I would like to bring a crucial point about strategy to the attention of Ron Paul voters, libertarians and especially members of the Libertarian Party. The LP might reconsider its three-decade old strategy and adopt an interest group approach that worked well for the Mugwumps, or independent Republicans, in the 19th century.
David Tucker has written an excellent book on the Mugwumps. The name Mugwumps comes from a term that Algonquin Indians used for young chieftain. They were upper-class north easterners, many of whom had been abolitionists. Many died just before World War I, and their last major battle involved opposition to US imperialism and the Spanish-American War, which the early progressive-liberals, such as Theodore Roosevelt, supported.
The Mugwumps were the first industrial age libertarian movement. The chief issues with which the Mugwumps were concerned were:
1. Sound money and reestablishment of a pure gold standard
2. Free trade
3. Elimination of corruption from government by establishment of civil service
The Mugwumps have not always received favorable press from left-wing historians. In spirit, they were the American branch of the anti-Corn Law movement of Cobden and Bright. Several of them corresponded with John Stuart Mill.
1. The Mugwumps constituted a smaller percentage of the population than the Libertarian Party reflects today, but their effect on American politics was much larger than the combined Libertarian and conservative movements of the past 40 years.
2. It is true that the Mugwumps had far greater media support, namely Harper's Weekly, the Nation, the New York Post and the New York Times as well as several other publications than today's libertarians.
3. In that period, voters were more committed to party-line voting than today, so although the Mugwumps could leverage greater publicity, their ability to influence voting was smaller as a percentage of the vote than the Libertarian Party's today. If you add Ron Paul's Republican followers, then the total number of today's libertarians would be many times greater than the votes that the Mugwumps could leverage
4. The Mugwumps ran separate presidential candidates only twice: Horace Greeley in 1872 and John M. Palmer in 1896.
5. The Mugwumps' greatest success came in 1884, when they refused to back the Republican candidate, James Blaine, and instead backed the hard money, free trade Democrat Grover Cleveland.
6. Because the race in New York was decided by less than one percent, some credited them with winning the 1884 election for Cleveland.
7. They saw many of their ideas accepted. These included official de-politicization of the money supply; free trade and reduction of the tariff; and the civil service.
8. They failed circa 1900 because economists trained in the German historical school came to dominate university economics departments, depriving them of universities' imprimatur, and because of widespread support for imperialism in the 1890s. Imperialism and government economic intervention were more attractive to turn of the century Americans, especially the generation born after the Civil War. The loss of academia to the progressive-liberals caused the Mugwumps to die. They have been largely forgotten because of the loss of continuity, but they were prominent in my grandfather's lifetime.
9. The Mugwumps were repeatedly successful when they brokered between the political parties and served as a special interest group. They were repeated failures when they ran third party candidates.
The Libertarian Party has served an important educational function since the 1970s in education in the principles of free markets and civil freedom. Although classical liberalism has numerically and percentage-wise a greater base now than it did in 1884, it has not succeeded anywhere near as much as the 19th century movement succeeded. The problem has been tactical.
The Mugwumps believed that the Republicans were the "party of principle", but they were willing to broker deals to support either party, as they did with the Democratic candidacy of Grover Cleveland. They did this because in their view the Republicans failed to live up to its promise and did not support liberal principle following the Civil War.
Conservatives and libertarians today have been dismayed at the choices that the mainstream parties present. But with five to ten percent of the vote, and possibly more, believers in classical liberalism constitute a powerful voting block.
The Libertarian Party is making a mistake by not offering compromise deals to the major parties, and going with the better of the two (not necessarily one or the other).
The Mugwumps were able to leverage say 100,000 votes by brokering between parties. There is no reason why classical liberals, libertarians and free market conservatives, who may represent 20 to 45 million votes, cannot do the same.
Partisan support for the Republicans and/or the third party approach has failed. The time has come for a change in strategy.
Showing posts with label Independent Republicans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Independent Republicans. Show all posts
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Democratic versus Achievement Motives in American History
David M. Tucker. Mugwumps: Public Moralists of The Gilded Age. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1998. 139 pp.
David M. Tucker's Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age is an excellent overview of the Mugwumps. It is sympathetic to its subject, unlike others who have written about the Mugwumps. Phrases like "Old Right" abound in the post-war libertarian literature, but the image often is vague. Tucker's book shows that the 19th century classical liberals, known as independent Republicans, were former abolitionists, not bigots in any sense of the word (the few that turned out to be, such as Henry Adams ceased to be considered Mugwumps and became associated with Populism), and were very conscious of their libertarian ideology, their commitment to Adam Smith, the Manchester liberals and John Stuart Mill, with whom several corresponded. The Mugwumps were:
-A small movement, no larger than today's Libertarian Party as a percentage of the voting public, and probably smaller
-sharply differentiated from the two major parties in terms of their commitment to liberal or libertarian ideas, specifically tariff reduction (which the Democrats tended to support and the Republicans tended to oppose); hard money and the gold standard (which neither party really supported); and opposition to imperialism
-support for the newly formed (under the Pendleton Act) federal civil service, which they thought would end corruption in government and reduce the opportunity for spoils, which led the public to support corrupt government (in other words, they wanted to end special interest capture of government)
The book is very well written (although at times there could have been slightly better transitioning and linkage of ideas) and of serious interest to libertarians, conservatives, and those with an interest in the decline of morals in business and government.
Although the Mugwumps were the first post-industrial libertarian movement, they also were at the root of today's progressive-liberalism, as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out. The effectiveness of their tactics, the use of social control and groupthink to effectuate a uniform party platform, served as a model to the next generation's emphasis on big government, imperialism and state intervention in the economy. Most of all, Mugwumps pioneered the use of groupthink as a political tactic. This has been copied not only by the progressive-liberals but also by today's Libertarian Party, which borrows the Mugwumps' appellation for the Republican Party, "the party of principle".
Tucker's perspective on the Mugwumps is sharply from John R. Dobson's Politics in the Gilded Age which I blog here. Tucker has more respect for the Mugwumps.
David Riesmann has argued that in the twentieth century Americans turned from a 19th century inner directedness that involves a goal and future orientation to an other directedness that involves a focus on peers, influence from popular media, fashion and interpersonal relationships at work. But the tension between these two impulses was already evident in the 1870s.
Several of the Mugwumps, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, sacrificed their Mugwump ideals for conformity to the Republicans' political demands. They refused to join the other Mugwumps in exiting the Republican Party in 1884. Both Roosevelt and Lodge had much more successful political careers than the other Mugwumps because they put politics over principle, and they did so by adopt the other-directed progressive-liberal ideas of the early twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt may be thought of as the first other-directed American.
A few of the Mugwumps, such as Henry Adams, who rejected Mugwumpery in favor of anti-Semitism, Populism and free silver (Tucker suggests that the Adamses' exit from Mugwumpery was related to their failure in real estate speculation in Spokane and Kansas City and their hope for a silver inflation). Henry Adams became a Populist who blamed Jewish bankers for his business failings.
The most effective Mugwumps were those who played off the two-party system, favoring one or the other party depending on who was following the most libertarian course. They became famous for this in 1884, when they contributed to the defeat of James G. Blaine in favor of Grover Cleveland, who was a largely libertarian president.
The Mugwumps ran only two independent candidates in their roughly 35-year history: Horace Greeley of the Liberal Republicans in 1872 and John M. Palmer of the National Democrats in 1895. Neither fared well. There is a lesson for the Libertarian Party here. The LP would function more effectively as an election spoiler than as an independent political party.
The Mugwumps (or Independent Republicans) were mostly upper class northeasterners, mainly from New England and New York. They tended to have been educated in religious, Protestant schools and to have had a strong moral sense. Many were former abolitionists. They were not religious themselves, but their grounding and education was. They were concerned with the decay of morals in American politics, and were inclined to foresake personal gain and office on behalf of their ideals, which did not match their economic interests. In other words, many of them benefited from paper money and inflation, but they opposed it on moral grounds, and the same is true of tariffs. Many left wing historians, who lack grounding in economics and ethics, look for class or personal motives in the Mugwumps' position. Ironically, support for inflation, free silver, greenbacks and Keynesian economics is very much the position that favors the upper class, banking interests, Wall Street, hedge fund billionaires, large coroporations and corporate executvies. It was Theodore Roosevelt who benefited from his cynical adoption of progressive-liberalism, the ideology of the American upper class from 1900 to 2007. EL Godkin, Carl Schurz, Horace White and the other Mugwumps paid dearly for their idealistic commitment to morality in politics. The fact that historians have often treated them shabbily suggests shabbines in academia more than anything else.
The Independent Republicans had one advantage over today's libertarians and conservatives: the intellectual support of mainstream universities. Relatively few Americans were capable of thinking through monetary issues even in the 1870s. Today, probably even a smaller percentage of the population is willing to expend the effort to do so. However, when the Mugwumps could say that their ideas had the backing of Harvard economists, the public was much more likely to defer. In this sense, they provided a role model to today's progressive-liberals, who dominate our society through their control of higher education. This intrigues me because it suggests a tighter link between the ideology of higher education, economic interests and what Howard S. Katz calls "the paper aristocracy" than I used to think.
The Mugwumps had limited data on which to base their arguments, and they fell into a number of errors. The most grievous Mugwumps fell were their support for the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank and their belief that the civil service would end special interest politics and government corruption. Their emphasis on the Fed came from three factors: (1) they believed that the Fed would be constrained by the gold standard, which Roosevelt abolished in the 1930s; (2) they believed that separating money from politics would reduce the temptation to inflate (they overrated the institutional separation of the Fed from Congress; (3) they did not anticipate Keynesian economics, which provided an ideological rationale for the inflationist view which (not to blame them, who could would have known?).
Their notions of morality led to their belief in free trade, the gold standard and honest government, notably via civil service reform. Their advocacy of sound money and free trade, which they explicitly linked to the elimination of special privilege, favoritism for the rich (the debtor class, according to their arguments, being the chief beneficiaries of paper money, then as now) was explicitly rooted in their moral sense. They saw individual achievement, self sufficiency and hard work as moral principles that protectionism and paper money would debase.
Then as now there were powerful forces arrayed against moralist and hard money positions. There was strong western agitation for greenbacks and then silver inflation by landowners (much as the subprime crisis today has been a strong motivation of reallocation of wealth to wealthy investment bankers and landowners), and politicians were inclined to support the demands for inflation. In fact, there were several greenback and free silver bills passed, that Mugwump agitation was able to stop, and some that the Mugwumps could not stop.
The Mugwumps saw the debate as one involving moral principle against personal gain. Those who favored personal gain over morals joined the regular party ranks. Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, are cited as two examples of reformers who chose to emphasize their careers as opposed to their morals. When James G. B
Gain in democracatic politics is linked to popular appeal. Hence other directedness results from focus on public opinion. However, the advances in American society came not from the political but from the creative, scientific, engineering and management fields, which do not depend on public opinion. Theodore Roosevelt was among the first other-directed, twentieth century men. In choosing personal gain and political advantage over moral belief, he set the stage for the progressive-liberalism of the twentieth century, its moral vacuity and the economic decline that will result from focus on relationships and opinion rather than achievement.
David M. Tucker's Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age is an excellent overview of the Mugwumps. It is sympathetic to its subject, unlike others who have written about the Mugwumps. Phrases like "Old Right" abound in the post-war libertarian literature, but the image often is vague. Tucker's book shows that the 19th century classical liberals, known as independent Republicans, were former abolitionists, not bigots in any sense of the word (the few that turned out to be, such as Henry Adams ceased to be considered Mugwumps and became associated with Populism), and were very conscious of their libertarian ideology, their commitment to Adam Smith, the Manchester liberals and John Stuart Mill, with whom several corresponded. The Mugwumps were:
-A small movement, no larger than today's Libertarian Party as a percentage of the voting public, and probably smaller
-sharply differentiated from the two major parties in terms of their commitment to liberal or libertarian ideas, specifically tariff reduction (which the Democrats tended to support and the Republicans tended to oppose); hard money and the gold standard (which neither party really supported); and opposition to imperialism
-support for the newly formed (under the Pendleton Act) federal civil service, which they thought would end corruption in government and reduce the opportunity for spoils, which led the public to support corrupt government (in other words, they wanted to end special interest capture of government)
The book is very well written (although at times there could have been slightly better transitioning and linkage of ideas) and of serious interest to libertarians, conservatives, and those with an interest in the decline of morals in business and government.
Although the Mugwumps were the first post-industrial libertarian movement, they also were at the root of today's progressive-liberalism, as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out. The effectiveness of their tactics, the use of social control and groupthink to effectuate a uniform party platform, served as a model to the next generation's emphasis on big government, imperialism and state intervention in the economy. Most of all, Mugwumps pioneered the use of groupthink as a political tactic. This has been copied not only by the progressive-liberals but also by today's Libertarian Party, which borrows the Mugwumps' appellation for the Republican Party, "the party of principle".
Tucker's perspective on the Mugwumps is sharply from John R. Dobson's Politics in the Gilded Age which I blog here. Tucker has more respect for the Mugwumps.
David Riesmann has argued that in the twentieth century Americans turned from a 19th century inner directedness that involves a goal and future orientation to an other directedness that involves a focus on peers, influence from popular media, fashion and interpersonal relationships at work. But the tension between these two impulses was already evident in the 1870s.
Several of the Mugwumps, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, sacrificed their Mugwump ideals for conformity to the Republicans' political demands. They refused to join the other Mugwumps in exiting the Republican Party in 1884. Both Roosevelt and Lodge had much more successful political careers than the other Mugwumps because they put politics over principle, and they did so by adopt the other-directed progressive-liberal ideas of the early twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt may be thought of as the first other-directed American.
A few of the Mugwumps, such as Henry Adams, who rejected Mugwumpery in favor of anti-Semitism, Populism and free silver (Tucker suggests that the Adamses' exit from Mugwumpery was related to their failure in real estate speculation in Spokane and Kansas City and their hope for a silver inflation). Henry Adams became a Populist who blamed Jewish bankers for his business failings.
The most effective Mugwumps were those who played off the two-party system, favoring one or the other party depending on who was following the most libertarian course. They became famous for this in 1884, when they contributed to the defeat of James G. Blaine in favor of Grover Cleveland, who was a largely libertarian president.
The Mugwumps ran only two independent candidates in their roughly 35-year history: Horace Greeley of the Liberal Republicans in 1872 and John M. Palmer of the National Democrats in 1895. Neither fared well. There is a lesson for the Libertarian Party here. The LP would function more effectively as an election spoiler than as an independent political party.
The Mugwumps (or Independent Republicans) were mostly upper class northeasterners, mainly from New England and New York. They tended to have been educated in religious, Protestant schools and to have had a strong moral sense. Many were former abolitionists. They were not religious themselves, but their grounding and education was. They were concerned with the decay of morals in American politics, and were inclined to foresake personal gain and office on behalf of their ideals, which did not match their economic interests. In other words, many of them benefited from paper money and inflation, but they opposed it on moral grounds, and the same is true of tariffs. Many left wing historians, who lack grounding in economics and ethics, look for class or personal motives in the Mugwumps' position. Ironically, support for inflation, free silver, greenbacks and Keynesian economics is very much the position that favors the upper class, banking interests, Wall Street, hedge fund billionaires, large coroporations and corporate executvies. It was Theodore Roosevelt who benefited from his cynical adoption of progressive-liberalism, the ideology of the American upper class from 1900 to 2007. EL Godkin, Carl Schurz, Horace White and the other Mugwumps paid dearly for their idealistic commitment to morality in politics. The fact that historians have often treated them shabbily suggests shabbines in academia more than anything else.
The Independent Republicans had one advantage over today's libertarians and conservatives: the intellectual support of mainstream universities. Relatively few Americans were capable of thinking through monetary issues even in the 1870s. Today, probably even a smaller percentage of the population is willing to expend the effort to do so. However, when the Mugwumps could say that their ideas had the backing of Harvard economists, the public was much more likely to defer. In this sense, they provided a role model to today's progressive-liberals, who dominate our society through their control of higher education. This intrigues me because it suggests a tighter link between the ideology of higher education, economic interests and what Howard S. Katz calls "the paper aristocracy" than I used to think.
The Mugwumps had limited data on which to base their arguments, and they fell into a number of errors. The most grievous Mugwumps fell were their support for the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank and their belief that the civil service would end special interest politics and government corruption. Their emphasis on the Fed came from three factors: (1) they believed that the Fed would be constrained by the gold standard, which Roosevelt abolished in the 1930s; (2) they believed that separating money from politics would reduce the temptation to inflate (they overrated the institutional separation of the Fed from Congress; (3) they did not anticipate Keynesian economics, which provided an ideological rationale for the inflationist view which (not to blame them, who could would have known?).
Their notions of morality led to their belief in free trade, the gold standard and honest government, notably via civil service reform. Their advocacy of sound money and free trade, which they explicitly linked to the elimination of special privilege, favoritism for the rich (the debtor class, according to their arguments, being the chief beneficiaries of paper money, then as now) was explicitly rooted in their moral sense. They saw individual achievement, self sufficiency and hard work as moral principles that protectionism and paper money would debase.
Then as now there were powerful forces arrayed against moralist and hard money positions. There was strong western agitation for greenbacks and then silver inflation by landowners (much as the subprime crisis today has been a strong motivation of reallocation of wealth to wealthy investment bankers and landowners), and politicians were inclined to support the demands for inflation. In fact, there were several greenback and free silver bills passed, that Mugwump agitation was able to stop, and some that the Mugwumps could not stop.
The Mugwumps saw the debate as one involving moral principle against personal gain. Those who favored personal gain over morals joined the regular party ranks. Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, are cited as two examples of reformers who chose to emphasize their careers as opposed to their morals. When James G. B
Gain in democracatic politics is linked to popular appeal. Hence other directedness results from focus on public opinion. However, the advances in American society came not from the political but from the creative, scientific, engineering and management fields, which do not depend on public opinion. Theodore Roosevelt was among the first other-directed, twentieth century men. In choosing personal gain and political advantage over moral belief, he set the stage for the progressive-liberalism of the twentieth century, its moral vacuity and the economic decline that will result from focus on relationships and opinion rather than achievement.
Friday, January 11, 2008
John M. Dobson's Politics in the Gilded Age
John M. Dobson. Politics in the Gilded Age: A New Perspective on Reform. New York: Prager Publishers. 1972. 200 pp.
Professor John M. Dobson retired from Iowa State University in 1999 and published Politics in the Gilded Age when I was a college sophomore in 1972. This is a good, timeless book. I read it because it sheds light on important issues: how past generations have pressured the established political parties; what strategies they have used; and how the American public has reacted to political corruption.
The politics of the gilded age was in some ways more naive than today, but in some ways it was more sophisticated. The reform-minded Republicans, who were well educated, affluent and often former abolitionists, believed that the corruption associated with the political machines would be ended through establishment of a civil service system. This belief turned out to have been naive. They believed that since the political machines depended on spoils, a civil service system would limit spoils and so end the machines. The civil service was adopted via the Pendleton Act, and even though the Presidents of the gilded age, notably Chester Alan Arthur, were part of the corrupt local machines (Arthur had been head of New York's customs house, among the most corrupt federal jobs) the Pendleton Act was implemented in good faith.
But the civil service did not end the political machines and it did not end the corruption. This was an early instance of reformers' believing that more government would end corrupt government, but it was not to be the last. This idea has been carried forward by today's progressive-liberals, who also have faith in the idea that lobbying, political favors, corrupt government contracts and the like can be ended through bigger programs.
In other ways, though, the politics of the gilded age were more sophisticated than today's. The chief issues that faced America were protectionism and the monetary system. These are still important issues, but today they are debated and discussed in a less sophisticated manner than in the 1880s. Unlike today, there were proponents of hard money in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. The Democrats who favored the gold standard included business-oriented conservatives known as the Bourbon Democrats. But the Republicans were also divided until the 1896election. Grover Cleveland, a Bourbon Democrat, supported the gold standard. It was in the 1896 election that William Jennings Bryan adopted the position of the Populist Party (ending the Populist Party's insurgency) and praised the use of silver for money, equivalent to the inflationist Keynesian ideology of today that both Democrats and Republicans favor.
Because of Bryan's candidacy, gold standard advocates moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party, and the Republican Party remained the hard money party until the 1960s. In 1971, President Richard Nixon adopted the Keynesian/Populist position, driving the hard money position to the fringes of American politics. This was reinforced by President Ronald Reagan, who was as inflationist as William Jennings Bryan. Hence, the insurgent Populist Party, which was a minor third party with wide public appeal, probably had more influence than any of the other major players in 1884.
Because the Federal Reserve Bank took control of the money supply away from politicians, the surviving Independent Republicans or Mugwumps from 1884 supported the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. As with the civil service, the Mugwumps were naive about the importance of innovative government programs like the Fed. They thought that setting up a body separate from the politicians would make the creation of money independent from political pressure.
Dobson does not emphasize the crucial debates of that period about hard money versus soft and protectionism versus free trade, but he mentions enough to paint a rough picture. The Republicans favored protectionism because high prices are in business's interest, and the Democrats favored free trade because low prices are in everybody else's interest. Some business-oriented Democrats also supported free trade. At the same time, the Republicans were able to convince some wage earners that protectionism was in their interest because higher prices might mean higher wages.
Dobson divides his interesting narrative into two parts. In the first, he describes how the highly structured Democratic and Republican Parties (that have continued until today) came about in the late nineteenth century. In the second, he describes how the Mugwumps fought the established Republicans, helping to give the 1884 Presidential election to Grover Cleveland and stopping the election of James Blaine.
Although Blaine may not have been particularly corrupt, the Mugwumps identified Blaine with corruption. The Mugwumps' failure to end corruption through their activism and through the establishment of the Civil Service led the early twentieth century to progressive-liberalism. Progressive-liberalism was a further response to political corruption.
Summary
The radical Republicans of the post-Lincoln era aimed to retaliate against the South and impeached President Andrew Johnson. They were dominant for the twenty years following the Civil War, in part because of what was called the Bloody Shirt, their use of the memory of the Civil War to win elections. The Republicans of this era included Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Butler and Roscoe Conkling (p.23). The Republicans' early big-government laws during the Civil War, such as the Homestead Act, appealed to landless farmers, and the Republicans also appealed to the recently freed slaves in the South.
Having been discredited by the Civil War, the Democrats appealed to white southerners, workers in the north and those concerned with local issues (p. 24). The parties quickly became very similar in ideas(p. 25), and their appeal was primarily sectional. Local political activists, ward healers, were the basis of the parties' strength. People interested in becoming professional politicians joined political clubs such as New York's Tammany Hall (p. 27). The political machines gained support by providing services, and these included things like being able to tell a judge to give a not guilty verdict on behalf of a political contributor. Government workers gave kickbacks from their salaries to support the machines as well. Patronage was even more important then than it is now, although Dobson argues that it was not essential to the functioning of the machines (p. 33), which was what the Mugwumps thought.
US Senators were elected by state legislatures in that period, so Senators were intimately involved with state politics. Dobson writes (p. 33) that "the Senate resembled a sort of federation of state bosses."
The federal government spent less after than during the Civil War than, and the sum of states' spending exceeded federal spending. In 1880 the federal government collected $360 million in tariffs, but the entire federal budget was only $260 million, half of which went to Civil War veterans, while the states spent $300 million (p. 35). The federal government had a $100 million surplus.
The public tended to be loyal to a single party (p. 38). However, each party had divergent beliefs internally. There was more divergence within the parties than between them. Samuel J. Tilden, the New York governor who ran for president in 1876, was an advocate of the gold standard, while Thomas Hendricks of Indiana, the Democrats' 1876 vice-presidential nominee, favored greenbacks, which would be the same as the pro-inflation stance that leading politicians have adopted today.
The post-Civil War period experienced an inflationary boom because of the of the greenbacks that financed the War. In the monetary sense, the post Civil War period was like a milder version of the post-World War II period, the ReInflateoCrat period, which has been associated with a mild inflationary boom. Also similar to the post-World War II period, the Civil War had expanded government.
In 1872, Senator Carl Schurz (R-Mo), a German immigrant, led an anti-Grant crusade (p. 41) within the Republican Party, which led to the formation of the Liberal Republican movement, which became a separate party for a while. The Democrats backed the Liberal-Republicans in 1872 because they were so weak in the immediate post-Civil War era.
The pro-Grant forces within the Republican Party were known as Stalwarts, and the anti-Grant forces within the Republican Party were later known as Half-Breeds. The Half Breeds were in favor of what Dobson calls (p. 64) "Northern moral attitudes". The Liberal Republicans formed a separate party that nominated Horace Greeley, once editor of the New York Tribune. However, the Liberal Republicans and Greeley were ineffective, a trait that Dobson argues the Mugwumps shared.
In 1873, the greenback boom led to a depression, and the Democrats won Congress for the first time since the Civil War. There were intermittent recessions through the late 19th century as the effects of the greenbacks wore off. (Then, in the 1890s, the Populists' free silver movement took root.) However, the deflation of the late 19th century was accompanied by rising real wages, a feat the that the ReInflateoCrats of the late twentieth century have been unable to duplicate. Unlike the 19th century, in the late twentieth century the American public has been too poorly educated to understand that its dollar buys two thirds less than it did 30 years ago.
In 1876, Governor Samuel J. Tilden (D-NY), who had ousted Boss Tweed and was known as an anti-corrupton governor, ran for president. The Stalwarts wanted Grant to run again, but the Half-Breeds favored James G. Blaine, a former Speaker of the House (p. 47). As a compromise, the Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes. The vote was very close, and was decided by an electoral commission. In return for agreeing to a partisan commission's findings and agreeing to let Hayes become president, the Democrats asked that all northern troops be withdrawn from the South (p. 48).
Dobson argues that President Hayes was "mixed" on civil service reform, in part because he appointed Carl Schurz as Secretary of the Interior and allowed Schurz to establish a merit-based system for the Department of Interior. He also appointed Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. (President Roosevelt's father) to be head of the New York Customs House (p. 63), firing Chester A. Arthur and Alonzo B. Cornell, who had been the corrupt heads. Senator Roscoe Conkling (R-NY) complained angrily, and the Senate vetoed the new appointments. However, President Hayes put through the Roosevelt appointment when the Senate was out of session.
The three Republican factions that were forming at this time were the Stalwarts, the Half Breeds and the much smaller Independent Republican faction. When Alonzo B. Cornell successfully ran for governor, the Independents handed in Republican ballots (ballots were printed by partisan newspapers in those days) but scratched Cornell's name from the ballots. Thus they became known as scratchers. The Independents hated patronage and corruption on moral grounds. They were unlike the Half-Breeds, who were moralistic but interested in partaking in the corruption. Today, the Stalwarts and the Half Breeds have mostly succeeded within the parties, although voters are not so party-focused as before. But the absence of effective third parties means that although there are more independent voters, with the parties being so dominated by partisan posturing, the independent voters have little choice. This is not so much a matter of right versus left or social conservative versus social liberal. It is, rather, a matter of an absence of intellectual innovation in both parties with no alternative to today's independent voter.
James Garfield won the 1880 presidential election but was assassinated by an insane Stalwart Charles Guiteau, on June 2, 1881. Garfield was a Half-Breed but his vice-president, Chester Alan Arthur, was a Stalwart. In response to Arthur's ascension to the presidency, the Independent Republicans created the National Civil Service Reform League in 1881. In 1882 Congress passed the Pendleton Act, empowering the president to appoint a Civil Service Commission that was charged with establishing a set of rules involving competitive examinations and objective selection of job candidates. The law applied only to some federal employees. Soon after the Pendleton Act, state legislatures passed similar state laws.
Dobson quotes (p. 74) the work of Gerald McFarland, who studied the backgrounds of 400 prominent Independent Republicans in 1884. Almost all of the Independent Republicans were professionals and independents, and a substantial number were millionaires (a million dollars in 1880 was worth about $45 million today). The Republicans had been a party of abolitionists and moralists, and they were disgusted by the corruption of the party machines. The leading state for Independent Republicans was Massachusetts closely followed by New York and then Connecticut and other New England states.
The leader was George William Curtis, who was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, editor of Harper's Weekly, an abolitionist, a supporter of Radical Reconstruction and opponent of the Tweed ring. Dorman B. Eaton, another Independent Republican was a Harvard Law School graduate whom President Arthur appointed to head the Civil Service Commission. Edwin Lawrence Godkin edited the New York Evening Post (now owned by Rupert Murdoch) and the Nation. The New York Times, at that time a Republican paper, also supported the Independent Republicans. As well, Teddy Roosevelt, who was only 25 in 1884 was a supporter of the Independent Republicans, although he did not break with the Republican Party in 1884 as many of them did.
In 1884, the Stalwarts supported a third term for Grant, while the Half-Breeds supported James G. Blaine (p. 87). Dobson notes of the Independent Republicans (p.88):
"The Independents' anti-Blaine campaign of 1884 illustrates the irrationality that often accompanies an emotional crusade. The reformers started out with a reasonable complaint abut the way political affairs were developing...Through their leagues and reform clubs, the Independents had developed a reputation for rational and intelligent action...They lost that and more in the 1884 campaign as they gradually turned into one-sided partisans."
Thus, the Mugwumps' reaction to James G. Blaine was probably irrational, much like much of the media buzz about politics today. They were subject to groupthink and were obsessed with preventing Blaine's election, even though his ultimate opponent, Grover Cleveland, was not demonstrably better than Blaine and owed party hacks in the Democratic Party.
The Independent Republicans backed George F. Edmunds of Vermont, and refused to compromise with the two major candidates, James Blaine and Chester Alan Arthur. When Blaine won the nomination, many of the Independents dropped out. These included many Harvard-connected activist such as President Charles Eliot. Then as now, there was considerable groupthink in the progressive camp. Although the Mugwumps preceded the progressives, you can see the intense social pressure. Those who did not drop out of the Republican Party enjoyed better subsequent careers. Examples are Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, who eventually became a Senator and remained one until he died in 1924. However, Lodge was socially ostracized by the Mugwumps. This intense social pressure to conform to a whimsical ideological position (hatred of James Blaine) and inept tactics very much presaged today's progressive-liberals' attitudes and methods. The groupthink and emotional pressure were very similar to today's liberal Borg.
The Bourbon Democrats were (p. 122) "a loose aggregation of Southern and Northern conservatives". While the Republicans favored government intervention to support business, much as they do now, the Bourbon Democrats "wanted to limit the government's activities to the bare minimum, much as Jefferson and Jackson had. A low tariff advocate almost invariably supported the Bourbon philosophy. Influential and wealthy businessmen, particularly railroad owners and traders, who derived much of their income from foreign commerce, became Bourbons and gave the Democratic Party the financial support so essential to its political success."
Grover Cleveland reflected this libertarian orientation. However, the Bourbon Democrats were ended by William Jennings Bryan and the free silver movement of 1896. It is unfortunate that the advocates of laissez faire were thereby shunted into one party.
One of the key points that Dobson makes is that even though the Mugwumps knew little about Grover Cleveland, who came from Buffalo and had served as New York's Governor for only two years, they were obsessed with supporting him. They were truly the forerunners of today's progressive-liberals.
During the Blaine-Cleveland campaign of 1884, the Mugwumps established political action clubs throughout the Northeast (p. 140). Like today's progressive-liberals, the Mugwumps were closely linked to the media of that time. Dobson's description of the Mugwump press sounds very much like today's liberal media. Mugwumpery may be viewed as the roots of liberalism not because the Mugwumps' ideas were like the twentieth century's progressive-liberals' (they were more like today's conservatives') but rather because their approach to ad hoc adoption of a singular idea, intense social pressure to conform to politically correct doctrine and the use of the media to create social conformity to their ideology is very much the technique that the progressive-liberals adopted in the early twentieth century and continue to use today.
Professor John M. Dobson retired from Iowa State University in 1999 and published Politics in the Gilded Age when I was a college sophomore in 1972. This is a good, timeless book. I read it because it sheds light on important issues: how past generations have pressured the established political parties; what strategies they have used; and how the American public has reacted to political corruption.
The politics of the gilded age was in some ways more naive than today, but in some ways it was more sophisticated. The reform-minded Republicans, who were well educated, affluent and often former abolitionists, believed that the corruption associated with the political machines would be ended through establishment of a civil service system. This belief turned out to have been naive. They believed that since the political machines depended on spoils, a civil service system would limit spoils and so end the machines. The civil service was adopted via the Pendleton Act, and even though the Presidents of the gilded age, notably Chester Alan Arthur, were part of the corrupt local machines (Arthur had been head of New York's customs house, among the most corrupt federal jobs) the Pendleton Act was implemented in good faith.
But the civil service did not end the political machines and it did not end the corruption. This was an early instance of reformers' believing that more government would end corrupt government, but it was not to be the last. This idea has been carried forward by today's progressive-liberals, who also have faith in the idea that lobbying, political favors, corrupt government contracts and the like can be ended through bigger programs.
In other ways, though, the politics of the gilded age were more sophisticated than today's. The chief issues that faced America were protectionism and the monetary system. These are still important issues, but today they are debated and discussed in a less sophisticated manner than in the 1880s. Unlike today, there were proponents of hard money in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. The Democrats who favored the gold standard included business-oriented conservatives known as the Bourbon Democrats. But the Republicans were also divided until the 1896election. Grover Cleveland, a Bourbon Democrat, supported the gold standard. It was in the 1896 election that William Jennings Bryan adopted the position of the Populist Party (ending the Populist Party's insurgency) and praised the use of silver for money, equivalent to the inflationist Keynesian ideology of today that both Democrats and Republicans favor.
Because of Bryan's candidacy, gold standard advocates moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party, and the Republican Party remained the hard money party until the 1960s. In 1971, President Richard Nixon adopted the Keynesian/Populist position, driving the hard money position to the fringes of American politics. This was reinforced by President Ronald Reagan, who was as inflationist as William Jennings Bryan. Hence, the insurgent Populist Party, which was a minor third party with wide public appeal, probably had more influence than any of the other major players in 1884.
Because the Federal Reserve Bank took control of the money supply away from politicians, the surviving Independent Republicans or Mugwumps from 1884 supported the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. As with the civil service, the Mugwumps were naive about the importance of innovative government programs like the Fed. They thought that setting up a body separate from the politicians would make the creation of money independent from political pressure.
Dobson does not emphasize the crucial debates of that period about hard money versus soft and protectionism versus free trade, but he mentions enough to paint a rough picture. The Republicans favored protectionism because high prices are in business's interest, and the Democrats favored free trade because low prices are in everybody else's interest. Some business-oriented Democrats also supported free trade. At the same time, the Republicans were able to convince some wage earners that protectionism was in their interest because higher prices might mean higher wages.
Dobson divides his interesting narrative into two parts. In the first, he describes how the highly structured Democratic and Republican Parties (that have continued until today) came about in the late nineteenth century. In the second, he describes how the Mugwumps fought the established Republicans, helping to give the 1884 Presidential election to Grover Cleveland and stopping the election of James Blaine.
Although Blaine may not have been particularly corrupt, the Mugwumps identified Blaine with corruption. The Mugwumps' failure to end corruption through their activism and through the establishment of the Civil Service led the early twentieth century to progressive-liberalism. Progressive-liberalism was a further response to political corruption.
Summary
The radical Republicans of the post-Lincoln era aimed to retaliate against the South and impeached President Andrew Johnson. They were dominant for the twenty years following the Civil War, in part because of what was called the Bloody Shirt, their use of the memory of the Civil War to win elections. The Republicans of this era included Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Butler and Roscoe Conkling (p.23). The Republicans' early big-government laws during the Civil War, such as the Homestead Act, appealed to landless farmers, and the Republicans also appealed to the recently freed slaves in the South.
Having been discredited by the Civil War, the Democrats appealed to white southerners, workers in the north and those concerned with local issues (p. 24). The parties quickly became very similar in ideas(p. 25), and their appeal was primarily sectional. Local political activists, ward healers, were the basis of the parties' strength. People interested in becoming professional politicians joined political clubs such as New York's Tammany Hall (p. 27). The political machines gained support by providing services, and these included things like being able to tell a judge to give a not guilty verdict on behalf of a political contributor. Government workers gave kickbacks from their salaries to support the machines as well. Patronage was even more important then than it is now, although Dobson argues that it was not essential to the functioning of the machines (p. 33), which was what the Mugwumps thought.
US Senators were elected by state legislatures in that period, so Senators were intimately involved with state politics. Dobson writes (p. 33) that "the Senate resembled a sort of federation of state bosses."
The federal government spent less after than during the Civil War than, and the sum of states' spending exceeded federal spending. In 1880 the federal government collected $360 million in tariffs, but the entire federal budget was only $260 million, half of which went to Civil War veterans, while the states spent $300 million (p. 35). The federal government had a $100 million surplus.
The public tended to be loyal to a single party (p. 38). However, each party had divergent beliefs internally. There was more divergence within the parties than between them. Samuel J. Tilden, the New York governor who ran for president in 1876, was an advocate of the gold standard, while Thomas Hendricks of Indiana, the Democrats' 1876 vice-presidential nominee, favored greenbacks, which would be the same as the pro-inflation stance that leading politicians have adopted today.
The post-Civil War period experienced an inflationary boom because of the of the greenbacks that financed the War. In the monetary sense, the post Civil War period was like a milder version of the post-World War II period, the ReInflateoCrat period, which has been associated with a mild inflationary boom. Also similar to the post-World War II period, the Civil War had expanded government.
In 1872, Senator Carl Schurz (R-Mo), a German immigrant, led an anti-Grant crusade (p. 41) within the Republican Party, which led to the formation of the Liberal Republican movement, which became a separate party for a while. The Democrats backed the Liberal-Republicans in 1872 because they were so weak in the immediate post-Civil War era.
The pro-Grant forces within the Republican Party were known as Stalwarts, and the anti-Grant forces within the Republican Party were later known as Half-Breeds. The Half Breeds were in favor of what Dobson calls (p. 64) "Northern moral attitudes". The Liberal Republicans formed a separate party that nominated Horace Greeley, once editor of the New York Tribune. However, the Liberal Republicans and Greeley were ineffective, a trait that Dobson argues the Mugwumps shared.
In 1873, the greenback boom led to a depression, and the Democrats won Congress for the first time since the Civil War. There were intermittent recessions through the late 19th century as the effects of the greenbacks wore off. (Then, in the 1890s, the Populists' free silver movement took root.) However, the deflation of the late 19th century was accompanied by rising real wages, a feat the that the ReInflateoCrats of the late twentieth century have been unable to duplicate. Unlike the 19th century, in the late twentieth century the American public has been too poorly educated to understand that its dollar buys two thirds less than it did 30 years ago.
In 1876, Governor Samuel J. Tilden (D-NY), who had ousted Boss Tweed and was known as an anti-corrupton governor, ran for president. The Stalwarts wanted Grant to run again, but the Half-Breeds favored James G. Blaine, a former Speaker of the House (p. 47). As a compromise, the Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes. The vote was very close, and was decided by an electoral commission. In return for agreeing to a partisan commission's findings and agreeing to let Hayes become president, the Democrats asked that all northern troops be withdrawn from the South (p. 48).
Dobson argues that President Hayes was "mixed" on civil service reform, in part because he appointed Carl Schurz as Secretary of the Interior and allowed Schurz to establish a merit-based system for the Department of Interior. He also appointed Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. (President Roosevelt's father) to be head of the New York Customs House (p. 63), firing Chester A. Arthur and Alonzo B. Cornell, who had been the corrupt heads. Senator Roscoe Conkling (R-NY) complained angrily, and the Senate vetoed the new appointments. However, President Hayes put through the Roosevelt appointment when the Senate was out of session.
The three Republican factions that were forming at this time were the Stalwarts, the Half Breeds and the much smaller Independent Republican faction. When Alonzo B. Cornell successfully ran for governor, the Independents handed in Republican ballots (ballots were printed by partisan newspapers in those days) but scratched Cornell's name from the ballots. Thus they became known as scratchers. The Independents hated patronage and corruption on moral grounds. They were unlike the Half-Breeds, who were moralistic but interested in partaking in the corruption. Today, the Stalwarts and the Half Breeds have mostly succeeded within the parties, although voters are not so party-focused as before. But the absence of effective third parties means that although there are more independent voters, with the parties being so dominated by partisan posturing, the independent voters have little choice. This is not so much a matter of right versus left or social conservative versus social liberal. It is, rather, a matter of an absence of intellectual innovation in both parties with no alternative to today's independent voter.
James Garfield won the 1880 presidential election but was assassinated by an insane Stalwart Charles Guiteau, on June 2, 1881. Garfield was a Half-Breed but his vice-president, Chester Alan Arthur, was a Stalwart. In response to Arthur's ascension to the presidency, the Independent Republicans created the National Civil Service Reform League in 1881. In 1882 Congress passed the Pendleton Act, empowering the president to appoint a Civil Service Commission that was charged with establishing a set of rules involving competitive examinations and objective selection of job candidates. The law applied only to some federal employees. Soon after the Pendleton Act, state legislatures passed similar state laws.
Dobson quotes (p. 74) the work of Gerald McFarland, who studied the backgrounds of 400 prominent Independent Republicans in 1884. Almost all of the Independent Republicans were professionals and independents, and a substantial number were millionaires (a million dollars in 1880 was worth about $45 million today). The Republicans had been a party of abolitionists and moralists, and they were disgusted by the corruption of the party machines. The leading state for Independent Republicans was Massachusetts closely followed by New York and then Connecticut and other New England states.
The leader was George William Curtis, who was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, editor of Harper's Weekly, an abolitionist, a supporter of Radical Reconstruction and opponent of the Tweed ring. Dorman B. Eaton, another Independent Republican was a Harvard Law School graduate whom President Arthur appointed to head the Civil Service Commission. Edwin Lawrence Godkin edited the New York Evening Post (now owned by Rupert Murdoch) and the Nation. The New York Times, at that time a Republican paper, also supported the Independent Republicans. As well, Teddy Roosevelt, who was only 25 in 1884 was a supporter of the Independent Republicans, although he did not break with the Republican Party in 1884 as many of them did.
In 1884, the Stalwarts supported a third term for Grant, while the Half-Breeds supported James G. Blaine (p. 87). Dobson notes of the Independent Republicans (p.88):
"The Independents' anti-Blaine campaign of 1884 illustrates the irrationality that often accompanies an emotional crusade. The reformers started out with a reasonable complaint abut the way political affairs were developing...Through their leagues and reform clubs, the Independents had developed a reputation for rational and intelligent action...They lost that and more in the 1884 campaign as they gradually turned into one-sided partisans."
Thus, the Mugwumps' reaction to James G. Blaine was probably irrational, much like much of the media buzz about politics today. They were subject to groupthink and were obsessed with preventing Blaine's election, even though his ultimate opponent, Grover Cleveland, was not demonstrably better than Blaine and owed party hacks in the Democratic Party.
The Independent Republicans backed George F. Edmunds of Vermont, and refused to compromise with the two major candidates, James Blaine and Chester Alan Arthur. When Blaine won the nomination, many of the Independents dropped out. These included many Harvard-connected activist such as President Charles Eliot. Then as now, there was considerable groupthink in the progressive camp. Although the Mugwumps preceded the progressives, you can see the intense social pressure. Those who did not drop out of the Republican Party enjoyed better subsequent careers. Examples are Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, who eventually became a Senator and remained one until he died in 1924. However, Lodge was socially ostracized by the Mugwumps. This intense social pressure to conform to a whimsical ideological position (hatred of James Blaine) and inept tactics very much presaged today's progressive-liberals' attitudes and methods. The groupthink and emotional pressure were very similar to today's liberal Borg.
The Bourbon Democrats were (p. 122) "a loose aggregation of Southern and Northern conservatives". While the Republicans favored government intervention to support business, much as they do now, the Bourbon Democrats "wanted to limit the government's activities to the bare minimum, much as Jefferson and Jackson had. A low tariff advocate almost invariably supported the Bourbon philosophy. Influential and wealthy businessmen, particularly railroad owners and traders, who derived much of their income from foreign commerce, became Bourbons and gave the Democratic Party the financial support so essential to its political success."
Grover Cleveland reflected this libertarian orientation. However, the Bourbon Democrats were ended by William Jennings Bryan and the free silver movement of 1896. It is unfortunate that the advocates of laissez faire were thereby shunted into one party.
One of the key points that Dobson makes is that even though the Mugwumps knew little about Grover Cleveland, who came from Buffalo and had served as New York's Governor for only two years, they were obsessed with supporting him. They were truly the forerunners of today's progressive-liberals.
During the Blaine-Cleveland campaign of 1884, the Mugwumps established political action clubs throughout the Northeast (p. 140). Like today's progressive-liberals, the Mugwumps were closely linked to the media of that time. Dobson's description of the Mugwump press sounds very much like today's liberal media. Mugwumpery may be viewed as the roots of liberalism not because the Mugwumps' ideas were like the twentieth century's progressive-liberals' (they were more like today's conservatives') but rather because their approach to ad hoc adoption of a singular idea, intense social pressure to conform to politically correct doctrine and the use of the media to create social conformity to their ideology is very much the technique that the progressive-liberals adopted in the early twentieth century and continue to use today.
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