Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics - Softcover

Summers, Mark Wahlgren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807855375 ISBN 13: 9780807855379

Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Summers examines the American political system of the late nineteenth century with a behind-the-scenes look at the poll taxes, rigged elections, and other electoral shenanigans designed to bring large numbers of voters to the polls but still keep power in the hands of major partisan players.

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Mark Wahlgren Summers is Thomas D. Clark Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. He is author of many books, including "The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878" and "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of a President, 1884."

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Party Games

Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age PoliticsBy Mark Wahlgren Summers

The University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2004 The University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8078-5537-5

Contents

Preface: The Dog That Didn't Bark at NightPart I. Our Friend the EnemyChapter 1. A Typical YearChapter 2. What Else Could He Have Put into H-l?Chapter 3. Politics Is Only War without the BayonetsChapter 4. The Demon LoversPart II. Party TricksChapter 5. The Press of Public BusinessChapter 6. The Best Majority Money Can BuyChapter 7. An Eye on the Maine ChanceChapter 8. Anything, Lord, But Milwaukee! Malapportionment and GerrymanderingPart III. Policy-The Golden Rule?Chapter 9. Purse'n'All InfluenceChapter 10. The (Round) House of LegislationChapter 11. Class Warfare, Mainstream-Party StylePart IV. Rounding off the Two and a Half Party SystemChapter 12. The Treason of the IneffectualsChapter 13. A Little Knight MusicChapter 14. The Fix Is InChapter 15. Dishing the PopsCoda: Parties to a ConspiracyNotesBibliographyIndex

Chapter One

A Typical Year

Bring the good old frying-pan, we're going to fry some fat; Bring a peck of anthracite in grandpa's old white hat, Put the "Protects" in the pan, then we'll know "where they're at" While we are frying for Bennie. -New York World, August 19, 1892

Particulars aside, the 1888 campaign was one like any other.

Every election differs from every other, of course. There was no mistaking blunt, bulky Grover Cleveland for any other president, his rough edges softened by a White House marriage, his great frame stirred only by a sense of duty and a passion for hard work. "We love him ... for the enemies he has made," an admirer had declared, and in four years of vetoing private pension grabs and scowling down office beggars, Cleveland should have increased that love tenfold. Not since 1840 had a Democratic incumbent president sought a second term. Contemporaries couldn't help remembering it: the winner, William Henry Harrison, was grandfather to Republicans' current nominee, former senator Benjamin Harrison. Political old-timers compared the parades and gimmickry to that first "log cabin and hard cider" campaign, and Democratic cartoonists drew Harrison as a half-pint, dwarfed under his grandfather's hat. Read the tracts, hear the marching masses' cries, and 1888 might seem the election of elections, settling the nation's destinies for the next quarter century. "Vote out Republican disease," the New York Sun exhorted,

Vote out the nation's lasting hurt; Vote out four years of bloody shirt, Vote in four years of thorough peace.

Armageddon with brass bands: that was the 1888 campaign.

And every other. If any partisan had paused to flip through newspapers' back files, he would have discovered that the country, by its votes in 1868, apparently chose bayonet rule over revolution and anarchy, just as it selected empire and robbery over free love and treason in 1872, fraud in vote-counting over fraud in vote-casting in 1876, political degeneracy over economic ruin in 1880, and sexual depravity over a saturnalia of corruption in 1884. The republic was always at stake. This heightened, apocalyptic sense was one by-product of the political carnival.

In truth, just about everything about 1888 was new except the basic pattern: the methods, wiles, and arts of the politician. The 1888 campaign, therefore, becomes a fitting showcase not just for the pleasures of partisan politics but for its perils. Hoopla, hype, trickery, bribery, and fraud were as natural to the process as a torchlight parade. Not just in its best but in its worst and most manipulative, not just in its most public attractions but in its most private rascalities, this was a typical election year in the so-called party period.

The brighter side of partisan display was plain to see. Politics could be savored in buttons, campaign clubs, and parades, and in the contributions of an intensely partisan press. "The whole face of the country is plastered with politics," a visitor to the Indiana farm country reported. "Seen from a train, the whole country might be thought the camp of some great army with the flags marking regimental headquarters." Every town had one mass meeting, and most cities had more. Just before the election, Republicans and Democrats shared the same night and paraded down different streets in New York. Each spectacle had its own attractions, of course. Democrats put the mother of Irish patriot Charles Stewart Parnell on their reviewing stand and Wild West showman "Buffalo Bill" Cody in a yellow dogcart. Onlookers could see banners of blue and gold, and scarlet pennants ornamented with golden legends, canes with flags waving from the handle, brass bands tramping under the guerdon of a stuffed rooster, platoons wielding brooms, jewelers carrying life-size portraits of the president, and endless mottoes. For the first time, campaign buttons became the fashion, including one for Cleveland that looked like the pin that members of the Grand Army of the Republic wore-which, since most GAR members were Republican, put many Union veterans in a rage. Consciously cultivated to give politics a more moral tone, women were enlisted in campaign clubs, displayed on floats as symbols of liberty and the purity of the republic, and provided with a whole array of badges that combined partisan identification with that tastefulness and discretion that a male electorate expected of ladies-whose involvement in politics, of course, was preeminently to protect home, family, and morality and unsullied by a sordid desire for offices or power. Something new called a "kazoo" allowed partisans to project a tune "with a lugubrious, whining intensity of dolor," and since these sold for twenty dollars per hundred, there was no escaping them. Songsters issued "rot of an offensively partisan character," and canvassers passed out cigars that may have been even more offensive than they were partisan. "I am so glad this damn campaign is over," labor leader Terence V. Powderly sighed as election day approached; "if it lasted another month, I believe every man, woman and child in the country would be stark, staring mad."

Likely enough, Powderly was not contemplating the kazoos. Republicans were incensed at the smear campaign of faked quotations from Benjamin Harrison. Not that they should have felt surprised; the spirit of intense partisanship that set parades in motion inevitably breached the rules of courtesy and biased each party's press to keep lies alive. Indianapolis residents knew that during the great railroad strike of 1877, Harrison never drilled a private company and marched them to the depot threatening to start "them trains running by force." They were not likely to believe that he ever said "a dollar a day was enough for any workingman" and "any amount was too much for a striker." But the quotations spread, and all Harrison's own denials could not stop them.

Even more sinister was the undercurrent of ugly gossip about Grover Cleveland's marriage, the inescapable result of campaigns so committed to selling a candidate's personality and the recognition of women's particular interest in upholding the highest personal morality in public life. High-placed Republicans carried on a whispering campaign, alleging that Cleveland beat his wife and went on drunken sprees. Confronted with his role in fostering the stories, Senator John J. Ingalls offered a curious defense. The very fact that the president's friends felt called upon to deny the charges was all but a confirmation that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807855375
• ISBN 13: 9780807855379
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland