Inauguration Day, 1877

The inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes on the east front of the U.S. Capitol, March 5, 1877. Library of Congress.


One hundred and thirty-two years ago, a new president took the oath of office promising an end to the tired politics of partisanship.

Standing on the east front of the U.S. Capitol on March 5, 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes vowed to govern in the interests of all, regardless of party.

“The President of the United States of necessity owes his election to office to the suffrage and zealous labors of a political party, the members of which cherish with ardor and regard as of essential importance the principles of their party organization,” Hayes conceded in his inaugural address. Then he added: “But he should strive always to be mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves the country best.”

Hayes, a principled and reform-minded Republican, outlined an ambitious agenda. He promised to pursue Civil Service reform after the rampant corruption that marred the Grant administration. He called for a constitutional amendment limiting the president to one six-year term. He urged greater state assistance, supplemented if necessary by the federal government, for education.

Most of his address, however, dealt with conditions in the South, where Reconstruction was coming to an end without having reconciled whites to the emancipation and enfranchisement of blacks. The people of the South, Hayes said, “are still impoverished, and the inestimable blessing of wise, honest and peaceful local self-government is not fully enjoyed.”

Hayes committed his administration to protecting “the rights of all by every constitutional means at the disposal of my Administration” while vowing to defer “in favor of honest and efficient local self-government.”

He could do little else. Hayes ascended to the White House after a bitterly contested presidential campaign against Democrat Samuel Tilden, the reform-minded governor of New York who earned national notice for his crusade against the Tweed ring. Hayes’s one-vote victory in the Electoral College came only after a special commission awarded him the disputed votes of three Southern states.

Democrats agreed to accept the panel’s findings in exchange for Hayes’s commitment to pull federal troops out of the South.

Despite the bargain, Democrats remained deeply hostile to the new president. As Hayes prepared to take the oath of office, House Democrats and the Democratic National Committee adopted a statement denouncing the commission’s decision and pledging unceasing hostility to the new president.

“Let no hour pass in which the usurpation is forgotten,” urged the declaration signed by Reps. Frank H. Hurd of Ohio, Randall L. Gibson of Louisiana, Josiah G. Abbott of Massachusetts, Otho R. Singleton of Mississippi and William P. Lynde of Wisconsin. “Let agitation be unceasing, that at every opportunity the people may express their abhorrence at the outrage. Let want of confidence be voted at every election in Mr. Hayes and his Administration.”

Not surprisingly, Hayes found himself embroiled in a bitter battle with congressional Democrats who attached riders to appropriations bills that would have barred the use of federal troops as peacekeepers at polling places in the South.

White-hot partisanship was only one of the problems Hayes confronted while in office. The lingering effects of the Panic of 1873 produced agitation for greater use of paper money and the first outbreak of the agrarian revolt that led to the rise, more than a decade later, of the Populist Party. Hayes called out federal troops to restore order after labor violence erupted along railroads lines.

Hayes never won the trust of Democrats, and tense relations with the Democratic-controlled Congress dominated his four years in office.

“Let the Democratic Party at once organize for the new contest to secure overwhelming victories, that conspirators may never again attempt the experiment which now humiliates the country and installed in its highest offices a usurper,” the House Democrats declared as Hayes prepared to take office.

In the end, partisan division carried the day.

Sources:

McPherson, James M., ed. To the Best of My Ability: The American Presidents.
London, New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2000.

The New York Times, March 5, 1877, p. 5.

Going for the Gold

At the age of 79, after a lifetime that included service as a Union Army general in the Civil War and a term as governor of Illinois, Democratic Sen. John M. Palmer might well have basked in the role of elder statesman.

Instead, he ventured into the world of presidential politics at the head of an ill-starred third-party campaign for the White House in 1896.

Palmer was the candidate of the National Democratic Party, a creation of conservative supporters of President Grover Cleveland who could not abide the Democratic ticket headed by William Jennings Bryan.

The split in the party followed a tumultuous and unhappy return to the White House by Cleveland in 1892. Shortly after he took office, the Panic of 1893 swept through banks, investment houses, factories and farms, creating economic chaos that dominated his second term.

In 1894, Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to suppress the Pullman strike organized by Eugene V. Debs. Legions of unemployed workers loosely organized as an “army” by Jacob Coxey marched on Washington demanding relief. In the congressional elections of 1894, Republicans routed Democrats and regained control of Capitol Hill.

Two years later, when Democrats met in Chicago to choose their presidential candidate, the party nominated Bryan, whose support for free-silver, among other things, made him anathema to the conservative financiers who backed Cleveland and favored the gold standard.

The rebuke in Chicago was an ignominious end for Cleveland, whose victory in 1884 made him the first Democrat to win the White House since before the Civil War.

So-called Gold Democrats met in Indianapolis in September and selected Palmer as their presidential candidate. To balance the impact of having a former Union Army general at the top of its ticket, the Gold Democrats picked Simon Bolivar Buckner, 73, the Confederate general who surrendered Fort Donelson to Ulysses S. Grant, as Palmer’s running mate.

The Gold Democrats adopted a platform that cast their defection from the Bryan ticket as a high-minded defense of principle.

“This convention has assembled to uphold the principles upon which depend the honor and welfare of the American people in order that Democrats throughout the Union may unite their patriotic efforts to avert disaster from their country and ruin from their party,” the Gold Democrats declared.

Cleveland pronounced himself pleased with the ticket, but others were less enthusiastic. “You would laugh yourself sick could you see old Palmer,” Kenesaw M. Landis, the future commissioner of baseball, wrote to a friend. “He has actually gotten it into his head he is running for office.”

“A Splendid Ticket – Don’t Vote for It,” declared the New York Sun. The New York Times was marginally more supportive.

“The Democrats of this state have always been for sound money,” the Times observed in its tepid endorsement of Palmer. “The platform of the Chicago assemblage was a radical departure from Democratic doctrines, and the Chicago ticket stands for Populism, not Democracy.”

The Times’s endorsement came on Sept. 30, but by then, the campaign between Republican William McKinley and Bryan had evolved into a clear-cut battle between the bimetallism favored by Bryan and the hard-money policies favored by the GOP. Hard-money Democrats were an irrelevancy.

The Gold Democrats, one study has concluded, represented the last gasp of classic 19th-century liberalism – with its emphasis on minimalist government, free trade and hard money – in the Democratic Party. The Gold Democrats’ “efforts to defend these values ended in almost complete failure.”

When the votes were counted, the Gold Democratic ticket received 132,871 votes – an insignificant fraction of the more than 13 million presidential ballots cast that year. It would be the only time since 1860 that the Times endorsed a third-party candidate. Palmer’s showing in the fall gave the paper little reason to do so again.

Sources:

The New York Times, Sept. 30, 1896

"Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classic Liberalism," David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito. The Independent Review, Vol. 4, No. 4, Spring 2000, pp. 555-575.

The Campaign of 1896: The Presidential Campaign, Cartoons & Commentary. Created by Rebecca Edwards and Sarah DeFeo. http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/1896home.html

Back Home Again

It has long been a reliable ritual of presidential election television coverage: the theme music comes up, the broadcast begins – and within an hour, Indiana goes into the Republican column.

In presidential politics, the birthplace of Michael Jackson, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene V. Debs and Dan Quayle has been a dependable GOP stronghold for the past 40 years. Not since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson piled up his landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater, has a Democrat carried the state. Its lopsided Republican majorities meant that the TV networks could safely declare a Republican victory there as part of the evening’s preliminaries and then move on to other business.

This year, however, could be different. Polls show only a handful of percentage points separate Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. For the first time since A.J. Foyt recorded his second win at the Indianapolis 500, the Hoosier State and its 11 electoral votes are up for grabs.

While the notion of Indiana as a battleground state seems unusual to modern-day political junkies, in the latter half of the 19th century both parties fought fiercely for its 15 electoral votes.

Between 1880 and 1892, neither party managed to carry the state by more than 7,125 votes – Democrat Grover Cleveland’s margin of victory over Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1892. Four years earlier, Harrison, a resident of Indianapolis and former U.S. senator, carried his home state by a mere 2,376 votes over Cleveland.

Recognizing its importance, both parties usually managed to include a Hoosier on the presidential ticket. With only two exceptions, Indiana was represented on the national ticket of at least one of the parties in every presidential election between 1868 and 1912.

That was no accident. With voting for state and local candidates held in October, and a population that was broadly representative of the Midwest, Gilded Age political operatives recognized that the Hoosier state was as an important bellwether. “If we carry Indiana,” Republican James A. Garfield advised friends during his 1880 campaign for the White House, “the rest will be easy.”

The 1880 campaign demonstrated the importance with which both parties regarded Indiana. After a stunning victory by the insurgent Greenback-Labor Party in Maine in September, the GOP poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the state, according to Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield, by Kenneth D. Ackerman.

The cash infusion was believed necessary to prevent what Republicans feared was a massive attempt by Democrats to buy votes to secure victory, Ackerman’s account notes, and included a large quantity of $2 bills “to scratch itchy palms.”

It worked. Garfield polled 49.3 percent of the vote and carried the state with a plurality of 6,646 votes.

Besides Harrison, the list of Hoosiers who figures in presidential politics during the Gilded Age is notable for the obscurity of those on it. It includes:

-- Schuyler Colfax, a former speaker of the House who served one term as vice president under Ulysses S. Grant and was later linked to the Credit Mobilier scandal;

-- William H. English, a former congressman nominated by the Democrats in 1880 to serve as Winfield Scott Hancock’s running mate;

-- Thomas A. Hendricks, a Democrat who served in both the House and Senate and holds the distinction of having been nominated for vice-president twice – once to run with Samuel Tilden in 1876 and again in 1884 with Grover Cleveland;

-- Republican Charles W. Fairbanks, Theodore Roosevelt’s vice-presidential candidate in 1904;

-- Democratic Sen. John W. Kern, who ran with William Jennings Bryan in 1908; and

-- John W. Marshall, Indiana’s Democratic governor, who ran as Woodrow Wilson’s running mate in 1912.

So if Indiana finds itself up for grabs this fall, that won’t be unprecedented – indeed, the Hoosier State will be “back home again” among the nation’s political battlegrounds.

Sources:
Congressional Quarterly, Presidential Elections. Congressional Quarterly, Washington D.C., 1995.
Ackerman, Kenneth D. Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003.
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Washington D.C.. http//.bioguide.congress.gov.