POLITICAL PARTIES

The so-called Gilded Age, which extended from roughly 1876 to 1896, saw two major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, dominate the political landscape. Also, during this era big businesses increased their wealth, social power, and political influence, which encouraged the two major parties to become more professional, conservative, and corrupt. As a result, some liberal reformers attempted to institute idealistic programs from within the major parties, while other citizens formed third parties to make their needs known. Many authors of realistic and naturalistic fiction wrote about political issues and were themselves politically active. In fact, this era was named after the 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain (a pseudonym for Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) and Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900). It satirically contrasts America's political ideals with its political realities and presents political corruption as so common that every spring Congress must arraign dozens of its members "for taking bribes to vote for this and that and the other bill [the previous] winter" (p. 465).

MAJOR PARTIES: THE REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS

Immediately following the Civil War, the Republican Party dominated the national political landscape. The young party's symbol was Abraham Lincoln; its legacy was preserving the Union and liberating the South's black slaves. The Republicans considered themselves the guardians of America's morality and social responsibility. The Democratic Party had lost national prominence because it had initiated secession in the South and continued to advocate political authority from the state and local level even after the war. Many northerners disliked the reform-minded Republicans and supported the Democrats' policies during and after the war, but in national elections they voted Republican to avoid being labeled unpatriotic "Copperheads"—a term used to refer to persons from the North who opposed the Civil War.

In the 1870s, a group known as the Radical Republicans determined the party's policies. They, and the authors who supported them, often "waved the bloody shirt," which meant they used the legacy of the war to promote their policies and proclaim the North to be financially, intellectually, and morally superior to the South. They used patriotic rhetoric to maintain political power and pass liberal social reforms in southern states. The war had devastated the South, and the Republicans' Reconstruction programs allowed northern businesspeople and politicians to exploit their advantage for profit and power. This caused deep resentment in the former Confederate states, and many people directed their anger toward Republicans, northerners, and freed blacks.

Writers of this time were interested in politics and active in political parties. William Dean Howells (1837–1920), a Republican before he became a Christian Socialist in the 1880s, supported President Ulysses S. Grant and his Reconstruction policies. Howells promoted the Republicans' war legacy while he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly in the 1870s, and in 1876 he wrote a favorable biography of the Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, who was his wife's cousin. Furthermore, in Howells's A Modern Instance (1882), the amoral anti-hero, Bartley Hubbard, supports the 1876 Democratic candidate, Samuel Jones Tilden, while his honest, honorable foil, Ben Halleck, supports Hayes.

Mark Twain also supported the Radical Republicans' militant Reconstruction policies, which meant modernizing and industrializing the South as well as attempting to change the attitudes of racist and sectionalist whites. Twain equates Republican values with human values in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade) (1885). Huck ultimately rejects the Democrats' attitude that blacks are naturally inferior and that whites have a responsibility to return fugitive slaves. Huck, ignoring Democratic political propaganda, bases his convictions on his innate sense of morality and his experiences with Jim, whom Huck saw as a human being and a friend.

While some writers used their talents to influence politics, others used their political contacts for personal favors. For example, Twain asked Howells to instruct President Hayes to block the consular appointment of fellow author Bret Harte (1836–1902). Twain felt that Harte had insulted him by not repaying a loan. "To send this nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too much," Twain wrote (Letters, p. 114), and he also called Harte a liar and a thief. In Mark Twain in Eruption, Twain criticizes Harte for refusing to vote in the 1876 election after securing promises for a consularship from both candidates. Twain remarks that Harte's maneuvering "was a curious satire upon our political system" (p. 288). However, Howells ignored Twain's protests and secretly advised Hayes to appoint Harte, who gained a consulship to Prussia in 1878.

At a time when blacks were asserting their citizenship and humanity, many southern whites used the political system to deny black men their newly acquired right to vote. Southern Democrats, with the aid of the Ku Klux Klan, limited blacks' civil and political rights. They intimidated or killed those who supported Republican candidates or black suffrage. Poll taxes and citizenship exams, from which whites often were exempt, also limited black voting and political change. W. E. B Du Bois (1868–1963) writes in The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903) that "not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls" (p. 23). Although a few blacks were elected to state and national offices, Du Bois writes that many whites told blacks to "be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud" (p. 6). The white voters of the "Solid South" continued to elect Democrats to local and federal positions, which put social pressure on southern blacks to remain second-class citizens and political pressure on Republicans to abandon Reconstruction.

Black writers supported the Radical Republicans' reforms by describing the hardships slaves endured and emphasizing the humanity, intelligence, and value of black people. These writers appealed to white citizens and white politicians for protection of their rights and their lives. Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) addressed Congress directly, asking that black suffrage be protected. The Equal Rights Party nominated Douglass for vice president in 1872, but he refused the nomination and campaigned for Grant's reelection instead. Douglass was criticized by some black writers for accepting several presidential appointments after the Republicans abandoned their protection of blacks' rights in the South to appease southern white voters. Douglass was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia (1877–1881), recorder of deeds for Washington, D.C. (1881–1886), and consul general to Haiti (1889–1891).

The Marrow of Tradition (1901) by Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) directly critiques the racism in American politics. The novel is based on the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot in which white citizens, enraged that a suspected black rapist was found innocent, took over the city government and lynched black citizens at random. This came about after a committee of Democrats, the "Secret Nine," removed the Republican government and urged local whites to attack blacks on the city's streets (Roe, p. 233). In the novel, it is the "Big Three" who spark a racial massacre after deposing the Republican city government that had passed unpopular social-reform laws (Chesnutt, p. 242). In the novel, the Republicans could not stop the coup or the violence. In America at that time, the Republicans could not or would not stop intimidation at the polls, Jim Crow legislation, and lynch mobs.

In addition to their political control of the Solid South, the Democratic Party controlled many northern cities with their political "machines." These corrupt local organizations bribed, coerced, and intimidated voters so that party candidates were elected, graft continued unchecked, and civil service jobs were given to party supporters. The Democratic machine in New York City was known as Tammany Hall. William Marcy "Boss" Tweed, who represented the first generation of professional politicians, took control of Tammany and, in the words of John G. Sproat in "The Best Men": Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age, "plundered and ruled the first city of the land from 1866 to 1871" (p. 46). A few decades later, George Washington Plunkitt held tremendous power as a state senator in New York and a Tammany man. In interviews with William Riordon, which were published in 1905 as Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, Plunkitt defends himself and his party. He differentiates dishonest and honest graft, explaining that buying cheap land that the city intends to use for a new park and selling it to the city at a large profit is successfully playing the game of politics. He brags, "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em" (Riordon, p. 3). Plunkitt argues that "politics is as much a regular business as the grocery" (p. 19) and that intellectuals, orators, and reformers ultimately fail because they are not trained to play the political game.

Several authors criticize Tammany politicians in their work, including Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) in his novel Sister Carrie (1900) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) in "Aunt Chloe's Politics" (1872). Harper's poem objects to the corrupt politicians' "mighty ugly tricks," naming "Boss" Tweed as one of the worst culprits. Harper writes that everyone must stand up to them, arguing,

this buying up each other

Is something worse than mean,

Though I thinks a heap of voting,

I go for voting clean.

(P. 1980)

In the 1870s the Radical Republicans resisted the Republicans who wanted more economically and socially conservative policies, but the party was beginning to fracture. A group known as the Liberal Republicans was formed, which served as a precursor to the Mugwumps of the 1880s. The Liberal Republicans defected from the party in 1872 and created a short-lived movement that criticized the Grant administration's political corruption and inefficiency, its Reconstruction policies, its practice of giving civil service jobs to party patrons, and its institution of unfairly high tariff rates. Politicians could no longer build coalitions among voters and within the party by "waving the bloody shirt." Realistic conceptions of American life and politics replaced the romantic image of the North's moral superiority. This change is evident in works by Howells, Frank Norris (1870–1902), Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane (1871–1900).

As voters shifted their focus from the nation's past to their own present and future, the Republican Party abandoned its Reconstruction and civil rights programs to gain support during the 1876 elections. Hayes won the White House, in part, because the party's more conservative policies attracted more voters. However, many Americans felt unhappy with the party's new priorities, and they sought new representation. New political movements gathered supporters from these disenfranchised citizens and put pressure on both the Republicans and Democrats.

FRONTIER PARTIES: THE GREENBACKS AND POPULISTS

In the 1870s and 1880s almost half of the nation's voters lived on farms, and many of them felt they had no political representation. Liberal reformers within the two major parties stood for many of the same policies that were supported by farmers and laborers, in particular, the elimination of political corruption, protective tariffs, and paper currency. However, the reformers defended the rights of property owners and called discontented farmers and laborers the "dangerous classes" (Sproat, p. 205). Therefore, many western farmers united to form the Granger movement and successfully lobbied to pass "Granger Laws," which limited railroad freight and grain elevator rates. Several state supreme courts declared these laws unconstitutional, but the reforms were soon federalized with the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Eager to join political parties that directly represented them, many farmers turned to the Greenback Party in the 1880s and the Populist Party in the 1890s.

After the Civil War, the two major parties allowed the dollar ("greenbacks") to lose value and supported big business during the financial crisis known as the panic of 1873, which destroyed desperate farmers. The Greenback Party (1874–1884) was formed to institute currency expansion, and after uniting farmers with urban labor and winning fourteen seats in Congress in 1878, the Greenbacks broadened their platform to endorse woman suffrage and a graduated income tax. By 1884 farmers in the western United States were more prosperous, causing the party to lose support and dissolve.

Third party interest revived in the 1890s. Again, economically desperate farmers and laborers criticized Republicans and Democrats for supporting urban, corporate interests and ignoring their needs. Some of the leaders of the Greenback Party reorganized in 1892, and the Populist, or "People's," Party was born. Hamlin Garland (1860–1940), whose stories dramatize the bitterly hard life farmers had, advocated political reform that would protect farmers from greedy bankers and unfair railroad prices. Garland made political speeches, advising farmers to unite. In his novel A Spoil of Office (1892), young Grangers idealize the Populist Party. They claim that if they elect a Populist congressman, he will "fight [for] the interests of the farmer" (p. 10). Their prediction comes true because Garland's fictional Populist, unlike the typical politician, is selfless, altruistic, and responsive to his constituents.

URBAN PARTIES: THE MUGWUMPS, POPULISTS, AND SOCIALISTS

Following the Civil War, the two major parties suppressed third party development in eastern cities. Their political control was challenged when the Mugwumps, a group of Republicans who left their party in 1884 to become independents, threw their support behind the Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland in that year's election. The Mugwumps rejected the patronage system and refused to compromise their beliefs in order to belong to one party. In 1898 Twain criticized the Republicans' imperialism, but he refused to vote for the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. He called himself a Mugwump because instead of blindly voting for a party, he analyzed every candidate and issue individually.

Because fewer people were blindly accepting the policies and activities of the two major parties, Populist Party membership increased in eastern cities, especially among the working class. Howells publicly asserted that Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) founded and legitimized the populist movement with his book Looking Backward 2000–1888 (1888) and his speeches in the 1890s. In his novel, Bellamy advocates economic and social reforms in order to change America's social and economic ideology from competition and prejudice to cooperation, equality, and reciprocity. In his speeches, Bellamy praised the Populist Party's nationalist agenda and its interest in the rights of poor farmers, poor workers, and women. He stated that it was the only American organization that could justify calling itself a national party.

The Democratic Party appropriated populist themes and nominated populist leader William Jennings Bryan as their candidate in 1896, 1900, and 1908. These elections undermined the agrarian insurgency, and the Populist Party dissolved, but popular interest in a third party did not die. Many writers joined the Socialist Party and criticized the government for allowing businesses to exploit their workers. Unlike European Socialists, American Socialists were more populist than Marxist, but the Socialist Party survived longer than other third parties because the Republicans and Democrats resisted appropriating its ideology to boost their memberships.

The Socialist Party's fight against worker exploitation is depicted in The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). Jurgis, a poor immigrant, becomes cynical after working for both of the major parties and seeing the corruption that occurred. Jurgis states that "at the last election the Republicans had paid four dollars a vote to the Democrats' three" (p. 308), which encourages him to vote "half a dozen times himself " (p. 315). Jurgis is disillusioned by politics and the politicians' unwillingness to help those truly in need. However, he regains his self-respect, his hope, and his faith in humanity after hearing a Socialist speech and joining the Socialist Party. Sinclair's novel directly influenced politics by encouraging voters to question the practices of the meatpacking industry and support the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was passed in 1906.

Frustrated that American society was based on self-interest, injustice, and the accumulation of personal wealth, Howells became a Christian Socialist in the 1880s and advocated a society based on brotherhood, equality, and freedom. His politics changed because of events like the unjust trial and execution of four anarchists associated with the 1886 Haymarket riot. Although Howells "disliked the anti-individualist implications of unionism" (Sproat, p. 218), he decided that his novels must encourage workers to organize and fight for their rights. In The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), the protagonist succeeds financially by being selfish, greedy, and competitive, but when he recognizes America's corrupt socioeconomic foundation, he acts morally and accepts financial and social ruin. In Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), a businessman's son rejects his father's competitive commercialism and joins a group of striking workers. The son agrees with a worker who argues that the Socialists should run the country because they guarantee that every man "haf voark, and that he haf foodt. All the roadts and mills and mines and landts shall be the beople's and be ron by the beople for the beople. There shall be no rich and no boor; and there shall not be war any more" (p. 310). In an 1890 book review, Hamlin Garland praises A Hazard of New Fortunes for dealing "with the most vital of all questions . . . the persistence of poverty, vice and crime," and for being "a magnificent study of the reform spirit of today" (Pizer, p. 409).

Jack London (1876–1916), concerned with economic and social injustices committed against the poor, converted to socialism in 1896. He wrote two pro-socialist books: the nonfiction title People of the Abyss (1903) and the novel The Iron Heel (1908). Also, he gave impromptu speeches to large Oakland, California, crowds in 1896, he campaigned as a Socialist mayoral candidate in 1901 and 1905, and he formed the Intercollegiate Socialist Society with Upton Sinclair in 1905. After years of frustration over the Socialists' lack of "fire and fight," London quit the party and supported Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party candidacy in 1916.

POWERFUL NEW PARTY: THE PROGRESSIVES

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Americans were calling for direct democracy to replace the political machines. In 1912 a group of Republicans rejected William Howard Taft's conservative administration and asked former president Theodore Roosevelt to run against Taft as a candidate of the Progressive, or "Bull Moose," Party. The Progressives wanted to end political corruption and fought for liberal reforms, such as increased political rights for blacks and women. By splitting the Republican vote, Roosevelt's candidacy enabled the Democrat Woodrow Wilson to defeat Taft. Wilson subsequently adopted several of the Progressive Party's policies, and the third party dissolved.

Although the two major parties tried to maintain their power by excluding third party participation, reformism did have an effect on local and national policy. For example, the prohibitionists and the women's movement forced Congress to pass significant legislation between 1900 and 1920. Although temperance organizations existed throughout the nineteenth century and the Prohibition Party was founded in 1869, it was not until the first decade of the 1900s that the antialcohol crusade became a powerful political force. Twain, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, humorously shows Huck negotiating between an escape to the western frontier and obeying his aunt's small town temperance and becoming civilized. The Bostonians (1886) by Henry James (1843–1916) satirizes the busybody, meddlesome nature of reformism, including temperance preaching, in the character of Miss Birdseye. The Prohibition Party also supported woman suffrage, free public education, and prison reform. In 1919 the party found success when the Eighteenth Amendment passed and alcohol was prohibited by law.

Although the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote, was not passed until 1920, American female writers and activists demanded their political rights during the Gilded Age and into the twentieth century. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), a suffragist and a Socialist, argued that women should be educated about politics and be allowed to vote for those whose laws directly affect women. In a 1910 essay in the Forerunner, a journal she wrote and published, she asserts that many women are, and more can be, knowledgeable and passionate about politics. Gilman sees a new political consciousness emerging in America and feels that everyone should be allowed to participate. "The day of the masculine monarchy is passing," she writes, "and the day of the human democracy is coming in" (p. 18).

see alsoThe Education of Henry Adams; Oratory; Reform; Temperance; Women's Suffrage

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Dover, 1994.

Garland, Hamlin. A Spoil of Office. 1892. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1969.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Our Androcentric Culture; or, The Man-Made World." Forerunner 1, no. 10 (1910): 17–20.

Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. "Aunt Chloe's Politics." In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1994.

Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes. 1890. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Riordon, William. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. 1905. New York: Dutton, 1963.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. 1906. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Twain, Mark. Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events. New York: Harper, 1940.

Twain, Mark. Selected Mark Twain-Howells Letters, 1872–1910. Edited by Fredrick Anderson, William M. Gibson, and Henry Nash Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967.

Twain, Mark, and Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age. 1873. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Secondary Works

Gibson, William M. "Mark Twain and Howells: Anti-Imperialists." New England Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1947): 435–468.

Murphy, Francis. "The End of a Friendship: Two Unpublished Letters from Twain to Howells about Bret Harte." New England Quarterly 58, no. 1 (1985): 87–91.

Pizer, Donald. "Hamlin Garland in the Standard." American Literature 26, no. 3 (November 1954): 401–415.

Roe, Jae H. "Keeping an 'Old Wound' Alive: The Marrow of Tradition and the Legacy of Wilmington." African American Review 33, no. 2 (1999): 231–243.

Sadler, Elizabeth. "One Book's Influence: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward." New England Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1944): 530–555.

Sproat, John G. "The Best Men": Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Matthew Teorey