The Election of 1876
Sep
9
Written by:
9/9/2008 6:27 AM
This is the first of a hoped-for study of all US elections that asks whether the will of the people had any effect on the result. Thanks to Gore Vidal, 1876 was picked to start the series.
The Election of 1876
In the fall of 1876, three years after having shot itself in the foot, the Establishment called in witch doctors to fix the festering sore of the worst depression in US history. Fix to Establishment satisfaction is what developed, but the turnaround did soon follow. The initial phase of the fix was to get the Democratic House to vote against the Democratic winner of the popular vote for president.
The shot in the foot was the panic of 1873, triggered by over-expansion of graft in railroad development.
The situation in 1876 has been described as follows: “It was a depression year, the worst year of the severest depression yet experienced. In the East labor and the unemployed were in a bitter and violent temper…Out West a tide of agrarian radicalism was rising…. From both East and West came threats against the elaborate structure of protective tariffs, national banks, railroad subsidies and monetary arrangements upon which the new economic order was founded.”[1] Further, the South, its “billions of dollars worth of slaves gone”, was wiped out[2]. And so, scabs on its wounds of war ripped off by Reconstruction, the South had become an irate handicap to expansion: “…could the South be induced to combine with the Northern conservatives and become a prop instead of a menace to the new capitalist order?”[3]
And so the Establishment moved to include the South in concerted action to resolve the crisis. This action would prove to be legislation to benefit the Establishment and restrain the people. To ease passage of such pernicity, a compliant president was needed. Accordingly, the Republicans nominated a dark horse candidate with no “baggage” who was, ah, agreeable. Not so the Democratic nominee, who was not only electable but also unlikely to, ah, go along. The prospect had become dire.
In November the foreseen problem developed when the Democrat, Tilden, won the popular vote by 250,000 with an initial solid electoral margin of eighteen. He needed only one more electoral vote. Now, a bale of Southern electoral votes were outstanding, nineteen of them. These were, so to speak, in the “carpetbag” as the three states possessing the nineteen votes happened to be the last three with Northern-appointed administrations. These three states had baldly reported for the Republican, Hayes, never mind the popular vote. The Southern Democrats contested, and so the Constitution directed the matter to the (Democratic) House of Representatives. Did the (Democratic) House give Democrat Tilden his one vote? No, the witch doctors innocently got both houses of Congress to turn the difficult decision over to a fifteen member committee called the Electoral Commission. And so from the public forum of the House the choice of president went into a cloakroom. The odd vote went to Hayes giving him all nineteen outstanding electoral votes.
In the cloakroom concessions were made to the Democrats and to the South including “an agreement to remove Union troops from the South, the last military obstacle to the reestablishment of white supremacy there.”[4] This was the Compromise of 1877. The privileges sought by the elite of the south were “sought with the backing of poor white farmers, brought into the new alliance against blacks.” “For example, the first act of the new North-South capitalist cooperation was to repeal the Southern Homestead Act which had reserved all federal lands – one-third of the area of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi – for farmers who would work the land. This enabled absentee speculators and lumbermen to move in and buy up much of this land”[5] And in the north, there came a series of tumultuous strikes by railroad workers in a dozen cities; they shook the nation as no labor conflict in its history had done”[6]. Some concession!
And so in the first year of the Hayes administration the depression bottomed out:
“In the year 1877, the country was in the depths of the Depression. That summer, in the hot cities where poor families lived in cellars and drank infested water, the children became sick in large numbers. The New York Times wrote: “ . . . already the cry of the dying children begins to be heard . . .Soon, to judge from the past, there will be a thousand deaths of infants per week in the city.” That first week in July, in Baltimore, where all liquid sewage ran through the streets, 139 babies died.”[7]
Republican National Convention:
The criteria were electability and, apparently, amiability toward the Establishment.
Charismatic, talented, speaker of the house James G. Blaine had the latter and led the first ballot, but Convention management feared that certain facets of Blaine’s personal economy might not go over too well with the electorate. So a field of three other amiables was considered then rejected as not prepossessing with regard to overpowering Tilden. Finally, the competent, prominent, squeaky clean governor of Ohio, Rutherford Hayes, was appointed by management.
Democratic National Convention:
New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York won the presidential nomination easily on the first ballot. Wikipedia notes that the Democratic platform: “demanded repeal of the Specie Resumption Act (see above); condemned Grant administration scandals; reaffirmed 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, while denouncing Congressional Reconstruction as unjustly coercive and corrupt; and supported a tariff for revenue only, conservation of public lands, and civil service reform.” Tilden had trounced corrupt Tammany Hall and, clearly, was a formidable opponent
Third Party Convention
There was a salient third party in 1876, one called several names involving “Greenback, People, and Labor. Its central purpose was to improve the lot of farmers by switching currency to paper (no, don’t ask me to explain). The easy nominee was a fascinating character of Dutch origin named Peter Cooper. That description is chosen in preference to “industrialist, inventor, and philanthropist” because his photo in Wikipedia shows a face framed in a halo of white hair suggesting an intelligent kindly baboon. He got 0.9% of the popular vote.
Conclusion:
The foregoing report may not show it but the common element in most aspects of this election was graft and bribery. This seems to have been a consequence of war profiteering, and railroad expansion graft – that too much money was about. After all, the Grant administration bridged Reconstruction and westward expansion, events which together with industrial invention embodied pursuit of large amounts of money.
This common element was evident in the fate of those nineteen electoral votes. Supposed Republican and Democratic beliefs were irrelevant to the action taken in the House, action to sidetrack democracy in the cause of Northern economic supremacy. Had the House even the slightest interest in the people of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, it would have let some of those electoral votes reflect their popular vote. All it would take was one.
Acknowledgements
The primary source for this carefully biased report was Professor Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Next, and indispensable, was Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia of mostly validated facts. The series on presidential elections is extremely well written and referenced. Next, John Nichols’ Against the Beast, a documentary history of American Opposition to Empire, is a treasure of vignettes. Finally, Gore Vidal’s novel 1876 is essential because it makes the election come to life. Further, he carefully notes non-historical portions, and everything “true” that we checked out proved to be in fact true.
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[1] C.Vann Woodward Reunion and Reaction, via Zinn
[2] Ditto
[3] Ditto
[4] Zinn
[5] Woodward
[6] Zinn
[7] Zinn