Furthermore, party comparisons understate the conservative dominance of politics during this era, because one major wing of the Democratic Party—the so-called Bourbon Democrats, who included both reactionary Southerners and probusiness Northerners—was just as supportive of the interests of the wealthy and opposed to government help for the poor as the Republicans. The Bourbon Democrats did differ from the Republicans on some issues: They believed in free trade rather than high protective tariffs, and they decried corruption in politics. But it would be wrong to characterize the Bourbons as being in any meaningful sense to the left of the GOP. And on the rare occasions when a Democrat did take control of the White House, it was always a Bourbon: Grover Cleveland, the only Democrat to win the presidency between the Civil War and Woodrow Wilson’s victory in 1912,[3] was a Bourbon, and so were Democrats who got anywhere near the White House, like Samuel Tilden in 1876.
What accounts for this prolonged conservative dominance in a country in which demands to tax the rich and help the needy should, by the numbers, have had mass appeal? The explanation involves several factors that are all too familiar from today’s political scene, but were present in an exaggerated form.
First there was the effective disenfranchisement of many American workers. In 1910 almost 14 percent of adult males were nonnaturalized immigrants, unable to vote. Meanwhile Southern blacks were effectively disenfranchised by Jim Crow. Between the immigrants and the blacks, about a quarter of the population—and by and large, the poorest quarter—were simply denied any role in the political process. As we’ll see later in this book the problem of disenfranchisement has returned in contemporary America, thanks to large-scale illegal immigration and the continuing low voting participation of blacks—aided by systematic vote suppression that is more subtle than that of Jim Crow days, but nonetheless can be decisive in close elections.
Then there was the matter of campaign finance, whose force was most vividly illustrated in the 1896 election, arguably the only time between the Civil War and 1932 that a challenger to the country’s ruling economic elite had a serious chance of winning the White House. Fearful of what William Jennings Bryan might do, the wealthy didn’t crucify him on a cross of gold—they buried him under a mountain of the stuff. William McKinley’s 1896 campaign spent $3.35 million, almost twice as much as the Republicans had spent in 1892, and five times what Bryan had at his disposal. And bear in mind that in 1896 three million dollars was a lot of money: As a percentage of gross domestic product, it was the equivalent of more than $3 billion today, five times what the Bush campaign spent in 2004. The financial disparity between the parties in 1896 was exceptional, but the Republicans normally had a large financial advantage. The only times the Democrats were more or less financially competitive between the Civil War and Woodrow Wilson’s election in 1912 were in 1876, an election in which the Democrat Samuel Tilden actually won the popular vote (and essentially had the electoral vote stolen, in a deal in which Rutherford B. Hayes got the White House in return for his promise to withdraw federal troops from the South), and in Grover Cleveland’s two victories in 1884 and 1892. Not coincidentally Tilden and Cleveland were Bourbon Democrats. When the Democratic Party nominated someone who wasn’t a Bourbon, it was consistently outspent about three to one.[4] Finally there was pervasive election fraud.[5] Both parties did it, in a variety of ways. For much of the period secret ballots were rare: Most voters used ballots printed by the parties themselves, and these ballots were easily distinguishable by size and color. As a consequence, vote buying was feasible, easy—there was no problem verifying that the votes were actually cast as purchased—and widespread. In 1888 the New York Times acquired a letter sent by William Dudley, the treasurer of the Republican National Committee, to Republican county chairmen in Indiana. It read, in part:
Your committee will certainly receive from Chairman Huston the assistance necessary to hold our floaters and doubtful voters…divide the floaters into blocks of five, and put a trusted man, with the necessary funds, in charge of those five, and make him responsible that none get away, and that all will vote our ticket.[6]
As the Times editorialized, this letter was “a direct incitement to criminal acts…an official handbook for the voter buyers and bribery corps of the Republicans in Indiana.” And it wasn’t unusual. In fact there’s reason to believe that high rates of voter participation in the Gilded Age largely reflected financial incentives. Vote buying was, inevitably, most prevalent in swing states: One widely cited estimate is that during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era up to a third of voters in New Jersey, which was very much a swing state at the time, regularly took cash for their votes.
Ballot-box stuffing was also widespread—and not just in areas dominated by urban machines, though most box stuffers were too bashful to say bluntly, as William Marcy Tweed did, “The ballots made no result; the counters made the result.” There was also extensive use of intimidation to keep the other party’s voters away from the polls. And as a last resort entrenched political groups sometimes simply overruled the will of the voters. For example, in 1897 the Indiana legislature simply unseated several Populists, even though it admitted that they had won a majority of the votes in their districts.
Again, both parties engaged in these tactics, though the financial edge of the Republicans probably meant that they came out ahead in the competitive corruption of politics at the time. More generally electoral fraud reinforced the advantages that money and organization carried: Elections were often decided not by who had the more popular platform, but by who was better prepared to rig the polls. At the same time, it greatly reduced the chances for electoral success of a platform that truly reflected the interests of the majority of the population.
It would be wrong, however, to think of the Long Gilded Age as an era in which there were heated clashes, in which the egalitarian impulses of the populace were forcibly suppressed by the forces of the elite. The truth was that most of the time the system’s inherent bias against any form of populism (with a small p—I’m not referring to the specific programs of the Populist Party, of which more below) was so strong and obvious that politicians didn’t even try to challenge the inequalities of the economic order.
Ironically the extreme weakness of populism in Gilded Age America made politics a more relaxed affair in certain respects than it is today. Most of the time, the conservative forces that sustained the Long Gilded Age didn’t require an equivalent to today’s disciplined movement conservatism to triumph. There was no need for an interlocking set of special institutions, Mafia-like in their demand for loyalty, to promulgate conservative thought, reward the faithful, and intimidate the press and any dissenters. There was no need to form alliances with religious fundamentalists, no need to exploit morality and lifestyle issues. And there was no need to distort foreign policy or engage in convenient foreign wars to distract the public.
The election of 1896 was the striking exception to the long-standing pattern of relaxed oligarchy. For a moment, it seemed as if Populism with a capital P really did represent a serious challenge to plutocratic rule. Populism failed, however, and not just because of a political system tilted in favor of those with money and organization. Populism lacked the kind of leadership that could bridge the divisions among the various groups whose interests would have been served by change. It was shipwrecked on the shoals of ethnic and geographic diversity.
3.
Wilson was considered a Bourbon before his presidential run but made his peace with Bryan before the election. In practice he did move the government somewhat to the left, adopting a relatively tolerant attitude toward unions and instituting the income tax. But he was no FDR.
4.
Election finance statistics from
5.
For an overview of the evidence, see Peter H. Argersinger, “New Perspectives on Election Fraud in the Gilded Age,”
6.
“Col. Dudley’s Letter: ‘Divide the Floaters into Blocks of Five,’