532 Chapter 20 From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896
Republicans. Many Republicans endorsed tariff
reform in principle, but when particular schedules
came up for discussion, most of them demanded the
highest rates for industries in their own districts
and traded votes shamelessly with colleagues repre-
senting other interests in order to get what they
wanted. Every new tariff bill became an occasion
for logrolling, lobbying, and outrageous politicking
rather than for sane discussion and careful evalua-
tion of the public interest.
A third political question in this period was cur-
rency reform. During the Civil War, the government,
faced with obligations it could not meet by taxing or
borrowing, suspended specie payments and issued
about $450 million in paper money, originally printed
in green ink. This currency, called greenbacks, did not
command the full confidence of a people accustomed
to money readily convertible into gold or silver.
Greenbacks seemed to encourage inflation, for how
could one trust the government not to print them in
wholesale lots to avoid passing unpopular tax laws?
Thus, when the war ended, strong sentiment devel-
oped for withdrawing the greenbacks from circulation
and returning to a bullion standard—to coining
money from silver and gold.
In fact, beginning during Reconstruction, prices
declined sharply. The deflation increased the realconservative white support by stressing
economic issues such as the tariff. When
the former strategy seemed wise, they
waved the bloody shirt with vigor; in the
latter case, they piously announced that
the blacks’ future was “as safe in the hands
of one party as it is in the other.”
The question of veterans’ pensions also
bore a close relationship to the bloody
shirt. Following the Civil War, Union sol-
diers founded the Grand Army of the
Republic (GAR). By 1890 the organization
had a membership of 409,000. The GAR
put immense pressure on Congress, first
for aid to veterans with service-connected
disabilities, then for those with any disabil-
ity, and eventually for all former Union sol-
diers. Republican politicians played on the
emotions of the former soldiers by waving
the bloody shirt, but the tough-minded
leaders of the GAR demanded that they
prove their sincerity by treating in open-
handed fashion the warriors whose blood
had stained the shirt.
The tariff was another perennial issue
in post-Civil War politics. Despite con-
siderable loose talk about free trade,
almost no one in the United States except for a
handful of professional economists, most of them
college professors, believed in eliminating duties on
imports. Manufacturers desired protective tariffs to
keep out competing products, and a majority of
their workers were convinced that wage levels
would fall if goods produced by cheap foreign labor
entered the United States untaxed. Many farmers
supported protection, although almost no compet-
ing agricultural products were being imported.
Congressman William McKinley of Ohio, who
reputedly could make reciting a tariff schedule
sound like poetry, stated the majority opinion in
the clearest terms: high tariffs foster the growth of
industry and thus create jobs. “Reduce the tariff
and labor is the first to suffer,” he said.
The tariff could have been a real political issue
because American technology was advancing so
rapidly that many industries no longer required pro-
tection from foreign competitors. A powerful argu-
ment could have been made for scientific rate
making that would adjust duties to actual condi-
tions and avoid overprotection. The Democrats
professed to believe in moderation, yet whenever
party leaders tried to revise the tariff downward,
Democratic congressmen from Pennsylvania, New
York, and other industrial states sided with the
When the supply of gold became perilously low during the Civil War, the U.S. Treasury
printed Demand Notes, usually in green ink. These “greenbacks” were withdrawn
after the Civil War and the “gold standard” was restored. But not enough gold dollars
were minted to keep up with the growth of the economy.