by H. W. Brands
But even Roosevelt had to admit it lacked something Blaine inspired in his followers.
Blaine was nominated by Judge [William] West, the blind orator of Ohio. It was a most impressive scene. The speaker, a feeble old man of shrunk but gigantic frame, stood looking with sightless eyes towards the vast throng that filled the huge hall. As he became excited his voice rang like a trumpet, and the audience became worked up to a condition of absolutely uncontrollable excitement and enthusiasm. For a quarter of an hour at a time they cheered and shouted so that the brass bands could not be heard at all, and we were nearly deafened by the noise.
Roosevelt couldn’t gainsay the enthusiasm for Blaine, but he did question the character of those who shouted so loudly.
Their ranks included many scoundrels, adroit and clever, who intend to further their own ends by supporting the popular candidate, or who know Mr. Blaine so well that they expect under him to be able to develop their schemes to the fullest extent; but for the most part these Republicans were good, ordinary men, who do not do very much thinking, who are pretty honest themselves, but who are callous to any but very flagrant wrongdoing in others, unless it is brought home to them most forcibly, who “don’t think Blaine any worse than the rest of them,” and who are captivated by the man’s force, originality, and brilliant demagoguery.
When Blaine won the nomination, on the fourth ballot, Roosevelt had to wonder about the future of Republicanism, and of the republic. “It may be that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ in fifty-one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty-nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.”11
DEVIL OR FOOL, it was a voice Roosevelt ignored only at his peril. The Blaine nomination provoked many who thought like Roosevelt to bolt the party. The defectors called themselves independents; their critics called them “Mugwumps,” a word supposedly derived from an Indian language and meaning “big chief.” (A more sardonic etymology suggested that the persons so described had their “mugs” on one side of the fence and their “wumps” on the other.) The revolt began in Boston, where Republican respectables of the Massachusetts Reform Club pledged to prevent Blaine from dishonoring New England and disgracing the party of Lincoln by getting himself elected. “All was excitement and everybody was on fire,” wrote a participant at an early meeting. “Not a man in the room wished to support Blaine.” Charles Francis Adams couldn’t attend but sent best wishes; cousin Josiah Quincy opened his law office to a follow-up gathering. From Boston the movement spread to New York. New York Evening Post editor E. L. Godkin’s plague-on-both-your-houses temperament made him a natural Mugwump. The more genteel George Curtis came aboard. Carl Schurz signed on. Henry Ward Beecher expostulated, “Put me down against Blaine one hundred times in letters two feet long.”12
The party regulars derided the Mugwumps as feckless do-gooders. Such men had never elected a candidate, they said, and never would. And if somehow their man did achieve office, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Blaine himself swatted the Mugwumps as “noisy but not numerous, pharisaical but not practical, ambitious but not wise, pretentious but not powerful.”
Theodore Roosevelt couldn’t dismiss them so easily. They included men whose opinion he valued, persons like those he had grown up with and still lived among. Yet Roosevelt had experienced enough of politics in Albany to understand that parties mattered. For better or worse, American democracy operated through parties, and if he intended to continue his political career, abandoning his party was a reckless way to proceed.
He tried for a time to avoid a decision. When the Chicago convention broke up and the rest of the New York delegation headed east for home, Roosevelt turned the other way, toward Dakota. He dodged reporters and disappeared into the Badlands, where he rode the range from morning till night, chasing cattle and dreaming of the ranch he was constructing. “I have just come in from spending thirteen hours in the saddle,” he boasted to his sister, “for every day I have been here I have had my hands full.” He contemplated staying out on the range, and out of the political crossfire, till after the November election.13
But as the campaign developed he reconsidered. The Democrats, after a quarter century in exile, were desperate to regain the White House. Though several states put forward favorite sons at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the vote counters in the party determined—again—that New York held the key to success. Grover Cleveland had been governor of the Empire State for little over a year, which meant that he hadn’t made many enemies. Tammany Hall didn’t like him, but its animus served the party’s larger purpose of contrasting the “ugly honest” Cleveland to the scandal-tainted Blaine. Various state delegations gradually fell in line behind Cleveland, who led on the first ballot and won on the second.
Even after the Cleveland nomination, Roosevelt might have kept mum but for a report linking him to the Mugwumps. A newspaper published a hearsay account from Chicago asserting that Roosevelt, in his anger at Blaine’s victory, had said that honest Republicans ought to support any credible Democratic nominee over Blaine. Roosevelt vehemently denied the report but then discredited his denial by saying that if he had said such a thing, he had done so in the heat of passion. “At midnight, two hours after the convention had adjourned, when I was savagely indignant at our defeat, and heated and excited with the sharpness of the struggle, I certainly felt bitterly angry at the result, and so expressed myself in private conversation.”
To set the record straight, Roosevelt explained that he would vote for Blaine in the fall. “A man cannot act both without and within the party; he can do either, but he cannot possibly do both.… I did my best and got beaten, and I propose to stand by the result.… I am by inheritance and education a Republican; whatever good I have been able to accomplish in public life has been accomplished through the Republican party. I have acted with it in the past, and wish to act with it in the future.”14
THE GENERAL ELECTION campaign of 1884 was the most entertaining in decades and the least edifying. The Democrats didn’t discover much new to throw against Blaine, but they merrily recycled the old charges. At Cleveland rallies the Democratic barkers led audiences in chants of “Burn this letter” and, when that grew tiresome, the slightly more complex “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, continental liar from the state of Maine.” Democratic leaders kept a healthy distance from the Mugwump Republicans, accepting their votes for Cleveland but fully realizing that the genteel likes of Harper’s editor Curtis and Harvard president Charles Eliot wouldn’t win them many votes outside the silk-stocking districts.
The Republicans had to work harder to find material to use against Cleveland, but their detectives struck dirt by midsummer. The obvious lead was Cleveland’s unmarried state, which was presumed to mean one of two things, both salacious. The truth lay on the less salacious side: his predilection was for women, in particular one Maria Halpin, a widow with whom Cleveland had been involved several years before. The affair produced a child, or so the evidence suggested. Mrs. Halpin admitted to having entertained other men during the period in question; possibly one of them was the father. But Cleveland accepted responsibility for the child—a boy—and paid for his support. The tale grew a bit more complicated when Mrs. Halpin suffered a nervous breakdown, partly brought on by alcohol, and had to be institutionalized. Cleveland paid for her care and arranged a foster home for the boy.
The story hit a Republican paper in Buffalo under the headline “A Terrible Tale.” The author was the Reverend George H. Ball, who subsequently elaborated his account into a saga of seduction and abandonment. Mrs. Halpin wasn’t the only victim of Cleveland’s animal appetites, the Baptist preacher said; Cleveland kept a “harem” of women. Lest anyone miss the conclusion to be drawn from the sordid business, Ball explained that the difference between Cleveland and Blaine was that “between the brothel and the family, between indecency and decency, between lust and law.”
The revelatio
n threatened a serious blow to the image of “Grover the Good.” Cleveland’s spokesmen stammered in embarrassment till the candidate telegraphed them a terse order: “Tell the truth.” This proved a brilliant stroke, especially after Cleveland’s advisers showed the telegram to the press. Their man had stumbled but accepted responsibility for his mistake. Some of Cleveland’s supporters, citing the confusion in the paternity, suggested that he had gone beyond the call of duty, saving the reputation of the real father, a married man. More than a few were relieved to be able to say that Cleveland’s single flaw was excessive masculinity. Henry Ward Beecher jokingly asserted that if every New Yorker who violated the Seventh Commandment voted for Cleveland, he’d carry the state in a landslide. The overall effect was just what the Cleveland side wanted: to emphasize the difference in integrity between their candidate and Blaine. It also gave Democrats ammunition to fire back at the Republicans. When Republican hecklers interrupted Democratic rallies with taunts of “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” the Democrats rejoined: “Going to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”
So they could say, and so they certainly hoped. But in the days before anything like scientific polling, no one knew what the voters would actually do. This ignorance didn’t prevent all sorts of people from professing intelligence. “A very singular thing happened on a horse-car recently,” a journalist wryly reported.
A gentleman thought to canvass the occupants as to their presidential preferences. He had taken the votes of two old ladies, and then inquired of the only male rider besides himself, “Whom are you going to vote for, my friend?” when the unsympathetic individual replied, “Go to thunder.” It is clear from this incident that Mr. Blaine’s majority in Massachusetts cannot be less than seventy thousand. A hard-workingman fell down on a banana skin last week, and has since been unable to do any labor, which proves conclusively that the votes of the workingmen will all be thrown for Blaine. An earnest Cleveland man, so his son informs us, will not vote in the coming election. He died last Wednesday. The Democratic candidate, it is believed, will lose many more votes in the same way … “Blaine” is a word of one syllable, while “Cleveland” has two syllables. This will give the former an increased advantage among the younger class of voters.15
Had more of substance separated the candidates, the auguries would have been easier to interpret. On a few issues the Republicans and the Democrats did draw apart. Blaine and the Republicans favored a protective tariff; Cleveland and the Democrats didn’t. Most Republicans wanted dearer money, preferably gold, than most Democrats. The Democrats demanded restraints on anticompetitive business practices; the Republicans were generally willing to let capitalists be capitalists.
But the issues had trouble rising above the personal attacks, not least since both sides believed their opponents’ weaknesses were more potent than their own strengths. For all his ability to play to the galleries, Blaine could point to little of constructive legislation in his record. Cleveland might be honest, but what had he actually accomplished in his brief career in office?
Turnout promised—or threatened—to decide the race. The major parties in the 1880s might have lost their zeal, but their organizational capacity remained impressive. Every campaign featured rallies, parades, and barbecues, with placards, speeches, songs, and drink. As the elections neared, the city machines turned out the vote by the methods Tammany made notorious; in the countryside the promise of spoils—in particular postmasterships, of which some forty thousand remained at the disposal of the president, despite the inroads of the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act—inspired office-holders and their would-be replacements, and the relatives and friends of each group, to vote early and as often as they thought they could get away with. Public voting was the norm, with each party supplying its own ballots, distinctively sized, colored, and shaped, and with the party’s candidates already marked. Voters cast their ballots in full view of neighbors, employers, and party hacks. Christopher Buckley, the Democratic “Blind Boss” of San Francisco, was renowned for haunting the polls in a large overcoat with deep pockets from which, at the whisperings of sighted spotters, he distributed gold quarter eagles ($2.50 coins) to those who upheld the California Democracy. (Apparently he didn’t think to emulate Tammany’s “Big Tim” Sullivan, who perfumed his ballots in order that loyal Democrats might be identified by scent as well as sight.) For just such reasons, the Australian ballot—nonpartisan and cast in secret, so named for having been introduced Down Under in the 1850s—was gaining support, but the parties stoutly and for the most part successfully resisted it. Voting continued to be a public act.16
Whatever the influence of the party activities on the fairness of elections, a conspicuous result was that Americans in the Gilded Age—indeed throughout the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century—went to the polls in numbers that would shame their great-grandchildren. From the 1840s to the 1890s, percentage turnout in presidential races consistently ran in the high seventies to low eighties. The highest participation in American history occurred in 1876, when nearly 82 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, but each of the next five presidential elections came within several points of that figure. (By comparison, turnouts in the 1990s and early 2000s ranged from the high forties to midfifties.)17
WITH TURNOUT THE KEY, each side in the 1884 race looked frantically for anything that would inspire its marginal supporters—those few fainthearts who couldn’t automatically be counted on to brave rain, muddy roads, or other discouragements—to get to the polls. Blaine attended a rally in New York City on October 29, the Wednesday before the election. Several Protestant clergymen were on the agenda; Blaine distractedly prepared his own remarks. One of the ministers, a Presbyterian named Samuel Burchard, warmed up the crowd for the candidate. “We are your friends, Mr. Blaine,” Burchard declared, eliciting cheers. “And notwithstanding all the calumnies that have been urged in the papers against you, we stand by your side.” From various parts of the audience arose shouts of “Amen!” “We expect to vote for you next Tuesday.” More cheers and shouts. “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify with the party of rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag. We are loyal to you.” Still more cheers.
Blaine wasn’t the next speaker; more ministers intervened. Blaine continued to work on his comments. When he did get up, he concentrated on the tariff and the way it embodied the principles of Christian charity. He went home and thought nothing more of the affair. One of the reporters, however, who had actually listened to the speeches and jotted down Burchard’s alliteration of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” asked Cleveland’s managers if they cared to comment. They kept quiet for the moment, but that Sunday handbills at thousands of Catholic churches across the state and the nation repeated the Republican identification of Catholics with drunkenness and treason. The strictly honest among the Democratic propagandists explained that the statement had been made in Blaine’s presence and gone unrebutted; the less scrupulous put the words in Blaine’s own mouth.18
Blaine had almost no time to respond, and what he said seemed weak and defensive. How many Catholic votes he lost by the blunder is impossible to say. But every one hurt, as soon became apparent. Cleveland carried New York state by a mere eleven hundred votes in the popular balloting. And New York’s thirty-six electoral votes made the difference in the election, as both sides had guessed they might. The South went solidly for Cleveland and was joined by Indiana, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Delaware, in addition to New York. Cleveland totaled 219 electoral votes to Blaine’s 182. In a national turnout of 77.5 percent, Cleveland received 4,880,000 popular votes to Blaine’s 4,850,000.
Chapter 15
CAPITAL IMPROVEMENTS
The sound and fury of popular politics during the Gilded Age couldn’t conceal an underlying but undeniable truth: that after almost a century during which the tide of democracy had risen ever higher, an ebb was setting in. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments nominally extended
the rights of citizenship and voting to the freedmen, but those rights were being gutted in much of the South as the old elites reconstituted themselves and reconsolidated their power. In the North and West, the faith in democracy that had sustained the Union during the Civil War weakened with the scandals of the postwar era. If democracy produced the Tweed ring, the gold ring, the whiskey ring, and Crédit Mobilier, perhaps it required rethinking. Citizens—white male citizens, that is; women still couldn’t vote in most places—might be voting in record numbers, but given the dismal performance of the officials they elected, the high turnout seemed to skeptics merely another reason to doubt democracy.
For this reason subscribers to the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston journal edited by William Dean Howells and consulted by the most serious thinkers in America, were intrigued to read an account of an unidentified country by a recent visitor there. “As soon as I had learned to speak the language a little, I became greatly interested in the people and the system of government,” the visitor related.
I found that the nation had at first tried universal suffrage pure and simple, but had thrown that form aside because the result was not satisfactory. It had seemed to deliver all power into the hands of the ignorant and non-taxpaying classes; and of a necessity the responsible offices were filled from these classes also.
