Chapter 23 –Political Paralysis
in the Gilded Age (1869-1896)
Local and national political corruption in the
19th century led to calls for reform, as
economic depression, racial strife, and labor
conflicts ravage the nation.
The Blood Shirt Elects Grant
 The Republicans nominated Civil War General
Ulysses S. Grant, a great soldier but an inept
politician.
 The Republicans got Grant elected (barely) by
“waving the bloody shirt,” or reliving his war
victories
The Era of Good Stealings
 Politics became corrupt during this time
 Railroad promoters, stock market investors, corrupt politicians and
judges plague the nation
 The infamous Tweed Ring (AKA, “Tammany Hall") of NYC,
headed by “Boss” Tweed, employed bribery, graft, and fake
elections to cheat the city of as much as $200 million.

Political machine: a party organization, headed by a single boss or small
autocratic group, that commands enough votes to maintain political and
administrative control of a city, county, or state.
 Samuel J. Tilden gained fame by leading the prosecution of
Tweed, and he would later use this fame to become the
Democratic nominee in the presidential election of 1876
 Thomas Nast, political cartoonist, constantly drew against
Tammany’s corruption.
While modern readers
intrinsically link
newspapers and political
cartoons, the use of
cartoons in the
American media was
minimal until Thomas
Nast popularized them
in the 1860s and 1870s.
Known today as the
father of American
political cartoons, Nast
gained fame as a
cartoonist for Harper’s
Magazine. Today he is
best remembered for his
cartoons about Boss
Tweed and the
Tammany Ring.
Thomas Nast at his Desk (1880)
Tammany Hall was a New York
City political organization that
originated in the late 18th
century. It became the
Democratic Party’s political
“machine” and thus controlled
the party’s nominations. William
M. Tweed, more commonly
known as Boss Tweed, was a New
York politician who became
Tammany’s leader in the late
1860’s. As the party’s boss, he
was able to appoint several city
officials and essentially
controlled the city government.
As a result, he had access to an
enormous amount of public
money, which he used to enrich
himself and his closest friends
and allies through a variety of
money laundering and profit
sharing operations. It is
estimated that he defrauded the
city out of anywhere from $30
million to $200 million dollars
(equivalent to $365 million to
$2.4 billion today). Tweed was
finally caught when The New
York Times secured evidence of
his misdeeds, and later died in
jail.
William “Boss” Tweed (1869)
A Carnival of Corruption
 Grant naively failed to see the corruption going on,
even though many of his friends wanted offices and
his cabinet was totally corrupt
 The Credit Mobilier scandal tarred Grant


a railroad construction company that paid itself huge sums of
money for small railroad construction
A New York newspaper finally busted it, and two members of
Congress were formally censured and the Vice President
himself was shown to have accepted 20 shares of stock
Depression, Deflation, and Inflation
 In 1873, a paralyzing panic broke out, the Panic of
1873, caused by too many railroads and factories
being formed than existing markets could bear and
the over-loaning by banks to those projects
 Causes of the panic (same that caused recessions
every 20 years that century):

(1) over-speculation and (2) too-easy credit
 It first started with the failure of the New York
banking firm Jay Cooke & Company, which was
headed by the rich Jay Cooke, a financier of the Civil
War.
Pallid Politics in the Gilded Age
 “The Gilded Age”: a sarcastic term for the 30 yrs.
following the Civil War


coined by Mark Twain hinting that times looked good, yet if
one scratched a bit below the surface, there were problems
Corruption, close presidential elections,
 Lifeblood of both parties was patronage: handing
out jobs in return for votes and money
 Republicans divided into two camps

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Stalwarts: those who were stalwarts (in favor of keeping) for
patronage
Half-Breeds: Stalwarts called them this implying they were
half Democratic
The Compromise of 1877 and the End of
Reconstruction
 Republican unknown Rutherford B. Hayes faced off
against Democrat Samuel Tilden in a disputed election
 Hayes becomes the 19th President due to the Compromise
of 1877
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Hayes would become president if he agreed to remove troops from
the remaining two Southern states where Union troops remained
(Louisiana and South Carolina)
For the South—military rule and Reconstruction ended when the
military pulled out of the South
The compromise abandoned the Blacks in the South by withdrawing
troops
A last ditch Civil Rights Act of 1875 (guaranteeing equal
accommodations in public places and prohibiting racial
discrimination on juries) had no effect on the South.
The Birth of Jim Crow
 As Reconstruction ended, whites re-asserted their power
 Blacks forced into sharecropping system: blacks rented land from a
plantation owner in exchange for a share of each year’s crop

Landowners manipulated this system to keep tenants in debt and unable to leave
 Legal codes of segregation enacted in the South known as Jim Crow laws
 Voting discrimination laws enacted
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Literacy tests for voting
Voter registration laws
Poll taxes
Violent intimidation of black voters tolerated
 In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that
“separate but equal” facilities were constitutional

But in reality, African American life was entirely unequal (inferior schools, theaters, restrooms)
 Southern whites dealt harshly with any black who dare to violate Jim Crow
laws
 Generally, this system of economic and political structure of the postReconstruction South became known as the New South
The term Jim Crow is believed to
have originated around 1830
when a white, minstrel show
performer, Thomas "Daddy"
Rice, blackened his face with
charcoal paste or burnt cork and
danced a ridiculous jig while
singing the lyrics to the song,
"Jump Jim Crow." Rice created
this character after seeing (while
traveling in the South) a crippled,
elderly black man (or some say a
young black boy) dancing and
singing a song ending with these
chorus words:
"Weel about and turn about and
do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about I jump
Jim Crow."
Some historians believe that a
Mr. Crow owned the slave who
inspired Rice's act--thus the
reason for the Jim Crow term in
the lyrics. In any case, Rice
incorporated the skit into his
minstrel act, and by the 1850s
the "Jim Crow" character had
become a standard part of the
minstrel show scene in America.
Origin of “Jim Crow” term
Modern Jim Crow?
GAYS:
HTTP://WWW.THEDAILYBEAST.COM/ARTICL
ES/2014/02/13/ANTI-GAY-JIM-CROW-COMESTO-KANSAS.HTML
BLACKS AND PRISONS
HTTP://THECOLBERTREPORT.CC.COM/VIDEO
S/AD10BN/MICHELLE-ALEXANDER
Class Conflict and Ethnic Clashes
 1877 Great Railroad Strike
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After railroads decide to cut wages, workers across the country
organized massive strikes
Courts, armed forces, police all side with Big Biz over labor
Hayes called in federal troops, leading to over 100 dead
 The failure of the railroad strike exposed the weakness of
the labor movement
 Racial divisions among workers (mostly between Irish
and Chinese) derailed labor movement

In San Francisco, Irish-born Denis Kearney incited his followers to
terrorize the Chinese
 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882): barred any Chinese from
entering the United States
Dennis Kearney attacks the
Chinese (1878):
To add to our misery and
despair, a bloated aristocracy has
sent to China—the greatest and
oldest despotism in the world—
for a cheap working slave. It
rakes the slums of Asia to find
the meanest slave on earth—the
Chinese coolie—and imports him
here to meet the free American in
the Labor market, and still
further widen the breach
between the rich and the poor,
still further to degrade white
Labor.
. These cheap slaves fill every
place. Their dress is scant and
cheap. Their food is rice from
China. They hedge twenty in a
room, ten by ten. They are
wipped curs, abject in docility,
mean, contemptible and
obedient in all things. They have
no wives, children or
dependents.
We shall meet fraud and
falsehood with defiance, and
force with force, if need be. And
we have resolved that they shall
not defeat us. We shall arm
California must be all American
or all Chinese. We are resolved
that it shall be American, and are
prepared to make it so.
Anti-Chinese discrimination
Garfield, Arthur, and Cleveland
 1880, Repubs nominated James A. Garfield for Prez and
stalwart Chester A. Arthur for VP
 Garfield assassinated
 Prez Arthur and Repubs surprisingly begin to call for reform
 Pendleton Act (1883): civil service reform to make gov’t jobs
based on merit


The patronage era was over
However, politicians had to look elsewhere for $: Big Biz
 Democrat Grover Cleveland wins 1884 prez election
 Cleveland was a fan of Big Biz due to his preference for
laissez-faire: a policy of government “hands off” the economy
Among the followers of the Stalwarts
was Charles Julius Guiteau, born
about 1840. He blamed his failure to
get a government post of Garfield.
On July 2, 1881, he lay in wait for
Garfield at a railroad station in
Washington and shot him, screaming,
“I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts, and
now Chet Arthur is president”!
Garfield was not killed outright, but
lingered on in pain. Bell, the inventor
of the telephone, devised a metallocating instrument to find the bullet
in the president’s body. The device
was a workable one but was frustrated
on this occasion because no one
thought of removing the steelspringed mattress, the metal of which
interfered with the search.
On September 19, Garfield died,
having been president for six and a
half months. Only William Henry
Harrison, forty years earlier, had held
the post more briefly.
The assassination of Garfield ruined
the respectability of the patronage
system forever.
President Garfield assassinated
Between good food and good
beer, Cleveland had grown
to 260 pounds and,
although a bachelor, he
indulged in female
company. It turned out that
one such indulgence had
resulted in an illegitimate
child whom he was
supporting. When the story
broke during the campaign,
his followers asked him
what to do. “Tell the truth”
he said, and there was no
attempt at a denial.
The result was the derisive
Republican chant:
Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?
Gone to the White House,
ha, ha, ha!
President Grover Cleveland
The Drumbeat of Discontent
 The Populist Party emerged in 1892 from disgruntled
farmers

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Denounce government injustice
Graduated income tax
Government regulation of railroads and telegraphs/telephones
Direct elections of U.S. senators
Shorter workdays
Immigration restrictions
 Homestead Strike (1892)
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A string of nation-wide strikes culminate at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steal
plant near Pittsburgh.
Carnegie calls in Pinkerton detectives to break the strike protesting wage cuts.
10 dead, 60 wounded
Federal troops called, the strike AND the union broken…WHO does the
government back during the Gilded Age?: Labor or Biz? Why? Trend?
Labor movement hampered by racial divisions
Prez Cleveland and Depression
 Cleveland = the only Prez ever reelected after defeat
 Depression of 1893 hits (worst of 20th cent.); trend of 20
year panics continue

Causes: overbuilding, speculation, labor disputes, credit panic
 Bankers (headed by J.P. Morgan) agree to lend the government
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$65 million in gold
Populists decried this close relationship of Wall Street with the
government
Federal income tax struck down by the Supreme Court
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Cleveland often
referred to as the “forgettable presidents”.
This era can be seen as a division between anti-Biz, prolabor/farmer populists AND the Big Biz politics of the Gilded Age