GROVER CLEVELAND

The Administration of Chester A. Arthur proved that the President had never been so discreditable a spoilsman as the reformers had believed, or else that he had changed his spots. The term ended in dignity and Arthur hoped to secure a personal vindication through renomination by his party. His struggle precipitated a contest of leaders, and until the nominations were made, none could say where either party stood.

The independents, chiefly of Republican antecedents, hoped to retain what had been gained in the last Administration. They hoped to extend the reform in the civil service and to focus attention upon the tariff. The failure of downward revision in 1883 had strengthened their hands and increased their hopes. They had dallied with bolting movements and threats so long that party regularity meant little to them. Either party could obtain their support by nominating men who could be trusted to stick to their platform. Arthur was not acceptable to them, and Blaine was anathema.

The candidacy of Arthur was doomed to failure. He had alienated the Stalwarts by his independence, while he had failed to win the reformers because he had not invariably refrained from playing the politician. In the fall of 1882 he had interfered in the campaign in New York, allowing his Secretary of the Treasury, Charles J. Folger, while retaining that office, to be the Republican candidate for governor. This had led to the belief that the patronage was being used for local purposes, and had stirred up an opposition to Folger which defeated him. Arthur's veto of the Chinese Exclusion Bill and the River and Harbor Bill further increased his unpopularity in various sections. He failed to win over the Blaine faction, who regarded him as an intrusive accident and waited impatiently for the next national convention.

Blaine was the leader of the Republican party in 1884, so far as it had a leader, and he possessed all the weaknesses of such a leader as well as personal weaknesses of his own. Rarely has it been possible to nominate or to elect one who has gained a dominant place through party struggles. Such men, Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and their kind, have commonly created enough enemies, as they have risen, to make them unavailable as leaders of a national ticket. Blaine was handicapped like these. His prolonged fight against Conkling and the Stalwarts created a breach too deep to fill, while the old questions respecting his honor would not down.

Early in 1884 Blaine was the leading candidate for the nomination in spite of all opposition. The Republican National Committee was in charge of men who sympathized with him. Dorsey had resigned as its secretary after the star-route exposure, though his associate in land speculations, Stephen B. Elkins, remained as one of the managers. The control was in the hands of men who had close affiliation with the old organization, and of the manufacturers who had blocked tariff revision in 1883. It was improbable, in the opinion of many independents, that a tariff reduction could be got from an Administration headed by Blaine; they questioned his sincerity upon civil service reform; and they thought it not right that any man, concerning whose character there was a doubt, should be President. They put forward, within the party, Senator George F. Edmunds, whom they had desired in 1880, and who had since become President of the Senate. Other candidates with local followings were General John A. Logan, of Illinois, John Sherman, and the President himself.

The Chicago Convention of the Republican party, meeting early in June, was the scene of a battle between the two elements in the party. At the outset, the old independents, headed by Curtis, and reinforced by younger men like Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, and Theodore Roosevelt, of New York, broke the slate of the National Committee and seated a chairman of their own choice. But the regulars rallied, controlled the platform, and made the nomination. Blaine and John A. Logan were selected, the former accepting the honor with secret misgivings, for he had a clear understanding of the intensity of the opposition within the party. The reformers went home discouraged, many of them determined not to let party regularity hold them to Blaine.

Out of the nomination of Blaine grew the "Mugwump" movement, whose influence was greater than that of the last bolt. The origin of the name "Mugwump" is not entirely clear, but it was well known as an opprobrious epithet, and was applied now by party regulars to the "holier-than-thou" reformers. One of the regulars later quoted Revelation at them: "Thou art neither hot nor cold ... so, then, I will spew thee out of my mouth." They were more offensive to Republicans than were the Democrats, while the latter were bewildered but cynical. "I know that to-day we are living in a very highly scented atmosphere of political reform," said one of the Democratic Senators a little later, "I know that under the saintly leadership of the Eatonian school of political philosophers we are all ceasing to be partisans, that we no longer recognize party obligations, party duty, party discipline, and party devoirs; that we are all to become reconciled to a life of political monasticism; but I will continue to have one failing, and that is in my humble way to be as watchful and as vigilant of the purposes, designs, and craft of the Republican leaders as I have endeavored to be in the past."

The Mugwumps left Chicago and at once opened negotiations with the Democratic leaders. The Nation and the Evening Post were already with them. Harper's Weekly, which had been a Union journal in the war, and Republican ever since, abandoned the party ticket. George William Curtis, its editor, led in the revolt, and the Mugwumps met at the house of one of the Harpers for organization, on June 17, 1884. Their problem was whether to nominate an independent ticket and be defeated, or to support and help elect a Democratic President, in case the Democrats should be willing to coÖperate with them.

Not all the reformers turned from Blaine. Whitelaw Reid, the successor of Horace Greeley on the New York Tribune, remained regular. Lodge went back to Massachusetts and persuaded himself to take part in the canvass. Roosevelt, discouraged by the nomination of Blaine, remained regular, but stepped out of the campaign and began his ranch life in the Far West. With him, as with many others, it was a matter of conviction that reform, to be effective, must be urged within the party. But enough of the reformers went with the Mugwumps to lessen Blaine's chances of election.

When the Mugwumps made overtures for fusion to the Democratic leaders, they had in mind as a candidate a young Democratic lawyer who had appeared as Mayor of Buffalo in 1881 and had been elected as reform Governor of New York in 1882. He had secured the aid of independent reformers in that campaign,—men who resented the candidacy of Folger and the intrusion of the National Administration in local politics. As governor he had speedily established his reputation for stubborn honesty and independent judgment. Grover Cleveland had become, like Tilden, the most promising candidate in a party that had no admitted leader.

The opposition from two elements in his party, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, strengthened Cleveland as the candidate of reform. Ben Butler, who had himself been nominated for the Presidency by an Anti-Monopoly Convention, denounced him as a foe of labor; and such was Butler's reputation that his enmity was one of Cleveland's assets. John Kelly, the chief of Tammany Hall, opposed him, too, having learned to know him as Governor of New York. Well might Cleveland's friends say, "We love him for the enemies he has made." They nominated him on the second ballot, selecting Thomas A. Hendricks, of Indiana, to run with him. Their platform was full of reform, even of the tariff, but on the latter subject it was less specific than the tariff reformers had hoped.

As the parties stood in 1884, personal character meant more than platform or party name. Cleveland possessed qualities that made his appeal to independents quite as strong as it was to Democrats. With older brothers in the army he had supported his mother during the war, and had kept clear of copperheadism. He stood for sound money; he believed in a tariff for revenue; he had proved his devotion to civil service reform; he lacked the factional enemies who weakened the candidacy of a prominent leader like Blaine; and his peculiar appeal to Republican dissenters led the canvass away from issues into the field of personalities.

The charge of the independents upon Blaine's personal honor caused the Republican schism and drove the party regulars into a retort in kind. The private life of the candidates was uncovered to the annoyance of both and to the greater embarrassment of Cleveland. Nothing discreditable to his honesty could be found, but an apparent lapse in his private conduct gave the pretext for wild and dishonest attacks upon his character. A few years later the novelist, Paul Leicester Ford, in a keen study of New York politics entitled The Honorable Peter Stirling, portrayed a situation somewhat resembling that of Cleveland, though disclaiming Cleveland as his model. The Boston Journal led in the exploitation of the charges, and partisans forgot decency on both sides. Nast, having formerly cartooned Blaine in the "Bloody Shirt," now turned to "A Roaring Farce—The Plumed Knight in a Clean Shirt," while others pointed out the fact that the admirer who coined the "plumed knight" epithet had been counsel for the fraudulent star-route contractors.

Attempts were made to appeal to class hatred on both sides. Butler had hesitated for several weeks in his acceptance of the nomination by the Anti-Monopoly Convention. Greenbackers and a few labor leaders made up his following, and it was supposed that they would draw votes from the Democrats. After conference with Republican leaders, Butler agreed to run, and it was freely charged that these leaders financed his campaign to injure Cleveland. Republicans appealed to the Irish vote by recalling Blaine's vigorous diplomacy against Great Britain; their opponents caricatured Blaine by representing him as consorting with Irish thugs and dynamiters. At the very end of the canvass a chance remark may have decided the result.

So much had been said of character in the campaign that both candidates brought out the clergy to give them certificates of excellence. In October a meeting of clergymen of all denominations was held at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to greet Blaine. The oldest minister, Burchard by name, was asked to deliver the address, and while he spoke Blaine thought of other matters. He thus missed a phrase which other hearers caught and which the Democrats immediately advertised. It denounced the Democrats as adherents of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion," and was reported as conveying a gratuitous insult to the Irish vote. How many Irish turned from Blaine to Cleveland in the last week of the campaign cannot be said, but the election was so close that a few votes, swung either way, could have determined it. Cleveland carried New York and won a majority of the electoral college, but his popular plurality over Blaine was only 23,000, while he had some 300,000 fewer than his combined rivals. Butler drew 175,000 votes without defeating Cleveland. Purists, disgusted with the personalities of the campaign, swelled the Prohibition vote to 150,000.

On March 4, 1885, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the first Democrat elected President since James Buchanan. His Cabinet was necessarily filled with men inexperienced in national administration, for the party had been proscribed for six terms. The greatest attention was attracted by the two former Confederates, Garland and Lamar, whose career did much to disprove the "gloomy and baseless superstition" of twenty years, "that one half of the nation had become the irreconcilable enemies of the national unity and the national will." It was an American Administration, and of its chief, James Russell Lowell, who had known men in many lands, wrote, "He is a truly American type of the best kind—a type very dear to me, I confess."

The State Department was entrusted to Thomas F. Bayard, who had been a competitor for the nomination in 1884, and who sustained the tradition that only first-rate men shall fill this office. Bayard proceeded at once to undo the work of the last five years and to reverse a policy of Blaine. A treaty with Nicaragua, negotiated by Frelinghuysen in December, 1884, ran counter to the English treaty of 1850. After a vain attempt to persuade Great Britain to abandon the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty respecting an isthmian canal, Frelinghuysen had disregarded it and acquired a complete right-of-way from Nicaragua. This was pending in the Senate when Cleveland was inaugurated, and was withdrawn at once. The United States reverted to the old Whig policy of a neutralized canal.

In all departments the new Administration was forced to test the strength of its convictions upon civil service reform. During its long years of opposition the party had often voiced a demand for reform, but now in office its workers demanded the usual rewards of success. Cleveland had fought the spoils politicians in New York, and had taken counsel of Carl Schurz after his election as President. In the next four years he nearly doubled the number in the classified service in the face of opposition from his most intimate associates.

The problems of prosperity and national growth, developing in the eighties and culminating between 1885 and 1889, involved administrative efficiency rather than party policy. On every side the Government was forced to expand its activities, and Cleveland was occupied in getting new machinery into operation and meeting conditions for which no precedents existed.

Organized labor had gained concessions from Congress in a Bureau of Labor, in 1884, and an Anti-Contract Labor Law in 1885. These called for sympathetic administration and encouraged labor to hope for more. During 1886 and 1887 the views of labor leaders attracted much attention because of a series of strikes and riots. In the greatest of these the local chapters of the Knights of Labor fought against the Gould railways of the Southwest—the Missouri Pacific and the Texas Pacific. The strike originated in March, 1886, in sympathy with labor organizers who had been discharged by the railroad. Under the leadership of Martin Irons it spread over the Southwest, causing distress in those regions which were dependent upon the railroad for fuel and food and causing disorder in the towns where the idle workmen congregated. Powderly and the other chief officials of the Knights tried to stop the strike, but were ineffective, while the railroad managers shaped events so as to divert the sympathies of the Western people against the strikers. The Knights never recovered from the blow which the loss of the strike inflicted upon them.

In May, 1886, a general demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day was planned and carried out. In Milwaukee riots ensued, the militia was called out by Governor Rusk, and a volley was fired into the mob. In Chicago the union movement was combined with anarchy and socialism, and opponents of all did not discriminate among them. A meeting of the anarchists was broken up by the police, several of whom were killed by the explosion of a bomb thrown in the tumult. In 1887 a group of the anarchist leaders were hanged, having been convicted of what may be called constructive conspiracy. The unrest revealed by the strikes and riots showed that the old period of uniform well-being and satisfaction was over.

The demands made upon politics by organized labor were exceeded by the demands of organized patriotism. The veterans of the Civil War, who were in early manhood in 1865, were now in middle life, were possessed of political influence, and turned to the National Government for personal advantage. Advocates of protection acted upon the theory that for national purposes special advantages ought to be given to manufacturers. The same idea of government readily bestowed these advantages in return for a past service.

The machinery of the veterans was the Grand Army of the Republic, which, from being an unimportant, reminiscent league, had grown to be an instrument for the procuring of pensions. The surplus tempted citizens to make demands upon it; the number of soldier votes encouraged politicians to comply with the demands. In 1879 the movement began with an Arrears of Pensions Act, by which pensioners were entitled to back pay from their mustering-out dates, regardless of the period at which their incapacity set in. The next step involved the issuing of pensions for incapacity and dependence, regardless of their cause, and opened the way for pensions for service only. In 1887 Cleveland vetoed a pension bill of this character, and prevented its passage until the term of his successor, in 1890. He had already offended many of his supporters by guarding the offices; his pension veto offended more by checking the attack of the old soldiers on the Treasury. No one opposed the granting of pensions to soldiers who had been injured in the Civil War, but the demands of the leaders of the Grand Army, supported by the interests of hundreds of attorneys who lived on pension claims, now assumed the appearance of an organized raid on the Treasury. The general laws were supplemented by special private pension laws, of which 1871 were sent to Cleveland in four years. He vetoed 228 of these, often to his political injury. In many cases these made allowances to persons whose claims had been rejected by the Pension Bureau as inadequate or fraudulent. In the course of time Cleveland became "thoroughly tired of disapproving gifts of public money to individuals who in my view have no right or claim to the same." The pension fund, he maintained, was "the soldiers' fund," and should be distributed so as to "exclude perversion as well as to insure a liberal and generous application of grateful and benevolent designs." In the ten years ending in 1889, Congress spent $644,000,000 on pensions; in the next ten it spent $1,350,000,000.

The surplus incited extravagance, and its reduction had been demanded on this ground, the tariff appearing to afford the best method of reduction. When the Democratic party gained control of the House, in 1883, it proceeded at once to discuss revision, and promptly uncovered a difference of opinion among its members. The last Democratic Speaker of the House had been Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who had been trained in the philosophy of Henry Clay and in the interests of a great manufacturing State. He was by conviction and association a protectionist, and was a candidate for his party's nomination as Speaker in the Forty-eighth Congress, which met in December, 1883. From this date he ceased to lead his party in the House and became the leader of an internal faction. John G. Carlisle, of Kentucky, supplanted him, was elected Speaker, and organized the House in the interest of a tariff for revenue only. For the next six years the Democratic organization of the House was pledged to revision, but operated in the face of a growing Republican opposition, and with Randall and the protectionist Democrats attacking from the rear.

The election of Cleveland gave the Democrats control of two branches of the Government, but left the Senate in the hands of the Republicans. It was vain to talk of serious revision or any other party measure in a divided administration, yet the President chafed under his inability to fulfill party pledges. The surplus continued to accumulate, to permit extravagance in Congress, and to arouse the cupidity of citizens. In his message to his second Congress, in 1887, Cleveland startled the country by devoting his undivided attention to this single topic. He set his party a text which could not be evaded, although there was even yet no reason to believe that a tariff bill could pass both houses. He had taken Carlisle into his confidence before sending the message; the latter entrusted the leadership in revision to Roger Q. Mills, of Texas, a free-trader, whom he appointed as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means.

With the opening of the debate on the Mills Bill, in April, 1888, there began "the first serious attempt since the war to reduce toward a peace basis the customs duties imposed during that conflict almost solely for purposes of revenue." Mills and William L. Wilson, who had been a college president in West Virginia, bore the burden of advocacy of a reduction of the revenue to the extent of $50,000,000. They were opposed by a united Republican party, both frightened and gratified because the issue had been made so clear. It was charged that the Committee on Ways and Means had drawn up the bill in secrecy, and that a majority of its Democratic members were Southerners who knew nothing of the needs of manufactures. The danger to American labor from the competition of the pauper labor of Europe was urged against it. It was asserted to be a pro-British measure, and stories were circulated of British gold, coming from the Cobden Club, a free-trade organization, to subvert American institutions. The Democratic organization drove the bill through the House of Representatives in spite of all resistance. In the Senate, with the Republicans in control, the bill never came to a vote, and was used to manufacture campaign materials for the campaign then pending. Many of the advisers of Cleveland had urged him to withhold the tariff message, lest he arouse the enemy and defeat himself, but he had risked personal and party defeat in order to get an issue definitively accepted—the first issue so accepted in politics since 1864.

The Mills Bill fiasco was the most important party measure of Cleveland's Administration, yet it served only to accentuate the difficulties in tariff legislation which had been experienced in 1883, and to provide an issue for the campaign of 1888. The laws that were passed between 1885 and 1889 were generally non-partisan in their character and were of most influence when they helped to readjust federal law to national economic problems. The Federal Government was unfolding and testing powers that had existed since the adoption of the Constitution, but had not been needed hitherto in an agricultural republic. The change that forced the resort to these powers came largely from the completion of a national system of communication.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For the election of 1884, consult, in addition to Stanwood, J.F. Rhodes, "The National Republican Conventions of 1880 and 1884" (Scribner's Magazine, September, 1911), and "Cleveland's Administrations" (Scribner's Magazine, October, 1911). There is an annotated reprint of the "Mulligan Letters" in Harper's Weekly (1884, pp. 643-46). The biographies of Blaine by Hamilton and Stanwood should be examined, as well as the sketches of Cleveland (who left few literary remains), by J.L. Williams, G.F. Parker, and R.W. Gilder. Among partisan party histories, the best are F. Curtis, The Republican Party, (2 vols., 1904), and W.L. Wilson, The National Democratic Party (1888). J.H. Harper recounts details of the Mugwump split in his history of The House of Harper (1912). The standard compilation on the pension system, which has not yet received adequate treatment, is W.H. Glasson, Military Pension Legislation in the United States (in Columbia University Studies, vol. XII). C.F. Adams and W.B. Hale published useful essays on the pension system in World's Work, 1911. H.T. Peck begins his popular Twenty Years of the Republic (1907) with the inauguration of Cleveland in 1885. Consult also Sparks, Dewey, Andrews, and the Annual CyclopÆdia.