Party Politics: Sidestepping the Issues 533income of bondholders and other creditors but
injured debtors. Farmers were particularly hard-hit,
for many of them had borrowed heavily during the
wartime boom to finance expansion.
Here was a question of real significance. Many
groups supported some kind of currency inflation. A
National Greenback party nominated Peter Cooper,
an iron manufacturer, for president in 1876. Cooper
received only 81,000 votes, but a new Greenback
Labor party polled over a million in 1878, electing
fourteen congressmen. However, the major parties
refused to confront each other over the currency
question. While Republicans professed to be the party
of sound money, most western Republicans favored
expansion of the currency. And while one wing of the
Democrats flirted with the Greenbackers, the conser-
vative, or “Bourbon,” Democrats favored deflation as
much as Republicans did. Under various administra-
tions steps were taken to increase or decrease the
amount of money in circulation, but the net effect on
the economy was not significant.
The final major political issue of these years was
civil service reform. That the federal bureaucracy
needed overhauling nearly everyone agreed. As
American society grew larger and more complex,
the government necessarily took on more functions.
The need for professional administration increased.
The number of federal employees rose from 53,000
in 1871 to 256,000 at the end of the century.
Corruption flourished; waste and inefficiency were
the normal state of affairs. The collection of tariff
duties offered perhaps the greatest opportunity for
venality. The New York Custom House, one
observer wrote in 1872, teemed with “corrupting
merchants and their clerks and runners, who think
that all men can be bought, and... corrupt swarms
[of clerks], who shamelessly seek their price.”
With a succession of relatively ineffective presi-
dents and a Congress that squandered its energies
on private bills, pork-barrel projects, and other
trivia, the administration of the government was
strikingly inefficient.
Every honest observer could see the need for
reform, but the politicians refused to surrender the
power of dispensing government jobs to their lieu-
tenants without regard for their qualifications. They
argued that patronage was the lifeblood of politics,
that parties could not function without armies of
loyal political workers, and that the workers expected
and deserved the rewards of office when their efforts
were crowned with victory at the polls. Typical was
the attitude of the New York assemblyman who,
according to Theodore Roosevelt, had “the same idea
about Public Life and the Civil Service that a vulture
has of a dead sheep.” When reformers suggested
establishing the most modest kind of professional,
nonpartisan civil service, politicians of both parties
subjected them to every kind of insult and ridicule
even though both the Democratic and Republican
parties regularly wrote civil service reform planks into
their platforms.Party Politics: Sidestepping the Issues
With the Democrats invincible in the South and the
Republicans predominant in New England and
most of the states beyond the Mississippi, the out-
come of presidential elections was usually deter-
mined in a handful of populous states: New York
(together with its satellites, New Jersey and
Connecticut), Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The fact
that opinion in these states on important questions
such as the tariff and monetary policy was divided
and that every imaginable religious and ethnic inter-
est was represented in the electorate goes far to
explain why the parties hesitated to commit them-
selves on issues. In every presidential election,
Democrats and Republicans concentrated their
heaviest guns on these states. Of the eighteen
Democrats and Republicans nominated for presi-
dent in the nine elections between 1868 and 1900,
only three were not from New York, Ohio, Indiana,
or Illinois, and all three lost.
Partisanship was intense in these states.
Campaigns were conducted in a carnival atmos-
phere, entertainment being substituted for serious
debate. Large sums were spent on brass bands, bar-
becues, uniforms, and banners. Speakers of national
reputation were imported to attract crowds, and
spellbinders noted for their leather lungs—this was
before the day of the loudspeaker—and their ability
to rouse popular emotions were brought in to
address mass meetings.
With so much depending on so few, the level of
political morality was abysmal. Mudslinging, charac-
ter assassination, and plain lying were standard prac-
tice; bribery was routine. Drifters and other dissolute
citizens were paid in cash—or more often in free
drinks—to vote the party ticket. The names of per-
sons long dead were solemnly inscribed in voting
registers, their suffrages exercised by impostors.
During the 1880 campaign the Democratic national
chairman, hearing that the Republicans were plan-
ning to transport Kentuckians into Indiana to vote
illegally in that crucial state, urged Indiana
Democrats to “check this outrageous fraud.” Then,
perhaps seeking an easier solution to the problem, he
added, “If necessary... keep even with them.”