Bringing Back the Gilded Age

By now, most of you have heard of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's threat to replace state workers with the National Guard if he can't unilaterally destroy worker benefits and create a right-to-work state.

I want to emphasize Walker's specific intent in bringing up the National Guard. Conservatives have done their homework. In their desire to recapture the plutocracy of the Gilded Age, they  know how their ancestors crushed labor--through government sanctioned force. The Great Strike of 1877, the Homestead Strike of 1892, the Pullman Strike of 1894--these were all solved with state or federal violence. As Lila Shapiro wrote today, the last time a governor called out the National Guard to end a labor dispute in Wisconsin was in 1886 when soldiers fired into a crowd of unarmed picketers in Milwaukee fighting for an 8 hour day.* I don't know anything specific about this episode, but it was clearly related to the Knights of Labor-led struggle for that cause that ended with the Haymarket bomb.

Here's the thing--Republicans want Haymarket back. They want Pullman. They want Homestead. They want excuses to use the military to fire into crowds of protesters. Now, I don't think Walker is going to be successful. Unions and their supporters have come out in droves to protest Walker's actions. On the other hand, his extremist rhetoric may still force significant setbacks to state workers. For Republicans, those setbacks are but a step on the road to return America to 1886.

*Yes, I understand the irony of linking to an article about unions on a purportedly progressive website that treats its writers like academic adjuncts. I hate Huff Post with 12 shades of passion. But the article was good. So I link to it with this explanation.

Historical Image of the Day

"Helping the Poor--Gratuitous Distribution of Coal by the City--Cherry Street," 1877

You have to love the generous and humane attitudes of the Gilded Age. Good thing we are heading back there. I can already see Republicans bemoaning giving free lumps of coal to the "undeserving poor."

America's Creepiest President

Last week, I visited the First Ladies National Historic Site in Canton, Ohio. It was OK, though it has a weird public-private partnership where the private side was not exactly great. Anyway, they had descriptions of each first lady. Naturally, I was attracted to the Gilded Age (Jackie Kennedy? Who cares? Now Lucy Webb Hayes, that's interesting!!!). Anyway, I was looking at the biography for Frances Folsom Cleveland. And I found it deeply, deeply disturbing.

Grover Cleveland had a pretty risque sexual reputation for the Victorian Age. He was accused of fathering a child out of wedlock, a child he supported financially. During the 1884, Republicans chanted "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" to make fun of Cleveland. When Cleveland became the first Democrat to win the presidency since James Buchanan, his supporters responded by saying "Off to the White House, ha ha ha."*

Anyway, Cleveland was a good friend with a man named Oscar Folsom. Just as they became friends, Folsom had a daughter named Francis. Cleveland was 27 years old at the time. 11 years later, Folsom died in a buggy accident. He did not leave a will. A court named Cleveland as Folsom's guardian.

At the time, Grover Cleveland was 38 years old. Francis Folsom was 11.

One might say that Cleveland was being a pretty nice guy. He was wealthy and well-connected. One might think he'd be a father figure to Francis and set her up for a prosperous lifestyle.

However, it didn't work how one would might expect. Cleveland took care of Francis and watched her grew up. Watched her grow through puberty and from a small girl into an attractive young woman.

Were I in that situation, I might be really proud of the young woman.

Cleveland on the other hand decided she was sexually attractive and married her in 1886. Cleveland was 47. Frances was 21.

Grover and Frances ended up having 5 children.**

Amazingly, no one seemed to care about this at the time. The public was fascinated by the story, but as far as I could tell, the reaction to his marriage was pretty positive.

And virtually no one has ever mentioned this marriage ever since.

Am I the only one who finds this story disturbing? Can you mention a current president marrying a woman 28 years younger, a woman he had taken care of since she was 11?

Also, if Jonah Goldberg knew this story, he'd use it as evidence that all Democrats are sexual deviants. 

*Gilded Age political slogans seem incredibly simplistic to me. Really, the Republicans couldn't attack Cleveland with a better chant?

**Amazingly, Cleveland was so much older than his wife that his  youngest son died in 1995. That means that Grover Cleveland's son was still alive until I was a senior in college.

Historical Image of the Day

Editorial cartoon satirizing Susan B. Anthony attacking Grover Cleveland for not supporting women's suffrage. I don't have a date, but obviously it was during one of Cleveland's 2 non-consecutive terms.

Historical Image of the Day

Children playing next to dead horse, Chicago, 1893.

What I love about this picture is that the dead horse is so shocking, you barely notice that they are also playing in an open sewer.

Historical Image of the Day

One of my favorite images of anti-Asian racism, this less than subtle image from either the late 1870s or early 1880s lays it out there for all of us to see. The Workingman's Party was the dominate force in California politics during the years leading up to Chinese exclusion. Their entire platform consisted of saving California for the white man by ending Chinese immigration. That they became such a political threat to both parties helped lead to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

In this get out the vote image, you see the white man kicking the Chinese guy in the butt, with his queue extending all the way over the Pacific back to China, where he is fleeing.

Historical Image of the Day

This week's images will look at anti-Asian propaganda in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Handbill celebrating the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, becoming the first law to ban an entire nation's immigrants from our shores. However, I'm not convinced that this image dates from that year, despite its celebratory tone. That's because it proclaims a Democratic president signed it. But Chester Arthur, a Republican if there was one, was president in 1882. So I'm assuming this handbill celebrates some kind of extension or modification signed by Grover Cleveland during one on his two terms.

However, one great thing about this handbill is the celebration of the Democratic party as protecting the white man, a key element of white supremacist ideology during the Gilded Age.

Corporate Bought America

The Supreme Court's overturning of campaign finance restrictions by corporations and unions is terrible, if predictable, news. We can now expect the Chamber of Commerce, big pharma, insurance companies, and oil companies buying and selling elections in a style not seen in this country since the Gilded Age.

Speaking of the Gilded Age, I blame those years of the Supreme Court, far and away the worst courts in American history, for giving corporations the same rights as actual people under the 14th Amendment. We still live with the negative consequences of this today. I am planning to begin a new series examining different Gilded Age SCOTUS decisions. As a society we are largely unaware of how these decisions still affect us today; despite the Progressive Era, New Deal, and Great Society, we have not undone the damage. That today's court has decided that corporations have the same speech rights as you and me is yet another example.

Worcestershire Sauce, circa 1876

If the Times is going to start pressing Gilded Age recipes upon us, I demand some delicious ways to prepare passenger pigeon.

Panic Blogging: 1893

The panic of 1893 and the resulting depression that lasted for the next five years were by far the worst economic collapse in American history before the Great Depression.

This story is pretty similar to 1873--corruption, a railroad bubble, terrible financial policies, deep and long-lasting suffering by the poor. Little had changed in American economic life between 1873 and 1893. In fact, I'd argue that the nation learned virtually nothing from that previous crisis. Corporations still owned Congress and state legislatures. The regulatory state was completely nonexistent. Even the most tame anti-business legislation like the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was interpreted by the courts to apply only to labor, not to business. The reinterpretation of the 14th amendment to given corporations the rights of individuals was well underway. Robber barons controlled the American economy while presidents and leading politicians were in their pockets, ready to do the bidding of their corporate masters.

Like in the 1870s and like in the 2000s, the economic boom of the late 1880s and early 1890s was built upon speculative bubbles that literally had to burst. And like in the 1870s, it was railroad construction that fueled the bubble. Many companies had gone deep into debt to both finance their own construction and to take over other railroads. Meanwhile, severe poverty overwhelmed American farmers upon which much railroad traffic was based. Still a majority of the American population in 1893, the terribly high prices railroads charged farmers to ship their products drove many of them to collapse. When the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad declared bankruptcy in February 1893, sparking the panic, farmers suffered even more as prices for their goods fell.

Banks failed around the country, as did leading railroads. The Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad went bankrupt, which was a huge and powerful railroad system. It's probably not quite on the level of Countrywide going under, but it had a major downward effect on the economy. Unemployment shot up to nearly 20%; given that so many poor people were working as farmers during these years, that number is much higher than it first seems.

The economic policies that helped lead to the panic and subsequent depression, particularly a lack of currency in the U.S. because of the nation's commitment to the gold standard, helped spur the Populists on. This movement of farmers and mining interests who wanted the U.S. to allow silver as the basis of its currency had already main major strides in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Ironically though, increased support for their positions, particularly on silver, doomed them in the end because their platform was co-opted by William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats in 1896.

Ultimately, what brought the nation out of the panic was nothing Washington did. Because Washington, still under the control of big business, did virtually nothing. It's that the currency supply significantly eased after the discovery of gold in Alaska and other parts of the world in the 1890s, increasing the money supply and credit availability, leading to another economic boom that would last until the late 1900s.

The Garfield Assassination

Never one to pass on a chance to talk about the Gilded Age, I wanted to link to M.J. Rosenberg's comparison of the assassination of James Garfield by angry Republicans in 1881 to the possibility of angry Republicans assassinating Barack Obama or other leading Democrats today or in the near future.

I'm skeptical. For one thing, while the corrupt wing of the Republicans were pissed that Garfield won the nomination instead of Grant or some other acceptable option, he was a Republican after all. He was a respected member of their party. It wasn't hate they spewed at him, it was contempt. If the Grant people had truly refused to support Garfield, as Rosenberg states, Garfield wouldn't have won the election. It's not as if they went and voted for Winfield Scott Hancock. The election of 1880 was very close, but that had a lot to do with enough disgust for Republican economic policies and corruption that the Republican policy of waving the bloody shirt at the Democrats in post-Civil War America didn't have its usual effect. Moreover, Rosenberg kind of underplays why Charles Guiteau assassinated Garfield. Other than he was crazy, he was a disgruntled office seeker. He expected to get an office under Grant and shot Garfield when that didn't happen, but it's an awful long way to go to blame anger from one faction of Republicans over an anti-Grant candidate defeating them for Garfield's demise.

Of course, he's trying to make a comparison between Republican hate mongering over time. I think this has some value, but I think it's also a fairly significant stretch in this particular case.

I do most especially agree with Rosenberg on this statement:

Thank God Obama has one thing Garfield didn't: the Secret Service.

Panic Blogging: 1873

The Panic of 1873, probably the worst economic depression the U.S. had faced to that time (though the Panic of 1837 and the immediate post-Revolutionary period are close) was caused by a combination of shady financial practices surrounding an unregulated market, uncontrolled railroad expansion, and monetary policy. The first two have some relevance for today's financial crisis, the last not so much.

The Gilded Age marked some of the nation's worst financial excesses and thus a series of economic boom and bust cycles. Business basically owned the government during these years, to the point of corporations simply buying state legislatures and creating false companies to pay off highly placed national political figures for their support. The rapid expansion of railroads across the country created conditions that opened the door for bad financial practices during the first decade of the Gilded Age. Widespread speculation in railroad growth created a completely unsustainable bubble that popped in 1873.

The Panic of 1873 was specifically set off by the failure of notorious speculator Jay Gould to move several hundred million dollars in railroad bonds he had purchased in order to build the Northern Pacific Railroad as the nation's second transcontinental line. There was a severe overextension of credit to Gould and other financiers. When the Grant administration refused to back American currency with silver any longer, through the Currency Act of 1873, American currency markets became very tight, helping to restrict credit and bring down Gould and others. When Gould went under, banks around the nation began calling in loans that creditors had no ability to pay. The banks themselves began to collapse and the panic was on.

Like other financial disasters, the Panic of 1873 started with bad decisions made in Washington, shady financial practices, and corruption. Of course, the poor suffered the most. The panic that began with Gould's failure quickly spread across the nation, leading to massive unemployment. Approximately 20% of American railroad companies went bankrupt in the next few years, as most of them had followed Gould's lead and severely overextended their credit lines.

The ensuing depression continued until the end of the 1870s. It helped lead to the nation's first mass workers' movement, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Fighting against wage cuts, rail workers shut down the nation's transportation system. The federal response showed just how closely tied the Republican Party had become to large corporations--President Hayes sent in federal troops to break the strike.

The Panic of 1873 also frequently takes the blame for undermining Reconstruction. It's true that the Republican failure to fix the economy led to the Democrats taking over the House in 1874 for the first time since before the Civil War. Certainly those Democrats were not favorable toward Reconstruction measures. But the Republicans were increasingly abandoning Reconstruction at the same time. I seriously doubt that the sordid history of the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow would have taken a different course had the Republicans managed to hold on to Congressional majorities past 1874.

Remaking Our Money After Latin America

From top to bottom--James Garfield, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester Alan Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, John Hay, James Blaine.


In most Latin American nations I have traveled through, on the money are obscure late 19th century politicians with fantastic Gilded Age facial hair, 90% of whom I don't even think the nation's population knows who they are. I think the U.S. should do this as well. Enough with the Washington and Franklin's of the world!

The $1 should have John Hay on it. The classic Republican insider, from Lincoln to Roosevelt, Hay always sported excellent facial hair. No one knows who he is today. He's important to historians of the time period, but no one else. Perfect!

A clearly excellent candidate for the $5 is James Blaine. Senator from Maine and Republican candidate for president in 1884 and the greatest political narcissist of his time, Blaine is my choice for this important bill. Also, the beard!

The $10 seems perfect for James Garfield? Why? Because you know nothing about him except that he was killed in office and that he has a great beard!

The $20 goes to Chester A. Arthur. I mean, when you signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, shouldn't you get some kind of honor? I think not. But when you have lambchops of that quality, indeed it is appropriate!

The $50. Right now it's Ulysses S. Grant. Let's see--good general, disastrous president whose administration was rife with corruption--wait a minute, I think Grant WAS a late 19th century Latin American leader! We're sticking with US Grant!

And finally who gets the $100. We're still talkin' bout the Benjamin's, but this time it's Benjamin Harrison!

Historical Image of the Day

C.J. Taylor political cartoon of John D. Rockefeller.

Historical Image of the Day

To close our set of Gilded Age Supreme Court judges with awesome facial hair, we have Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II of Mississippi. Appointed by Grover Cleveland in 1888.

You might think that the nation would have barred leading secessionists from serving on the nation's highest court, but you'd be wrong. Lamar was a member of Mississippi's secessionist committee in 1860 and then became a Confederate officer. Despite this, he was back in the House of Representatives in 1873. When Grover Cleveland became president in 1884, he named Lamar Secretary of the Interior and then promoted to the Court near the end of his first term. He served until 1893 when he died, having left no discernible mark upon the Court.

Historical Image of the Day

Supreme Court David Davis and his beard. Evidently the Waite court favored this sort of beard, as Chief Justice Morrison Waite had virtually the precise style.

Appointed by Lincoln in 1862, he served until 1877. He resigned that year and served a term as Senator from Illinois, from 1877 to 1883.

Historical Image of the Day

Chief Justice Morrison Waite and his fine beard.

Appointed by Ulysses Grant in 1874, Waite served for 14 years. Like many of Grant's Supreme Court nominees, he worked to roll back racial protections for African-Americans. This makes me wonder why Grant's supposed belief in racial equality has improved his standing among both historians and progressives. Almost all of his judicial choices were terrible on race and you'd think that in an age when we pay so much attention to judges generally and the Supreme Court especially, people would take this into account. Those who promote Grant's presidency point to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which he signed. But his own judges, including Waite, overturned the law in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). So I have yet to see a compelling case for the argument that Grant was a good president on racial issues.

Crisis of Masculinity Blogging: I Wish It Were 1882 Edition

Certainly one of the most fascinating issues with masculinity worriers is their obsession with the past. Usually this manifests itself in one of a couple of periods. The Progressive Era is a favorite, with poser masculinity worriers idealizing poser masculinity worriers of the past like Theodore Roosevelt. The 1950s Rat Pack era of Old Hollywood and Old Vegas is another favored time--Hefner, Sinatra, Wayne, cigars, and the like. And then there's the super retrograde types who wish it were medieval olde-timey days where you could rape any wench who walked your way, probably in a haystack or something. Sometimes though, masculinity worriers who are really trying to think through these things go to more obscure ideas of manhood. Such is The Art of Manliness who, while they are typically obsessed with the Progressives and the 50s, also have a weird thing with ideas of the Gilded Age.

Gilded Age masculinity was based largely on Victorian Era moderation, upright living, and hard work. All of this would lead to financial success, ultimately the definer of middle class masculinity. This is classic Horatio Alger pull yourself up by your bootstraps thought. Worthy men achieved because they took the temperance pledge and were good role models. That in reality they were visiting prostitutes in red-light districts, eating prodigious amounts of food, gambling, and drinking on the side was brushed under the rug.

But I can see how certain masculinity worriers would look to this period as a model. It reinforces ideas about individual economic success without government assistance in ways that many white men find very appealing. It is a rejection of our supposed sex-crazed culture, even if, as Foucault shows so vividly, the Victorians were at least as obsessed about sex as we are. It eschews drugs and alcohol and values being a good father. Probably the most prominent modern-day masculinity worriers who embraced Gilded Age ideals were the Promise Keepers, who combined evangelical Christianity with 19th century ideas of manhood in a late 20th century context.

So the Art of Manliness is warning good men to avoid "over-stimulation," which sounds like it is taken right out of a 1890 book on the evils of meat and masturbation. While the advice given on the site often sounds incredibly innocuous (increase your attention span! don't eat ice cream too much!), it's really very much about self-denial and repression of instincts, both sexual (note: the next post in this series will take on this link directly) and otherwise. At the end, if men are repressing their instincts, it follows that women must as well, and return to Victorian norms of femininity, which these men think they would like very much.

Historical Image of the Day

Supreme Court justice George Shiras and his impressive mutton chops.

Out of Pennsylvania, he was appointed by Benjamin Harrison in 1892 and served until 1903. His impact on the court seems pretty unnotable except for casting the deciding vote in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company (1895) which ruled the income tax unconstitutional.

Historical Image of the Day

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field.

Field was a justice from 1863-97, the second longest tenure of any associate justice. Although named to the court by Lincoln, Field played an important role in turning the focus of the court away from black rights and toward protecting big business. He dissented in Munn v Illinois, allowing states to regulate railroads within their borders. He opposed the graduated income tax, anti-trust laws, and the Interstate Commerce Commission. He also sided with the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Despite my intense dislike of almost every major decision Field made, he had a fine beard.