The Age of Acrimony by Jon Grinspan

Author:Jon Grinspan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

In those blinding, blizzard years of the late 1880s, as the “business and intelligent classes” were reengaging American politics, the men and women falling below the Gilded Age wedge began to look for other options. Though often overlooked, 1886 to 1888 saw an incredible birth of communal solutions to the isolating era. In the Midwest, preachers like Maria Woolford joined huge crowds in trance-like, evangelical prayer. Further west, the explosively popular Ghost Dance offered laboring Native Americans a shared vision of a reincarnated future. And in the heartland of American labor—miners and steelworkers in Pennsylvania or Ohio, farmers and lumbermen in Kansas or Minnesota—a small minority began to unite against both the exploitative economy and the parties that were failing to protect them. Certainly, the great majority remained committed Republicans and Democrats, but the first wobbles of iron partisanship were starting to show themselves. In the same years that the well-to-do veered back toward party politics, some blue-collar voters veered away.

Working-class Americans were becoming more articulate about income inequality in these years and less pacified by the assurances that a growing economy would eventually aid them. One Scandinavian immigrant living in the Dakota territory, R. D. Støve, wrote in 1888 about his dawning awareness that “our money is disproportionately in the hands of the few.” He had long known about inequality, but was shocked to learn that just five thousand people possessed half the wealth in America. “I had never dreamt that it was so wild.” Støve wondered: “What has allowed so much wealth to accumulate in so few hands in the course of approximately twenty years?”25

To some, the answer seemed obvious. It was the political parties. They had claimed to protect ordinary Americans, but really they sold power to the wealthy. In the southwest, young, struggling Texans felt less tied to Confederate roots and the Democratic “big bugs” who owned massive ranches. In the upper Midwest, new immigrants with few memories of the Civil War felt slim ties to the old Republican Party. In Wisconsin, anti-tariff workingmen denounced what they called “The Rape of the Party,” blaming politicians for siding with capital against labor. Even purported allies like William Kelley were really working for big business, they accused, a fact that “is slowly dawning upon the average-minded man of that party. This complaint is heard everywhere.”26

Over the late 1880s, a great wobbling away from partisanship began, especially in the western states. Places like Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota—which had each voted more than three-fifths Republican in 1880—could not muster majorities for that party a dozen years later. Instead, these voters showed a greater willingness to experiment with third parties, backing experimental movements at four times the rate of mid-Atlantic voters. The men toying with political alternatives were still a minority, but workers and farmers were showing more flexibility than at any time since the fluid days after the Civil War. When that old crank Ignatius Donnelly gave stump speeches for third parties in Minnesota in 1886, he found that almost all his converts were aggrieved Republicans.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.