American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

by H. W. Brands

  James Bryce would have been called Scotch Irish had his family emigrated to America from Ulster. Instead, amid the potato famine of the 1840s they moved back to Scotland, to Glasgow, where James’s father taught school. The boy excelled at his studies and won a chance for a scholarship to Trinity College at Oxford. But Trinity students were required to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglican orthodoxy, and James, with the double determination of the Scot and the Presbyterian, refused. His case became a test, and his persistence resulted in a partial victory for religious and intellectual tolerance: though refused a master’s degree, he was allowed to take a bachelor’s. His brilliance eventually broke down the remaining barriers, and in 1870 he became the Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford.

  That same year he visited the United States, consorting in Boston with Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes père et fils. He conceived an enthusiasm for America as both a field of study and a portent of civilization’s future, and after returning to England he published a series of articles that established his reputation as Britain’s expert on the American republic. He traveled again to the United States in 1881 for an extended tour, and once more in 1883 to conduct a seminar at Johns Hopkins, the new research university in Baltimore, where the class included John Dewey, John Franklin Jameson, and Woodrow Wilson. The text for the course was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which Bryce considered “a model of art and a storehouse of ethical maxims” but woefully deficient as an interpretation of its nominal subject. Some of Tocqueville’s arguments were out of date, Bryce asserted; others had always been wrong. “That is to say, some were true of America, but not of democracy in general, while others were true of democracy in general but not true of America.”1

  Bryce thought he could do better, and in 1888 he published The American Commonwealth, in three volumes. A century after the founding of the federal republic, Bryce—and others—could detect a pattern in American politics. Americans initially organized into parties based on causes, but as the causes lost their power to motivate, the parties remained. The fight over the Constitution had produced America’s first party system, of Federalists and Republicans. The struggle for democracy had spawned the second party system, of Democrats and Whigs. The sectional crisis had generated the third party system, of Republicans and Democrats. This third system had manifested the greatest power to motivate: witness the inordinate passions of the 1850s, the monumental carnage of the Civil War, the violence and vindictiveness of Reconstruction and Redemption. But a decade after Redemption, the fire had gone out of the parties (as the fire had previously gone out of their forerunners). Their members still spoke the language of their causes; the Republicans claimed equality and opportunity, and the Democrats defended states’ rights. But mostly they squabbled for office and the spoils it brought. The best men—those with the most conspicuous talent and ambition—looked elsewhere than politics for their challenges and rewards.

  Recruitment was a particular problem during the declining phase of each party system, but Bryce perceived it as a chronic issue for Americans. And it was most striking at the top of the American political pyramid: the presidency. Considering the powers of the chief executive and the relative openness of American society, Bryce wrote, the naïve observer of American politics should have expected the presidency to attract the most brilliant and gifted men.

  But since the heroes of the Revolution died out with Jefferson and Adams and Madison some sixty years ago, no person except General Grant has reached the chair whose name would have been remembered had he not been President, and no President except Abraham Lincoln has displayed rare or striking qualities in the chair. Who now knows or cares to know anything about the personality of James K. Polk or Franklin Pierce? The only thing remarkable about them is that being so commonplace they should have climbed so high.

  Bryce adduced various reasons for this talent dearth in the White House. “One is that the proportion of first-rate ability drawn into politics is smaller in America than in most European countries.” In France, in Britain, and in Germany, politics was the most exciting field of human endeavor, but in America, politics competed with a peculiarly dynamic brand of capitalism—“the business of developing the material resources of the country,” Bryce called it—and often lost out.

  A second reason was that American political life offered few opportunities for individual distinction. Congress operated by committees and compromises; the states, the other major source of presidential candidates, were many and diffuse. National reputations were hard to come by, which explained the frequent success of generals, whose gifts lay in the martial rather than the political line.

  A third reason had to do with the interaction of democracy and human nature.

  Eminent men make more enemies, and give those enemies more assailable points, than obscure men do. They are therefore in so far less desirable candidates. It is true that the eminent man has also made more friends, that his name is more widely known, and may be greeted with louder cheers. Other things being equal, the famous man is preferable. But other things never are equal. The famous man has probably attacked some leaders in his own party, has supplanted others, has expressed his dislike to the crotchet of some active section, has perhaps committed errors which are capable of being magnified into offences. No man stands long before the public and bears a part in great affairs without giving openings to censorious criticism. Fiercer far than the light which beats upon a throne is the light which beats upon a presidential candidate, searching out all the recesses of his past life. Hence, when the choice lies between a brilliant man and a safe man, the safe man is preferred. Party feeling, strong enough to carry in on its back a man without conspicuous positive merits, is not always strong enough to procure forgiveness for a man with positive faults.2

  FROM BIRTH THE Republican party had really been two parties: one stressing social issues, starting with antislavery and extrapolating to Radical Reconstruction; the other emphasizing economics, in particular aid to business. The war had welded the two wings together, and the bond persisted, albeit weakened, during the decade after the war. But under Rutherford Hayes, who terminated Reconstruction by removing the last federal troops from the South, and thereby delivered the South to the Democrats for the foreseeable future, the two wings abandoned all pretense of comity. Each now treated the other as more dangerous than the Democrats.

  Roscoe Conkling led one faction, the Stalwarts, so called (at first by themselves, later by others) for their devotion to the great causes of Lincoln and Grant. The Grant they preferred was the brave general, but when pressed they were willing to settle for the scandal-prone president, who, whatever his faults, had kept the party in power for eight years. Realists among the Stalwarts recognized that the Civil War was over, and Reconstruction too, but they—and the unrealists as well—hoped to squeeze a few more victories out of the bloody shirt.

  James Blaine led the other faction, the Half-Breeds, so called at first by their enemies but eventually by themselves. The Half-Breeds believed the party must move on to the new issues raised by industrialization. With each year that passed, the Civil War meant ever less, particularly to the millions of immigrants who had arrived since Appomattox. To harp on the old themes risked conceding the newcomers to the Democrats.

  The politics of post-Reconstruction America put the Republicans in a particular bind. The Democrats’ reconquest of the South gave them a lock on the electoral votes of the old Confederacy. Even modest inroads into the North or West could hand them the White House. To be sure, they had to choose their candidates carefully; Southerners were essentially disqualified. But a Northern Democrat with pull in one of the large Northern states became almost an odds-on favorite for president. The formula would have worked for New York’s Tilden in 1876 had the votes been counted fairly; it might well work the next time around.

  Or the time after that. In the 1880 election Republican James Garfield squeezed one more victory out of the old form
ula, beating Democrat (and Union war hero) Winfield Scott Hancock by less than 40,000 votes out of 9 million cast. “Your real troubles will begin now,” fellow Republican Carl Schurz told Garfield in lieu of congratulations, referring to the continuing fight within their own party. Garfield did his best, trying to balance appointments of Stalwarts against those of Half-Breeds. But the task proved impossible, for every Republican acted as though he had a claim on the president’s patronage. “The fountains of the population seemed to have overflowed and Washington is inundated,” Garfield lamented. More than once he asked himself whether the presidency was worth the headaches. “My God!” he said. “What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?”3

  His troubles ended unexpectedly. In July 1881, before the appointments were completed and long before the country learned what kind of president the former congressman would make, Garfield decided he needed a vacation. Walking to catch a train at Washington’s Union Station, he was confronted by Charles Guiteau, an unsuccessful applicant for a consulship. Guiteau raised a pistol and fired two shots. “I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be president!” he was heard to say. Garfield survived the shooting but not the consequent care. He lingered for several weeks while doctors probed for the bullets, to Garfield’s excruciating pain. By September he seemed sufficiently out of danger that the doctors let him take his delayed vacation, to the New Jersey shore. But complications, including pneumonia, set in, and on September 19 he collapsed and died.4

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT HAD a grudge against Chester Arthur that antedated Arthur’s succeeding to the presidency upon Garfield’s death. In 1877, when Roosevelt was in college and Arthur was customs collector in New York, President Hayes nominated Roosevelt’s father, also called Theodore, to replace Arthur. The nomination angered Roscoe Conkling, Arthur’s mentor, and the Stalwart leader marshaled his troops to block the nomination. Conkling’s campaign started with parliamentary maneuvers—he claimed a breach of the senatorial courtesy allowing members to veto home-state appointments—but quickly escalated to nasty rumors about the elder Roosevelt and his failure to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. Theodore Sr. was a tyro at party politics, and the stress of the nomination fight strained a physical constitution already wracked, as it turned out, by colon cancer. He died just weeks after the Senate rejected his nomination. Arthur retained the customs post.5

  The younger Theodore Roosevelt had spent a childhood sheltered by wealth and sickness; his father was at once his role model and closest friend. The Stalwart campaign against Theodore Sr., culminating in his death, made his son a bitter enemy of all Stalwarts, including Arthur. Roosevelt’s hostility to the spoilsmen helped motivate his entry into politics, and upon his election to the New York assembly it inspired an early campaign against the party machine. About the time Roosevelt went to Albany, Jay Gould seized control of the Manhattan Elevated Railway. The takeover involved Gould’s typical finagling, including some questionable rulings by Judge Theodore Westbrook. Roosevelt indignantly demanded an investigation of the affair. Isaac Hunt, who became a Roosevelt ally, remembered the twenty-three-year-old lawmaker as “a society man and a dude,” with tailored coat, silk hat, gold fob, eyeglasses, and hair parted down the middle. The sight of the college boy taking on the Mephistopheles of Wall Street tickled Hunt’s imagination and that of reporters and editors across the state. “Mr. Roosevelt has a most refreshing habit of calling men and things by their right names,” the New York Times asserted, “and in these days of judicial, ecclesiastical, and journalistic subservience to the barons of the Street”—Wall Street—“it needs some little courage in any public man to characterize them and their acts in fitting terms.” George Curtis’s Harper’s Weekly applauded the young assemblyman who “does not know the meaning of fear and to whom the bluster and bravado of party and political bullies are as absolutely indifferent as the blowing of the wind.”6

  Roosevelt got his investigation but nothing more than a reprimand of the judge, who almost certainly was guilty of unethical, if perhaps not illegal, conduct. He also got a lesson in real-world politics. Roosevelt had married Alice, but like most legislators he left his wife at home when he went to Albany. Gould’s agents trailed him to discover whether he, like more than a few lawmakers, strayed from fidelity among the fleshpots of the state capital. When the private dicks found nothing, they tried to lure him into sin and scandal. An attractive young woman fainted on the sidewalk as he was passing by. He helped her up and hailed a cab to take her home. She asked him to accompany her. This aroused his suspicion and he refused, but as he put her in the cab and paid the driver, he noted the address she gave the man. He sent a detective of his own to the place; the investigator reported criminal-looking characters loitering about.

  New York assemblymen served single-year terms, and Roosevelt had to defend his seat in November 1882. The elevation of Arthur to the presidency, at a time when Conkling’s influence was waning, cast New York’s Republicans into confusion; compounding their difficulties was the surprising emergence of Buffalo mayor Grover Cleveland, whose popular nomination for governor topped a strong Democratic ticket. Cleveland led the Democrats to a landslide victory in the state races; Roosevelt was one of the few Republican survivors.

  Roosevelt took the debacle as an opportunity to move up in the party. With most of his seniors gone, he sought and won the Republican nomination for speaker of the assembly. It was an honor without substance, as the Democratic majority guaranteed a Democratic speaker, but Roosevelt made the most of it, casting himself—at twenty-four—as the putative leader of his party in the assembly.7

  HIS STANDING WAS his ticket to the Republican national convention in 1884. By the time the GOP (as Republican headline writers had taken to calling the “Grand Old Party”) gathered in Chicago, Roosevelt’s personal situation had changed dramatically. His wife had died, leaving him stricken with grief and wondering whether he could carry on as before. He was of two minds about politics when he reached Chicago, and the circumstances of the convention only increased his ambivalence.

  Chester Arthur’s performance as president, while less dismal than most students of politics expected, had done nothing to endear him to the Blaine wing of the Republicans. “I do not desire or expect the nomination,” Blaine said honestly but unconvincingly, before adding, quite believably: “But I don’t intend that man in the White House shall have it.” Arthur might have struggled harder for election in his own right had he not been secretly sick, of the kidney failure then called Bright’s disease. Yet he felt obliged, for the sake of honor and the Stalwart cause, to make a run. And those many persons who owed their offices to Arthur felt obliged, for his sake and theirs, to support him.8

  More than a few Republicans sought to draft William Sherman, who might be positioned as Grant without the corruption. Blaine led the Sherman movement, writing the general a letter a week before the convention offering to choreograph the nomination. “Your historical record, full as it is, would be rendered still more glorious by such an administration as you would be able to give the country,” Blaine told Sherman. The general need simply keep quiet. “Do not say a word in advance of the convention, no matter who may ask you.… Do not answer this.”

  But Sherman did answer it, with characteristic bluntness. He said he would be “a fool and a madman and an ass to embark anew, at sixty-five years of age, in a career that may at any moment become tempest-tossed by the perfidy, the defalcation, the dishonesty or neglect of any one of a hundred thousand subordinates.” Soldiers did not make good presidents. “I remember well the experience of Generals Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Hayes, and Garfield, all elected because of their military services, and am warned, not encouraged, by their sad experiences. No, count me out.… Leave us old soldiers the peace we fought for and think we earned.”9

  Blaine saw no alternative to running himself. Eight years earlier he had sought the nomination eagerly; four years ago he would have accepted it gladly. Now he
wasn’t so sure the prize outweighed the cost. He wanted to be president and thought he’d make a good one, but he knew a national campaign would revive all the old allegations and doubtless invent new ones. He sincerely wanted Sherman to run, in part because he hoped to become the general-president’s right-hand man. When Sherman refused, Blaine decided that honor and country required him to step forward. Anything was better than Arthur.

  THE UNSAVORY CHOICE between Blaine and Arthur initially drove Theodore Roosevelt to Senator George Edmunds, a quiet reformer from Vermont. In the days before primary elections, much of the battle for a presidential nomination took place at state party conventions, where delegates committed to the competing candidates slugged it out for slots in the state delegations to the national convention. New York’s Republicans met in April 1884 in Utica, and Roosevelt argued that neither Arthur nor Blaine stood a chance in the general election. Only a candidate unsullied by scandal, with a record for reform, could hope to rally Republicans to the polls and stave off a Democratic victory. Few of the party regulars at Utica were convinced, with most lining up behind either Arthur or Blaine. But the balance between the two was close enough that they were willing to send four uncommitted delegates to Chicago. Roosevelt was one.

  Roosevelt spent the weeks before the national convention trying to carve space for Edmunds between Arthur and Blaine by blasting the prospects of both. Blaine was a “most dangerous man,” he declared, while Arthur “would be beaten out of sight.” Roosevelt corresponded with others of independent mind, including Henry Cabot Lodge, the acquaintance from Boston who was becoming a friend and ally. “For Heaven’s sake,” Roosevelt wrote Lodge, “don’t let the Massachusetts delegation commit any such act of suicidal folly as (from panic merely) supporting Arthur would be.”10

  Edmunds’s supporters acknowledged his blandness, but their regard for themselves made up for the deficiencies in their candidate. In Chicago, Roosevelt thrilled to be associated with the Edmunds bloc. “It included all the men of the broadest culture and highest character that there were in the convention, all those who were prominent in the professions or eminent as private citizens,” he told his sister afterward. “And it included almost all the ‘plain people,’ the farmers and others, who were above average, who were possessed of a keen sense of personal and official honesty, and who were accustomed to think for themselves.” The nominating speech for Edmunds, by Massachusetts governor John Long, was “the most masterly and scholarly effort I have ever listened to.”