The Republican and Democratic parties entered the 1884 presidential campaign with the electorate now almost evenly split between them. With the end of Reconstruction, the Democratic Party had regained thorough dominance of the South; in effect, the southern bloc composed of the former Confederacy and border states was a one-party region, with only a small number of Southerners identifying with the Republican Party, many of those African Americans who still managed to remain politically active despite the efforts of southern states to disenfranchise them. On the other hand, the Republican Party had emerged as the party of free enterprise and industrialization; but within its ranks, a progressive, reformist faction was gaining in influence.
Given that the Republican Party was anathema throughout the South, it was clearly evident that in order to sustain its post-Civil War lock on the White House, the Grand Old Party needed an effective counterbalance, and it sought one by fortifying its base in the North and the Midwest. To finally retake the White House, the Democratic Party understood that it needed to pick off at least one populous northern state while holding its southern base. This was not out of the question, as both New York and New Jersey went with the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, in 1876. The West was a slightly different story. In 1880, Colorado, Oregon, Kansas, and Nebraska went for James A. Garfield, the Republican candidate and eventual winner. Nevada and California supported Winfield Scott Hancock, the Democrat. California was particularly divided, as Hancock won by only a slender 144 popular votes in the Golden State. This was a new development, for in the previous elections involving states west of the Mississippi (with the exception of Texas, which in electoral politics is usually considered part of the southern bloc, or at least through the 1980s, depending upon one’s perspective), Republicans dominated, losing only California to James Buchanan in 1856 and Oregon to Horace Seymour in 1868. Hence with the results of 1880, the western states now seemed to be in play, but their clout in the Electoral College at that time was not strong, California at that time was sparsely populated and thus in reality a “small” state in the Electoral College, far from the electoral colossus that it is today. Still, since the last two elections had been so close, the balance could be tipped anywhere.
The best chance for the Democrats outside the South was in the Northeast, and especially New York, where a tradition of Democratic strength had been established since the days of Martin Van Buren and the Albany Regency. New immigrants coming to New York and New England, as well as parts of the Midwest such as Chicago, also provided an opportunity for the Democrats to foster fresh loyalties unprejudiced by the ill feelings left by the Civil War and the stigma of the “bloody shirt.” This actually gave the Democrats an advantage that the Republicans could not match in the South. But even though New York held out promise for the Democrats, they still needed to overcome the potent forces that could be mustered by Roscoe Conkling and Thomas C. Platt, two of New York’s more powerful machine bosses. One thing was clear: Even though the Democrats had not sent a member of their party to the White House since 1856 (James Buchanan), the close (and for some, stolen) election of 1876 (it is to be remembered that the Democrats, with Tilden, actually won the popular vote in that election, and by no small margin) and the extremely close popular vote in 1880 proved that they were no longer simply a minority party in opposition to the more powerful GOP. The Republicans were still strong, but they were no longer invulnerable. The Democratic Party, with one or two lucky breaks, was on the verge of once again achieving the presidency.
The Republican National Convention met in Chicago, Illinois, on June 3–6. Even though incumbent president Chester A. Arthur, who had sadly assumed the presidency three years earlier after the assassination of President James A. Garfield, sought the nomination, he faced considerable opposition from within his own party. Arthur was a Stalwart (that faction of the party connected to the old machine system), but as president, he could not smooth over the discontent stewing within his own faction. He certainly was not the man for the Half Breeds (political moderates who opposed the machine patronage system and pushed for civil service reform); their man, Garfield, had been gunned down and replaced by a vice president that, fairly or unfairly, they could not bring themselves to trust. Even though Arthur had personally profited from his patronage position as collector of the Port of New York in the 1870s, he did possess a strong personal streak of honesty; but as a committed protégé of Roscoe Conkling, he was well accustomed to the spoils system, an attitude that had set him against President Garfield, who was committed to civil service reform. In short, Arthur perceived patronage to be more efficient and practical than the merit-based civil service system promoted by President Garfield and the Half Breeds. Nonetheless, once Arthur became president in the wake of Garfield’s murder, he rose to the occasion, setting aside his Stalwart preconceptions and practices and thereby making a genuine effort to support civil service reform—a cause that had been given irresistible momentum in the wake of the assassination committed by a crazed and confessed Stalwart and murderous adherent to the spoils system. Arthur’s surprising overnight transformation into a civil service reformer lost him a good deal of support among his old Stalwart associates. All this notwithstanding, Arthur soldiered on in spite of losing his friends among the Stalwarts and without having won over the Half Breeds. A further complication remained unknown to the party at the time: Arthur was terminally ill, suffering from a fatal kidney condition. Looking back, his quest for the nomination was likely less about any hopes over his political chances than about preserving his dignity and the legacy of his administration.
As expected, Republican Half Breeds threw their support behind their leader, former Speaker of the House and senator James G. Blaine of Maine. Eight years earlier, during the Campaign of 1876, Blaine lost the Republican nomination largely as the result of the Crédit Mobilier/Mulligan Letters scandal that had implicated Blaine in bribery, railroad influence peddling, and graft. He had also been a candidate for nomination in 1880, but he was overshadowed initially by former president Grant’s bid for a third term and then by Garfield’s spectacular rise to prominence. The Mulligan Letters scandal dogged him, but the “Plumed Knight” maintained his dignity and continued to exude a striking charisma; and by 1884, with the aid of a strong and numerous following, he was able to regain his reputation and was once again the front-runner at the opening of the convention. Senator Blaine cut the most impressive persona of any Republican since President Lincoln, and if he could shake off the scandals of the past and tap into his personal magnetism and many loyalties, he would indeed seem the inevitable choice for the White House.
President Arthur and Vermont senator George F. Edmunds were Blaine’s main challengers. Interestingly, Edmunds, a reform candidate, enjoyed the ardent support of two of the Republican Party’s more promising young activists: Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and his close friend, New York’s Theodore Roosevelt, who even then, at the age of twenty-five, stormed the political stage as a highly charged, dominating force. While still lacking the sober judgment that comes from years of experience in the public arena, Roosevelt’s intellect, dynamic personality, and sheer force of will made him an irresistible figure, one that, it was clear to those who made his acquaintance, might soon challenge the charisma of Blaine. General William Tecumseh Sherman was also a prospective candidate, leading Sherman, who genuinely held no interest in politics, to laconically spurn such advances with his famous quip, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” Other candidates in the field were Sherman’s younger brother, Senator John Sherman, a reformer who had been a candidate in play in the previous convention; John A. “Black Eagle” Logan of Illinois (sometimes referred to as “Black Jack” Logan); Senator Joseph R. Hawley of Connecticut; and Robert Todd Lincoln, President Lincoln’s son, who had also made a name for himself in recent years as a political reformer.
As the Republican conventioneers gathered in Chicago, an interesting contest over who would serve as the convention chairman opened the proceedings. Blaine’s supporters desired Powell Clayton as chair. Clayton, a former general and Reconstruction governor of Arkansas, was widely admired within the party; but a vocal faction, led by the youthful tandem of Lodge and Roosevelt, opposed Blaine’s choice and sought to install John R. Lynch, an African American delegate and former congressman from Mississippi, as the convention chairman. Lobbying hard with Lodge, Roosevelt delivered an eloquent speech on Lynch’s behalf, reflecting that it had now been “less than a quarter of a century since, in this city, the great Republican Party organized for victory and nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who broke the fetters of the slaves and rent them asunder forever. It is a fitting thing for us to choose to preside over this convention one of that race whose right to sit within these walls is due to the blood and treasure so lavishly spent by the founders of the Republican Party” (Morgan, p. 50).
This, Roosevelt’s debut on the national political stage after already having gained prominence in New York politics, was a stunning success. Against the resistance of the party’s Old Guard, Lynch was elected by a vote of 424 to 384, the first African American to serve as the chairman of a national nominating committee, a feat done in 1884 during a period of particular strife for African American citizens. From this point and throughout the convention, Roosevelt, along with Lodge, would lead a faction of independents against both the Stalwart President Arthur and the Half Breed Blaine (owing to his connection to Conkling, who had deliberately thwarted the political career of his father, Theodore Sr., the younger Roosevelt was deeply opposed to Arthur, and he was also openly disdainful of Blaine); and for a time the Roosevelt-Lodge duo would impose their will on the convention. Eventually, they were overtaken by the party establishment, but not without first having memorably made a name for themselves, foreshadowing for both men still greater things to come.
On the eve of the convention, President Arthur and Senator Blaine had been evenly matched in terms of delegates, each relying on about 300 firm supporters. Vermont’s Edmunds ran a distant third but, owing to the pre-convention efforts of Lodge and Roosevelt, held enough delegates to swing the balance of power. When the balloting finally began, Blaine opened with a lead of 334 to President Arthur’s 278, the Edmunds faction led by Roosevelt and Lodge holding the pivotal 93 delegates, with the remainder of the candidates far behind (Logan led the also-rans with 63). Arthur’s supporters began to angle for a coalition with the Edmunds faction, but Roosevelt and Lodge remained firm in their resistance; they sincerely meant to find a way for Edmunds to win, not simply to throw in with one of the front-runners when tactical considerations called for it. The second ballot did little to change the situation: Blaine’s position improved slightly, with Arthur holding on to second, losing just two votes while the rest of the field faded slightly. President Arthur lost only two more votes on the next ballot, but Blaine’s lead swelled to 375, only 36 shy of the nomination that had eluded him in 1876 and 1880. On the fourth ballot, Blaine’s supporters, buoyed by the momentum, managed to convince large numbers of delegates to swing their way, in spite of the tireless efforts of Roosevelt and Lodge, thus managing to avoid another protracted deadlock. Blaine won with 541 votes. Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of President Abraham Lincoln who had served as secretary of war under presidents Garfield and Arthur, who never managed more than just a handful of votes, was considered by some as an appealing running mate for Blaine, but he refused to allow his name to be nominated for vice president. The delegates then turned to Black Jack Logan, nominating him with near unanimity on the first ballot. One of the heroes at the convention was a young William McKinley from the Ohio delegation, who, in the latter days of the convention, worked earnestly (and in the end, successfully) to counter Roosevelt’s influence and help break the deadlock, ensuring Blaine’s nomination.
The Democrats met in Chicago as well, with four candidates who had all been considered at some point in previous conventions—Samuel J. Randall of Pennsylvania, Allen G. Thurman of Ohio, Delaware’s Thomas F. Bayard, and Thomas A. Hendricks, who ran for the vice presidency on the party’s ticket with Samuel Tilden in 1876. A fifth candidate, Indiana’s Joseph McDonald, enjoyed limited support as a favorite son. Even though there were four veterans of previous convention battles, including one who was nearly elected vice president eight years earlier, from the beginning the true front-runner was New York’s Grover Cleveland (born Stephen Grover Cleveland), who emerged from near obscurity in just a few short years to rapidly become New York’s leading statesman in spite of his open opposition to the powerful political machine of Tammany Hall. (In Albany, Governor Cleveland had formed a bipartisan reformist alliance with Roosevelt, who had, even at his young age, become one of the state assembly’s most important leaders during his brief but productive tenure there.)
An imposing figure who in at least one instance had faced down the juggernaut Roosevelt, Cleveland was the leader of the Bourbon Democrats, a more conservative faction within the Democratic Party that supported unfettered business development and opposed high protective tariffs, fought against the old machine politics common in the nineteenth century and were thus committed to civil service reform, were wary of the growing sentiment for continued American expansionism (a political ambition that was now being referred to by some as “imperialism”), and opposed the free coinage of silver. The latter policy, commonly called “Free Silver” or “bimetallism” (the supporters of which were often referred to as “Silverites,” and later “Silver Bugs,” in contrast to the monometallist “Gold Bugs”), had its roots in the 1870s and was with each election becoming an increasingly divisive issue, to some as important or even more important than the old debate over tariffs. During Reconstruction in the United States, after a period of time during which the government relied on paper currency (or “greenbacks”) to help defray Civil War debt, there arose a strong movement to establish gold alone as the official currency, thereby imposing a “monometal” policy that excluded the coinage of silver, which had previously been an option given the country’s bimetal policies, but one that for the most part was decidedly less common than the more favored gold coinage. In 1873, under the Grant administration, Congress passed the U.S. Coinage Act, which effectively eliminated the silver dollar as a measure of value and thereby ensured the dominance of gold. The bimetallists referred to this act as the “Crime of ’73” and argued that both gold and silver could be coined for circulation, whereas their opponents favored continuing with the monometal policy fixed on gold. During his tenure, President Hayes worked to continue the gold standard policy, thus further alarming the Silverites. This disagreement was not yet the key policy issue debated by politicians, but it would gain importance with each election, and it would develop into an issue that would cross party lines.
In many ways, Cleveland and the “Gold Bug” Bourbon Democrats resembled their more conservative counterparts in the Republican Party, which was mostly in favor of using gold as the standard currency (although the Republican Party would contain an activist Western faction known as the “Silver Republicans”), a fact that no doubt strengthened Cleveland’s appeal in the North, especially among banking and financial interests. Cleveland had gained a reputation as a brave, disciplined, competent, and scrupulous public servant, and his ability to deflect the influence of Tammany proved to work to his advantage. As the convention opened, Cleveland took a commanding lead on the first ballot, winning 392 votes, with Bayard placing second at 170. Given Cleveland’s strong early showing and the lack of real energy behind the other candidates, delegates quickly switched to Cleveland’s cause. He won 683 votes on the next ballot, enough to deliver the nomination. Hendricks was then nominated, as he had been in 1876, for vice president on the first ballot, receiving all but four abstaining votes. Hendricks would become the first of three candidates to be nominated for vice president by a major party in two nonconsecutive years (the other two would be Adlai Stevenson and Charles Fairbanks).
Minor parties multiplied. Four in particular are worth mentioning: the Greenback Party and the Anti-Monopoly Party, which both nominated Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts and his running mate, Mississippi’s A. M. West; the Prohibition (or Prohibition Reform) Party, which nominated John P. St. John of Kentucky; and the Equal Women’s Rights Party, which nominated Belva C. Lockwood of the District of Columbia. These parties sprouted as part of a growing populist mood throughout the country, a mood that was particularly strong in the West and parts of the South. Both major parties responded by adopting some reform planks in their own platforms, such as regulation of the working day and the railroads. Both parties also contained factions that were divided over the more populist measures. This was particularly influential with regard to Republican unity, as elements within the party were not as keenly fixated on the pro-business, pro-industry attitudes of the party leadership. Among these elements in the party, a number of delegates were ripe for defection, particularly given their distaste for Blaine, Thomas Nast’s “Tattooed Man” of the Mulligan Letters scandal. Those letters reappeared for a brief time to haunt Blaine, as they were actually published for public consumption in a number of major newspapers. One letter contained a postscript enjoining its recipient to “Burn this Letter,” and as a result the phrase “Burn this Letter” became a wry campaign slogan for the Democratic cause.
This reformist and anti-Blaine element now gaining strength in the Republican Party was soon referred to, at first pejoratively, as the “Mugwumps.” (“Mugwump” is a word that comes from the Native American Algonquin language, meaning “war leader” or “very important person,” and initially it was used by the Republican Old Guard, or the party conservatives, to describe what they perceived to be the sanctimonious and presumptuous attitudes of the Republican reformists.) While they were a minority within the party, their influence would reach into the general election, as a number of Mugwumps would switch allegiance and support Cleveland—they admired Cleveland’s defiance of Tammany Hall—rather than swallow their pride (and for some, deny their principles) and vote for Blaine. (Roosevelt and Lodge, in spite of their dislike of Blaine and intense opposition to him at the convention, refused to follow bolting Mugwumps to the other side, an act that, for a short time at least, cost them politically.) As before in the Campaign of 1880, the major candidates were not that distant on the issues, hence in switching to Cleveland rather than remaining loyal to their own party, the Mugwumps were indeed making a primarily (but not wholly) personal rejection of Blaine.
With partisan allegiance now evenly split within the electorate and the similarity of the two main parties on the major issues quite evident, the campaigns yet again resorted to the obligatory tactics of character assassination. Cleveland’s personal character and public integrity while serving the state of New York had rightly earned him the nickname “Grover the Good,” but Republican operatives working in support of Blaine went after his reputation nonetheless, and after enough digging, they uncovered an allegation that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock. To the surprise of many observers, Cleveland willingly admitted paternity (even though it could not be proven) and hid nothing of his relationship with the mother and child, which included generously providing financial support and the placement of the child in a respectable home upon the collapse of the mother’s health. Nonetheless, Blaine’s supporters vilified Cleveland as a debauched libertine, cad, “gross and licentious man,” and “moral leper,” pounding Cleveland with the chant “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” Cleveland’s supporters retaliated, and given Blaine’s own checkered past, it was not too difficult. Chanting, “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the Continental Liar from the State of Maine,” and referring to him as “Old Mulligan Letters,” the “Tattooed Man,” and “Slippery Jim,” the Democrats delighted in dredging up Blaine’s “mottled” record. As in 1876, Blaine continued to deny any wrongdoing in the railroad scandal, even despite the fact that newly found evidence raised yet again serious, unanswered questions about the veracity of Blaine’s denials. The published “Burn this Letter” postscript no doubt worked effectively against him. Typically, all the personal attacks made against Blaine and Cleveland did little to shake their expected partisan allegiance, but it did fortify the Republican Mugwumps in their support of the Democrat Cleveland.
Following previous presidential campaigns, both major parties relied upon songbooks to boost their image and message. The Blaine and Logan Song Book contained numerous songs directed at reminding voters of the role of the Republican Party in defeating the rebellion, another installment in the “bloody shirt” strategy. In response, one of Cleveland’s most effective campaign songs contained the lyric, “Eight years ago we won the prize, but then were robbed by tricks and lies, of freedom’s foes in friends’ disguise, Democrats, good Democrats!”
Both parties realized that the electoral votes of New York, Cleveland’s home state—and a state that Garfield and the Republicans had most recently carried in 1880 but that had been won by Democrats Tilden in 1876 and Horatio Seymour in 1868—could be the major factor in determining the outcome of the general election. Given recent developments, it was definitely a state in play and was thus a vital battleground. Pursuing New York votes nigh to the election, Blaine intensified his efforts in the Empire State, an effort that proved fateful owing to one peculiar incident. Attending a campaign event for pro-Republican Protestant ministers in New York City, Blaine made a mistake that could very well have cost him the presidency. During his introduction of the candidate Blaine, Reverend Samuel D. Burchard launched a stinging indictment of the Democratic Party and Grover Cleveland. Using an impolitic (and bigoted) phrase that was actually introduced eight years earlier, Burchard referred to the Democratic Party as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” It is unlikely that Blaine himself supported such views, as his own mother was Roman Catholic and one of his sisters was a nun (Blaine was himself a Congregationalist). But Blaine did nothing to publicly repudiate Burchard’s remark. At one point he claimed to have heard Burchard say “Rum, Mormonism, and Rebellion” (an excuse that no doubt put him in swell with the Latter-day Saints, who also knew how to vote); other times he seemed to claim that he had not heard anything at all. But regardless of the status of Blaine’s hearing, the comment was in fact made in his presence as he sat only a few feet away, and news of Burchard’s gaffe and Blaine’s lack of response to it spread rapidly. By the following day, a few anti-Catholic Republicans embraced the slogan, catching Blaine off guard when he saw the “three R’s” prominently displayed in a Republican handbill endorsing the Blaine-Logan ticket. On November 1, with the election imminent, Blaine finally issued a weak and convoluted rejection of the “Romanism” sentiment. His apology, however, came too late; the damage was already done, as New York’s Irish Catholic vote was now amassed against the Republicans. This, along with the Mugwump Republicans, wrecked Blaine in New York, a state that Cleveland barely carried by a margin of just over 1,100 votes.
New York was still the biggest electoral prize, and it proved to be the state the Democrats needed in order to crack the Republican stronghold and carry Cleveland into the White House, the first Democrat since James Buchanan to ascend to the presidency. But it is important to remember that he was the second Democratic candidate in that same period of time to win the popular vote in the general election, as Samuel Tilden had actually won a popular majority in 1876 but failed to carry the necessary majority in the Electoral College. Cleveland, with just over 4,914,000 votes, won election with a plurality of 48.5 percent of the popular vote, less than the clear majority won by Tilden in 1876. Blaine carried 48.3 percent (around 4,857,000), the Prohibition and Greenback parties taking approximately 151,000 and 134,000 votes, respectively. Cleveland won by just over 57,500 votes nationwide. The rum-and-Romanism crack no doubt damaged Blaine in New York, and given the narrow margin of the outcome there, it likely made the difference between victory and defeat. Cleveland finished with a narrow 1,100-vote lead in New York, but according to statistician Mike Sheppard’s MIT Web site, the margin was smaller still, at 575. If the latter is correct, had Blaine won just 575 more votes in New York, he would have then taken the Empire State’s 36 electors, which would have been enough to give him an Electoral College victory and the presidency, even though Cleveland would have still won the most popular votes nationwide (which would have made this election a repeat of 1876). By this measure, the election of 1884, in terms of the popular vote, is the third closest in American history. But those 1,100 votes (or 575, depending on the angle from which you look) in New York amounted to the slim difference that gave Cleveland, not Blaine, the victory there and thus the White House, and it is hard to imagine that victory without an incensed and unified Irish Catholic population falling in behind Cleveland, their former governor. Thus James Blaine, the most influential Republican since the loss of President Lincoln with the exception of President Grant, became, as the result of one of the closest elections in history, only the second Republican to lose a presidential election, and the first since John C. Fremont in 1856.
Because Cleveland did manage to take New York with its 36 electors, his margin of victory in the Electoral College was not nearly so slight. The final count showed Cleveland winning 219 electoral votes (55%) to Blaine’s 182 (45%). Blaine swept the six western states (not counting Texas, which Cleveland won, as it has historically been a part of the southern bloc), but there were not enough votes there to compensate for the inroads that the Democrats made in the North (Connecticut and New Jersey joining New York in going for Cleveland) as well as in the Midwest (Indiana going for the Democrats for the second time in twelve years). By carving these inroads and holding every southern and border state, Grover Cleveland became the twenty-second president of the United States, and he would also, as fate would have it, become the only Democrat to win the White House between Buchanan (1856) and Woodrow Wilson (1912). In the meantime, Democrats celebrated. With “Grover the Good” as the nation’s new president, the Republican chant of “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” could now be well answered by enthusiastic Democrats responding, “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!” On a more sober note, Cleveland’s vice president, Hendricks, whose health had been compromised by a stroke five years earlier, died suddenly eight months into the new administration. The office would remain empty throughout the remainder of President Cleveland’s first term.
President Chester A. Arthur, known to some by the nickname “the Gentleman Boss,” with his health failing, retired into private life, and he quietly passed away in November 1886. While Arthur had made enemies during his administration, enough to block his nomination in 1884, he came to be held in high esteem once out of office. Author, editor, and historian Alexander K. McClure wrote of Arthur, “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted, and no one ever retired . . . more generally respected,” a sentiment shared by the incomparable Mark Twain, who had once peevishly referred to Arthur as a “flathead,” but who is reported by journalist Melville Stone to have later more thoughtfully remarked, “I am but one in 55,000,000; still, in the opinion of this one-fifty-five millionth of the country’s population, it would be hard to better President Arthur’s Administration. But don’t decide until you hear from the rest.”
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Hirsch, Mark D. “Election of 1884.” In Arthur M. Schlesinger, Fred Israel, and William P. Hansen, eds. History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968. Vol. 2. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.
Morgan, James. Theodore Roosevelt: The Boy and the Man. New York: Kessinger Publishing, 1907.
Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Random House, 1979.
Sheppard, Mike. “How Close Were U.S. Presidential Elections?” http://www.mit.edu/~mi22295/elections.html.
Summers, Mark Wahlgren. Rum, Romanism and Rebellion: The Making of a President, 1884. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
The White House. http://www.whitehouse.gov.