Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
THE CIVIL WAR WAS A COMPLETE BREAKDOWN OF THE rule of law. It might have been avoided if the founders had put aside their own financial interests and freed slaves on their plantations. Instead, they retained their slaves and embedded slavery into the Constitution, allowing Southern states to count slaves for congressional representation while still denying slaves voting rights.
When we talk about slavery and the Civil War, we usually talk about racism. It’s important we continue to address racism, but what gets overlooked are the enormous financial conflicts of interest by the founders, some of whom were extremely wealthy and owned many slaves.
Financial conflicts of interest have consequences—tragic consequences—that have not been emphasized enough by scholars who write about slavery. Our founders failed to acknowledge the inherent and fundamental immorality of slavery. Slavery had been banned in Great Britain. We knew it was wrong, and yet the founders used their financial interests to distort the meaning of morality in the Bible and the Constitution. Slavery was about racism and also about money.
Valuing slave labor over morality is the greatest instance of the tragic consequences of financial conflicts of interest in a representative democracy. Although trade disputes and other disagreements also played a role in the Civil War, corruption and racism set up our republic to descend into chaos and warfare less than a century following its founding.
Shortly after the start of the Civil War, the right to due process came under attack. President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Habeas corpus gives people who have been imprisoned or detained the right to appear before a court to determine if that imprisonment is lawful. Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution provides:
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
This is the only common-law tradition in the Constitution, and the Constitution also explicitly says when it can be overridden. President Lincoln took that opportunity.
When the Sixth Massachusetts Union Regiment marched in the streets of Baltimore a week after the firing on Fort Sumter and Virginia’s secession, the Union soldiers were attacked by a mob supporting Southern secession. Four soldiers were killed, thirty-six soldiers wounded, and twelve civilians killed. Following the bloodshed, the governor of Maryland and the mayor of Baltimore asked Lincoln not to send any more troops to the city. Lincoln replied that if the troops had to go through Baltimore, they would go through Baltimore. In response, locals cut telegraph wires and damaged railroads to try to stop the advance of Union troops.
Fearing that Maryland would secede, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had four civilians thrown in jail without a hearing in order to ensure the safety of the military supply lines between Philadelphia and Washington, DC. He also suspended the writ of habeas corpus between Philadelphia and New York and along the Florida coast.
Lincoln would imprison pro-secessionist Maryland legislators so they could not vote to secede from the Union. John Merryman, a farmer, was arrested on suspicion of treason and imprisoned at Fort McHenry without a hearing. His lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court.
Roger Taney, the chief justice of the Supreme Court and federal court judge of Maryland, ordered Merryman to be brought before him. The commander of Fort McHenry refused, citing President Lincoln’s suspension of the writ.
Taney called Lincoln’s action unconstitutional and said that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus.
Lincoln ignored Taney, a Maryland slaveholder who earlier had written the notorious Dred Scott decision denying liberty to slaves, even in free states. Taney—who rightly stood up to Lincoln’s infringement of due process but perpetuated the problem of slavery—would die on October 13, 1864, the same day Maryland outlawed slavery.
The charges against Merryman were eventually dismissed.
Following the Battle of Antietam on September 24, 1862, Lincoln broadened his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. He wrote, “All Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting military drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of the United States, shall be subject to martial law and liable to trial and punishment by Courts Martial or Military Commission.”
The policy was first implemented by Secretary of State William Seward and then by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. As many as 38,000 were imprisoned and held without a hearing during the war.
The Habeas Corpus Act, passed by Congress in March 1863, required the government to provide names of those imprisoned to civilian judges and to have them charged by a grand jury. They were to be released if the requirement wasn’t met.
Once again, Lincoln, acting outside the rule of law, ignored Congress’s mandate.
In 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War, Congress passed the Enforcement Act of 1870, empowering the president to enforce the first section of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African American men the right to vote. Passed during the Reconstruction Era, the law prohibited discrimination by state officials in voter registration on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It created penalties for those who broke the law and empowered federal courts to enforce the act. It allowed the president to call upon the army to quell disturbances and to send federal marshals to polling places if violations of the act were detected.
After the amendment was passed, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, in an attempt to stop African Americans from bettering their lot, organized a paramilitary terrorist group of former Confederate soldiers to push back against Reconstruction and keep African Americans submissive. This group, the Ku Klux Klan, dressed in white outfits including hoods that covered their faces, allowing the wearers to remain anonymous. Riding in large groups, the Klan terrorized former slaves and those who supported them with intimidation, assaults, destruction of property, and murder. For this reason, the Enforcement Act of 1870 was also often referred to as the First Ku Klux Klan act.
During and after the Civil War, the United States thus faced a challenge to the rule of law that was in some ways similar to the challenge we faced after September 11, 2001. How far should our federal government go in suppressing civil liberties and curtailing due process in order to combat the threat of terrorism?
In an attempt to stop these terrorist acts, President Ulysses S. Grant declared martial law. Passed by Congress and signed by Grant on October 17, 1871, the Second Enforcement Act, better known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, suspended habeas corpus for KKK members arrested by federal troops. Explained Grant in his proclamation, “Whereas such unlawful combinations and conspiracies for the purposes aforesaid are declared by the act of Congress aforesaid to be rebellion against the Government of the United States; and Whereas by said act of Congress it is provided that before the President shall suspend the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus he shall first have made proclamation commanding such insurgents to disperse.”
Grant thus engaged in his own “war on terror” against the Ku Klux Klan, the oldest and the most deadly domestic terrorist organization in American history. The act was passed to make sure that sympathetic Southern legislators did not release arrested Klansmen. Grant’s suspension of habeas corpus was brief and mostly affected South Carolina.
THE PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION
The handling of Reconstruction had an aftereffect on our politics. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party started with noble objectives. Their effort to rectify the legacy of slavery and its racist foundations was tragically undermined by the age-old problem of corruption. Reparations for freed slaves were part of the Republican platform, and many freed slaves expected to gain ownership of the land they had worked. Union general William Sherman seemed to bolster that claim when he promised freed slaves forty acres and a mule. Some land redistribution took place, but not much and not for very long.
What happened instead was a river of corruption as white Northerners came to take control of Southern governments for the purpose of personal gain. These people became known as carpetbaggers, named after the carpetbags they carried. They were outsiders who ran for public office in communities they didn’t know or care about.
The carpetbaggers said they had come to help the freed slaves, but their primary goal was to stuff their own pockets and rip off the people of the South. For a period after the war, Southerners were not allowed to vote, and the carpetbaggers got themselves elected into Southern state legislatures.
Once again, America experienced the ugliness of corruption. The effort to reconstruct the South after the Civil War and to give voting rights and economic opportunity to African Americans was very much undermined by the corruption that took over both political parties. After Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the Republican Party became embroiled in corruption, as did the Democrats and the entire country.
But first came the impeachment of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.
THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON
The North-South divide led not only to the first assassination of a president—Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865, by Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth—but also to the first impeachment of a president: Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.
Lincoln, a Republican, after the Civil War had tried to unify the country by choosing as his running mate Johnson, a Democrat with Southern sympathies. But six weeks after his second term began, Lincoln was assassinated. Lincoln’s death allowed Johnson as president to go easy on the Southern states while Lincoln’s progressive Republicans who controlled Congress fumed.
Johnson, a protégé of President Andrew Jackson, was authoritarian, narcissistic, and defiant of Congress. He had represented Tennessee in the Senate and had been the only Southern senator not to resign and side with the Confederacy. Despite his loyalty to the United States, Johnson’s sympathies were with the Southern states, which he wanted quickly to bring back into the Union, even if it meant doing little to hold accountable the men who had led the rebellion or to make the lives of African Americans less odious.
The congressional Republicans, who controlled both houses, passed laws trying to restore representative government in the South, hold the guilty accountable, and rescue the former slaves from demeaning and inferior conditions that would persist without federal intervention.
The provisions of the (first) Reconstruction Act of 1867, for example, called for the following:
1. The former Confederate States of America (CSA) will be divided into five military districts under the direction of Union military officers, who are supported by federal troops.
2. Military courts can be used to try cases involving civil and property rights violations as well as criminal trials.
3. States need to enact new constitutions that grant voting rights to black men (“Freedmen”).
4. High-ranking Confederate officials are temporarily barred from political participation.
5. States must ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in order to be represented in Congress.
Johnson vetoed each of these laws, and Congress then overrode his vetoes. But only Tennessee among the former Confederate states agreed to carry out the laws. With Johnson urging the Southern state lawmakers to push for more autonomy (which would virtually guarantee continued white supremacy), Congress was unable to stop state laws and practices severely limiting the rights of blacks.
Blacks were kept from voting in North Carolina. South Carolina passed a law that “no Negro could pursue the trade of an artisan, mechanic, or shopkeeper,” or any other trade or employment besides that of husbandry, without a special license. An Alabama law said that “any stubborn or refractory servants” or “servants who loiter away their time” should be fined fifty dollars, and if they could not pay, they’d be hired out for six months’ labor.
A Mississippi law was even more Draconian. It said that every Negro under eighteen who was an orphan or not supported by his parents must be apprenticed to a white person, preferably the former owner of the slave. It was clear that the basic rights of four million African Americans were not going to be protected in the Southern states as long as Andrew Johnson was president. Racial animus led to bloody race riots in Memphis and New Orleans.
For Republicans, Johnson stood for everything that Abraham Lincoln abhorred. Despite the fact that Johnson had remained steadfastly loyal to the Union in the Civil War, congressional Republicans considered Johnson to be a traitor. They referred to him as “the great criminal.” Because he was stubborn and authoritarian, others called him “King Andrew.”
Those who mourned the death of Abraham Lincoln felt that Johnson was an illegitimate president. General Benjamin Butler, in his opening statement of the impeachment trial, said of Johnson, “By murder most foul he succeeded to the Presidency, and is the elect of an assassin to that high office.”
It fell to Congress to figure out a way to dethrone Johnson. Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, a law that made it illegal for Johnson without Senate approval to fire officials who had been previously appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate.
Johnson had been threatening to fire his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, a firm proponent of Reconstruction, and the Republicans were betting that Johnson would risk a confrontation and fire him anyway. If he did so, they promised, he would be impeached.
Headstrong and bullheaded, Johnson went ahead and fired Stanton.
In March of 1868, the Republican House hit Johnson with eleven accusations of high crimes and misdemeanors, most related to his firing of Stanton, even though Johnson’s real offense was his obstruction of congressional efforts to advance Reconstruction. The tension between parties was so great that a second Civil War was predicted.
The Senate trial began on March 5, 1868, and it appeared that Johnson would actually be convicted, but in this blatantly political drama there was one important factor that saved him. Because Johnson had become president after Lincoln’s assassination, and a new vice president had not been nominated and confirmed by Congress as the Constitution requires, the next person in line to be president according to the law at the time was the president pro tempore of the Senate, Benjamin Wade, one of the most liberal and outspoken Radical Republicans in Congress.
Originally a Whig, Wade joined the Republican Party and established a reputation as one of the most radical politicians of the era, favoring a woman’s right to vote, trade union rights, and full equality for African Americans. Wade opposed the spread of slavery before the war, was a foe of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and was strongly opposed to passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which spread slavery westward. During the war, Wade didn’t think Lincoln was freeing the slaves fast enough and criticized him often. After the war, Wade took his stand with the Radical Republicans, a group of congressmen that advocated for severe punishment of the South and its white citizens.
Andrew Johnson was certainly unpopular, but Wade was equally unpopular among other more conservative Senate factions, including some Republicans, and it was the dislike of Wade that in part led to the impeachment attempt falling one vote short. Wade, sure of victory, was selecting his cabinet in May 1868 when the vote was taken.
After the impeachment trial and his acquittal, Andrew Johnson issued a blanket amnesty to all Confederate soldiers, including Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. After Union general Ulysses S. Grant was elected president in 1868, Andrew Johnson refused to attend his inaugural the following year. If he had attended, Grant had said that he would not have allowed Johnson to ride with him to the ceremony, as was the custom.
Andrew Johnson had been impeached by politicians who hated him for political reasons (the second impeachment of a president, Bill Clinton in 1998, would have some of the same characteristics). But the attempt to remove Johnson failed, proving just how difficult it is to remove a sitting president.
GRANT AND HIS LEGACY
The Ulysses Grant administration was one of the most corrupt in American history. Though Grant was a great general, perhaps the officer most responsible for winning the Civil War, he was ill equipped to be president. He hired military leaders, men whom he knew and trusted, men who were as new to politics as he was.
What Grant couldn’t comprehend was that many of his military friends were crooks. As with Trump today, Grant was a sucker for flattery. His personal secretary, Orville Babcock, controlled whole sections of the federal government. Babcock was indicted twice: first for the Whiskey Ring, the most famous scandal of the Grant administration.
Whiskey distillers in Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin had evaded taxes for years by bribing Treasury Department agents, who would overlook the taxes of seventy cents per gallon and split the illegal gains with the distillers.
Treasury Secretary Benjamin Bristow eventually broke up the ring, seized the distilleries, and made hundreds of arrests. Among those indicted was Babcock and Grant’s other private secretary, Horace Porter.
Grant then appointed a special prosecutor to go after the ring. Babcock, it turned out, had been one of the ringleaders. The supervisor of internal revenue accused Babcock of taking $25,000 in bribes. Even when Grant was presented with evidence of Babcock’s guilt, he refused to believe it.
When Grant was accused of protecting Babcock, he fired the first special prosecutor in American history, John Henderson, a former senator, just a month before Babcock’s trial, replacing Henderson with another attorney.
With the president siding with Babcock, the prosecution never stood a chance. Despite this flagrant interference with an investigation of his own administration, Grant paid no meaningful political price.
There were other scandals. Two Grant appointees set up an extortion ring at the New York Custom House and were accused of charging exorbitant fees from private merchants. There was a postal ring—lucrative postal contracts were given to profiteers who were paid a lot of money for fictitious routes or for low-quality service. Interior Secretary Columbus Delano, accused of taking bribes for fraudulent land grants, was forced to resign on October 15, 1875. Grant’s attorney general, George H. Williams, was rumored to have taken bribes to dismiss some cases of fraud. When informed that Williams’s wife, Kate Hughes, had received a $30,000 payoff, Grant forced Williams to resign.
The corruption didn’t stop there. Just as the Whiskey Ring graft trials were coming to an end, a House investigation committee accused War Secretary William W. Belknap of taking extortion money in exchange for appointing Caleb Marsh, a friend of Carita Belknap, the secretary’s second wife, to run the lucrative Indian trading post at Fort Sill. Native Americans would buy food and clothing at the fort at exorbitant prices. Marsh, a resident of New York City, became quite wealthy.
One of those who testified against Belknap was Lieutenant Colonel George Custer.
Belknap, who was impeached, resigned.
Grant, who again said he knew nothing about this, never asked Belknap why he was resigning.
Then there was the secretary of the navy, George Robeson. Congress had approved a $56 million budget for navy construction projects. but discovered in 1876 that $15 million of that money was unaccounted for. The committee believed Robeson had embezzled it.
Robeson was accused of taking bribes from a grain dealer to give the company profitable contracts. The committee found that Robeson had received a $320,000 vacation cottage and a valuable team of horses. The contractor also paid off $10,000 of Robeson’s debts. His annual salary was $8,000, but he had tucked away $300,000 in cash. The committee, however, wasn’t able to prove the grain company had provided him with the money. All they could do was admonish him.
The second time Orville Babcock was indicted came in September 1876, when corrupt building contractors in Washington, DC, were tried for graft by prosecutor Columbus Alexander, a reformer and critic of the Grant administration. On the night of April 23, 1874, burglars broke into the safe in the district attorney’s office and took the evidence. They substituted fake evidence that suggested that prosecutor Alexander was involved in the theft.
The conspiracy was revealed when two of the burglars confessed. Prosecutor Alexander was exonerated in court. Babcock was named as one of the conspirators who wanted to punish Alexander for his efforts to clean up Washington. Babcock was acquitted. Later it was revealed that the jury had been tampered with.
Enter Wall Street.
The Gold Ring scandal saw the Grant administration become embroiled in an attempt to corner the gold market.
In 1869, immensely wealthy speculators Jay Gould and Jim Fisk attempted to convince Grant not to sell treasury gold. This would increase the sales of agricultural products overseas (thus increasing business for Gould’s Erie Railroad). Gould and Fisk got Grant’s brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, to help persuade Grant. In exchange for the inside information they needed to carry out this plan, Gould gave Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Daniel Butterfield a $10,000 bribe.
On June 5, 1869, Gould and Fisk met with Grant while he rode on one of Gould’s steamships from New York to Boston. Grant wasn’t persuaded, and the treasury continued to sell gold.
In late August, Grant met with A. T. Stewart, his first cabinet nominee for treasury secretary, to talk about whether to sell the treasury gold. Stewart, fearing an upset in the sales of agriculture products, advised him not to. On that recommendation, Grant ordered Treasury Secretary George Boutwell to stop selling the gold. Boutwell had been selling $1 million worth of gold a week.
On September 6, 1869, Gould and Fisk bought the Tenth National Bank and began purchasing gold in large quantities. As the price of gold rose precipitously, Grant became suspicious. Still, two weeks passed before he figured out what Gould and Fisk were up to. Grant cautioned his brother-in-law to get out of the gold market. Gould then started selling off his gold, while Fisk kept buying.
By September 21, the price of gold had risen from $37 to $141 an ounce. At that point, Gould and Fisk owned between $50 million and $60 million in gold.
Grant ordered the treasury to release $5 million in gold, and on Friday, September 23, 1869—the first Black Friday—Boutwell released $4 million in gold and ordered the Tenth National Bank closed. This stopped Gould and Fisk from cornering the market and also ruined many other investors.
Stock sales on Wall Street dropped by 20 percent. The price of agricultural products fell sharply, devastating many farmers across the country.
Gould and Fisk, who refused to pay off their obligations, had expert legal representation and were never indicted for their profiteering.
Assistant Treasury Secretary Butterfield resigned.
Grant’s reputation took another beating.
The gold panic wrecked the economy for months.
This was an early example of a theme that would arise again in the years leading up to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression and again in the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. Corruption and recklessness in the financial sector repeatedly intersected with corruption in the public sector to create economic and political crises.
Despite the corruption surrounding the Grant administration, the president never argued that he was above the law. He demonstrated his fealty to the Constitution in 1872 after he was arrested for driving his horse and carriage at breakneck speed down M Street NW in Washington, DC.
William West, an African American who had fought for the North in the Civil War, was patrolling the streets, and he flagged down Grant and gave him a warning for traveling too fast. A mother and child recently had been run over by a horse and carriage, and patrolman West so informed the president and asked him to obey the speed limits.
The next day Grant again came barreling through at top speed, and West again made him stop. Grant apologized, saying what many modern-day motorists say, that he hadn’t realized he was going so fast.
“I’m very sorry, Mr. President, but I have to do it,” said the patrolman. “Duty is duty, and I will have to place you under arrest.”
After Grant accompanied West to the police station, he was ordered to put up twenty dollars as collateral. A trial was held the next day. He didn’t appear, and he was not fined.
But Grant didn’t contest the arrest or fine, and he didn’t issue a statement saying the president was above the law.
It was the only time in American history that a president was arrested.
As the Grant administration became known for its terrible corruption, Southerners became very resentful, and instead of directing this anger at the corrupt politicians in DC, they indulged in a deep racial hatred of African Americans. Racism—a threat to the rule of law in America from the very beginning—once against reared its ugly head.
When the Union Army left the South in 1877, the carpetbaggers soon left too. Blacks were associated with the carpetbaggers. Some freed slaves, used by carpetbagger politicians and others, were left to fend for themselves against the angry Southern whites. Southern whites retaliated by installing Jim Crow laws, a system intended to perpetuate legal slavery. Blacks in the South, kept from voting well into the twentieth century, were powerless in the face of such flagrant discrimination. When the Supreme Court decided in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that public accommodations could be separate but equal, segregation of schools, public transportation, restaurants, and even bathrooms became the official law of the land.
The racism was bad in itself, but what we wish to stress again is that the corruption at the founding of our country and the failure to address the moral issue of slavery in the Constitution allowed slavery to exist in America. Further corruption with carpetbaggers, the Grant administration, and beyond fed white resentment and made the treatment of blacks much worse from the Civil War into the present.
It’s also worth noting that after the carpetbaggers left, there were movements across the country to accommodate the South and bring the nation together. Autonomous once again, the South celebrated itself with statues of Confederate heroes and romantic notions of the Civil War. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other generals were depicted not as traitors, but as beloved heroes. Yale University even named one of its colleges after John C. Calhoun, a Southern senator and vice president who defended slavery and claimed that owning slaves was the key to success.
The ugliness of slavery, the massive slaughter during the Civil War, and the corruption that followed were thus downplayed so Northern industrialists and their bought politicians could celebrate the post–Civil War economic expansion, while Southerners found an uneasy and reluctant place in the Union by oppressing former slaves and romanticizing the past.
For decades, political power eluded the South. It only returned when the South aligned itself with one of the two political parties. In return for that support, and the balance of power that came with it, the party embraced by Southern politicians was expected to loyally support the South—the white South—and its political agenda.
Up until the mid-1960s, the white South was steadfastly loyal to the Democratic Party, an alliance used to carry out populist attacks on Northern industrial elites and Republican politicians beholden to them. The Democratic flag bearers were an uneasy alliance of Southerners (some more progressive than others, but most imbued with deep prejudices against African Americans); agrarian champions such as William Jennings Bryan, who lost four presidential races; and Northern politicians who claimed to represent the rising working class (including corrupt urban machines such as New York City’s Tammany Hall; New York governor Al Smith, in 1928 the first Catholic to run for president; and the patrician FDR, who won the White House in 1932).
For decades, even the most progressive Democrats had to accommodate Southern racists. President Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey grew up in the South and shared that racism. Others looked the other way. (It was Eleanor Roosevelt, not her husband, who spoke out most forcefully when African American opera star Marian Anderson was barred from singing at the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Constitution Hall in 1939.)
This alignment lasted until the 1960s and 1970s when the white South shifted away from the Democrats and toward the Republican Party. This was due in part to the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 under Democratic president Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy’s support of civil rights, Republican Richard Nixon’s pursuit of a “Southern strategy,” and Republican Ronald Reagan’s reinforcement of a GOP Southern strategy in 1980.
This shift—which we will discuss later—empowered the GOP, but also threatened the rule of law, with a combination of immense industrial wealth, which had always been strong in the Republican Party, and the socially conservative—some argue still racist—white South. These two factions of the GOP have warred for decades, with the social conservatives gaining power and eventual dominance. By 2016, Donald Trump was poised to ride to power on the alliance of concentrated wealth, Southern social conservatism, and lingering racism throughout the country.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves on modern-day Republican politics. That the Democrats attempted to combine progressive politics with social conservatism and, often, racism from the nation’s founding until the 1960s is itself worthy of note. This brought many contradictions for America’s oldest political party, ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s famous words in the Declaration of Independence that “all [white] men are created equal,” to Andrew Jackson’s vision of a populist democracy that excluded Native Americans and blacks, to former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan’s testimony against public schools teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in the Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1920s, and finally to the infamous Richard J. Daley machine that ruled Chicago with an iron fist and as late as 1972 refused to bring African American delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
It wasn’t until the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912 that the country had a Southern president after the Civil War. Wilson had been president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, but he was a Virginian. His reforms at Princeton included curbing the social influence of eating clubs populated by the scions of wealthy industrial families (mostly from the North), but he also prohibited the admission of African Americans, fearing their presence would offend Southern students.
President Wilson’s administration (1913–1921) is remembered not only for its many accomplishments, such as enacting and enforcing antitrust laws and other restrictions on big businesses, mostly from the North, and appointing the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, in 1916, but also for a resurgence of racism. Blacks were excluded from federal employment, much more so than during the preceding Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft administrations, and Wilson was allied with powerful Southern governors.
On March 21, 1915, the White House held a private screening of Birth of a Nation, a silent film celebrating the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The film, a justification of white supremacy, was a box office smash. President Wilson said, “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at least there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
NORTHERN INDUSTRIALISTS TAKE OVER THE GOP
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Republicans quickly fell under the control of Northern industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who saw donating to and supporting the Republican Party as a way to control government. They could keep labor costs low while fighting labor unions. They also supported high tariffs on imports to protect their own manufacturing industries, making high tariffs (as well as opposing the income tax) an important part of the GOP platform up through President Herbert Hoover’s disastrous implementation of tariffs in 1930, and the ensuing trade war that prolonged the Great Depression. (The GOP should have learned its lesson about protectionism from the 1930s, but it has flirted yet again with protectionism under Donald Trump.)
These industrialists used their money to make sure that the Republican Party would do their bidding.
During William McKinley’s presidency, beginning in March 1897, we started to see big money come into politics. After McKinley’s assassination in 1901, his vice president, Teddy Roosevelt, became president. Roosevelt was a progressive who disapproved of the corrupt practices of big business. This caused a wide split in the Republican Party. Those backing the wealthy and powerful industrialists supported William Howard Taft instead of Roosevelt for the Republican nomination in 1908. This pro-business Taft wing of the Republican Party existed through the 1950s.
Teddy Roosevelt, in retaliation, formed the Bull Moose Party. But again, it was corruption that caused this split in the party. Roosevelt wanted public funding for elections. He wanted to break up monopolies and trusts.
On October 14, 1912, Roosevelt was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to make a speech about the sins of private citizens having too much economic and political power when a disturbed man named John Schrank shot him. Schrank, a saloonkeeper, had been stalking Roosevelt around the country before getting a clear shot. When arrested, Schrank proclaimed that “any man looking for a third term ought to be shot.”
The .32-caliber bullet, aimed at Roosevelt’s heart, first struck his eyeglass case and then the pages of the speech he was to give. By the time it broke his skin, it had slowed considerably, so Roosevelt insisted on making his speech.
After telling the audience he had been shot, he pulled the torn, bloodstained manuscript from his breast pocket and said, “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose … The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will do my best.”
The assassination attempt, Roosevelt said, “emphasizes to a particular degree the need of the Progressive movement. Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the ‘have nots’ arraigned against the creed of the ‘haves.’”
Roosevelt spoke of the importance of labor unions. He boasted of his work to bolster the antitrust laws and the interstate commerce law, which gave government control over the railroads. He talked of taking government control of Standard Oil, “Big Sugar,” and “the Tobacco Trust.”
He chided Woodrow Wilson, who was then governor of New Jersey and running against him for president, for saying that the states were the proper authorities to deal with the trusts.
“Well,” Roosevelt said, “about eighty percent of the trusts are organized in New Jersey. The Standard Oil, the Tobacco, the Sugar, the Beef, all those trusts are organized in the state of New Jersey and the laws of New Jersey say that their charters can at any time be amended or repealed, and Mr. Wilson has been governor for a year and nine months and he has not opened his lips. The chapter describing what Mr. Wilson has done about trusts in New Jersey would read precisely like a chapter describing snakes in Ireland, which ran: ‘There are no snakes in Ireland.’ Mr. Wilson has done precisely and exactly nothing about the trusts.”
He asked the men and women of Wisconsin to stand with him. He went on, “I will say that, friends, because the Republican Party is beaten. Nobody needs to have any idea that anything can be done with the Republican Party.”
He spoke of how Taft had wrecked the party for good by stealing the presidential nomination in 1912.
“They stole that nomination from me,” he said, “but it was really from you … But you are the people they dread. They dread the people themselves, and those bosses and the big special interests behind them made up their mind that they would rather see the Republican Party wrecked than see it come under the control of the people themselves.”
Roosevelt then spoke of Wilson’s commitment to states’ rights, instead of power for the federal government. He said that Wilson opposed the bill to abolish child labor, a bill that would prohibit women from working more than eight hours a day, and a law to provide a minimum wage for women.
His message was clear: Wilson, although a progressive like Roosevelt, relied too heavily upon the mantra of states’ rights that had permeated the Democratic Party since the days of Jefferson. True Progressive reform, Roosevelt argued, required a powerful federal government on the side of the people rather than special interests.
In November, Roosevelt was defeated by Woodrow Wilson in a three-way race that included President William Taft, a Republican. Schrank, his would-be assassin, was committed to a mental hospital, where he died in 1943.
William Howard Taft’s head of the Department of the Interior, Richard Ballinger, had contributed to the Republican Party split. Ballinger rekindled that ancient problem of corruption that had plagued the Grant administration, had been driven back by Teddy Roosevelt, and saw a resurgence once Roosevelt was gone. Ballinger also began what is now a century-long practice of politicians using the Interior Department to open up public lands on sweetheart terms to mining, timber, oil, and other industries owned by political supporters, with little respect for environmental consequences or the reasons why the Teddy Roosevelt administration and Congress had set aside lands for conservation in the first place.
Despite Taft’s purported policy of land conservation, 15,868 acres in Montana were sold to large corporations (General Electric, Guggenheim, and Amalgamated Copper). Ballinger at first ignored the story, then accused reporters of opposing development in the West. Ballinger was dogged by accusations of favoritism.
An even more serious charge involved coal development in the Chugach National Forest by Clarence Cunningham, a Seattle developer and an associate of Ballinger. The deal was financed by a corporation associated with J. P. Morgan and the Guggenheim family of New York City. The group had staked thirty-three claims, even though Alaska land laws were designed to benefit small farmers and prevent monopolies.
Cunningham was one of Ballinger’s former clients. For several months in 1908, between the time Ballinger was employed as land commissioner and interior secretary, he had acted as an agent for the Cunningham/Morgan/Guggenheim development group with the federal government, lobbying then interior secretary James Garfield. Now that Ballinger was interior secretary, Cunningham expected continued loyalty and was not disappointed.
Upon becoming interior secretary, Ballinger also reassigned General Land Office investigator Louis R. Glavis, and fired him when Glavis complained about Ballinger’s dealings. President Taft, who had approved of the Glavis firing, exonerated Ballinger. A scandal in the press followed. Collier’s magazine published Glavis’s account of the incident and, when Congress started an investigation and Ballinger threated to sue Collier’s, the magazine hired Boston lawyer, and future Supreme Court justice, Louis D. Brandeis to represent it and Glavis.
Woodrow Wilson’s successor, Warren Harding, had perhaps the biggest scandal since the Grant administration. In a sensational investigation, Senator Thomas Walsh revealed that a group known as the Ohio Gang, members of Harding’s administration, had taken bribes to lease oil reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming to private companies.
Not three months after taking office, President Harding signed an executive order transferring custody of federal oil reserves from Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby to the secretary of the interior. Three sites—the naval reserves at Elk Hills, California; Buena Vista, California; and Teapot Dome, Wyoming—were being held out as an insurance policy in case there was a shortage of oil.
On April 3, 1922, in secret and without competitive bidding, Albert Fall, the secretary of the interior, leased the Teapot Dome reserve to Harry Sinclair’s Mammoth Oil Company. On December 11, 1922, he leased the Elk Hills reserve to Edward Doheny’s Pan American Petroleum Company.
Later it was discovered that Fall had received $260,000 from Sinclair, and that Doheny had “lent” him $100,000.
The scandal was publicized in 1924, a year after Harding died of a heart attack and was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge. Secretary of the Interior Fall was convicted of conspiracy and bribery and became the first member of a president’s administration to go to prison while in office. After the public outcry, Secretary of the Navy Denby resigned. Harry Sinclair was also jailed for contempt of court and attempting to bribe jurors.
Charles Forbes, head of the Veterans’ Bureau, was another member of Harding’s Ohio Gang. Forbes sold government property for less than it was worth in exchange for large payments. He resigned and fled to Europe after he was caught. In 1924, a Senate investigation found that Forbes had taken in more than $200 million. He was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the United States by rigging federal contracts and served two years in Leavenworth federal penitentiary.
Yet another Harding administration scandal arose in the Justice Department. Attorney General Harry Daugherty was suspected of profiting from the sale of government supplies of alcohol. He was also charged with selling pardons and failing to enforce prohibition laws. He was never convicted.
Some historians have sought to redeem the reputation of President Harding. He was unfaithful in marriage, but the corruption he tolerated was probably no worse than what was encouraged later under Richard Nixon and certainly less than Donald Trump’s corruption.
The most recent sympathetic biography of Harding is from John Dean, a famous former lawyer who grew up in Marion, Ohio, where Harding lived. Dean, the White House counsel for President Nixon, testified against Nixon and others in the Watergate scandal. Dean was convicted of obstructing justice and lost his law license, but his frequent television commentary against the Trump administration reminds us that corruption in politics has gotten worse. The trajectory from Teddy Roosevelt to Taft to Harding to Nixon to Trump has not moved in the right direction.