Mugwumps, late nineteenth‐century reformers who blamed partisanship for the rampant corruption of
Gilded Age politics.By voting independently of party lines, Mugwumps attempted to pressure regular Republicans and Democrats to support
civil service reform, lower
tariffs, and a hard‐money policy based on the
gold standard.
In 1884, members of the
Republican party's independent wing rejected their party's presidential candidate, James G.
Blaine, to support the
Democratic party nominee, Grover
Cleveland. Republican loyalists called the insurgents “Mugwumps,” an Algonquian word for “great man,” used in this context to deride the bolters’ claim to moral superiority.
Most Mugwumps were college‐educated business and professional men from New York or
New England. Their spokesmen in 1884 were veteran Republicans such as Carl Schurz (1829–1906), a former U.S. senator and cabinet official, and George William Curtis (1824–1892) and E.L. Godkin (1831–1902), editors respectively of
Harper's Weekly and
The Nation. But younger men such as R.R. Bowker, a New York publisher, and George Fred Williams, a Boston lawyer, did the day‐to‐day organizational work.
Cleveland's slim victory margin in 1884 seemed to underscore the importance of the Mugwump vote, and Cleveland courted their support by backing civil service reform and lower tariffs. After 1884, some bolters became Democrats and helped revive Democratic strength in New England in the early 1890s. But Mugwump‐Democratic cooperation was never wholehearted. Irish‐American Democrats and the Mugwumps distrusted each other from the start, and the Democrats’ 1896 presidential candidate, William Jennings
Bryan, advocated populist programs that the Mugwumps abhored. The last national campaign in which the Mugwumps figured prominently was the anti‐imperialist opposition to U.S. annexation of the
Philippines following the
Spanish‐American War.
See also
Political Parties;
Populist Era.
Bibliography
John G. Sproat , “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age, 1968.
Gerald W. McFarland , Mugwumps, Morals and Politics, 1884–1920, 1975.
Gerald W. McFarland
