THE GOOD OLD DAYS
WEREN’T
Republican
Ulysses S. Grant
defeated Democrat
Horatio Seymour in the
election of 1868 to win
the first of two terms as
President, in which his
performance in office
would fall far short of
his earlier achievements
in the military.
Grant’s administrations were marred by
incompetence as well as by numerous scandals
that tarnished his reputation and that of the
Republican Party.
The Credit Mobilier scandal involved bribing
Congressmen to allow Union Pacific Railroad insiders
to establish a shell corporation which fraudulently
billed the US government, costing the nation millions.
The “Whiskey Ring” involved the
embezzlement of millions of dollars in excise
taxes on alcohol by Republican officials,
110 of whom were convicted.
Grant’s Secretary of War
William Belknap resigned
and became the 1st cabinet
official ever impeached
for accepting kickbacks in
awarding trading rights at
Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
In spite of the scandals, Grant defeated publisher
Horace Greeley, nominated by Democrats and
the newly-established reform-seeking Liberal
Republicans, to win re-election in 1872. The
threat of a schism resulted in a viable
third-party candidate and led to
civil-service reform and a tariff reduction as
well as amnesty for most former Confederates.
The Panic of 1873 resulted
from over-speculation & a
subsequent contraction of
the money supply and led
to a clamor against the
Republican administration
by debtors who favored
inflating the currency.
After a highly-disputed
election in 1876,
the Republicans only held
on to the presidency by
negotiating an
end to Reconstruction in
the South in exchange for
Rutherford B. Hayes
becoming President rather
than Democrat
Samuel Tilden.
Hayes’ undistinguished administration was
followed by the 1880 election of dark-horse
James A. Garfield, who was succeeded by
Chester Arthur following Garfield’s
assassination.
Arthur alienated his Republican supporters by
disavowing the patronage system and supporting
the Pendleton Act, which established the
Civil Service Commission to ensure the
competency of deserving federal employees.
Arthur was followed in
office by Grover Cleveland,
the 1st Democrat in 28 years,
who angered American
industrialists by supporting
a reduced tariff designed to
eliminate the federal
surplus, and lost his first reelection bid to Benjamin
Harrison in spite of
earning 90,000 more
popular votes.
Harrison and Republican Speaker Thomas Reed
pushed through the McKinley Tariff, the highest
peace-time tariff in US history at 48.4%,
infuriating farmers and resulting in an electoral
backlash that would bring Democrats back into
control of Congress and the Presidency with the
re-election of Grover Cleveland in 1892, and
making the Populist Party one of the most
significant 3rd-party players in US history.
The Populist Party evolved
from the Farmer’s Alliance
and demanded
an inflated currency, a
progressive income tax,
direct election of Senators,
the initiative & referendum,
and government control of
public utilities.
The Populists won over
1 million popular and 22 electoral votes in
1892, but the reluctance of Southern whites to
ally with the Populists due to their inclusion of
African-American voters kept the Populists from
ever reaching their full potential and allowed
Grover Cleveland to become the only President
to serve non-consecutive terms when he was
elected again in 1892.
Cleveland’s second term was
marred by the Depression of
1893 which saw him need to
turn to financier JP Morgan to
replenish US gold reserves
and which brought to the fore
Democratic icon
William Jennings Bryan, who
fought Cleveland’s decision to
repeal the Sherman Silver
Purchase Act and
return to the Gold Standard.