3.5 Politics and Reform

Main Ideas
From 1877 to 1896, Republicans and Democrats were so evenly matched that only a few reforms were possible at the national level.
Farmers in economic crisis embraced an independent political movement called populism that emerged in the 1890s to challenge the two major parties.
In the late 1800s, Southern states passed laws that denied African Americans the right to vote and imposed segregation.

Vocabulary
populism, inflation, deflation, graduated income tax, poll tax, grandfather clause, segregation, Jim Crow laws

Reading Objectives

1. Explain why the Republicans and Democrats were so evenly matched during this period and why the People’s Party gained support.
2. Discuss how African Americans in the South were disfranchised and how segregation was legalized.

Stalemate in Washington

• Under the spoils system, or patronage, government jobs went to supporters of the winning party in an election. By the late 1870s, many Americans believed that patronage corrupted those who worked for the government. They began a movement to reform the civil service.
• President Rutherford B. Hayes attacked the practice of patronage. The “Stalwarts”—a group of Republican machine politicians who strongly opposed civil service reform—accused Hayes of backing civil service reform to create openings for his own supporters. Civil service reformers were called “Halfbreeds.”
• The Republican candidates for the election of 1880 were a Halfbreed, James Garfield for president, and the Stalwart, Chester Arthur for vice president. They won the election.
• President Garfield was assassinated a few months into his presidency.
• In 1883 Congress passed the Pendleton Act. This civil service reform act allowed the president to decide which federal jobs would be filled according to rules set up by a bipartisan Civil Service Commission. Candidates competed for federal jobs through examinations. Appointments could be made only from the list of those who took the exams. Once appointed to a job, a civil service official could not be removed for political reasons.
• A major reason that few new policies were introduced in the 1870s and 1880s was because the Democrats had control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans had the control of the Senate.
• Both the Republicans and the Democrats were well organized in the late 1800s. The presidential elections were won with narrow margins between 1876 and 1896. In 1876 and 1888, the presidential candidate lost the popular vote, but won the electoral vote and the election.
• The Republicans won four of the six presidential elections between 1876 and 1896. The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, however, and the Senate was controlled by Republicans who did not necessarily agree with the president on issues.
• In the presidential election of 1884, Republicans remained divided over reform. Democrats nominated Governor Grover Cleveland of New York, a reformer who opposed Tammany Hall.
• Republicans nominated James G. Blaine, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives. Blaine was popular among Republican Party workers.
• A major issue in the campaign was corruption in American government. Voters focused on the morals of each candidate.
• Some Republican reformers, called “Mugwumps,” disliked Blaine so much that they left the party to support the Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland. The Mugwumps did not like Blaine’s connection with the Crédit Mobilier scandal.
• Cleveland admitted to having fathered a child ten years earlier and retained the support of the Mugwumps for his honesty.
• Blaine tried to persuade Roman Catholics to vote Republican because his mother was an Irish Catholic. His tactic failed, and Cleveland was elected president.
• Many strikes occurred during Cleveland’s administration. Small businesses and farmers became angry at railroads because they paid high rates for shipping goods, but large corporations were given rebates, or partial refunds, and lower rates for shipping goods.
• Both Democrats and Republicans believed that government should not interfere with corporations’ property rights. In 1887 a bill was signed creating the Interstate Commerce Commission. This was the first law to regulate interstate commerce.
• Many Americans wanted to do away with high tariffs because they felt that large American companies could compete internationally. They wanted Congress to cut tariffs because these taxes caused an increase in the price of manufactured goods. President Cleveland proposed lowering tariffs, but Congress was deadlocked over the issue. Tariff reduction became a major issue in the election of 1888.
• The Republican candidate in the 1888 election was Benjamin Harrison. His campaign was given large contributions by industrialists who wanted tariff protection. The Democratic candidate was Cleveland. He was against high tariff rates. Harrison won the election by winning the electoral vote, but not the popular vote.
• As a result of the election of 1888, Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress and the White House. The Republicans were able to pass legislation on issues of national concern.
• The McKinley Tariff cut tariff rates on some goods, but increased the rates of others. It lowered federal revenue and left the nation with a budget deficit.
• The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 made trusts illegal, although the courts did little to enforce the law. Businesses formed trusts and combinations at a great rate.

Populism

• In the 1890s, a political movement called Populism emerged to increase the political power of farmers and to work for legislation for farmers’ interests.
• The nation’s money supply concerned farmers. To help finance the Union in the Civil War, the government issued millions of dollars in greenbacks, or paper currency that could not be exchanged for gold or silver coins. This rapid increase in the money supply without a rapid increase in goods for sale caused inflation—a decline in the value of money. The prices of goods greatly increased.
• To get inflation under control, the federal government stopped printing greenbacks and started paying off bonds. Congress also stopped making silver into coins. As a result, the country did not have a large enough money supply to meet the needs of the growing economy. This led to deflation—or an increase in the value of money and a decrease in the general level of prices.
• Deflation forced most farmers to borrow money to plant their crops. The short supply of money caused an increase in interest rates that the farmers owed.
• Some farmers wanted more greenbacks printed to expand the money supply. Others wanted the government to mint silver coins.
• The Grange was a national farm organization founded for social and educational purposes. Grangers put their money together and created cooperatives—marketing organizations that worked to help its members. The cooperatives pooled members’ crops and held them off the market to force the prices to rise. Cooperatives could negotiate better shipping rates from railroads.
• The Grange was unable to improve the economic conditions of farmers. By the late 1870s, many farmers left the Grange and joined other organizations that offered to help them solve their problems.
• The Farmers’ Alliance was formed in 1877.
• The Alliance organized large cooperatives called exchanges for the purpose of forcing farm prices up and making loans to farmers at low interest rates. These exchanges mostly failed. Wholesalers, manufacturers, railroads, and bankers discriminated against the exchanges. The exchanges were too small to dramatically affect world prices for farm products.
• Members of the Kansas Alliance formed the People’s Party, or Populists, to push for political reforms that would help farmers solve their problems.
• In 1890 the Farmers’ Alliance issued the Ocala Demands to help farmers choose candidates in the 1890 elections. The demands included the adoption of the subtreasury plan, the free coinage of silver, an end to protective tariffs and national banks, tighter regulation of the railroads, and direct election of senators by voters.
• By early 1892, Southern members of the Alliance began to realize that Democrats were not going to keep their promises to the Alliance and they were ready to leave the Democratic Party and join the People’s Party.
• In July 1892, the People’s Party held its first national convention where it nominated James B. Weaver to run for president. The People’s Party platform called for unlimited coinage of silver, federal ownership of railroads, and a graduated income tax, one that taxes higher earnings more heavily. It also called for an eight-hour workday, restriction of immigration, and denounced the use of strikebreakers.
• Democrats nominated New Yorker Grover Cleveland for the 1892 presidential election. Cleveland won the election.
• The Panic of 1893 was caused by the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroads. It resulted in the stock market crash and the closing of many banks. By 1894 the country was in a deep depression.
• President Cleveland wanted to stop the flow of gold and make it the sole basis for the country’s currency, so he had Congress repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. This caused the Democratic Party to split into the goldbugs and the silverites. Goldbugs believed the American currency should be based only on gold. Silverites believed coining silver in unlimited amounts was the answer to the nation’s economic crisis.
• The Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for the presidential election of 1896. He strongly supported the unlimited silver coinage. Populists also supported Bryan for president.
• The Republicans nominated William McKinley of Ohio for president. He promised workers a “full dinner pail.” Most business leaders liked McKinley because they thought the unlimited silver coinage would ruin the country’s economy.
• McKinley won the election of 1896. New gold strikes in Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory and in other parts of the world increased the money supply without needing to use silver. As the silver issue died out, so did the Populist Party.

The Rise of Segregation

• After Reconstruction, most African Americans were sharecroppers, or landless farmers who had to give the landlord a large share of their crops to cover their costs for rent and farming supplies.
• In 1879 Benjamin “Pap” Singleton organized a mass migration of African Americans, called Exodusters, from the rural South to Kansas.
• Some African Americans that stayed in the South formed the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance. The organization worked to help its members set up cooperatives. Many African Americans joined the Populist Party.
• Threatened by the power of the Populist Party, Democratic leaders began using racism to try to win back the poor white vote in the South. By 1890 election officials in the South began using methods to make it difficult for African Americans to vote.
• Southern states used loopholes in the Fifteenth Amendment and began to impose restrictions that barred almost all African Americans from voting.
• In 1890 Mississippi required all citizens registering to vote to pay a poll tax, which most African Americans could not afford to pay. The state also required all prospective voters to take a literacy test. Most African Americans had no education and failed the test. Other Southern states adopted similar restrictions. The number of African Americans and poor whites registered to vote fell dramatically in the South.
• To allow poor whites to vote, some Southern states had a grandfather clause in their voting restrictions. This clause allowed any man to vote if he had an ancestor on the voting rolls in 1867.
• In the late 1800s, both the North and the South discriminated against African Americans. In the South, segregation, or separation of the races, was enforced by laws known as Jim Crow laws.
• In 1883 the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The ruling meant that private organizations or businesses were free to practice segregation.
• Southern states passed a series of laws that enforced segregation in almost all public places.
• The Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson endorsed “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans. This ruling established the legal basis for discrimination in the South for over 50 years.
• In the late 1800s, mob violence increased in the United States, particularly in the South. Between 1890 and 1899, hundreds of lynchings—executions without proper court proceedings—took place. Most lynchings were in the South, and the victims were mostly African Americans.
• In 1892 Ida B. Wells, an African American from Tennessee, began a crusade against lynching. She wrote newspaper articles and a book denouncing lynchings and mob violence against African Americans.
• Booker T. Washington, an African American educator, urged fellow African Americans to concentrate on achieving economic goals rather than legal or political ones. He explained his views in a speech known as the Atlanta Compromise.
• The Atlanta Compromise was challenged by W.E.B. Du Bois, the leader of African American activists born after the Civil War. Du Bois said that white Southerners continued to take away the civil rights of African Americans, even though they were making progress in education and vocational training. He believed that African Americans had to demand their rights, especially voting rights, to gain full equality.