd lawyer, a reticent politician, a
descendant of the hero of Tippecanoe, and a son of the old Northwest.
Accepting the outcome of the election as a vindication of their
principles, the Republicans, under the leadership of William McKinley in
the House of Representatives, enacted in 1890 a tariff law imposing the
highest duties yet laid in our history. To their utter surprise,
however, they were instantly informed by the country that their program
was not approved. That very autumn they lost in the congressional
elections, and two years later they were decisively beaten in the
presidential campaign, Cleveland once more leading his party to victory.


=References=

L.H. Haney, _Congressional History of Railways_ (2 vols.).

J.P. Davis, _Union Pacific Railway_.

J.M. Swank, _History of the Manufacture of Iron_.

M.T. Copeland, _The Cotton Manufacturing Industry in the United States_
(Harvard Studies).

E.W. Bryce, _Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century_.

Ida Tarbell, _History of the Standard Oil Company_ (Critical).

G.H. Montague, _Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company_
(Friendly).

H.P. Fairchild, _Immigration_, and F.J. Warne, _The Immigrant Invasion_
(Both works favor exclusion).

I.A. Hourwich, _Immigration_ (Against exclusionist policies).

J.F. Rhodes, _History of the United States, 1877-1896_, Vol. VIII.

Edward Stanwood, _A History of the Presidency_, Vol. I, for the
presidential elections of the period.


=Questions=

1. Contrast the state of industry and commerce at the close of the Civil
War with its condition at the close of the Revolutionary War.

2. Enumerate the services rendered to the nation by the railways.

3. Explain the peculiar relation of railways to government.

4. What sections of the country have been industrialized?

5. How do you account for the rise and growth of the trusts? Explain
some of the economic advantages of the trust.

6. Are the people in cities more or less independent than the farmers?
What was Jefferson's view?

7. State some of the problems raised by unrestricted immigration.

8. What was the theory of the relation of government to business in this
period? Has it changed in recent times?

9. State the leading economic policies sponsored by the Republican
party.

10. Why were the Republicans especially strong immediately after the
Civil War?

11. What illustrations can you give showing the influence of war in
American political campaigns?

12. Account for the strength of middle-western candidates.

13. Enumerate some of the abuses that appeared in American political
life after 1865.

14. Sketch the rise and growth of the reform movement.

15. How is the fluctuating state of public opinion reflected in the
elections from 1880 to 1896?


=Research Topics=

=Invention, Discovery, and Transportation.=--Sparks, _National
Development_ (American Nation Series), pp. 37-67; Bogart, _Economic
History of the United States_, Chaps. XXI, XXII, and XXIII.

=Business and Politics.=--Paxson, _The New Nation_ (Riverside Series),
pp. 92-107; Rhodes, _History of the United States_, Vol. VII, pp. 1-29,
64-73, 175-206; Wilson, _History of the American People_, Vol. IV, pp.
78-96.

=Immigration.=--Coman, _Industrial History of the United States_ (2d
ed.), pp. 369-374; E.L. Bogart, _Economic History of the United States_,
pp. 420-422, 434-437; Jenks and Lauck, _Immigration Problems_, Commons,
_Races and Immigrants_.

=The Disputed Election of 1876.=--Haworth, _The United States in Our Own
Time_, pp. 82-94; Dunning, _Reconstruction, Political and Economic_
(American Nation Series), pp. 294-341; Elson, _History of the United
States_, pp. 835-841.

=Abuses in Political Life.=--Dunning, _Reconstruction_, pp. 281-293; see
criticisms in party platforms in Stanwood, _History of the Presidency_,
Vol. I; Bryce, _American Commonwealth_ (1910 ed.), Vol. II, pp. 379-448;
136-167.

=Studies of Presidential Administrations.=--(_a_) Grant, (_b_) Hayes,
(_c_) Garfield-Arthur, (_d_) Cleveland, and (_e_) Harrison, in Haworth,
_The United States in Our Own Time_, or in Paxson, _The New Nation_
(Riverside Series), or still more briefly in Elson.

=Cleveland Democracy.=--Haworth, _The United States_, pp. 164-183;
Rhodes, _History of the United States_, Vol. VIII, pp. 240-327; Elson,
pp. 857-887.

=Analysis of Modern Immigration Problems.=--_Syllabus in History_ (New
York State, 1919), pp. 110-112.




CHAPTER XVIII