American Political History: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Donald Critchlow

Author:Donald Critchlow [Critchlow, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780199340057
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Gilded Age frustration and the Progressive response, 1877–1918

Self-gain, partisan loyalty, and corruption characterized politics after the Civil War at a time when United States became the world’s leading industrial power. From 1877 through 1900, Americans—white males—participated in politics as never before. Voters divided generally along ethnic, religious, and sectional lines. Republicans controlled the White House during most of these years, while party control of Congress remained divided, with the Republicans usually holding the Senate and Democrats the House.

During the late nineteenth century, the presidency remained weak, in large part because of the mediocrity of most who held it. The emergence of a Progressive movement in the first decades of the twentieth century strengthened the executive office, enlarged federal power, and marked the beginnings of the regulatory administrative state. Government became more interventionist, exerting its coercive powers to tax, protect workers and consumers, and oversee national monetary policy. Politics remained as fierce as ever, but the call for nonpartisan government and the emergence of newspapers and magazines not directly controlled by political parties helped change the tenor. Even though suffrage expanded to include women, voter turnout declined in part because of new voting regulations and general apathy within the electorate.

After the Civil War, political machines in both parties dominated politics in the North. The South remained solidly Democratic. These machines, controlled by political bosses, often showed flagrant disregard for public morality. Politicians ignored problems created by the new industrial order and urban dislocation, and numerous third parties were unsuccessful in challenging politics as usual. By 1900 middle-class Americans, fed up with corruption and the failure to address social issues, backed progressive reformers inside both political parties. Progressivism began on the local and state levels, but also produced three reform-minded presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft (to a lesser degree), and Woodrow Wilson. With reform came a stronger presidency and the growth of the federal government.

The problems of late nineteenth-century America seemed embodied in the presidency. Republicans controlled the White House throughout this period, except for the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884 and 1892. Following the Compromise of 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, a Civil War hero and devoted family man, entered the White House even though he lost the popular vote. His morally earnest wife, Lucy, a teetotaler, refused to serve alcohol in the White House, much to the dismay of congressmen and foreign dignitaries.

Hayes stepped into an economic depression that created massive unemployment and class conflict when railway workers went out on a national strike, joined by miners, mill hands, unemployed workers, women, and children. Socialist radicals seized control of St. Louis and Cincinnati. Hayes restored order by calling out federal troops, an ironic step in that he had withdrawn federal troops in the South, leaving freed slaves at the mercy of whites, who were often willing to use violence through groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to regain political power.

In response to economic depression and the decline in prices, debtors, farmers, and urban workers called for expanding the money supply by issuing paper money called “greenbacks.

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