Chapter 23
Political Paralysis in the Gilded Age, 1869–1896
Chapter Themes
Theme: Even as post–Civil War America expanded and industrialized, political life in the Gilded Age was marked by ineptitude, stalemate, and corruption. Despite their similarity at the national level, the two parties competed fiercely for offices and spoils, while doling out “pork-barrel” benefits to veterans and other special interest groups.
Theme: The serious issues of monetary and agrarian reform, labor, race, and economic fairness were largely swept under the rug by the political system, until revolting farmers and a major economic depression beginning in 1893 created a growing sense of crisis and demands for radical change.
Theme: The Compromise of 1877 made reconstruction officially over and white Democrats resumed political power in the South. Blacks, as well as poor whites, found themselves forced into sharecropping and tenant farming; what began as informal separation of blacks and whites in the immediate postwar years evolved into systematic state-level legal codes of segregation known as Jim Crow laws.
chapter summary
After the soaring ideals and tremendous sacrifices of the Civil War, the post–Civil War era was generally one of disillusionment. Politicians from the White House to the courthouse were often surrounded by corruption and scandal, while the actual problems afflicting industrializing America festered beneath the surface.
The popular war hero Grant was a poor politician and his administration was rife with corruption. Despite occasional futile reform efforts, politics in the Gilded Age was monopolized by the two patronage-fattened parties, which competed vigorously for spoils while essentially agreeing on most national policies. Cultural differences, different constituencies, and deeply felt local issues fueled intense party competition and unprecedented voter participation. Periodic complaints by “Mugwump” reformers and “soft-money” advocates failed to make much of a dent on politics.
The deadlocked contested 1876 election led to the sectional Compromise of 1877, which put an end to Reconstruction. An oppressive system of tenant farming and racial supremacy and segregation was thereafter fastened on the South, enforced by sometimes lethal violence. Racial prejudice against Chinese immigrants was also linked with labor unrest in the 1870s and 1880s.
Garfield’s assassination by a disappointed office seeker spurred the beginnings of civil-service reform, which made politics more dependent on big business. Cleveland, the first Democratic president since the Civil War, made a lower tariff the first real issue in national politics for some time. But his mild reform efforts were eclipsed by a major economic depression that began in 1893, a crisis that deepened the growing outcry from suffering farmers and workers against a government and economic system that seemed biased toward big business and the wealthy.
Note Card Terms
- Ulysses S. Grant
- “ Let us have peace”
- “ Waving the bloody shirt”
- “ Jubilee Jim” Fisk
- Jay Gould
- “ Boss” Tweed
- Thomas Nast
- Samuel J. Tilden
- Credit Mobilier scandal
- Whiskey Ring
- Horace Greeley
- Panic in 1873
- Inflation
- “ folding money”
- “ hard money”
- “ cheap money”
- deflation
- “ sacred white metal”
- contraction
- Gilded Age
- Grand Army of the Republic
- Patronage
- “ Stalwart”
- Half-Breeds
- James G. Blaine
- Rutherford B. Hayes
- Compromise of 1877
- Electoral Count Act
- Filibuster
- Civil Rights Act of 1875
- Civil Rights Cases (1883)
- “ crop lien” system
- Jim Crow Laws
- Plessy v. Ferguson
- Great railroad strike
- “ not a Chinaman’s chance”
- Chinese Exclusion Act
- US v. Wong Kim
- “ birthright citizenship”
- jus soli
- James A. Garfield
- Chester A. Arthur
- Winfield Scott Hancock
- Charles J. Giteau
- spoils system
- Pendleton Act
- Civil Service Commission
- “ Mulligan letters”
- Mugwumps
- Grover Cleveland
- Laissez –Faire
- GAR
- Pension Grabbers
- tariff issue
- “ pork-barrel bills”
- Benjamin Harrison
- “ Billion-Dollar Congress”
- McKinley Tariff Act of 1890
- Farmers’ Alliance
- Populists
- General James B. Weaver
- Nationwide strikes
- Colored Farmers’ National Alliance
- “ grandfather clause”
- Tom Watson
- Depression of 1893
- “ endless chain” operation
- William JenningsBryan
- J. P. Morgan
- Wilson-Gorman Tariff
Homework Directions: Read the chapter and complete the following:
1. Complete American Pageant Study Guide.
Chapter 23 Study Guide
The "Bloody Shirt" Elects Grant
1.Was General Grant good presidential material? Why did he win?
The Era of Good Stealings
2."The Man in the Moon...had to hold his nose when passing over America." Explain.
A Carnival of Corruption
3.Describe two major scandals that directly involved the Grant administration.
The Liberal Republican Revolt of 1872
4.Why did Liberal Republicans nominate Horace Greeley for the presidency in 1872? Why was he a less than ideal candidate?
Depression and Demands for Inflation
5.Why did some people want greenbacks and silver dollars? Why did others oppose these kinds of currency?
Pallid Politics in the Gilded Age
6.Why was there such fierce competition between Democrats and Republicans in the Gilded Age if the parties agreed on most economic issues?
The Hayes-Tilden Standoff, 1876
7. Why were the results of the 1876 election in doubt?
The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction
8.How did the end of Reconstruction affect African-Americans?
The Birth of Jim Crow in the Post-Reconstruction South
9.Analyze the data in the lynching chart on page 513.
Class Conflicts and Ethnic Clashes
10.What was the significance of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?
Garfield and Arthur
11. What new type of corruption resulted from the Pendleton Act?
Makers of America: The Chinese
12. Why did most Chinese immigrants come to America?
The Blaine-Cleveland Mudslingers of 1884
13.Explain how character played a part in the presidential election of 1884.
“Old Grover" Takes Over
14.Assess the following statement: "As president, Grover Cleveland governed as his previous record as governor indicated he would."
Cleveland Battles for a Lower Tariff
15.What were the reasons behind Cleveland's stance in favor of lower tariffs?
The Billion Dollar Congress
16. Explain why the tariff was detrimental to American farmers.
The Drumbeat of Discontent
17. What was the most revolutionary aspect of the Populist platform? Defend your answer with evidence.
Cleveland and Depression
18. What could Cleveland have done to lessen the impact of the financial turmoil?
Cleveland Breeds a Backlash
19. Is the characterization of the Gilded Age presidents as the “forgettable presidents” a fair one? Explain.
Varying Viewpoints: The Populists: Radicals or Reactionaries?
20. Were the Populists romanticized, or were they truly “authentic reformers with genuine grievances?”
expanding the “varying viewpoints”
- Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955).
A view of the Populists as backward-looking and irrational reactionaries:
“In the attempts of the Populists ... to hold on to some of the values of agrarian life, to save personal entrepreneurship and individual opportunity and the character type they engendered, and to maintain a homogeneous Yankee civilization, I have found much that was retrograde and delusive, a little that was vicious, and a good deal that was comic.... Such tendencies in American life as isolationism and the extreme nationalism that often goes with it, hatred of Europe and Europeans, racial, religious, and nationalist phobias, resentment of big business, trade-unionism, intellectuals, the Eastern seaboard and its culture—all these have been found not only in opposition to reform but also at times oddly combined with it.”
- Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America(1976).
A view of the Populists as forward-looking and rational:
“For the triumph of Populism—its only enduring triumph—was the belief in possibility it injected into American political consciousness.…Tactical errors aside, it was the élan of the agrarian crusade, too earnest ever to be decisively ridiculed, too creative to be permanently ignored, that lingers as the Populist residue.…The creed centered on concepts of political organization and uses of democratic government that—even though in a formative stage—were already too advanced to be accepted by the centralizing, complacent nation of the Gilded Age.…The issues of Populism were large. They dominate our world.”
questions about the “varying viewpoints”
21.What does each of these historians see as the essential character of populism?
22.How does the holder of each of these viewpoints see the relationship between populism and the new corporate industrial order of the late nineteenth century?
23.How would each of these historians likely interpret the fact that populism disappeared as a political force but has remained a strong undercurrent in American political thinking?
HISTORIC NOTES
- The post-Civil War era is rife with corruption, graft, and influence peddling. Corruption is rampant at the local and state level as well. The infamous New York City political machine known as the Tweed Ring, for example, bilks the city and state out of millions of dollars.
- In an attempt to clean their own house, the Republicans take steps to lower the protective tariff, which many consider unreasonably high and beneficial to specific industries. In addition, to address the problem of nepotism and favoritism in attaining government employment, the Republicans pass modest civil service reform legislation such as the Pendleton Act.
- A devastating Depression hits the nation in 1873, adding to the already significant political woes of President Grant and his Republican Party.
- An effect of the Civil War, the weakening of the Democratic Party during this period, would have a long term effect. Indeed, only two Democrats were elected president between 1860 and 1912.
- While he himself was honest to a fault, President Grant’s administration was riddled with political figures who viewed their position in government as a means to acquire ill-gotten wealth. Some people who were not government officials found ways to penetrate the federal government to benefit them selves. For example, financial speculators Jay Gould and Jim Fisk cornered the gold market. Their unscrupulous acts were uncovered, but not before ruining many unsuspecting investors and businessmen and further tarnishing the already tainted Grant administration.
- With the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws brought a new form of subordination and degredation for southern blacks. Relegated again to a position of dependence, many former slaves turned to sharecropping, one of the few options open to them. Millions of blacks scratched out a meager existence while locked into a system that made them indebted to the owners of the land on which they worked. In many cases those landowners were their former masters.
Advanced Placement United States History Topic Outline
15. Industrial America in the Late Nineteenth Century
A. Corporate consolidation of industry
B. Effects of technological development on the worker and workplace
C. Labor and unions
D. National politics and influence of corporate power
E. Migration and immigration: the changing face of the nation
F. Proponents and opponents of the new order, e.g., Social Darwinism and Social Gospel
16. Urban Society in the Late Nineteenth Century
A. Urbanization and the lure of the city
B. City problems and machine politics
C. Intellectual and cultural movements and popular entertainment
17. Populism and Progressivism
A. Agrarian discontent and political issues of the late nineteenth century
B. Origins of Progressive reform: municipal, state, and national
C. Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson as Progressive presidents
D. Women's roles: family, workplace, education, politics, and reform
E. Black America: urban migration and civil rights initiatives