20

From Smoke-Filled Rooms

to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896

From Smoke-Filled Rooms

to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896

CONTENTS

■A parade for Grover Cleveland in Chicago in 1892, by John Klir. Music, mirth,

real drama—a presidential election was perhaps even better entertainment

thanAmerican Idol.

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voters did so in presidential campaigns from 1876 to

1896—the highest rates in the nation’s history.

This puzzles scholars, because the issues of that

time seem inconsequential: Civil War soldiers’ pen-

sions, the tariff, paper money vs. gold and silver coins,

and civil service reform. Perhaps the most volatile

issue—the plight of former slaves—never attracted

much notice because most politicians looked the other

way. The other key issue—the minimal role of the fed-

eral government in the nation’s industrial ascent—

went without saying and, being unsaid, generated

little controversy.

Why, then, did so many people vote? Local issues

seem to have loomed large in most people’s thinking.

Public health, municipal services, and corruption all dom-

inated the headlines. Then, during the 1890s, a nation-

wide industrial depression crushed many local

manufacturing firms, just as an agricultural crisis was

sweeping through the midsection of the nation.

Because the nation had become more tightly inte-

grated, these economic upheavals jolted nearly every

community. National policy and local issues converged,

culminating in the extraordinary election of 1896, which

brought over 80 percent of the electorate to the polls.

In Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio (important

farm states) over 95 percent of those eligible to vote did

so. In these years, politics had become the greatest

show around.■

■Congress Ascendant

■Recurrent Issues

■Party Politics: Sidestepping

the Issues

■Lackluster Presidents: From

Hayes to Harrison

■African Americans in the

South After Reconstruction

■Booker T. Washington: A

“Reasonable” Champion for

African Americans

■City Bosses

■Crops and Complaints

■The Populist Movement

■Showdown on Silver

■The Depression of 1893

■The Election of 1896

■The Meaning of the Election

■Debating the Past:

Populism—Crusade of Cranks

or Potent Grass-Roots

Protest?

■Mapping the Past:

Agrarian Discontent and the

Populist Challenge

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