 Republicans – Gen. Ulysses S. Grant  Great soldier, but no political experience  “waving the bloody shirt”  Democrats – denounced military Reconstruction  Couldn’t agree on anything else  Nominate Horatio Seymour  Said no redemption of greenbacks

Republican “Southern Strategy”

 Jay Gould & Jim Fisk – Millionaires who practiced “insider trading” with gold stock  Tried to get treasury to stop selling gold  Used Grant & brother-in-law  Plan failed when treasury sold more gold

 Grant presided over an era of unprecedented growth and corruption  Credit Mobilier Scandal  Whiskey Ring  The “Indian Ring”

 Union Pacific Railway created a construction company called Credit Mobilier  Awarded them its contracts  Credit Mobilier overcharged Union Pacific  Money was going into the pockets of Union Pacific investors  Union Pacific almost went bankrupt as a result  Congress gives it more land grants  Investigation implicates many members of congress  Including the VP & James Garfield who later becomes Pres.

 In 1875, the Whiskey Ring had robbed the Treasury of millions of dollars  Grant’s own private secretary was one of the criminals  Grant retracted his statement of “Let no guilty man escape”

 In 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap was shown to have pocketed some $24,000 by selling junk to Indians

 Tammany Hall – was the most famous New York Democratic political machine  William M. Tweed was the boss of Tammany Hall in 1860s and 1870s

Thomas Nast – crusading political cartoonist/reporter who went after Boss Tweed

 Employed bribery, graft, and fake elections to cheat the city of as much as $200 million  Tweed caught when The New York Times secured evidence of his misdeeds, and later died in jail  Samuel J. Tilden led the prosecution of Tweed  Later became Democratic nominee in presidential election of 1876

 A wave of disgust at Grant’s administration was building  Liberal Republican Party formed  Nominate Horace Greeley  Democratic Party supports Greeley  Blasted them repeatedly in his New York Tribune  Now called for a clasping of hands between the North and South & end to Reconstruction

 Greeley called an atheist, a communist, a vegetarian, and a signer of Jefferson Davis’s bail  Grant called an ignoramus, a drunkard, and a swindler  Greeley died on November 29, 1872!

GENERAL AMNESTY ACT  1872 – the Republican Congress passed a general amnesty act that removed political disabilities from all but some 500 former Confederate leaders

 Too many railroads and factories being formed than existing markets could bear  Over-loaning by banks  Essentially:  over-speculation  too-easy credit

 Began with failure of the NY bank, Jay Cooke & Co.  Before Panic, Civil War greenbacks being recalled  Now, “cheap-money” supporters wanted greenbacks printed to create inflation  Supporters of “hard-money” got Grant to veto a bill calling for more paper money  Resumption Act of 1875  Withdrawal of greenbacks  Redeemed all paper money in gold at face value, starting in 1879 Jay Cooke – a financier of the Civil War

 Debtors said silver was under-valued  Called for inflation  Grant refused to coin more silver dollars  Had stopped in 1873  Silver strikes in the 1870s lowered price of silver  Greenbacks regained their value  Few bothered to exchange them for gold on Redemption Day in 1879

THE BLAND-ALLISON ACT (1878)  Treasury to buy & coin between $2 million & $4 million worth of silver bullion each month  The minimum was actually coined  Minimal effect on creating “cheap money”

GREENBACK LABOR PARTY CREATED  The Republican hard-money policy led to:  Election of a Democratic House in 1874  The Greenback Labor Party in 1878

 The Gilded Age – 1873, written by Mark Twain  “ Gilded” refers to a cheap metal covered by gold  Politics became very corrupt.  Railroad tycoons  Stock-market investors  Judges and legislators  Growing gap between rich and poor

A TWO PARTY STALEMATE

REPUBLICANS & DEMOCRATS DIFFERENCES IN THE GILDED AGE  Republicans  Puritanical  Strong in North & West  Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.)  Democrats  Lutherans & Roman Catholics  More forgiving  Strong in the South & Northern cities

LAISSEZ FAIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT  From : Govt. did very little domestically  Main Duties of federal govt.:  Deliver mail  Collect taxes & tariffs  Conduct foreign policy  Exception – administer the annual Civil War veterans’ pension

Senator Roscoe Conkling THE PRESIDENCY AS A SYMBOLIC OFFICE  Party bosses ruled  Presidents should avoid offending any factions within their own party  President just doled out federal jobs  1865: 53,000 people worked for the federal govt.  1890: 166,000

STALWARTS & HALF-BREEDS  Republican infighting led by two rivals  Roscoe Conkling (Stalwarts)  James G. Blaine (Half- Breeds)  Bickering deadlocked their party Conkling Blaine

 Grant almost ran for a third term  House derailed that proposal  Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes  The “Great Unknown”  Democrats ran Samuel Tilden  Election was very close  Tilden got 184 votes out of a needed 185  Disputed votes in Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and part of Oregon  Two sets of returns, one Democrat, one Republican

THE POLITICAL CRISIS OF 1877  “Corrupt Bargain” Part II?

1876 PRESIDENTIAL TICKETS

1876 ELECTION RESULTS

 The Electoral Count Act (1877)  Commission to count the votes  15 total made up of members of Congress & Supreme Court  Commission decided to use Republican returns  Led to a standoff  Compromise of 1877  North—Hayes would become president if  Removed troops from Louisiana and S.C.  Subsidized the Texas & Pacific rail line  South—military rule and Reconstruction would end  Compromise abandoned the African Americans

THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1875  Crime for any individual to deny full & equal use of public conveyances and public places.  Prohibited discrimination in jury selection  Shortcoming – lacked a strong enforcement mechanism  No new civil rights act was attempted for 90 years!

HAYES PREVAILS

ALAS, THE WOES OF CHILDHOOD… Sammy Tilden—Boo-Hoo! Ruthy Hayes’s got my Presidency, and he won’t give it to me!

Jim Crow Laws  Both the North and South discriminated against African Americans  South: Segregation and Jim Crow Laws  Segregation – a separation of the races  Jim Crow – laws enacted to discriminate against the Blacks & keep them segregated

Plessy v. Ferguson  Southern states passed laws to enforce segregation in almost all public places  Plessy v. Ferguson – Supreme Court cases which ruled that segregation was legal as long as there was “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans  Allowed for the South to legally discriminate for the next 50 years

GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE OF 1877  The 4 largest railroads cut wages by 10%  Workers stopped working  President Hayes sent in troops  Violence erupted  More than 100 people died  Failure of the strike showed the weakness of the labor movement  Partly caused by friction between races  Esp. between the Irish and Chinese

CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT  Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 – stopped Chinese immigration for 10 years  Prevented the Chinese already in America from becoming citizens  Act ended up lasting until 1943

ELECTION OF 1880  Republicans: James A. Garfield  From Ohio  Major general in Civil War  VP: Chester A. Arthur of NY, notorious Stalwart (supporter of Roscoe Conkling)  Democrats: Winfield S. Hancock  Civil War general  Appealed to the South (fair treatment during Reconstruction)  Wounded at Gettysburg  Appealed to vets  Campaign once again avoided touchy issues  Garfield squeaked by in popular vote  Electoral count was wider: 214 to 155)

Half BreedsStalwarts Sen. James G. Blaine Sen. Roscoe Conkling (Maine) (New York) James A. Garfield Chester A. Arthur (VP) compromise 1880 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: REPUBLICANS

1880 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

ASSASSINATION OF GARFIELD  Garfield named James G. Blaine to the position of Secretary of the State  Made other anti-Stalwart acts  Sept. 19, 1881, Garfield died after getting shot in the head by a crazy but disappointed office seeker, Charles J. Guiteau  After being captured, used an early version of the “insanity defense” to avoid conviction (he was hanged anyway)

Charles Guiteau: I Am a Stalwart, and Arthur is President now! 1881: GARFIELD ASSASSINATED

 Chester Arthur didn’t seem to be a good fit for the presidency  He surprised many by giving the cold shoulder to Stalwarts, his chief supporters  Called for reform  Heeded by the Republican party as it began to show newly found enthusiasm

PENDLETON ACT (1883)  Civil Service Act  “Magna Carta” of civil service reform  1883 – 14,000 out of 117,000 federal jobs became required civil service exam  1900 – ½ of 200,000 fed. jobs required exam  Drove politicians into “marriages of convenience” with business leaders

ELECTION OF 1884  Republicans: James G. Blaine  Some Republican reformers switched to the Democratic Party & were called Mugwumps  Democrats: Grover Cleveland  Revealed that he might have been the father of an illegitimate child

 The contest depended on how New York chose  One foolish Republican insulted the race, faith, and patriotism of New York’s heavy Irish population, and as a result, New York voted for Cleveland; that was the difference

 Portly Grover Cleveland was the first Democratic president since James Buchanan, and as a supporter of laissez-faire capitalism, he delighted business owners and bankers.  Cleveland named two former Confederates to his cabinet, and at first tried to adhere to the merit system (but eventually gave in to his party and fired almost 2/3 of the 120,000 federal employees), but he had his problems.  Military pensions plagued Cleveland; these bills were given to Civil War veterans to help them, but they were used fraudulently to give money to all sorts of people.  However, Cleveland showed that he was ready to take on the corrupt distributors of military pensions when he vetoed a bill that would add several hundred thousand new people on the pension list.

 By 1881, the Treasury had a surplus of $145 million, most of it having come from the high tariff, and there was a lot of clamoring for lowering the tariff, though big industrialists opposed it.  Cleveland wasn’t really interested in the subject at first, but as he researched it, he became inclined towards lowering the tariff, so in late 1887, Cleveland openly tossed the appeal for lower tariffs into the lap of Congress.  Democrats were upset at the obstinacy of their chief while Republicans gloated at his apparently reckless act.

 The new Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, was a large, tall man, a tremendous debater, and very critical and quick man.  To solve the problem of reaching a quorum in Congress, Reed counted the Democrats who were present yet didn’t answer to the roll call, and after three days of such chaos, he finally prevailed, opening the 51st, or “Billion Dollar” Congress—one that legislated many expensive projects.

 The Populist Party emerged in 1892 from disgruntled farmers.  Their main call was for inflation via free coinage of silver.  They called for a litany of items including: a graduated income tax, government regulation of railroads and telegraphs/telephones, direct elections of U.S. senators, a one term limit, initiative and referendum, a shorter workday, and immigration restriction.

 Grover Cleveland won, but no sooner than he had stepped into the presidency did the Depression of 1893 break out. It was the first such panic in the new urban and industrial age, and it caused much outrage and hardships. This completed the almost predictable, every-20-year cycle of panics during the 1800s (panics occurred during 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893).  About 8,000 American business houses collapsed in six months, and dozens of railroad lines went into the hands of receivers.  This time, Cleveland had a deficit and a problem, for the Treasury had to issue gold for the notes that it had paid in the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and according to law, those notes had to be reissued, thus causing a steady drain on gold in the Treasury—the level alarmingly dropped below $100 million at one point.  Meanwhile, Grover Cleveland had developed a malignant growth under the roof of his mouth, and it had to be secretly removed in a surgery that took place aboard his private yacht; had he died, Adlai E. Stevenson, a “soft money” (paper money) man, would have caused massive chaos with inflation.  Also, 33 year-old William Jennings Bryan was advocating “free silver,” and gaining support for his beliefs, but an angry Cleveland used his executive power to break the filibuster in the Senate—thus alienating the silver-supporting Democrats.

 Cleveland was embarrassed at having to resort to J.P. Morgan to bale out the depression.  He was also embarrassed by the Wilson- Gorman Tariff. He’d promised to lower the tariff, but so many tack- ons had been added, the result was nill.  Further, the Supreme Court struck down an income tax. It looked like all politicians were tools of the wealthy.