A. The National Scene
1. There were five
presidents from 1877 to 1893:
Rutherford B. Hayes ®, James A. Garfield ®,
2. The president’s
biggest job was to dispense political patronage; after the assassination of President
Garfield in 1881, reform of the spoils system became urgent even though the
spoils system was not the immediate motive for the murder.
3. The Pendleton Act
of 1883 created a list of jobs to be filled on the basis of examinations
administered by the new Civil Service Commission, but patronage still accounted
for the bulk of government posts.
4. The biggest job of
the executive branch was delivering the mail; in 1880, 56 percent of federal employees
worked for the post office.
5. One of the most
troublesome issues of the 1880s was how to reduce the federal funding surplus
created by customs duties and excise taxes.
6. Congress had more
control over national policy than the presidents; even so, on most issues of the day, divisions on policy occurred within the
parties, not between them.
7. The tariff remained
a fighting issue in Congress as the Democrats attacked Republican protectionism;
each tariff bill was a patchwork of bargains among special interests.
8. Every presidential
election from 1876 to 1892 was decided by a thin margin, and neither party
gained permanent command of Congress.
9. The weakening of
principled politics was evident after 1877, as Republicans backpedaled on the
race issue and abandoned blacks to their own fate.
B. The Ideology of
Individualism
1. In the 1880s the
economic doctrine of laissez faire was the belief that the less government did, the better.
2. Popular writings
abounded with rags-to-riches stories, like the novels of Horatio Alger and
innumerable success manuals. Also popular were Carnegie’s autobiography Triumphant
Democracy and sermons praising wealth, including Bishop Lawrence’s
assurance that “Godliness is in leage with riches”
and Russell H. Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds.”
3. Charles Darwin’s Origin of
Species (1859) explained a process of evolution called natural selection
and created a revolution in biology.
4. Herbert Spencer’s
theory of social Darwinism spun out an elaborate analysis of how human society
had evolved through competition and “survival of the fittest” — millionaires
being the fittest.
5. Social Darwinists
regarded any governmental interference on behalf of the “unfit” as destructive to
“natural” social processes.
C. The Supremacy of the
Courts
1. Suspicion of
government paralyzed political initiative and shifted power away from the
executive and legislative branches.
2. From the 1870s
onward, the courts increasingly became the guardians of the rights of private
property against the grasping tentacles of government, especially state
governments.
3. State governments
had primary responsibility for social welfare and economic regulation, but it
was difficult to strike a balance between state responsibility and the rights
of individuals.
4. Used by the Supreme
Court, the Fourteenth Amendment was a powerful restraint on the states in the
use of their police powers in order to regulate private business.
5. Judicial supremacy
reflected how dominant the ideology of individualism had become and also how
low American politicians had fallen in the esteem of their countrymen.
A. Cultural Politics:
Party, Religion, and Ethnicity
1. Proportionately
more voters turned out in presidential elections from 1876 to 1892 than at any
other time in American history.
2. In an age before
movies and radio, politics ranked as one of the great American forms of entertainment,
yet party loyalty was a deadly serious matter.
3. Sectional
differences, religion, and ethnicity often determined party loyalty; northern
Democrats tended to be foreign-born and Catholic, and Republicans tended to be nativeborn and Protestant.
4. Hot social issues —
education, the liquor question, and observance of the Sabbath —were also party
issues and lent deep significance to party affiliation.
Chapter Annotated Outline 37
B. Organizational
Politics
1. By the 1870s, both
parties had evolved formal, well-organized structures.
2. The parties were
run by unofficial internal organizations
·
“political machines” — that
consisted of insiders willing to
do party work in exchange for public jobs or connections.
3. Power brokerage
being their main interest, party bosses treated public issues as somewhat irrelevant.
4. There was intense
factionalism within the parties; in 1877 the Republican Party divided into the
Stalwarts and the Halfbreeds, who were really fighting
over the spoils of party politics.
5. Veterans of machine
politics proved to be effective legislators and congressmen, and party machines
did informally much of what governmental systems left undone. However,
political machines never won widespread approval.
6. In 1884, some
Republicans left their party and became known as Mugwumps,
a term referring to pompous or self-important persons.
7. The Mugwumps controlled newspapers and journals that shaped
public opinion. They registered their biggest success in the battle for the secret
ballot. Adopted in the early 1890s, the secret ballot freed voters from party
surveillance as they exercised the right to vote.
8. Mugwumps
were reformers but not on behalf of working people or the poor; true to the spirit
of the age, they believed that the government that governed least, governed
best.
C. Women’s Political
Culture
1. Due to the nature
of party politics, it was considered to be no place for women.
2. The woman suffrage
movement met fierce opposition; suffragists abandoned their efforts to get a
constitutional amendment and concentrated on state campaigns.
3. Since many of the
women’s social goals required state intervention, women’s organizations became
politically active and sought to create their own political sphere.
4. Women’s
organizations worked to end prostitution, assisted the poor, agitated for
prison reform, and tried to improve educational opportunities for women.
5. The Women’s
Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was formed in 1874 to combat alcoholism, and
later, under the guidance of Frances Willard, the WCTU adopted a “Do Everything”
policy.
6. The WCTU was drawn
to woman suffrage, arguing that women needed the vote in order to fulfill their
social and spiritual responsibilities as women—an argument that did not pose a threat
to masculine pride.
7. By linking women’s
social concerns to women’s political participation, the WCTU helped to lay the
groundwork for a fresh attack on male electoral politics in the early twentieth
century.
A. Biracial Politics
1. When Reconstruction
ended in 1877, blacks had not been driven from politics—but they did not
participate on equal terms with whites and were routinely intimidated during
political campaigns.
2. After the Civil
War, southern Democrats felt they had “redeemed” the South from Republican domination;
hence, they adopted the name “Redeemers.”
3. The Republican
Party in the South soldiered on, aided by a key Democrat vulnerability: the gap
between the Redemption claims of universality and its actual domination by the
South’s economic elite.
4. The Civil War
brought out differences between the planter elite and the farmers who were called
on to shed blood for a slaveholding system in which they had no interest.
5. After the Civil
War, class tensions were exacerbated by the spread of farm tenancy, instead of farm
ownership, and the emergence of the low-wage factory.
6. In
7. As an insurgence
against the Democrats accelerated, the question of black participation in politics
and interracial solidarity became critical.
8. Black farmers
developed a political structure of their own, the Colored Farmers’
B. One-Party Rule
Triumphant
1. The conservative
Democrats paraded as the “white man’s party” and denounced the Populists for
promoting “Negro rule,” yet they shamelessly competed for the black vote.
2. Mischief at the
polls—counting the votes of blacks that were dead or gone—enabled the Democrats
to beat back the Populists in the 1892 elections.
3. Disenfranchising
the blacks became a potent movement in the South; in 1890,
38 Chapter 18 The Politics of
Late Nineteenth-Century
4. Poor whites turned
their fury on the blacks; they did not want to be disenfranchised by their own
lack of education and expected lenient enforcement of the literacy test.
5. Tom Watson, once a
fervent Georgia Populist, reversed his position, largely to save his political career.
Rallying poor whites, he appealed not to their class interests but to their
racial prejudices.
6. Segregated seating
in trains in the late 1880s set a precedent for the legal separation of the races;
Jim Crow laws soon applied to every type of public facility.
7. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme
Court upheld the constitutionality of “separate-but-equal” segregation.
8. Williams v.Mississippi (1898) validated the
disenfranchising devices of southern states, as long as race was not a
specified criterion for disfranchisement.
9. Race hatred in the
South manifested itself in a wave of lynching and race riots, and public
vilification of blacks became commonplace.
C. Resisting White
Supremacy
1. Southern blacks
resisted white supremacy as best they could; beginning in 1891, blacks
boycotted segregated streetcars in at least twentyfive
cities; Ida Wells began her antilynching campaign.
2. Some blacks were
drawn to the Back to
3. The foremost black
leader of his day, Booker T.
4.
5. Younger educated
blacks thought
6. By 1915,
A. The Populist Revolt
1. Farmers needed
organization to overcome their social isolation and to provide economic
services—hence, the appeal of the Granger movement and later the farmers’
alliances.
2. Two dominant
organizations emerged: the Farmers’
3. The
4. As state alliances
grew stronger and more impatient, they began to field independent slates; the
national People’s (Populist) Party was formed in 1892.
5. In 1892 the
Populist’s presidential candidate, James B.Weaver,
captured enough votes to make it clear that the agrarian protest could be a
challenge to the two-party system.
6. Although the
Populist Party welcomed women, its platform was silent on woman suffrage.
7. Populism differed
from the two mainstream parties in that it had a positive attitude toward government,
and it acknowledged the conflict between capital and labor.
8. Free silver emerged
as the overriding demand of the Populist Party and the Omaha Platform; embattled
farmers hoped that an increase in the money supply would raise farm prices and give
them relief.
9. Social Democrats
and agrarian radicals argued that if free silver became the defining party issue,
it would undercut the broader Populist program and alienate wage earners.
10. The practical appeal
of silver was too great, and the Populists fatally compromised their party’s
capacity to maintain an independent existence.
B. Money and Politics
1. The
2. The
3. When silver prices
plummeted, inflationists began to agitate for a
resumption of the bimetallic policy; modest victories were won with the
Bland-Allison Act of 1878 and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890.
4. When the crash of
1893 hit, the silver issue divided politics along party lines, with the
Democrats bearing the brunt of the responsibility for handling the economic
crisis.
5. Grover Cleveland, a
sound-money man, did a poor job of handling the crisis; he had to aban-
Chapter Annotated Outline 39
don a silver-based currency
and had Congress repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.
6.
7. In his “Cross of
Gold” speech in 1896, the Democratic nomination ofWilliam
Jennings Bryan established the Democrats as the party of free silver.
8. The Populists accepted
9. The Republicans’ candidate,William McKinley, won
the election;McKinley stood solidly for high tariffs,
honest money, and prosperity.
10. When McKinley won
the election, Republicans became the nation’s majority party, and electoral politics
regained its place as an arena for national debate.
11. Populism faded away,
as did the issue of free silver—the issue upon which the party had staked its
fate.
12. In 1897 the world
market for agricultural commodities turned favorable and a new spirit of optimism
took hold in the “golden age” of American agriculture before World War I.
1. Discuss the American
political scene from the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes to the election of William
McKinley. Points to cover include the limited function of the federal
government and the presidency; the Mugwumps; party
deadlock, especially in Congress; ethnocultural
politics; the Populists; and the developing woman suffrage movement.
2. Analyze the “ideology
of individualism.” Define “individualism” as it was understood at the time.
Explain the principles of social Darwinism and the activities of the courts in
this regard. Explore the connection between the ideology of individualism and
the idea of the American dream.
3. Explain the American
fascination with politics in the 1870s and 1880s and note the importance of
party loyalty. Explain how the parties divided along ethnic and religious lines
as well as people’s attitudes toward public morality issues.
4. A lecture on the
Populist revolt provides a good opportunity to bring together discordant points
in the chapter. For example, one can tie the quest for woman suffrage to the
significant role women played in the Populist movement. Similarly, the
hardships of agriculture can be linked to the issue of race, as exemplified by
the Colored Farmers’
5. The importance of
the 1896 presidential election makes it a worthwhile lecture topic. Significant
points to emphasize include how the election broke a political deadlock and
created a Republican ascendancy, the sectional nature of the voting, the role
of the currency standard in the campaign, the importance of the economy to
voters, and a comparison of the campaigns of William Jennings Bryan and William
McKinley.