Thoughts on the Mugwumps

I just sent the following email to a colleague who was talking about the Mugwumps. The Mugwumps were a group of elite Republicans who switched sides and voted for Grover Cleveland in 1884.  The name derives from a bastardization of a Native American word for chief, but the above cartoon suggests a different interpretation.

I don't consider them moderates. They switched party because of strong political belief, specifically in rational government. They were laissez faire Republicans, and many had been abolitionists. There was nothing moderate about them even though they switched sides.

The confusion many people have about today's two extremist parties leads to the mistaken impression that if you don't favor either party you are in between.  The crank TV newscaster Bill O'Reilly makes a similar claim.  He is moderate because he splits the opinions of the two big parties.  

The two parties are close, and they are both extreme in their support for big government. By historical standards, today's America occupies the extreme Whig end of the spectrum, and that's true of both parties. Only an extremist can call two parties that both advocated lending as much as $29 trillion to Wall Street to be moderate.  Today's America is an extremist, authoritarian state. There is no Aristotelian mean here.

This is the email to my colleague:

A classic in the study of the Gilded Age is Edward Wiebe, The Search for Order http://www.amazon.com/Search-Order-1877-1920-Robert-Wiebe/dp/0809001047/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427393497&sr=8-1&keywords=wiebe .

The first book I read on the Mugwumps was Nancy Cohen’s Reconstruction of American Liberalism 1865-1914, which is an intellectual history that gives a good overview. You can piece together a libertarian perspective from it.  See http://www.amazon.com/Reconstruction-American-Liberalism-1865-1914/dp/0807853542/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427393591&sr=8-1&keywords=nancy+cohen+progressivism .

The third book I recommend is a little different. It is Burton Bledstein’s Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. http://www.amazon.com/culture-professionalism-development-education-America/dp/0393055744/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1427393672&sr=8-3&keywords=bledstein . It traces the creation of professionalism in a host of fields.  Professionalism was intimately connected to the Mugwumps’ interest in civil service reform. The impetus for rationalization led directly to Progressivism. Once the commitment to organized professions took hold, it was a small step to building legal standards and regulations for the professions.  That, in turn, was linked to the development of universities. Hence, big government, the organized professions, and universities have always been linked.

The institution of the modern university in 1876 via the founding of Johns Hopkins came near the heart of the Mugwump era, which was in 1884, during the election of Grover Cleveland.  I don’t think historians have a clear understanding of why the Mugwumps opposed James Blaine and turned against their own Republican Party to support Cleveland.  [My colleague] may be right that there was a laissez faire impetus, but showing that would require a new, or at least clearer,  historical treatment of it.  Among the interesting Mugwump figures (see Cohen) were EL Godkin, David Ames Wells, and William Graham Sumner.

I also don’t believe that historians have a clear understanding of the role of the greenbacks in stimulating the expansion of industry in the Civil War era and what the economic effects were on bondholders, so the post-1873 gold deflation, which harmed other asset holders (likely Western and Southern farmers as well as stockholders) and generated Populism and Bryan (and which Friedman calls “the crime of 1873” in an article that was published in the Journal of Economic History), may have been a reaction to the post-Civil War inflation. Godkin writes about his anger at the effects of inflation on redistributing wealth to Jay Gould and others. 

One question that no one has asked is whether there was a relationship between Wall Street and Bryan or the Populists.  Mark Hanna, a high school friend of John D. Rockefeller,  was, of course, McKinley’s close adviser. On the other hand, it may be that the election of McKinley (as propped by Wall Street) was not really opposition to silver, but rather it may have been preemptive and done in the hope for the central bank that was recommended fourteen years later, in 1910, by the same Rockefeller (with Morgan and Kuhn Loeb) interests.  It is unlikely that there is much public information on something like this.

In any case the 1896 election had an opposite dynamic from what today’s pro-inflation banking community offers, and I suspect that something is not being said about who the Populists were and, more importantly, who their opponents were.  Was a central bank being quietly considered by ‘96? 

The same is true of the conflict within the Democratic Party between Bryan and the Bourbon Democrats,* of whom Cleveland was the chief representative. Wilson had been a Bourbon Democrat, and I think that he voted for a third party, the Gold Democrats, in 1896.  His connection to Morgan is mentioned in my paper on colleges, and I suspect that his signing of the Federal Reserve Act came from his relationship with Morgan.  An interesting point in the biography of Frank Vanderlip is that Wilson dropped him as a friend, and Wilson would have nothing to do with Vanderlip once Wilson was elected. Wilson did not want to seem to be linked to bankers.  I wonder who thought up that plan of action.  Wilson went from voting for gold in 1896 to refusing to have to do with bankers so he could propose the Federal Reserve Bank.  As a result of secrecy, it may be hard to get data. But was the opposition of the banking community to silver a strategic one?
  

*Wikipedia: Bourbon Democrat was a term used in the United States from 1876 to 1904 to refer to a conservative or classical liberal member of the Democratic Party, especially one who supported Charles O'Conor in 1872, Samuel J. Tilden in 1876, President Grover Cleveland in 1884–1888/1892–1896 and Alton B. Parker in 1904. After 1904, the Bourbons faded away. Woodrow Wilson, who had been a Bourbon, made a deal in 1912 with the leading opponent of the Bourbons, William Jennings Bryan; Bryan endorsed Wilson for the Democratic nomination, and Wilson named Bryan Secretary of State. The term "Bourbon" was mostly used disparagingly, by critics complaining of old-fashioned viewpoints.

William Graham Sumner on Social Doctors

"The amateur social doctors are like amateur physicians--they always begin with the question of remedies, and they go at this without any diagnosis or any knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of society. They never have any doubt of the efficacy of their remedies. They never take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature. Against all such social quackery the obvious injunction to the quacks is to mind their own business.

"The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They are able to see what other men ought to do when the other men do not see it. An examination of the work of the social doctors, however, shows that they are only more ignorant and more presumptuous than other people. We have a great many social difficulties and hardships to contend with. Poverty, pain, disease, and misfortune surround our existence. We fight against them all the time. The individual is a centre of hopes, affections, desires and sufferings...But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling and blundering of social doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in political economy and social science...the greatest reforms which could now be accomplished would consist in undoing the work of statesmen in the past and the greatest difficulty in the way of reform is to find out how to undo their work without injury to what is natural and sound."

---William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, Originally published in 1883.

Elitism in American History

Progressivism and social democracy are democratic liberal doctrines that introduce the possibility of an activist, authoritarian state that they aim to limit. Progressives of the early twentieth century management of large business enterprise, although many such as Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt argued for expansion of state action into the social welfare realm. The social democrats under the New Deal discarded the Progressives' interest in efficiency and instead focused on social welfare. Hence, American public policy debate became that that countered those interested in greater efficiency with those interested in increasing welfare transfers. The advocates of greater efficiency tended to emphasize management solutions in the tradition of the Mugwumps. Hence, their emphasis on low taxes was accompanied by an interest in limiting waste in government. These views seem to overlap with the Jeffersonian philosophy of limiting centralized federal government but the Progressives' most basic belief was that efficiency in overseeing big business could not be achieved without centralization of state power. Hence, their philosophy is fundamentally statist and centralizing and so is very much in the Federalist tradition. The social democrats too are descendants of Federalism. The anti-Federalist Jeffersonians and their Jacksonsian descendents believed that centralized institutions such as the central bank and Hamiltonian schemes to support business expansion were opposed to the interests of taxpayers and small holders. It is true that in Jefferson's day there were relatively few workers, but those supported Jefferson. Jefferson opposed the same common law that was used in the Philadelphia Cordwainers' case against unions, and the Jacksonian democracy saw a renewed support for the union cause in the form of the decision of Commonwealth v. Hunt, which changed American legal attitudes in unions' favor. However, the eighteenth century's anti-Federalists nineteenth century's Jeffersonians had a very different point of view from the twentieth century's social democrats. First, the anti-Federalists and Jeffersonians opposed the central bank. Second, they opposed government support for business. Third, they opposed taxation (the Federalists advocated taxes such as the Whiskey tax, not the anti-Federalists). Thus, the spirit of pro farmer and by extension pro worker laissez faire was fundamental to the earliest political debates in America. The elitism of the Federalists was associated with support for big business and big government. The claim that the state's power would be used to support workers and the poor had not occurred to the Federalists at that point. Part of the reason was that the Federalists were individualists who opposed political parties and factions, hence manipulative or political doctrines such as social democracy would not have occurred to them. There were indeed early rumblings of interest in governmental support for workers, such as during Jefferson's 1807-08 Embargo Acts, which caused unemployment in the cities. Some workers demonstrated for expansion of city employment to counter the unemployment that resulted from the embargoes.

The elitist philosophy of Federalism did not die with the Federalist movement in 1800. Federalism died in part because of internal fighting among Hamilton, Adams, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and other prominent Federalists. Much of their struggle had to do with the abrasive personalities of Hamilton and Adams and their unwillingness to think in terms of a unified party (Hamilton preferred Jefferson to Adams and Adams preferred Jefferson to Hamilton and Pinckney). However, the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans eventually broke into two parties, the Whigs of Henry Clay and the Democrats of Andrew Jackson. Of these, the Whigs trailed the Federalists and were precusors to today's Republicans while the the Jacksonians retained the anti-Federalist impulse, were pro-worker, pro-union and anti-elitist. The Whigs believed in big government and support for business, and in central banking. In contrast, the Democrats believed in states' rights and were relatively, but not perfectly laissez faire in orientation. Hence, the history of elitism can be traced directly from the Federalists to the Whigs to the Republicans. It is tragic that the anti-elitist philosophy of Jacksonian democracy became associated with slavery because of its states rights emphasis. Without the issue of slavery, the American debate would have been more clearly along class lines, with the general public supporting Jacksonian democracy and laissez faire, and the business and plantation elites supporting Federalist, Whiggish and then Republican big government and centralization. But the states rights and slavery issue confounded this alignment to a degree.

The transformation in the party orientation of elitism began to occur in the late nineteenth century. In 1884 the elite Republican Mugwumps bolted the Republican Party in favor of the candidacy of Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was a traditional Jeffersonian-Jacksonian candidate, favoring the gold standard and low taxes. The Mugwumps, supported the laissez faire philosophy, perhaps contributing to its identification with the wealthy. However, the Mugwumps also supported rationalization of government and civil service. Even more important, the Mugwumps represented the college-educated elite of the late nineteenth century. Whereas only about five percent of the American public had attended college in the 1880s, over 50 percent of the Mugwumps had attended college. The Mugwumps were very interested in shoring up professionalism in academia, education, social work, law and medicine. They were the first professional interest movement in American history. Thus, some Mugwumps did favor some forms of government intervention, such as improvement of housing standards, and virtually all favored the Pendleton Act and attempts to improve the management of government at the federal as well as the state level. The Mugwumps were predecessors to the Progressives and were the earliest advocates of enhanced focus on rationalizaton of government and support for the professional (and implicitly) economic interests of the professional classes. Thus, American reform took the form of an alliance between professionals interested in narrow interests of their specific professions coupled with rationalization of government. The impulse toward social democracy came in part from the fixation on professional problems, not from a socialistic or equalitarian impulse. Thus, specialists in housing reform and social work began the emphasis on government intervention to improve municipal housing. It was a narrowly defined professional response. The response had two implications: one broad and one narrow. The broad response was to legitimate needs in the cities that the economy would address only slowly as productivity improved and people became wealthier. The narrow response was that the professions gained in power, prestige and access to resources as the broad response gained currency. Hence, the pattern of government programs that combined rationalization with social welfare began to take root with the Pendleton Act. American elites, both in business and in the professions, found that they had much at stake in state largess, and so the American political debate, which became increasingly a debate among elite economic interests (business and rationalizers versus the professions) began to take the shape that it has today.

Bernanke Discovers the Dollar

The valiant New York Sun has printed my letter in its June 10th edition and online here:

'Bernanke Discovers the Dollar'

Thank you for your editorial about the Fed's role in creating inflation ["Bernanke Discovers the Dollar," June 5, 2008].

In the late 19th century the Mugwumps, the educated New Yorkers and Bostonians who opposed the spoils system and big government, were concerned about currency depreciation and inflation that Civil War greenbacks had caused.

In particular, the Mugwumps were concerned that inflation led to the re-distribution of wealth from wage earners and those on fixed incomes to financial speculators like Jay Gould.

Ever since President Nixon jettisoned the international gold standard in 1971, Americans' average real hourly wage has declined. There has been no previous 38-year decline in the real hourly wage.

Modern economists, lacking the Mugwumps' courage, have averted their gaze from link between income inequality and monetary expansion.

But the link is obvious, and it is becoming more severe. In 1884 the Mugwumps bolted the Republican Party to vote for a Democrat, Grover Cleveland, a gold standard proponent.

Let us hope that John McCain offers greater integrity than did Cleveland's 1884 opponent, James Blaine.

MITCHELL LANGBERT
Associate Professor of Business and Economics
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Why Democrats and Republicans Are Mostly the Same: the Roosevelts

The two Roosevelts were founders of post-modern progessivism. Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican who believed in a statist corporate system. He became the most radically left-wing of all American presidents, including his cousin Franklin. Roosevelt believed that corporations should be licensed to engage in interstate commerce and that the federal government should tell firms what prices to charge and how to function. Although his ideas were too extreme, and ultimately were rejected by his appointed successor, William H. Taft, the model of a state-regulated economy was the product of the Progressive Republicans and of Roosevelt's presidency. Today, Democrats are calling themselve Progressive, but the fact is that Progressivism was a Republican more than a Democratic movement. Wilson was a Progressive because he had to be. His Mugwump background was consistent with a belief in freedom and private enterprise, and although many Mugwumps, including Theodore Roosevelt, had turned to statism in the Progressive era, Wilson did so in response to political pressure.

The Republican Party, then, was not a small government party in the twentieth century until Barry Goldwater ran on those views in the 1964 presidential election. The Republican Party included a minority of small business advocates (who were NOT libertarian in philosophy-- this was the group that had fought for the Sherman Ant-trust Act and the Interstate Commerce Commission in the 1880s). It included a minority of laissez faire advocates in the late 19th century, the Mugwumps, but but their laissez faire orientation had diminished by 1900, and they were too few in number to be of any importance until Goldwater, who lost by a landslide in the federal election.

The laissez-faire Republican Mugwumps of the late 19th century were not loyal to the Republican Party because the Republicans were indifferent to laissez faire and in their minds good government (civil service) principles. The laissez-faire Democrats in the late 19th century were known as the Bourbon Democrats, and included President Grover Cleveland. But these groups were small even in the 19th century (certainly less than 5 percent of the electorate). Laissez faire was not the philosophy of late nineteenth century Americans, many of whom were immigrants who benefitted from political machines in the cities and had no understanding of the economics of Smith or the opinions of EL Godkin. Thus, it is impossible that laissez-faire conservatives reflected even a small fraction of the Republican Party by the 1930s, when Roosevelt was elected.

Those conservatives who saw themselves adversely affected by the Franklin Roosevelt policies (at least in the public relations sphere) reaped what they had sown. They had not funded opposition to Progressivism in the early twentieth century, and there was no intellectual foundation to fight the New Deal in the 1930s.

Thus, while the founder of the modern Republicans was the Progressive Theodore Roosevelt and his protege (and more conservative but still rather statist) William H. Taft, the founder of the modern Democrats was the social Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who adopted many of the ideas of Herbert Croly with respect to legislation.

Thus, the debate of the twentieth century has been largely among progressive Republicans, who follow the Taft position, and the progressive Democrats, who follow the Roosevelt position. Both are descendents of Theodore Roosevelt, who may be viewed as the founder of twentieth century ideological debate.

John Lukacs has argued that the dominant ideology of the twentieth century was national socialism. Stalin advocated "socialism in one country" as did Mao, while Hitler coined the term Nazi-Sozi. Progressivism is the American strain of the national socialist movement, and most Americans believe in it. The twenty or thirty percent of Americans who do not must clarify a few points among themselves.

1. The difference between national socialist Americans and those who believe in "none of the above" is that "none-of-the-above" Americans believe in a limited state. That should be the glue that binds them. Other issues distract from the need to restrain state power, which is the chief threat to freedom, progress and economic gain. These are difficult to withstand, because nationalism is a highly emotional cause.

2. Many of the supposed arguments between conservatives and the left are spurious. They are instituted by statists on both left and right. Both the statist left, in its radical as well as liberal forms, and the right, in its converstive talk-show form, are progressive, national socialist movements, even though the right claims to be for small government (but of course belies those claims when elected). Those who would change in the direction of less government have to change habits of thought. That means asking what others who believe in reductions in state power are least likely to believe and avoiding emphasis on those issues for political purposes.

3. Advocates of "none of the above" ought to think of ways to include each other, not to exclude each other because of shibboleths, code words, racial divides, or side issues that serve only to distract.

4. It is a mistake for libertarians to believe that big business Republicans and neo-conservatives are on their side. There is no alliance between those who do not believe in left or right wing national socialism and libertarians, small scale liberals and those who oppose the extension of state power and favor economic development. The conservative right is and always has been as statist as the radical left. The libertarian right has been bamboozled much as the libertarian left has been bamboozled by Stalin and Mao.

David Ames Wells on Creative Destruction

Joseph Schumpeter is generally cited as the economist who fashioned the concept of creative destruction in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, published in 1942. But David Ames Wells wrote this in 1889 in his well known book Recent Economic Changes (p. 31):

"In all commercial history, probably no more striking illustration can be found of the economic principle that nothing marks more clearly the rate of material progress than the rapidity with which that which is old and has been considered wealth is destroyed by the results of new inventions and discoveries."

In a footnote Wells quotes Edward Atkinson:

"'In the last analysis it will appear that there is no such thing as fixed capital; there is nothing useful that is very old except the precious metals, and all life consists in the conversion of forms. The only capital which is of permanent value is immaterial--the experience of generations and the development of science.'"

Moralists or Pragmatists: The Mugwumps 1884-1900

Mugwump Seth Low, last Mayor of Brooklyn, Mayor of New York City and President of Columbia University


Gerald W. McFarland, editor. Moralists or Pragmatists? The Mugwumps, 1884-1900: A Penetrating Study of This Political Reform Movement. Articles by Robert L. Beisner, Goeffrey T. Blodgett, Ari Hoogenboom, Michael G. Kammen, Gerald W. McFarland, Gordon S. Wood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. 152 pages.

This a good book. When read in combination with Gerald W. McFarland's Mugwumps, Morals and Politics one gets a good appreciation for McFarland's sound scholarship as well as the mugwumps. All of the essays are good and several are excellent.

McFarland notes (p. 2-3) that:

"Modern stereotypes of liberalism scarcely fit the Mugwumps...In economics they adopted the classical nineteenth-century liberal position that the greatest good would be served when the supposedly 'natural' laws of competition and of supply and demand were allowed to work without interruption. On these grounds they denounced most proposals for federal social and economic legislation. Inflationary financial schemes--advocated by Greenbackers and Populists--would simply create 'dishonest' dollars, the Mugwumps charged. Similarly, they condemned the protective tariff as government paternalism on behalf of special interests...

"Implicit in the Mugwumps' careers are three subjects--corruption, motivation and political strategy--which have particular relevance to us..."

McFarland raises the question of what the Mugwumps' motivations were: simple interest in reform, economic self-interests, or psycho-social feelings arising from loss of social status (Hofstadter's thesis in Age of Reform).

McFarland also points out that the Mugwumps' history is suggestive as to the kind of strategy that political minorities should follow. "Are political minorities better off staying in the party and hoping to have some influence within it? Or should dissenters leave the party in an effort to purify it?" There is no satisfactory answer in McFarland's view.

He also notes that "the pressure group ethic" of emerging industrial America was distasteful to the Mugwumps. However, somewhat contradictorily, the Mugwumps were leaders in the movement to rationalize the professions. During the first two decades of the American Bar Association's existence (1878-1898) three Mugwumps served as its president, and Mugwumps were involved with early learned societies like the Modern Language Association.

The Mugwumps' interest in civil service reform was as much an interest in "purifying" government (p.10) as in providing better management. The editor of the Nation, EL Godkin, one of the most famous Mugwumps, called the election of New York City Mayor William L. Strong (sponsored by the Committee of Seventy, which included many Mugwumps) the "Triumph of Reform". You get a feel for the Mugwumps' cultural orientation in that Strong appointed Theodore Roosevelt police commissioner, and Roosevelt rigorously enforced Sunday blue laws prohibiting liquor sales, which enraged German immigrants and caused Strong to lose the next election. The Committee of 70's successor, the Citizens' Union, won the 1901 election when Seth Low, former mayor of Brooklyn and president of Columbia University, was elected New York City mayor.

The Mugwumps realized that the Citizens' Union could not defeat the Tammany Hall machine without the lower East Side ethnic vote. One can really see the origins of progressivism in this paragraph (p.12):

"With 'The City for the People!' as its slogan, the Union endorsed a wide range of measures on behalf of lower-class constituents: public baths and lavatories, improved tenement housing, more small parks in tenement districts and increased social services for the sick, destitute and aged. 'Mismanagement, favoritism and dishonesty must go," the Union's election handouts insisted. 'But this is not enough. We must have positive benefits for the people.' Sincere though it was, this bid for support from 'other' New Yorkers gave the gentlemen-led Union a mild case of campaign schizophrenia--Citizens' Union speakers promising downtown slum residents more services and uptown middle-class voters more economy. Yet the fusion of these two voting blocs was one of the Union's foremost goals and a crucial factor in Seth Low's 1901 victory."

The Mugwumps were the first limousine liberals! Some of the Mugwumps went on to become progressives, although I believe that McFarland overstates the percentage because he includes government reforms in the issues that he indexes to determine whether Mugwumps later became progressives. I think that he underestimates the power and importance of the Mugwumps' laissez faire philosophy. McFarland adds (p.14):

"The political and social reforms of the Cleveland Democrats in New England and the municipal reform programs of the Strong administration and the Citizens' Union campaigns in New York City were the chief signs that the Mugwumps were making practical concessions to urban-industrial conditions. The tools the genteel progressives applied were modernized ones, such as expert administration, centralized control and scientific investigation of social problems. Instead of morality, the new reform generation made progress its creed. Experts were its chief priesthood. There were orthodox underpinnings to these innovations, however, as reform still had a strong vein of old-fashioned elitism. Earlier the community's elite had reserved to itself the role of determining what was moral. Similarly, the new elite of experts claimed to have special credentials for interpreting what constituted progress. Granted, the progressive liberals actively sought to ameliorate the harsh impact of industrialism on lower-class Americans, but the reformers retained for themselves primary responsibility for deciding what the people needed.

"From a critical perspective today many aspects of both preindustrial Mugwump ideas and modern American liberalism are troubling. In pre-industrial United States the ranks of the 'best men' were restricted by class status and family connections. After modernization, limited access to high status was sustained by new, 'objectified', devices--intelligence tests, civil service examinations and educational credentials. Neither the old nor the new pattern was an absolutely closed system, but both, as is obvious now, seriously discriminated against Americans who started behind in the race for wealth and status."

Geoffrey T. Blodgett's contribution to the book, "The Mind of the Boston Mugwump" (p. 18) is a rich description of the Mugwumps' cultural and social world. Blodgett argues that in 1884 the Mugwumps' "dominating motive for their behavior was a desire to escape the status fitted for them by indulgent families, an eagerness to break loose from their role as passive heirs. This did not make them rebels against the New England past."

"Boston Mugwumps maintained a notably more genial temper than did their contemporaries in New York...The Bostonians looked to New York for inspiration...Godkin's Nation was their Bible...But years of dismal experience with Grant, Conkiling and Tammany Hall had played out the resilience in the New Yorkers..." (P.25)

"Immigration, urbanized politics and the rushing growth of protected industry had by the 1880s made town-meeting democracy almost a rural relic...Democracy had broken out of the stable framework in which New England had contained it. Now, to the Mugwump eye, it ran through her cities, crude, impetuous, without a memory. Unbridled democracy seemed to threaten not only private property but personal liberty and all the subtle authority which the town meeting had once assured the educated man of substance"(p.27).

Blodgett is a bit hard on the Mugwumps, though. No broad movement, even of educated people, is mostly composed of economics scholars or original thinkers. Somewhat condescendingly, Blodgett writes (p. 32):

"The Mugwumps looked on the economic and social problems of their era with well-meaning but uncreative conservatism. Their prime assumptions were absorbed at second-hand from the texts of Harvard's Francis Bowen, the pages of Godkin's Nation, the essays of William Graham Summer...Imprecise notions from Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer mingled in shadowy fashion in their minds."

but (p.33)

"The Mugwumps staked little claim to economic authority. Their main concern was with party politics...Mugwumpery was above all an escape from party. By breaking fixed rules of political behavior, the Mugwumps hoped to change them..."

and (p.36)

"the driving impetus toward civil service reform was the Mugwump desire to slash through the tangle of personal influence and responsibility that tied public office to the party system. The more exuberant theorists envisioned an ideal future government run by administrative technicians whose only loyalty was patriotism"

and (p. 36)

"their muddling confirmed them as political amateurs."

Ari Hoogenboom, a former Brooklyn College professor, contributes an excellent article entitled "Civil Service Reform and Public Morality" in which he attacks the common belief that the Gilded Age was all that corrupt (I would argue that the present day is more corrupt in terms of real dollars but less overtly so) and makes a useful point as to the reason for the emphasis of corruption in the Gilded Age (p. 42):

"The historian is usually liberal, more often than not a Democrat. He is hostile to big business, an advocate of government regulation, strong executive leadership and an expert civil service. The post-Civil War era stands for all the historian opposes. It was an era of Republicanism, big business power, ineffectual attempts at government regulation, weak executives and an essentially nonprofessional civil service."

As a result, while reformers of the Gilded Age exaggerated corruption, historians tend to repeat the accusations too uncritically (p.43).

In Hoogenboom's view, the Mugwumps wanted careers in government, but were foreclosed by the spoils system. Thus, they became enemies of the spoils system. He gives the example of Charles Eliot Norton, who was related to Charles W. Eliot, Harvard's president, and co-founded the Nation with E.L. Godkin. Norton believed that democracy contributed to "the unfortunate national 'decline of manners.'" When President Grant was elected, Norton hoped to be appointed as ambassador to Holland or Belgium, and when he was ignored, he concluded that Grant was under the control of the spoils system. Likewise, George William Curtis, editor of Harper's Weekly, "was not opposed to the spoils system until it ceased to function satisfactorily for him and his friends." Lincoln had offered him an ambassadorship to Egypt, but postwar politicians (p. 46) "snubbed Curtis and his peers."

I don't find this argument entirely convincing, because the examples that Hoogenboom gives of Curtis's failure to win New York's senatorial nomination and failure on the Civil Service Commission are consistent with alternative interpretations, namely, that Curtis was not manipulative and found real-world politics to be distasteful. Hoogenboom also uses Henry Adams as an example, but again this example is not convincing of his point that the Mugwumps' interest in reform came from their lack of personal gain from Gilded Age politicians.

Hoogenboom argues that "The careers of Norton, Curtis and Henry Adams demonstrated that the civil service reform movement fitted a pattern of those out of power versus those in power...The civil service reformer's political impotence accurately reflected his loss of social and economic power. He was out of step with the rest of society..."

The last of the contributions about which I blog is McFarland's. I had previously blogged his book, but he has a slightly different take on his data here. McFarland argues that "I do not believe that displacement was the primary stimulus for the Mugwumps' reform efforts. As I will attempt to show in my conclusions, the Mugwumps' moral intensity and elitist feelings were in large part the outgrowth of their family tradition, educational background and professional status. Their familial, educational and professional experiences led them to feel a personal responsibility for the preservation of civic morality.

McFarland's data is interesting He complies a list of 396 Mugwumps and then traces their occupations viewable here.

Individualist Ethics and Corporate Social Control

The history of human resource management has evolved from an individualist/conflictual approach where wage cuts followed by strikes were common. As employers started to realize that violent strikes were counterproductive, they implemented three approaches. One, scientific management and welfare capitalism, aimed for a "mental revolution" among labor and management whereby workers' aims were aligned with management's through incentives and employee benefits. A second approach was a bureaucratic approach whereby laws, rules and union agreements established a high degree of formal control through regulation and collective bargaining. However, by the 1930s employers had realized that a third approach, emotive manipulation or social control through managing workers' feelings, attitudes and ethical beliefs had the potential for a more complete influence. This theory was related to Progressivism, which, as McFarland has argued, followed an earlier attempt by the Mugwumps to establish professional standards, credentials and licensure in such fields as medicine, law, economic policy, public health and library science. The Mugwumps were most concerned with rationalization of the public sector.

The Mugwumps had earlier demonstrated that an organized movement, even if small in numbers, that utilized mass media to unify and focus the movement, could result in effective political action. The Progressives utilized this approach. The argument that labor relations could be improved through psychological methods followed the muckrakers and Herbert Croly's emphasis on the use of public power and mass movements to recreate democracy.

The shift to emphasis on psychological and social control, via the management theories of Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard, was a reflection of the Progressive movement's tactical application of the same principles for public influence. The Progressives emphasized moral relativism to combat the American religious tendency toward individual conscience. They utilized the groupthink approach that Mugwumps pioneered. They realized that to manipulate the public, understanding of the public's group processes was necessary. Thus, the progressives applied the welfare benefit approach that local political clubs had used for centuries, but nationalized it and rationalized it.

Toward an Aristotelian Moral Ubermensch

In his >Mugwumps, Morals and Politics 1864-1920 Gerald McFarland writes (p. 147):

"The consequences of the progressive perspective were evident in an older Mugwump organization, the National Municipal League. Gradually, the NML shifted its goal from one of creating municipal efficiency by throwing out the rascals to creating efficient administration by working with whomever was in. As less emphasis was put on individual moral responsibility and more on malfunctioning of the system, the tone of municipal reform changed. It was a change of style that even progressively inclined Mugwumps found quite jarring."

In The Lonely Crowd David Riesman argued that the twentieth century saw an evolution from inner directedness, whereby personal goals and firm morals drive aims and values, to other directedness, where conformity, peer pressure and media opinion drive aims and values. The transition from Mugwumpery to Progressivism that occurred among some few of the Mugwumps during the first decade of the 1900s (many Mugwumps had died by then and two thirds of the Mugwumps did not adopt Progressivism or publicly adopted only one Progressive issue, according to McFarland).

The transition from inner-directedness to other-directedness may have resulted from (or at least be related to) the change in political emphasis from the late nineteenth century Mugwumps to the Progressives. The Mugwumps were largely religiously educated and mainly came from Protestant backgrounds. They had a specific moral sense, part of which involved an emphasis on individual responsibility and morality. In contrast, the shift among the Progressives to a systems approach lifted the emphasis on responsibility and morality from the individual and turned it into a political or public problem. The Progressives may have emphasized this in their educational activities, which were led by John Dewey. In other words, the shift from inner-directedness to other-directedness may be a result from the Progressives' political ideology. Their emphasis on systems may have been linked to scientific management and the idea that you can improve output through rationalization of systems. Herbert Croly discusses scientific management in Progressive Democracy.

Business schools also gained currency around this time or a bit later, and the ideas of Chester Barnard and the human relations advocates of the 1930s were reflective of the progressives' emphasis on systems as opposed to individual moral responsibility. Barnard emphasized morals heavily in his Functions of the Executive , but his interpretation of morals was entirely relativistic. He argued that executives must be morally creative to motivate workers. Such moral creativity leaves little room for moral grounding. He probably thought that public morality and public scrutiny and control systems would be sufficient to prevent deviant moral beliefs from becoming part of executives' moral creativity. But Barnard does not treat the problem adequately. Rather, he gives examples that suggest that deviant behavior, such as becoming indifferent to the death of one's parent, can be induced through moral creativity. In this, Barnard was not unlike Adolf Eichmann, the chief of the Nazis' prison camp operations. In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt quotes Eichmann as saying that he is a Kantian and that the duty to obey orders was his moral imperative. This kind of moral creativity finds little inhibition once the problem of morality becomes one of moral systems rather than conscience or individual responsibility.

The management literature has addressed the problem of inhibiting moral deviance in two key ways: through control systems (financial accounting and incentive systems that reduce conflicts between agents and principals) and through organizational culture. But neither approach anticipates the possibility of sociopathic or morally deviant management, as occurred with Enron and other firms in the first decade of the 21st century.

The inclucation of moral sense is a lifelong process. Aristotle argued that the young must develop habits through their upbringing, and if such habits are not developed then they will not be able to be taught to be moral decision makers. Progressive education approaches that encourage students to discover principles for themselves may fail to encourage the habits necessary for moral decision making. Thus, Progressive education contribute to the lax morality that we have witnessed in business. But even those who have good upbringings in the first place can develop bad habits when they work. Social pressure to conform to deviant orgnaizational norms can displace the good habits a young executive learned when he was young.

Aristotle argued that moral behavior involves balancing extremes. Excessive honesty, revealing too much information, is foolish and can lead to being duped. Excessive dishonesty leads to criminality. The mean involves good faith, fair dealing and comeptent negotiation. The competent executive needs to negotiate the moral challenges with which organizations cope but needs to retain the ability to judge when compromises with his basic personal values are too great. That our education has failed to do this is evident from the case of Enron, whereby young MBA graduates bought into Enron's dishonest handling of regulatory agencies; accounting fraud; willingness to cheat investors; and similar kinds of criminality.

Progressivism and its followers, to include Chester Barnard and the advocates of modern management theory, agency theory and systems-based approaches to control, de-emphasize individual responsibility. This is erroneous, as Adolph Eichmann and Jeff Skilling proved. The unscrupulous will always find the way around systems. Not that systems can be ignored or should be, but they are not enough.

Students must learn to balance Aristotle's moral mean with Barnard's moral creativity. To do so requires a considerable degree of self-awareness and managerial skills, of the very kind that managerial skills advocates such as David Whetten and Kim Cameron have advocated. Finding the Aristotelian moral mean in a complex organization means have considerable interpersonal skill and moral awareness, both of which are too often missing.

Gerald W. McFarland's Mugwumps, Morals and Politics, 1884-1920

Gerald W. McFarland. Mugwumps, Morals and Politics 1884-1920. Amherst, Ma: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975. 291 pages.


Gerald W. McFarland's Mugwumps, Morals and Politics 1884-1920 (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975) is a well-researched, well-written and scholarly book. In contrast to David M. Tucker's Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age and John M. Dobson's Politics in the Gilded Age: A New Perspective on Reform McFarland combines a quantitative analysis with his historical narrative; focuses on the later Mugwumps (the narrative ends in 1920); and reviews a wider range of activities than Tucker, who focuses on the ideology of key Mugwumps, and Dobson, who focuses on politics. The Mugwumps were, in McFarland's book, a broader movement than in Tucker's, although Tucker's perspective is better because it clarifies the original Mugwumps' purposes.

McFarland does not consider that the Mugwumps may have been ideologues, motivated by belief in science and morality. Rather, McFarland suggests at several points that the economics of the Mugwumps was "derivative" and motivated by class interest or erroneous thinking. Not that he discounts their ideology entirely, but he does not stress it. It would seem that if the Mugwumps indeed spent a large portion of their time fighting for the gold standard, free trade and efficient government, then they held an underlying belief system to which they were emotionally committed. The gold standard is not, as McFarland seems to think, a silly, abstract idea. Thus, I prefer Tucker's purpose-driven or teleological perspective to McFarland's. But McFarland's book is excellent nonetheless.

McFarland's logic can be equally applied to the Progressives, who followed the Mugwumps by a generation. The leading Progressives were upper class and some were former Mugwumps. Many were professionals. Many were business executives. For instance, the Roosevelts were from a wealthy background. The Progressives' ideas were certainly derivative, in part based on 17th century Mercantilism and in part based on Bismarck's welfare state, which itself was derivative of feudalism. The former Mugwumps, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Simeon Baldwin (who adopted a modest Progressive program into his gubernatorial administration) and Louis Brandeis, who transformed themselves into regular Republicans and then Progressives benefited from their beliefs professionally much more than did most of the Mugwumps. Progressivism advocated the creation of commissions, professional jobs, regulations and the like that served the narrow interests not only of professionals, but of big business as well.

Some of the Mugwumps began to gradually transform into Progressives by the 1890s. McFarland finds that 40% of the Mugwumps never adopted Progressivism, 27% adopted one or more Progressive ideas (many of which were extensions of Mugwumpery involving improving government) and only 33% became outright Progressives. Some of the Mugwumps, such as Josiah Quincy, mayor of Boston, adopted socialist ideas. Perhaps not coincidentally, Quincy was one of the few Mugwumps associated with corruption and political spoilsmanship.

When progressive ideas confronted the Mugwumps, their professional interests likely conflicted with their classical liberal ideology. In other words, the spoils from Progressivism were probably greater than the spoils from classical liberalism. Outside of the emphasis on professionalization (which includes establishing the professions in which many of them worked as well as rationalizing government) the classical liberal ideology never served their eonomic interests, so if the Mugwumps were purely an economic interest group they might as well have dropped classical liberalism in the first place and become another interest group pleading for favors from the Stalwarts or Halfbreeds (supporters and opponents of President Grant). This is a problem for the view that classical liberalism served the Mugwumps' economic interests.

The economic philosophy that best served upper class investors and real estate holders was Populism, but this point seems to escape McFarland, or at least he deemphasizes it. Similarly, although Wilson adopted the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 and the Federal Trade Commission, an anti-trust measure, in 1914, neither of these were viewed as radically progressive. Many Mugwumps supported the Fed because they believed that removing control of money from the political process would rationalize it. They could not anticipate widespread acceptance of Populism via Keynesian economics in the 1930s and Roosevelt's ending of the gold standard in the 1930s.

But Wilson became much more progressive when he realized that he needed to win over the progressive wing of the Democratic and Republican Party for the 1916 election. Thus, political opportunism as much as anything can explain Progressivism's successes, for example Wilson's adoption of it. Opportunism applies less to Mugwumpery than to Progressivism, for the Mugwumps had little to gain from bolting or from supporting classical liberalism. Few were factory owners and many were investors. Opposition to labor unions would have been much less important to them than support for the gold standard (the gold standard hurt speculators because it resulted in deflation). Yet, they supported the gold standard, which was not beneficial to them economically.

What destroyed Mugwump individualist-liberalism was the wresting of scientific blief from classical liberalism that occurred in universities. Richard T. Ely's establishment of the American Economics Association in the 1890s seriously damaged the individualist-liberal Mugwump movement. They could no longer say that "science" supported their moral views. Although von Mises offered an alternative perspective beginning in the 1920s as did Hayek in the 1940s and Friedman in the 1960s, mainstream academics have emphasized market failure since the 1890s. This made it much more difficult for Mugwumps and later conservatives and libertarians to defend their views.

McFarland's quantitative descriptions of the Mugwumps are useful, although they would have been improved had they been hypothesis or theory driven. The findings that the Mugwumps were almost entirely college graduates (in an era when only two percent of the public graduated from college); that they were not the super-rich millionaires like Jay Gould associated with the regular Republicans (and that a smaller percentage of Mugwumps were millionaires than were the regular Republicans who attended fundraisers); that the Mugwumps came from well-to-do ancestries; and that they were mostly professionals involved in nascent professions attempting to establish themselves (professors, librarians) are interesting but not powerful (i.e., they do not enable us to reject Tucker's null hypothesis that they were morally and ideologically driven).

It seems that the transformation of a third of the Mugwumps from classical liberals to Progressives is linked to their gradual recognition that to win power they needed to one-up the political machines in the cities, which had traditionally provided jobs and benefits to immigrants and the poor. The way to do this, some Mugwumps began to realize in the 1890s, was to provide benefits to the working class that superseded the machines' paternalistic and spoils-based approach. Progressivism was thus a way to wrest power from the political machines by replacing locally-based paternalism with nationally based paternalism. Thus, the New Deal was the logical extension of progressivism, not because of ideology, but from the standpoint of obtaining power and utilizing programs to win power.

The machines began to realize that the Progressives' strategy worked, and responded by tentatively adopting the Progressives' reform ideas. Charles (Silent Charlie) Murphy, the boss of Tammany Hall from the 1890s to the 1920s began to support reform-oriented candidates as early as 1903. Ultimately, Murphy supported Al Smith for Governor of New York, and it was Smith who conceptualized the framework that became the New Deal. Smith was a Tammany Hall man. Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded Smith as governor of New York, and when he was president in the 1930s adopted Smith's program on the national level.

Thus, progressivism was the nationalization of political bossism. Roosevelt never addressed urban corruption, which would have been a chief Mugwump concern. Tammany Hall was destroyed by the fusion (Republican) mayoralty of Fiorello Laguardia, but it is not clear that this completely eliminated corruption. Progressive and New Deal administrators like Robert Moses, who admittedly was more effective than prior generations' administrations, "got things done" at a very high cost to poor New Yorkers. The progressives' and New Deal liberals' control of New York from the Laguardia administration through John Lindsay resulted in the city's near bankruptcy (saved by Felix Rohatyn and some financial maneuvering), a result that did not attend the political bossism of the nineteenth century.

A useful point that McFarland makes is on p. 113 in his discussion of Robert Treat Paine, a philanthropist and attorney from Boston:

"Paine was a Social Gospel Episcopalian--not a reform type that would dominate liberal circles after the New Deal, perhaps, but a type that played a major role in the incipient social progressivism of the 1890s."

Likewise, McFarland notes (p. 103-4):

"One of the foremost spokesmen for social progressivism was R. Fulton Cutting, a Mugwump who served as chairman of the Citizens' Union...Cutting was descended from Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton and had inherited a large fortune through his family connections...

"In a speech...Cutting denounced past reform movements for savoring 'more of Oligarchy than Democracy'. Patronizing appeals for civic morality had met with limited success, he believed, because reformers made no effort to make city government important to the average voter...As a advocate of Social Gospel Christianity, Cutting predicted that the twentieth century would produce a broad trend toward expanded government social and economic programs: "There is a swelling tide of human brotherhood that seeks to expose itself through Democratic institutions and the religion of the Twentieth Century is destined to employe Government as one of its principal instrumentalities for the solution of social issues."

Cutting said so in 1901. What is revealing in the cases of Paine and Cutting is that (1) they were upper class; (2) they were devout Protestants of the Social Gospel type; (3) they had seen the Mugwumps' reform ideas frequently defeated by corrupt political machines that provided benefits to immigrants and the poor; (4)they believed that they found a way to implement both their Christian beliefs and their interest in reform.

As with any effective ideology, the Paine/Cutting view combined a strategy for obtaining power with a belief that the strategy is morally right. More than 100 years later, Mike Huckabee continues to reflect this perspective, which reflected the views of a segment the Republican Party in 1901.

Those who believe in individualist-liberal ideas, the economics of Mill and Smith, and see progressive-liberalism as a reactionary, poverty-generating system that harms citizens and reflects anything but love, need to make the case that classical liberalism is humane and helps the poor while government does not. As well, the reform of universities to regain a place for classical liberal ideas is crucial. The mass media lacks the theoretical grounding to provide a foundation for a successful reversal of progressive-liberal domination.

The Libertarian Party Should Become a Voter Block Brokerage Organization

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.

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.

The Origins of Progressive Liberalism

The modern progressive-liberal movement may be said to have its earliest origins in the presidential campaign of 1884 when the Independent Republicans or Mugwumps (named after the word for young Algonquin Indian chieftain) bolted the Republican Party to fight the candidacy of James G. Blaine (R-ME), whom they associated with corruption and feared would scotch the Pendleton Act that had recently established the federal civil service. Instead of Blaine, whom they hated, they supported Grover Cleveland (D-NY). Theodore Roosevelt was linked to the Independent Republicans as was Harvard University's president, Charles Eliot, the New York Times, the Nation, the New York Evening Post, and Harper's Weekly. John M. Dobson* writes of the Mugwumps, the progressive-liberals' precursors:

"In their energetic promotion of Cleveland and their unstinting criticism of Blaine, the Mugwump journalists sometimes exceeded the bounds of objectivity. If they avoided telling outright lies, they were guilty at least of telling only part of the truth. Seldom content with straightforward statements of fact, the Mugwumps interpreted and twisted their stories to suit themselves. Editorializing about Blaine in late September, for example, the New York Times stated, 'There is no speculation which he can resist, but, rich as he is, he has never earned money by any business or profession...' Blaine did initiate a libel suit against and Indianapolis Democratic newspaper...But many Americans considered it somewhat unsportsmanlike to go that far..."

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.

*John M. Dobson, Politics in the Gilded Age: A New Perspective On Reform. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972. p. 141.

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.