Moving into the latter decade of the nineteenth century, American social and economic life was undergoing dramatic change. The Industrial Revolution, which had been under way for some time in North America, was now accelerating toward a high pitch. The United States was now a leading economic power, its industrial capacity surpassing even the Great Powers of Europe. As such, a massive restructuring of the nation’s economy was under way, accompanied by any and all attendant changes within American society and culture. The United States was a prosperous and vibrant society like none before. These changes were also marked by the intense concentration of immense amounts of wealth and a reorganization of economic and political influence that to some observers gave far too much power to far too few people, and thus militated against the egalitarian principles upon which the republic was, at least in part, founded. This concentration of wealth led to corporate “combinations,” also known as monopolies, or, in the parlance of the time, trusts; and trusts were widely declaimed as corrosive to a free and fair society.
To address this problem, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, named after the former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Senator John Sherman of Ohio, and designed to limit monopolies and provide regulative and investigative authority to prevent their future formation. The law was enacted with President Harrison’s signature but scarcely enforced, much to the discontent of the American public. The two major parties were on record as supportive of the idea of busting trusts, but they were not always quick, at least initially, to execute those legal provisions that would actually allow government to solve the problem of monopolies. In other words, the law was in place, but a few years would still have to pass before the nation, under the leadership of a very different kind of president, would see it put into full and effective operation.
Equally important, neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party supported legislation to help improve the working conditions of millions of men, women, and children; or, if there was any sympathy, it was somewhat diluted by other interests, distractions, and allegiances. The reluctance of both parties to deal with these serious and fundamental issues opened the door for a third party that would challenge the status quo. It is true that American prosperity was moving off the charts, even when compared to the other affluent nations of the world; but it was equally true that a great many Americans were not able to enjoy the fruits of this wealth and, in many instances, suffered the dispiriting hardships of subsistence living. Finally, in addition to worry over combinations and trusts, the debate over monetary policy and the legitimate medium of currency, which can be traced to the early 1870s, began to intensify to the point of becoming the dominant issue in the campaigns of the 1890s.
President Harrison, who fought hard to win the election in 1888, soon discovered that being president was more onerous than he had anticipated. He regarded the White House as a confining fishbowl, exposing his family to constant scrutiny and restricting his own personal freedom. He would refer to it as “my jail,” and thus he seemed to his friends quite prepared to follow the example of President Rutherford B. Hayes and make his administration a one-term presidency. Additionally, his wife suffered poor health, which had been a distraction for the president and a justification for his stepping back into private life. Nonetheless, as a former general, he felt an obliging sense of duty to soldier forth as his party’s standard-bearer, personal feelings and needs notwithstanding, and that sense of duty checked his desires for retirement.
For the most part, the president had run an effective administration. He kept his campaign promise to impose, with the critical support of Congress, high tariffs (set under the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, which was made possible largely by the efforts and skills of Representative William McKinley of Ohio, one of the Republican Party’s more promising prospects), as well as signing into law the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He worked to expand foreign markets and cooperated with Congress to address inflation. For the most part, the Harrison administration was considered a success; but the president had his critics, many within his own party, and he did absolutely nothing to reach out to them. Harrison was viewed by many as dispassionate and aloof, even cold, an independent thinker unbound by party discipline, unconcerned by the need to compromise with the various factions, and his Calvinist piety at times alienated even his close supporters.
Furthermore, many within the party rank and file still felt a strong allegiance to James G. Blaine, the venerable Plumed Knight, who was at that time President Harrison’s secretary of state (and with whom Harrison had an amicable relationship). Blaine had again managed to slough off the old tarnish of corruption that had coated his political record since the mid-1870s and was still seen by many as the preferred candidate in the upcoming election. But Blaine suffered from ill health and depression, having recently lost two children within a time span of less than a month, and as a result of this heavy sadness was not in the proper state of mind to make another run at the White House. According to some accounts, while Blaine managed to keep up a cheerful appearance in public, once home and behind closed doors, he would collapse and take to his bed. Probably due to his ability to maintain an even keel in public, his followers worked hard prior to the convention to gather support for a Blaine candidacy that would displace the dispassionate President Harrison. Blaine was as popular as ever, and rumors of failed health and hardship could not dampen the spirits of his loyal diehards. The president, who had enjoyed a sound relationship with Blaine, now began to grow disenchanted with the Plumed Knight, and he worked to distance himself. Finally, Blaine issued a public statement clarifying his position: He would not be a candidate. Privately, Blaine remarked to a family member, “When the American people choose a President, they require him to remain awake four years. I have come to a time in my life [in] which I need my sleep.” Blaine’s more zealous supporters were nonetheless left with the impression that Blaine might still entertain the possibility of a draft, but the draft never happened.
By the time the convention opened in Minneapolis, Harrison was poised to lock up the nomination, which he managed to do on the first ballot in spite of the anti-Harrison/draft Blaine faction. The president gained 535 votes to Blaine’s unsolicited 182. Interestingly, William McKinley, now Mark Hanna’s favored protégé and who was currently serving as governor of Ohio after his successful tenure in Congress, matched Blaine to share second place, an important step toward future opportunities. Curiously, Robert Todd Lincoln, not a serious candidate and never expressing interest in the White House, still received one vote. Harrison thus reentered the campaign for the general election with solid Republican support, the party dissidents temporarily quieted. Whitelaw Reid of Ohio, Harrison’s ambassador to France, was unanimously nominated on one ballot to replace incumbent vice president Levi Morton, who had disappointed the president by his failure, as president of the Senate, to quash a Senate filibuster against the passage of legislation, supported by Harrison, enforcing the voting rights of African Americans. The Republican platform reaffirmed its support for high protective tariffs, and in an effort to attract Western voters, the platform supported bimetallism. The platform also included a plank reaffirming the promise to protect the voting rights of African Americans in southern states, calling again for the passage of new voting rights laws designed to protect the franchise for all citizens. In an effort to appeal to urban Northeastern voters, the platform expressed support for the independence of Ireland from Britain. Among other items, the platform also endorsed the construction of a canal in Nicaragua that would create a channel joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
At the Democratic convention held in Chicago, former president Grover Cleveland became the first of only two people to win three consecutive nominations from a major party for president of the United States; Franklin Roosevelt is the only other candidate to match, and eventually surpass, Cleveland’s political achievement (eventually winning four consecutive nominations in the 1930s and 1940s). William Jennings Bryan would earn three nominations as well, but only two consecutively. (It should also be noted that Eugene V. Debs would win five nominations as the candidate for the Socialist Party, which, while important, still remained a minor party.) Many in the party felt that Cleveland could regain the White House, for he did, after all, win the popular vote against Harrison in the previous election. Thus he came into the convention as the front-runner, but this time he faced opposition. Cleveland still had old enemies in Tammany Hall, which once again made him vulnerable in New York—the state that won him the presidency in 1884 and took it away in 1888. Furthermore, Cleveland’s reputation as a Bourbon Democrat and his Gold Bug attitudes on the issue of currency won him strong critics from within his own party. Thus, ten other candidates were in play, the biggest challenges made by David B. Hill, a fellow New Yorker and Tammany man, whom many believed could deliver New York to the Democrats; and Horace Boies of Iowa, a bimetallist who might run strong in the West and the Midwest. Among the eight remaining candidates, none of whom became serious contenders, was Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, the grandfather of his famous namesake who would twice become the Democratic candidate in the 1950s. Stevenson was selected by the convention to run for the vice presidency, even though Cleveland initially favored Isaac Gray of Indiana. Stevenson, who supported Free Silver and greenbacks, was viewed as a counterweight to Cleveland’s hard-currency, gold-standard principles and thus a concession to those elements at the convention who held reservations regarding Cleveland’s return to the White House.
Cleveland’s political triumph at gaining a third consecutive party nomination concealed the reality that he was not enthusiastically embraced, at least not this time around. His popularity was by default; the Democratic Party simply had not as yet produced a figure that could match his stature. As president, he was neither dynamic enough to capture the public imagination nor cunning enough to undercut his rivals, both good qualities stemming from his personal integrity but, unfortunately, not always the kind of qualities needed for the ego-driven world of high-powered politics. Hence, even though he was the obvious best choice available based upon his personal virtues and experience, he seemed vulnerable, and he might have been blocked had the rest of the field not been so disunited. But he managed a first-ballot win, not as convincing as Harrison’s, as he earned just ten votes above the requirement, but convincing enough to rebuff the challenge from Tammany and the Silverites. Thus the former president was poised to challenge the incumbent president, the man who unseated him four years earlier.
In many ways, Cleveland resembled his once and present rival. Like Harrison, he had earned a reputation for obstinacy; he was an independent agent not willing to curry the favor of either the party elites or the general voters. Henry Adams, scholar, erudite social critic, and scion of the legendary Adams family, wrote, “The two candidates were singular persons of whom it was the common saying that one of them had no friends; the other only enemies.” With the exception of the ever-important tariff issue that had defined the previous contest, his views on policy were not that different from Harrison’s. Neither candidate was actively engaged in the campaign. Because of the ill health of the president’s wife and his low spirits, the front-porch campaign tactics that he had used to great effect in 1888 were abandoned. He was virtually absent from the public arena during the campaign. Cleveland followed Harrison’s example, thoughtfully forbearing from active campaigning out of respect for the First Lady.
Harrison and Cleveland were not the only notable candidates in 1892. In July, the People’s Party, more commonly known as the Populist Party, held its first national nominating convention in Omaha, Nebraska. In the midterm elections of 1890, the emerging Populist Party had surprisingly won nine congressional seats. The Populists appealed to farmers, miners, ranchers, and rural Americans who blamed their economic problems on Eastern industrialists, bankers, financiers, speculators, and railroad magnates. Appealing to the “common man,” Populists advocated extensive government action to more fully control the power of corporate trusts and monopolies. Bolstered by its midterm election victories, the Populist Party nominated former Greenback candidate James Weaver of Ohio for president and James Field of Virginia for vice president. Among other proposals, the Populist platform supported Free Silver and greenbacks, labor reform limiting the working day and providing protection against child-labor abuses, universal adult suffrage for both men and women, government control of the railroads, the use of the democratic procedures of the initiative and referendum, a graduated federal income tax, and amending the Constitution to provide for the popular election of senators as well as limiting presidential administrations to just one term. Interestingly, the Populist platform also included a plank calling for new laws prohibiting the importation of contract labor. In the preamble to their party platform, the Populists affirmed the following:
We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver and the oppressions of the usurers may all be lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude to secure corruption funds from the millionaires. (American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara)
Effectively stirring recruits to the people’s cause, Mary Lease of Kansas, a prominent suffragette, stumped with Weaver throughout the West and the South. Exhorting her audience to “raise less corn and more hell,” Lease quickly became a leading figure in the campaign. Her attacks against the empires of finance epitomized the Populist attitude. “Wall Street owns the country,” she declared, and, through parody of a mythic sentiment, she declaimed the American state as a “government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” Because both major parties found themselves vulnerable to charges of plutocracy and elitism, the Populists were able to attract their more disaffected elements.
While the People’s (or Populist) Party attempted to build interest in its radical reform agenda, the Democratic and Republican parties focused on their traditional positions regarding tariffs and one’s loyalty to the Union. Cleveland refused to compromise his steadfast low-tariff principles or to embrace the bimetallism supported by the Democratic Party’s own populist wing. Labor unrest and Harrison’s support for high tariffs created more serious problems for the Republicans than for the Democrats. Republican arguments holding that high tariffs strengthened American industry and produced jobs fell on deaf ears within labor. To many industrial workers, tariffs appeared to have the opposite impact. When leading industrialist Andrew Carnegie ordered a significant reduction in the wages of Pennsylvania steelworkers, the workers organized and went out on strike. The 1892 Homestead Strike led to intense violence between the strikers and Carnegie’s private, armed Pinkerton security agents. Largely because of the growing alliance between the Republican Party, especially its conservative Old Guard, and powerful industrialists, many industrial workers blamed the Republicans for the anti-union tactics of Carnegie and other industrialists. Although the Democratic Party had its pro-business Bourbon wing, with which Cleveland was affiliated, the more populist, pro-labor elements in the party attracted labor votes, an advantage that would prove valuable in the upcoming election.
Some within the Republican Party again attempted to wave the “bloody shirt” by raising questions about the loyalty of Cleveland to the Union. Throughout the campaign, Judge, a popular illustrated newspaper, published cartoons reminding readers of the Democratic Party’s historic association with the Confederacy. Judge and other Republican-leaning publications pointed out the fact that both Grover Cleveland and Adlai Stevenson had hired substitutes to fight for them after being drafted into the Union army. Comparisons were drawn to President Harrison and Reid, who had both served with distinction, Harrison achieving the rank of brigadier general and playing a crucial role under General Sherman, and Reid earning praise as a war correspondent who earned the military rank of captain. During the war, Cleveland was a War Democrat, and Stevenson, while remaining a civilian, helped to organize troops for the state of Illinois. But Stevenson had also been unfairly accused of being a Copperhead, and while the accusation was false, the stigma followed him throughout his political career.
In the final analysis, President Harrison’s lifeless campaign and Cleveland’s ability to attract the support of angry industrial workers in midwestern and northeastern states cost Harrison a second term. Cleveland received 46.1 percent of the popular vote against the 43 percent of the popular vote received by Harrison. In all three presidential elections in which he was involved, Cleveland won the popular vote but in each case fell short of an actual majority. In fact, he won a lower share of the popular vote in his successful 1892 bid than he had in either his winning 1884 campaign or his losing 1888 campaign. He was the first president twice elected without a popular majority, and one of only two, the other being President Bill Clinton a century later. More important, Cleveland received 277 electoral votes against the 145 electoral votes tallied for Harrison. To the dismay of the Republican Party leadership, Harrison failed to carry the Republican strongholds of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and the critical state of New York, a total loss of 87 electoral votes. Cleveland predictably swept the South, and he took California in the West, the first time since 1880 (when the state was won by Winfield Scott Hancock by a margin of less than 200 votes) that the Golden State went to the Democrats. The Populist Party won over a million votes, or 8.5 percent of the popular vote, the best showing of a third party since Millard Fillmore’s Know-Nothings won 21 percent in 1856. However, the Know-Nothings won just one state in the Electoral College, while the Populists behind Weaver impressively won five states in 1892, all in the West—Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, and North Dakota—for a total of 22 electoral votes, 5 percent of the total electoral count. While these states did not carry the electoral clout found in the East and the Midwest, they signaled a growing impatience with the established parties among a noticeable segment of the electorate, prompting sympathetic factions in both of the major parties to double their efforts. The effects of the populist influence were first felt in the Democratic Party as early as the next election, in the first campaign of Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan, and later in the Republican Party with the ascent of progressive figures such as Theodore Roosevelt. But for the moment, Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland was returned to the White House as the twenty-fourth president, to this day the only president in American history to serve two nonconsecutive terms. He would be the last Democratic president until the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson twenty years later.
The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
Boller, Paul F., Jr. Presidential Campaigns. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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Knoles, George Harmon. The Presidential Campaign and Elections of 1892. New York: AMS Press, 1971.
Morgan, H. Wayne. “Election of 1892.” 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.