Chapter 13

Prelude to the Progressive Presidency

In This Chapter

◆ The “stolen election” of 1876

◆ The fight for civil service reform

◆ Cleveland introduces the “centrist” presidency

◆ McKinley establishes the American president as a world leader

The Grant left the presidency at a low point of prestige and power. The only Americans pleased by this state of affairs were senators, who felt that, in cowing President Grant, they had permanently asserted the primacy of the Senate over the chief executive. What they had not counted on was the eagerness of Grant’s successor, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, to rehabilitate the damaged office.

“His Fraudulency”

Under the best of circumstances, the new president’s ambition would have been difficult to fulfill, and Hayes’s entrance into the White House was hardly under the best of circumstances. On the contrary, it was the product of a backroom political deal so brazen that President Hayes was mockingly referred to as “His Fraudulency.”

The Loser and Next President …

Although Grant had been elected to two terms, his eight years in office had left such a bitter taste that it was universally assumed that the American electorate would not install another Republican. The Democratic candidate was a strong one, New York governor Samuel J. Tilden, who had earned national fame as a fighter of corruption for his successful efforts to purge graft from the administration of the state’s canal system.

Tally

Democrat Samuel J. Tilden polled 4,284,757 votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’s 4,033,950, a margin of 51 versus 48 percent. The election was disputed by the Republicans and was decided by a congressional commission, which awarded Hayes 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184.

Although the popular returns on election night gave Tilden a quarter of a million vote lead over Hayes, Republican Party leaders determined that the fate of their candidate could be determined by contesting electoral votes in Oregon, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida—the three southern states were still under Reconstruction military rule, which in itself was sufficient to cast doubt on the results. If these disputed electoral votes could be delivered to Hayes, he would win, despite the popular vote.

 

The dispute that resulted raged wildly and with no end in sight before the looming March 4 inauguration date. With just two days left before the inauguration deadline, Congress authorized a bipartisan electoral commission while legislators hammered out a behind-the-scenes deal: the South would give the election to Hayes in return for his pledge to bring full home rule to the southern states and an immediate end to the military-enforced Reconstruction governments. The southern legislators agreed to a commission composed of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, who voted straight down party lines in favor of Hayes.

The Cost of the Bargain

The cost of the backroom bargain was the legitimacy of the election process, the perceived integrity of the presidency, and, worst of all, the rights of African Americans in the South. With the soldiers gone, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—the former guaranteeing civil rights to all citizens of whatever color, the latter affirming the right to vote, regardless of color—became little more than ink on paper.

 

Yet, at this exorbitant cost, a reform-minded Ohio governor was ushered into the White House, determined to bring about the federal civil service reform Grant had proposed and then given away to Congress, and to create a cabinet of the highest distinction.

What They Said

The great fraud of 1876-77, by which, upon a false count of the electoral votes of two States, the candidate defeated at the polls was declared to be President, and for the first time in American history, the will of the people was set aside under a threat of military violence, struck a deadly blow at our system of representative government. —from the Democratic Party platform of 1880

The Cabinet Reborn

The senatorial Republican Stalwarts—the champions of machine politics who had even tried to get Grant to run for a third term—planned to populate the Hayes cabinet with Republican Party faithful. The incoming president, however, delivered a shot across their bow by independently selecting his own cabinet officers, all distinguished by their integrity and competence. Most notable was Carl Schurz as Secretary of the Interior; a militant civil service reformer, Schurz was the sworn enemy of the spoils system (see Chapter 8).

 

Outraged Senate Stalwarts dragged their feet on confirmation of each and every cabinet appointment. The Senate’s intransigence backfired. The public demonstrated unprecedented support for the president against the Senate, deluging both the White House and the Congress with letters and telegrams expressing approval of Hayes’s cabinet choices. Faced with the prospect of alienating voters, the Senate ultimately approved everyone Hayes had chosen. It was the first victory of the executive over the legislature since the Lincoln administration.

def•i•ni•tion

The Stalwarts were the Republican Party faction, led by New York senator Roscoe Conkling, that supported machine politics fueled by political patronage (the spoils system) and opposed merit-based civil service reform.

“Now for Civil Service Reform”

Having restored at least some balance between the executive and the legislative branches, Hayes recorded in his dairy on April 22, 1877, “Now for Civil Service reform.”

The Custom House Fight

Hayes created a commission to investigate port-city custom houses, which had been staffed with patronage appointees. The commission made headway in most of the custom houses, except for the largest, at the port of New York. Hayes moved to replace top New York custom house management, which consisted of three Stalwarts, among them future vice president and president Chester A. Arthur. Senate Stalwarts hung up Hayes’s nominations, and Republican boss Roscoe Conkling brought to bear the infamous Tenure of Office Act. Although it had been amended after the failure of the Johnson impeachment, so that it no longer empowered the Senate to overturn a presidential nomination, it did stipulate that the official who was to be replaced would remain in office (he could be suspended, but not removed) until the Senate approved the new nominee. The Senate withheld consent.

Executive Event

Federal duties payable on goods imported into the United States were assessed and collected at custom houses maintained at all major American ports. In the days before income tax (introduced in 1913 by ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment), import duties represented the largest single source of all federal revenue.

But the fight wasn’t over. After the Senate adjourned in 1878, Hayes fired the three again, replacing them with recess appointments. When the Senate reconvened in December, the recess nominees had to step down, and the original three Stalwarts replaced them—ostensibly until the Senate voted on the president’s nominations. Conkling, however, overplayed his hand by making a speech in which he divulged passages from the private correspondence of cabinet members. Widely perceived as a grave breach of protocol, this gaffe prompted the Senate to approve the nominees in spite of Conkling early in 1879.

Victory’s Price

Hayes not only won another power struggle against the Senate and partisan self-interest, he also succeeded in reforming the New York custom house and, through this, provided the nation with proof that a merit-based civil service system was possible. The cost to Hayes was heavy, however. Locked in mortal combat with the Senate for a year and a half, the president was essentially powerless to suggest, let alone promote, any legislative agenda, and because he could not hope to receive the endorsement of his own party, he did not even offer himself as a candidate for reelection.

The Surprising Character of Chester A. Arthur

In 1880, the Republican Party nominated Ohio representative James A. Garfield, a candidate who aimed to please everyone in his party by offering something to the Stalwarts as well as to the moderates, who were known derisively as Half-Breeds.

The Battle Renewed

Once in office, Garfield found that conciliation and compromise would only go so far. New York’s Conkling renewed the Senate’s battle against the presidency by coercing the president into installing New York banker Levi P. Morton as secretary of the treasury, which prompted Garfield to retaliate by installing one of Conkling’s arch political enemies as collector of the port of New York. Working through Chester A. Arthur—Garfield’s Stalwart vice-president—Conkling pressured the president to withdraw the nomination. When this failed, he maneuvered the Senate to approve all of Garfield’s nominees except for the collector. The president responded by withdrawing every other nominee to federal posts in New York state. This forced the Senate to capitulate, and, in desperation, both Conkling and his fellow New York senator, Thomas Platt, resigned, confident that the New York legislature (popular election of senators would not become law until ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913) would reelect them, thereby forcing Senate Republicans to align behind them rather than the president. The ploy failed when state legislators sent two others to the Senate.

def•i•ni•tion

In the late nineteenth century, moderate Republicans, who favored civil service reform and opposed the party’s Stalwart faction, were dubbed Half-Breeds.

Tally

Republican James A. Garfield polled 4,454,416 popular votes in 1880, defeating Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock, who received 4,444,952 votes. The margin of victory was a razor-thin 48.3 percent to 48.2 percent.

Assassination

Garfield did not long savor his victory. On July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau, described in newspapers as a “disappointed office seeker,” shot the president in the back in a Washington railroad station. Although Guiteau was clearly psychotic, his declared motive was political. Arrested, he exclaimed, “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur is president!” The president lingered through the summer, his physicians unable to locate and remove the bullet lodged in his back. He succumbed to infection on September 19, the second American president to fall to an assassin.

… And Arthur Is President!

The Stalwarts had every reason to expect that Chester A. Arthur would undo the reforms Garfield had begun. But responding to a tidal wave of public opinion condemning the spoils system—many saw the slain president as literally a martyr to patronage—Arthur became at least a tentative advocate of civil service reform, supporting passage of the Pendleton Act, which introduced a form of the civil service examination system and barred political affiliation as a requisite for civil service appointment.

Grover Cleveland, the Bourbon Democrat

As the public went to the polls in 1884, their disgust with hardcore party politics was apparent. The Republicans accordingly nominated a Half-Breed, House speaker James G. Blaine, and the Democrats ran a member of their own moderate faction, New York governor Grover Cleveland, a Bourbon Democrat, so called because the sipping of Kentucky bourbon connoted old-fashioned conservatism, as did the Bourbon dynasty of France.

The Centrist Presidency

Cleveland’s was the first self-consciously “centrist” presidency, a political philosophy that tended toward the conservative end of the spectrum and upon which most Democrats and most Republicans found common ground. Like moderate Republicans, the Bourbon Democrats saw themselves less as representatives of the masses than of the establishment, siding with big business against the “radical” demands of immigrants, industrial workers, and small farmers. The Bourbon presidency deemed the best government to be the least government.

Centrism, the Presidency, Congress, and Reform

As a centrist, Cleveland not only attempted to cooperate with Congress, he held as an article of political faith the belief that the president had no legislative role to play other than to recommend measures from time to time. As for reform, he faithfully enforced the Pendleton Act, partly because he believed that civil service reform was a good idea and partly in the belief that the chief duty of the presidency was to faithfully execute the nation’s laws. Cleveland also carefully evaluated candidates for appointments not covered by civil service reform, but generally limited his choices to Democrats. The Republican-dominated Senate repeatedly invoked the modified Tenure of Office Act and often declined to approve his appointments.

 

The conflict came to a head over the removal of the Republican U.S. attorney for Alabama and his replacement by a Democrat. The Senate demanded to review all executive documents relating to the Democrat’s appointment and the Republican’s removal. Cleveland deemed it appropriate to furnish the documents relevant to the appointment because the Constitution specified the Senate’s responsibility to “advise and consent,” but he withheld the documents relating to the dismissal, because he did not believe the Constitution gave the Senate the power to approve removals from office.

 

The issue was rendered moot in the case in question by the expiration of the Republican’s term, but, later, Congress, in a bipartisan vote, repealed the Tenure of Office Act, an action Cleveland heartily approved.

Tally

In the election of 1884, Democrat Grover Cleveland polled 4,911,017 votes (49 percent) to Republican James G. Blaine’s 4,848,334 (48 percent). In 1888, Cleveland received 5,540,329 votes (49 percent) to Republican Benjamin Harrison’s 5,439,853 (48 percent), but earned fewer electoral votes—168 to Harrison’s 233—and therefore lost his reelection bid. Four years later, in 1892, Cleveland became the only U.S. president to win a nonconsecutive term, defeating Harrison 46 to 43 percent—Populist candidate James B. Weaver taking 9 percent of the vote. Cleveland polled 5,556,918 popular votes and 277 electoral votes; Harrison, 5,176,108 popular and 145 electoral; and Weaver, 1,041,028 popular and 22 electoral votes.

“The President Should ‘Touch Elbows with Congress’”

The election of 1888, like that of four years earlier, was nearly a dead heat. Cleveland outpolled his Republican opponent, Indiana senator Benjamin A. Harrison (grandson of short-lived President William Henry Harrison; see Chapter 9), 49 to 48 percent, but Harrison captured more northern states, along with their hefty complement of electoral votes, and won.

What They Said

The President should “touch elbows with Congress.” He should have no policy distinct from his party and this is better represented in Congress than in the Executive. —Sen. John Sherman to presidential candidate William Henry Harrison, 1884

Without pressing to expand the presidency, Cleveland had gone a long way to bringing it into equity with the legislature, which, however, remained dominant in government. But whereas Cleveland fought Congress when he believed the executive’s constitutional standing was at stake, Harrison always yielded, conceiving of the presidency not as a position of political leadership but as the office of the largely symbolic head of state.

Presidential Power Resurgent

As it turned out, the American public may not have wanted a strong Jacksonian president, but they wanted a mere figurehead even less. In 1892, Cleveland ran against Harrison and defeated the incumbent by the significant margin of 46 to 43 percent. To this day, Cleveland remains the only U.S. president to win election to nonconsecutive terms, making him both the twenty-second and twenty-fourth chief executive.

 

A catastrophic financial panic during his first year in office, 1893, in which more than 15,000 firms, including 500 banks, failed and as much as 19 percent of the workforce became unemployed, spurred Cleveland to the vigorous exercise of executive power as he called Congress into special session to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. The 1890 legislation had been intended to make more credit available by increasing the amount of silver the government was required to purchase every month using treasury notes redeemable for either silver or gold, but it created severe inflation when investors redeemed their notes not for gold rather than silver dollars.

 

Cleveland prevailed, and the Sherman Act was repealed, but at the price of giving the president the appearance of an anti-populist dictator. This image was darkened even more by Cleveland’s response to the massive Pullman Strike of 1894. Taking the position that he was enabling the unimpeded delivery of the U.S. mails, the president used his executive authority as commander in chief to send federal troops to break up the strike—without consulting Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld. Altgeld objected to what he deemed a violation of state jurisdiction, and many people were outraged by the exercise of executive authority to support big business at the expense of the working majority.

McKinley: Almost an Activist

Cleveland’s unpopular resurrection of vigorous executive authority should have put the Democratic candidate for 1896, populist William Jennings Bryan, in a strong position; however, Bryan was identified not with small farmers rather than urban labor, whereas Republican candidate William McKinley appealed to voters in industrial cities and won.

def•i•ni•tion

A populist is a politician or leader who appeals to the interests of the common people rather than the “special interests” of big business and the wealthier classes. The term is generic; however, a Populist Party was active in American politics from 1884 to 1908 and was defined mainly by its opposition to the gold standard.

The Partnership Presidency

The McKinley presidency was far more active than that of Benjamin Harrison, but, instead of competing with Congress, as Cleveland had in his second term, McKinley worked through the congressional Republican caucus to influence legislation.

Tally

Republican William McKinley defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 by a margin of 51 percent to 47 percent. McKinley won 7,035,638 popular votes and 271 electoral votes; Bryan, 6,467,946, for 176 electoral votes. In 1900, McKinley again defeated Bryan, 7,219,530 (52 percent) to 6,358,071 (46 percent), earning 292 electoral votes against Bryan’s 155.

The President as Commander in Chief

Where McKinley did take the presidency unmistakably into the lead was in the conduct of diplomacy, foreign affairs, and war. During his administration, the United States became increasingly engaged in world affairs. McKinley saw a certain degree of American imperialism as necessary to ensure that the United States would remain economically competitive in international commerce.

 

The most dramatic demonstration of this was the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the associated annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the acquisition of Hawaii and lesser Pacific islands, and the establishment of Cuba as a nominally independent American client state. It may be argued that McKinley actually weakened the presidency by bending to public pressure and the will of Congress to go to war with Spain over Cuban independence instead of pursuing the course of diplomatic negotiation he clearly preferred. But what McKinley’s secretary of state John Hay called the “splendid little war” was so brief and so resoundingly triumphant that it made the president, in his role as commander in chief, very popular. From McKinley forward, the American president was expected to be an able war leader, capable of rallying the nation to the support of military action. More important, the president was also now expected to be a world leader.

The Least You Need to Know

◆ The presidencies of Hayes, Garfield, and Cleveland were marked by efforts to promote civil service reform while restoring the presidency itself to a level of authority consistent with the Constitution.

◆ James A. Garfield became the second American president to suffer assassination; his successor, Chester A. Arthur, stunned fellow Stalwart Republicans by taking up Garfield’s crusade to curb political patronage.

◆ Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland introduced the “centrist” presidency.

◆ William McKinley expanded the president’s role in foreign affairs, establishing the American presidency as the office of a world leader.