Party Games

Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics

Mark Wahlgren Summers

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780807855379, 9780807828625
• eBook ISBN: 9780807863756
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Much of late-nineteenth-century American politics was parade and pageant. Voters crowded the polls, and their votes made a real difference on policy. In Party Games, Mark Wahlgren Summers tells the full story and admires much of the political carnival, but he adds a cautionary note about the dark recesses: vote-buying, election-rigging, blackguarding, news suppression, and violence.
Summers also points out that hardball politics and third-party challenges helped make the parties more responsive. Ballyhoo did not replace government action. In order to maintain power, major parties not only rigged the system but also gave dissidents part of what they wanted. The persistence of a two-party system, Summers concludes, resulted from its adaptability, as well as its ruthlessness. Even the reform of political abuses was shaped to fit the needs of the real owners of the political system — the politicians themselves.

NOTES

Abbreviations

AmN	American Nonconformist
BWC	Bangor Whig and Courier
ChaN&C	Charleston News & Courier
ChanMSS (LC)	William E. Chandler MSS, Library of Congress, Washington
ChanMSS (NHHS)	William E. Chandler MSS, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord
ChiTi	Chicago Times
ChiTr	Chicago Tribune
CinCG	Cincinnati Commercial Gazette
CinEnq	Cincinnati Enquirer
CinGaz	Cincinnati Gazette
ClPD	Cleveland Plain Dealer
CMMHC	Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, Knox County Public Library System, Knoxville
ConMon	Concord Daily Monitor
CR	Congressional Record
DEN	Detroit Evening News
DMSR	Des Moines Iowa State Register
HML	Rutherford B. Hayes Memorial Library, Fremont, Ohio
HW	Harper’s Weekly
InJ	Indianapolis Journal
InN	Indianapolis News
InSen	Indianapolis Daily Sentinel
ISHS	Illinois State Historical Society, Springfield
IW&AIL	Irish World and American Industrial Liberator
JSP	John Swinton’s Paper
KoL	Knights of Labor
LC	Library of Congress, Washington
LC-J	Louisville Courier-Journal
LRArkG	Little Rock Arkansas Gazette
ManU	Manchester Daily Union
MHS	Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul
NAR	North American Review
NOrT-D	New Orleans Times-Democrat
NYEP	New York Evening Post
NYH	New York Herald
NYS	New York Sun
NYSL	New York State Library, Albany
NYStan	New York Standard
NYT	New York Times
NYTr	New York Tribune
NYW	New York World
ODB	Omaha Daily Bee
PhilRec	Philadelphia Record
PiPo	Pittsburgh Post
RanMSS	Samuel J. Randall MSS, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
RJ	Racine Journal
SFAltaC	San Francisco Alta California
SHSW	State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison
SprRep	Springfield Republican
StLG-D	St. Louis Globe-Democrat
StLP-D	St. Louis Post-Dispatch
StPGW	St. Paul Great West
StPP-P	St. Paul Daily Pioneer-Press
SU	Stanford University, Palo Alto
WilEvEv	Wilmington Every Evening
WVC	West Virginia Collection, West Virginia University Library, Morganton

Preface

1 C. Cushing to William E. Chandler, October 22, 1868, ChanMSS (NHHS).

2 Washington Post, May 18, 1897.

3 The best examples of the corruptionist school are Matthew Josephson’s Politicos, Ginger’s Age of Excess, and, with greater credibility and more careful research, Ginger’s Altgeld’s America and Myers’s Tammany Hall. Those whose description of the joys of political culture may entrance the reader far beyond the author’s intent include McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics; Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party, Silbey, American Political Nation, and, with much more detail given to the darker workings of organizational politics and the limited effectiveness of reform, Reynolds, Testing Democracy. Keyssar’s Right to Vote, concerning only the gradual disfranchisement in postwar America, without dwelling on the hoopla, stands in a class by itself. All of them are excellent, and, while I lay far more emphasis on the disconcerting methods of the mainstream partisans and share Reynolds’s recognition of the larger role played by politicians in deciding how reform would be implemented (if at all), I have learned much from McGerr’s book and am sold on his conclusion of the deadening impact that “advertised” politics had on voter turnout. For the dismissal of politics itself as a vastly overrated concern, in which popular participation was shallow, misinformed, or meaningless, large voter turnout no proof that the public had engaged with the real issues, and an America in which interested partisans put on a tremendous show for their own personal advantage, Altschuler and Blumin’s stimulating Rude Republic stands alone. It is remotely possible, though, that study of manuscript sources outside of Cornell’s library and of newspapers from some, or any, city larger than Syracuse, New York, for a period of the Gilded Age extending beyond three years may afford a different insight into how nineteenth-century politics worked.

4 This is a point well emphasized in a much narrower context, in Yearley, Money Machines.

5 How politicians’ responsiveness to organized groups worked is part of the story in Hammack, Power and Society, and Kousser, “Restoring Politics to Political History,” 592 - 94, and can be deduced in Campbell, Representative Democracy.

6 For example, Stewart and Weingast, “Stacking the Senate,” 223 - 71; McCormick and Reynolds, “Outlawing ‘Treachery,’ ” 835 - 58; Argersinger, “Value of the Vote,” 279 - 98, Argersinger, “Place on the Ballot,” 290 - 300; and Perman, Struggle for Mastery.

7 For the appeal to a larger definition of politics, see Daniel W. Howe, “Evangelical Movement and Political Culture,” 235 - 36, and Paula Baker, “Domestication of Politics,” 620 - 48.

8 As note, again, McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics, and Sproat, Best Men, the latter a study that may give Godkin and the talkers — as opposed to the doers — far more weight than they deserve. A far more sympathetic portrait appears in Blodgett, Gentle Reformers; McFarland, Mugwumps, Morals, and Politics; Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils; and Klebanow, “E. L. Godkin,” 52 - 75.

Chapter One

1 The best treatments of the 1888 election are the chapters in H. Wayne Morgan’s From Hayes to McKinley; Marcus’s Grand Old Party; and Nevins’s Grover Cleveland; see also McDaniel, “Presidential Election of 1888,” and Reitano, Tariff Question.

2 For “Grandpa’s Hat,” see Puck, July-November 1888; see also transparency, Buffalo Courier, November 4, 1888.

3 NYS, September 27, 1888.

4 On the choices of 1872, see James Rood Doolittle to his wife, September 12, 1872, Doolittle MSS, SHSW; StPP-P, November 1, 2, 1872; and “Annus Domini, 1873 - 74 - 75,”4, 5, 31.

5 Milwaukee Journal, November 5, 1888; NYS, November 18, 1888; James S. Martin to Joseph Fifer, September 8, 1888, Fifer MSS, ISHS.

6 Edwards, “Gender in American Politics,” 28 - 32, 129; NYH, October 28, November 4, 1888; NYS, July 15, September 27, 30, October 1, 8, 1888, November 4, 1888; ChiTr, August 3,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• I - Our Friend the Enemy
• II - Party Tricks
• III - Policy — The Golden Rule?
• IV - Rounding off the Two and a Half Party System
• CODA
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY