Constance writes:
>Prof Langbert,
I have just started to “self-educate” on economics and have found your blog very useful. I am currently reading a book by Jesus Huerta de Soto called “Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles’. He is of the Austrian school and supports sound money backed by precious metals and a 100% reserve requirement for demand deposits. In his book he argues that a gold-backed money would be inelastic and would prevent serious deflations as experienced during the Great Depression. I have always heard that one of the advantages of our present economic system (fractional reserves and a central bank) was that the Fed could “manage the money supply” which I take to mean expand or contract the supply of money.
If you had the time and inclination, it would be great if you could write a blog post on the advantages/disadvantages of an elastic versus inelastic money supply.
My reply (edited for the blog):
There is no need for an elastic money supply. I will put de Soto on my list, but I do not believe that deflation is as important a problem as he says.
I'll be glad to answer but let me give you a little background about myself. I'm not really an economist. I studied labor issues in graduate school and teach business and human resource management. I finished my Ph.D. in 1991 and have taught management ever since. In the 1970s I had gotten involved in the libertarian movement in New York City right after Murray Rothbard dropped out of what was then called the Free Libertarian Party. There I met Howard S. Katz who has written a great deal about the money issue on his blog http://www.thegoldbugnet.blogspot.com..
Since 2004 I renewed my interest in this subject because of current events. What seemed bad in '04 has turned into a worst case scenario over the past year. I decided to pursue a new research topic concerning decentralization. I decided to make the monetary issue a part of that topic, so I have begun to familiarize myself with it. Perhaps we can form a study group!
I recommend these books to begin your pursuit of understanding money:
Hans Sennholz, Money and Freedom, available through the von Mises Institute (www.vonmises.org)
Murray Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking and What Has Government Done to Our Money?
Howard S. Katz, The Paper Aristocracy
I read William Greider's book Secrets of the Temple last fall. Greider is a Keynesian and the book is full of inconsistencies (such as that the Federal Reserve system helps the poor but the banks lend hundreds of billions to big business boondoggles; inflation is good for the middle class, etc.).
Business and banking interests have always said that flexibility in money, an elastic money supply, is desirable. However, the history of the nineteenth century was that when money was tightest, from 1879 to 1900, progress was most rapid in technology and innovation. The three central banks that existed before the Fed, The Bank of North America, The First Bank of the United States and The Second Bank of the United States, were all associated with corruption, high inflation and economic dislocation.
Business interests favor central banks because the banks create money out of thin air and then lend it to favored business interests. The business interests can make investments at pre-inflation levels, and as the money filters through the economy and the banking system multiplies it, prices go up as do asset values. The businesses repay their loans in depreciated dollars and enjoy increased asset values and diminished loan values (because the loan is for a fixed dollar amount but the asset goes up with inflation). The gain in real wealth that the business interests enjoy has to come from somewhere. It generally comes from those who own the least assets, average workers whose wages lag the inflation.
Thus, the real hourly wage (not family income--families have compensated for declining real wages by holding multiple jobs) has been in decline since the gold standard was abolished in 1971. However, the stock market has climbed steadily higher. This is because artificially low interest rates boost the stock market but the inflation caused by monetary expansion reduces workers' real (inflation-adjusted) wages. Thus, central banks allocate money from the average worker to hedge fund managers and stock holders. It is telling that one of the themes of William Greider's book is that inflation hurts asset owners. That would be true if asset owners held their assets in bank accounts, which hasn't been true in 100 years. Greider's book is testimony to my long standing belief that the left's aim is to support Wall Street and the wealthy at the expense of those whom it claims to represent, the poor. Thus, leftists are granted academic posts and are hired by capital to dominate the mass media and expatiate on why inflation is good for the poor.
Children like candy, and if you asked a nine year old whether they should have cake and ice cream for breakfast they would say "Yes, an elastic diet is good for me. You let me eat cake and ice cream when I choose." Naturally businesses like cheap credit. But if you look historically, the late nineteenth century was when most of the American innovation occurred, and it was a period of deflation. Competition is painful to business but it breeds productivity. No pain no gain. Today's business executive is a self-indulgent, other-directed narcissist who pays himself a high salary in order to move plants overseas and cannot come up with new ideas to save his or her life.
Also, there was proportionately more immigration into America the late nineteenth century despite the depressions of the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. Yet real wages were rising. Yes they were. Despite cheap immigrant labor in the late nineteenth century, there was more innovation than at any other time in history and rising average real wages but deflation. Yet, most economists you hear on television tell you that deflation is the worst thing imaginable. If you can find it in a library, a great book on that topic is David Ames Wells' Recent Economic Changes published in 1889.
The pro-inflation position has been the mainstream view of the economics profession. Not coincidentally, the economics field enjoys benefits from the banking industry. For instance, many economists find work there, banking interests donate to universities and the like. The mass media only gives air time to the Keynesian viewpoint, there are almost never Austrian or monetarist economists on TV these days.
The ideas of John Maynard Keynes came out of the Populist movement in America. In the late nineteenth century there was deflation. The deflation hurt property owners. Farmers formed a mass movement to protest the gold standard. Earlier in American history there had been a bi-metallic standard. Historians who study this topic do not ask the right questions. They look at the income level of the farmers but not their asset holdings. They conclude that the Populists were low income farmers who needed loans to finance their crops. But it is likely that many of the Populist supporters were land holders who had obtained land via the land grant acts of the mid nineteenth century. Holding land might have represented hope for a good investment to many, but deflation made farming much less attractive. It is difficult to know the extent of that phenomenon. In general, falling food prices help workers but hurt farmers. Historians paint the picture that falling food prices were bad because the farmers didn't like them, but they ignore the effects on other kinds of workers. Also, it is not clear that real wages of agricultural labor were falling. There is a difference between farm profit and farm wages. Profits in general were falling in the late nineteenth century, and much of the protest about the gold standard was from business owners who resented deflation that caused falling profits. Perhaps farming was no different. As laborers, farmers may have been receiving increasing wages, but as real estate investors farmers may have been suffering even bigger losses.
There were two investment bankers who picked up on the Populist inflationist concept, I forget their names but the title of their book was something like "Road to Plenty". They argued that inflation could create wealth. The banker Mariner Eccles made similar arguments and FDR later appointed him head of the Fed. John Maynard Keynes wrote his General Theory after the Populists, the Road to Plenty guys and Eccles had written about inflation stimulating investment and social welfare. No one denies that Keynes derived his ideas from these movements.
The history of the Fed was that it was established Christmas week 1913 and it is likely that neither Wilson nor the Congressmen who voted it in totally understood it. They believed the "elastic" argument. Within two years World War I began and the Fed initiated its first inflation, leading to a contraction and depression of 1920. There was a mild inflation in the 1920s, and there was a second credit contraction in the late 1920s which led to the Great Depression. During the 1920s there was increased use of consumer credit in the form of car loans and margin buying on stocks, and neither of these had existed before.
The Great Depression began with Roosevelt illegalizing ownership of gold and abolishing the gold standard. He re-inflated in 1933 and there was a 75% stock market rise in 1933. He appointed Eccles to be Fed chairman and the recovery was stopped in 1935 or 6 by another Fed contraction. The massive inflation of World War II ended the Depression. Since then, there has been consistent inflation. The result has been a considerable degree of economic miscalculation. Excessive real estate construction, one corporate boondoggle after the next, excessive financing of corporate waste. For instance, the Hunt Brothers' attempt to corner the silver market in 1980 was bank financed and could not have happened without the Fed. Likewise, the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s, the tech bubble, Long Term Capital Management. Oh, and did I mention the stagflation of the 1970s? Who paid for all this waste? Not university professors, who live off fresh Fed money funneled through government grants. Not Wall Street bankers and business executives who were responsible for one incomprehensible business boondoggle after the next, but the average American, who has passively racked up big credit card bills while allowing the Fed and its academic boosters to run amok. This generation of Americans is a disgrace to the memory of Andrew Jackson.
If you're ambitious, the next book I plan to read is : Ludwig von Mises, Theory of Money and Credit.
Hope that helps!
Showing posts with label Populism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Populism. Show all posts
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
19th Century Land Policy and the Fed
The Land Act of 1796 allowed purchasers of public land a minimum of 640 acres, one square mile at $2 per acre with one half of the purchase price being able to be deferred for a year. The large size of the plots prohibited most Americans from purchasing public land. These minimums were reduced over the ensuing 66 years, resulting in an increase in agricultural output.
Under federal land policy, the minimum was reduced to 320 acres payable over four years in 1800. In 1820 80 acres could be purchased at $1.25 per acre, and in 1832 parcels of 40 acres could be sold. Especially after 1830 squatters were granted rights and in 1841 the "Log Cabin Bill" allowed squatters preemption rights of up to 160 acres. The Graduation Act put up land unsold for 30 years for sale at 12.5 cents an acre. During the Civil War, in 1862, the Homestead Act granted 160 acres and 320 per married couple as long as they lived on the land or cultivated it for five years. Thus, the population of the western states grew from about one million in 1810to about 14.8 million in 1869, or from 15% of the US population to 47.1%.*
From 1870 to 1890, corn output increased from 1.125 billion bushels to 1.650 billion bushels, an increase of 46.7%. Land used for corn increased from 38.4 million acres to 74.8 million acres, an increase of 94.8%. Because the newly granted land was less fertile than the land that settlers purchased first (since settlers chose the best land first) productivity fell from 29.3 bushels per acre to 22.1 bushels per acre. A slightly different pattern applied to wheat, whose output increased 76.8% between 1870 and 1890 and whose land increased by 75.5%. Because of expanding output, real farm income per capita rose by only .8% from 1869 to 1879 and .7% from 1879 to 1889.**
According to Walton and Rockoff***, "it is alleged that the rapid distribution of the public domain laid the groundwork for modern agricultural problems by inducing too much capital and labor into agriculture, thereby impeding the process of industrialization."
"...Partially as a result of this rapid addition of resources, the new West produced crops at such a rate that consumers of foodstuffs and raw materials enjoyed 30 years of falling prices. Furthermore, according to Robert Fogel and Jack Rutner, average rates of return on investments in land improvements, livestock, farm buildings and machinery equaled or exceeded returns on other contemporary investments, and real incomes in the new agricultural areas outside the South grew at rates comparable with those in manufacturing."
Nevertheless, despite the Fogel and Rutner findings, it would seem that Populism was related to falling agricultural prices. Moreover, the culture of farming was likely one that included an element of speculation. As Richard Hofstadter points out in Age of Reform****
"Frequent and sensational rises in land values bred a boom psychology in the American farmer and caused him to rely for his margin of profit more on the process of appreciation than on the sale of crops. It took a strong man to resist the temptation to ride skyward on lands that might easily triple or quadruple their value in one decade and then double again in the next...The penchant for speculation and the lure of new and different lands bred in the American farmer a tremendous passion for moving--and not merely, as one common view would have it, on the part of those who had failed, but also on the part of those who had succeeded...Mobility among farmers had serious effects upon an agricultural tradition never noted for careful cultivation: in a nation whose soil is notoriously heterogeneous, farmers too often had little chance to get to know the quality of their land; they failed to plan and manure and replenish; they neglected diversification for the one-crop system and ready cash...In a very real and profound sense, then, the United States failed to develop (except in some localities, chiefly in the east) a distinctively rural culture...What differentiated the agricultural life of these regions...was that it was so speculative, so mobile, so mechanized, so 'progressive', so thoroughly imbued with the commercial spirit."
Moreover, increasing agricultural productivity put additional pressure on commodity prices. Walton and Rockoff point out that+
"Thanks to the research of Olmstead and Rhode we have a greater appreciation of changes in plant varieties, irrigation systems, fertilizers and other biological inventions that greatly impacted the use of land for planting. These changes worked along two lines: (1) the discovery of new wheat varieties (and hybrids) that allowed the North American wheat belt to push hundreds of miles northward and westward and (2) researchers and farmers who found new methods of combating insects and diseases, some of which came from experimentation with new varieties (seeds) from Europe and elsewhere..labor productivity grew dramatically in wheat and corn over these decades. According to Robert Gallman, labor productivity in these two crops grew at a rate of 2.6 percent annually between 1850 and 1900."
As well, point out Walton and Rockoff, mechanization due to McCormick's reaper as well as thresher, mowers, horse rakes, seed planters, grain cleaners, portable grist mills, corn-shellers and similar devices enhanced labor productivity on farm.
The result was of course increasing competition and economic stress on farmers, who had to adapt, "to run faster just to hold ground". Such rapid change creates anxiety, which in turn leads to the demand for political fixes. For farmers, this was Populism. Of course the alternative, retaining primitive agricultural methods, would have prohibited industrialization. "In 1870 Americans spent one third of their current per capita income on farm products. By 1890, they were spending a much smaller fraction, just over one-fifth...Thus, although the real incomes of the American population rose during the period, and although Americans did not spend less on food absolutely, the proportion of those incomes earned by farmers declined." On the other hand "the value of agricultural exports rose from $297 million in 1870 to more than $840 million in 1900.++
Added to this mix was the "rapid increase in the supply of agricultural products. All over the world, new areas were entering the competitive fray. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina as well as in the United states, fertile new lands were becoming agriculturally productive."+++
The Fed was not established purely because of Populism, but Populism was certainly a contributing factor. Fed apologists like William Greider in his Secrets of the Temple emphasize agitation among farmers because of falling commodity prices. Greider neglects to mention that falling commodity prices were great for workers. But they were bad for farmers, including moderate-to-poor income ones, who were landholders or speculators. In his book, Greider does not mention the relationship of federal land policy to falling agricultural prices. He merely paints falling agricultural prices as a monetary issue--in other words he takes the Populists' economic reasoning at face value. Nor does he raise the question as to whether farmers-as-speculators or farmers-as-workers dominated the Populist movement.
As Walton and Rockoff point out:
"Farmers were not inclined to see their difficulties as the result of impersonal market forces. Instead, they traced their problems to monopolies and conspiracies: bankers (some thought that Jewish bankers were particularly to blame) who raised interest rates, manipulated the currency, and then foreclosed on farm mortgages; grain elevator operators who charged rates farmers could not afford; industrialists who charged high prices for farm machinery and consumer goods; railroads that charged monopoly rates on freight; and so on."++++
Greider's book provides an excellent example of the inability of the public to debate questions concerning money dispassionately. A good example is his discussion of the Populist movement.
*Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff, History of the American Economy Tenth Edition. South-Western-Cengage Learning, 2005, pp. 145-148
**Ibid, p. 288
***Ibid.
****Richard Hofstadter, Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR. New York: Vintage Books, 1955
+Op. cit., pp. 290-1
++Op. cit., p. 294
+++Op. cit., p. 293
++++Op. cit., p. 294
Under federal land policy, the minimum was reduced to 320 acres payable over four years in 1800. In 1820 80 acres could be purchased at $1.25 per acre, and in 1832 parcels of 40 acres could be sold. Especially after 1830 squatters were granted rights and in 1841 the "Log Cabin Bill" allowed squatters preemption rights of up to 160 acres. The Graduation Act put up land unsold for 30 years for sale at 12.5 cents an acre. During the Civil War, in 1862, the Homestead Act granted 160 acres and 320 per married couple as long as they lived on the land or cultivated it for five years. Thus, the population of the western states grew from about one million in 1810to about 14.8 million in 1869, or from 15% of the US population to 47.1%.*
From 1870 to 1890, corn output increased from 1.125 billion bushels to 1.650 billion bushels, an increase of 46.7%. Land used for corn increased from 38.4 million acres to 74.8 million acres, an increase of 94.8%. Because the newly granted land was less fertile than the land that settlers purchased first (since settlers chose the best land first) productivity fell from 29.3 bushels per acre to 22.1 bushels per acre. A slightly different pattern applied to wheat, whose output increased 76.8% between 1870 and 1890 and whose land increased by 75.5%. Because of expanding output, real farm income per capita rose by only .8% from 1869 to 1879 and .7% from 1879 to 1889.**
According to Walton and Rockoff***, "it is alleged that the rapid distribution of the public domain laid the groundwork for modern agricultural problems by inducing too much capital and labor into agriculture, thereby impeding the process of industrialization."
"...Partially as a result of this rapid addition of resources, the new West produced crops at such a rate that consumers of foodstuffs and raw materials enjoyed 30 years of falling prices. Furthermore, according to Robert Fogel and Jack Rutner, average rates of return on investments in land improvements, livestock, farm buildings and machinery equaled or exceeded returns on other contemporary investments, and real incomes in the new agricultural areas outside the South grew at rates comparable with those in manufacturing."
Nevertheless, despite the Fogel and Rutner findings, it would seem that Populism was related to falling agricultural prices. Moreover, the culture of farming was likely one that included an element of speculation. As Richard Hofstadter points out in Age of Reform****
"Frequent and sensational rises in land values bred a boom psychology in the American farmer and caused him to rely for his margin of profit more on the process of appreciation than on the sale of crops. It took a strong man to resist the temptation to ride skyward on lands that might easily triple or quadruple their value in one decade and then double again in the next...The penchant for speculation and the lure of new and different lands bred in the American farmer a tremendous passion for moving--and not merely, as one common view would have it, on the part of those who had failed, but also on the part of those who had succeeded...Mobility among farmers had serious effects upon an agricultural tradition never noted for careful cultivation: in a nation whose soil is notoriously heterogeneous, farmers too often had little chance to get to know the quality of their land; they failed to plan and manure and replenish; they neglected diversification for the one-crop system and ready cash...In a very real and profound sense, then, the United States failed to develop (except in some localities, chiefly in the east) a distinctively rural culture...What differentiated the agricultural life of these regions...was that it was so speculative, so mobile, so mechanized, so 'progressive', so thoroughly imbued with the commercial spirit."
Moreover, increasing agricultural productivity put additional pressure on commodity prices. Walton and Rockoff point out that+
"Thanks to the research of Olmstead and Rhode we have a greater appreciation of changes in plant varieties, irrigation systems, fertilizers and other biological inventions that greatly impacted the use of land for planting. These changes worked along two lines: (1) the discovery of new wheat varieties (and hybrids) that allowed the North American wheat belt to push hundreds of miles northward and westward and (2) researchers and farmers who found new methods of combating insects and diseases, some of which came from experimentation with new varieties (seeds) from Europe and elsewhere..labor productivity grew dramatically in wheat and corn over these decades. According to Robert Gallman, labor productivity in these two crops grew at a rate of 2.6 percent annually between 1850 and 1900."
As well, point out Walton and Rockoff, mechanization due to McCormick's reaper as well as thresher, mowers, horse rakes, seed planters, grain cleaners, portable grist mills, corn-shellers and similar devices enhanced labor productivity on farm.
The result was of course increasing competition and economic stress on farmers, who had to adapt, "to run faster just to hold ground". Such rapid change creates anxiety, which in turn leads to the demand for political fixes. For farmers, this was Populism. Of course the alternative, retaining primitive agricultural methods, would have prohibited industrialization. "In 1870 Americans spent one third of their current per capita income on farm products. By 1890, they were spending a much smaller fraction, just over one-fifth...Thus, although the real incomes of the American population rose during the period, and although Americans did not spend less on food absolutely, the proportion of those incomes earned by farmers declined." On the other hand "the value of agricultural exports rose from $297 million in 1870 to more than $840 million in 1900.++
Added to this mix was the "rapid increase in the supply of agricultural products. All over the world, new areas were entering the competitive fray. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina as well as in the United states, fertile new lands were becoming agriculturally productive."+++
The Fed was not established purely because of Populism, but Populism was certainly a contributing factor. Fed apologists like William Greider in his Secrets of the Temple emphasize agitation among farmers because of falling commodity prices. Greider neglects to mention that falling commodity prices were great for workers. But they were bad for farmers, including moderate-to-poor income ones, who were landholders or speculators. In his book, Greider does not mention the relationship of federal land policy to falling agricultural prices. He merely paints falling agricultural prices as a monetary issue--in other words he takes the Populists' economic reasoning at face value. Nor does he raise the question as to whether farmers-as-speculators or farmers-as-workers dominated the Populist movement.
As Walton and Rockoff point out:
"Farmers were not inclined to see their difficulties as the result of impersonal market forces. Instead, they traced their problems to monopolies and conspiracies: bankers (some thought that Jewish bankers were particularly to blame) who raised interest rates, manipulated the currency, and then foreclosed on farm mortgages; grain elevator operators who charged rates farmers could not afford; industrialists who charged high prices for farm machinery and consumer goods; railroads that charged monopoly rates on freight; and so on."++++
Greider's book provides an excellent example of the inability of the public to debate questions concerning money dispassionately. A good example is his discussion of the Populist movement.
*Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff, History of the American Economy Tenth Edition. South-Western-Cengage Learning, 2005, pp. 145-148
**Ibid, p. 288
***Ibid.
****Richard Hofstadter, Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR. New York: Vintage Books, 1955
+Op. cit., pp. 290-1
++Op. cit., p. 294
+++Op. cit., p. 293
++++Op. cit., p. 294
Friday, February 8, 2008
John Lukacs on Hitler
"But here we come to the mistaken view that many conservatives adopted during the twentieth century and that they have even now. This is that the rise of nationalist anti-liberalism meant a great historical reaction against 1789.* In 1933 and 1934 the then-leading German conservative, Franz von Papen, said that what was happening in Germany in 1933 was the great answer of history against the largely French-inspired idea of 1789 (And this is the enduring mistake of many conservatives, who despise the "Left" more than they distance themselves from "extremists" on the "Right".) But Hitler was someone very different from a counterrevolutionary; and the German 1933 was not a counterrevolutionary movement. Nothing was further from Hitler (or even from Mussolini, or from Peron, etc., etc.) than to see anything good in monarchy or aristocracy (let alone in the world of the eighteenth century). He was a populist; and a revolutionary; and at least in some ways, a democrat. Evidences of this, in his words and acts, could fill a small book."
----John Lukacs
Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, 248 pp.
*The French Revolution occurred in 1789.
----John Lukacs
Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, 248 pp.
*The French Revolution occurred in 1789.
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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