Chapter 23

The Gilded Age — a term coined by Mark Twain to describe a glittering surface over deep corruption — was marked by remarkably even political competition. Democrats and Republicans were closely matched in numbers, and voter turnout ran extraordinarily high even though the two parties differed little on the era's pressing economic questions.

Republican bosses split into Stalwarts, who defended the traditional patronage ("spoils") system of rewarding loyal supporters with government jobs, and Half-Breeds, who favored modest reform. Reform-minded independents who bolted the party altogether were mocked as Mugwumps.

With patronage as the glue holding parties together, officeholding itself — not bold policy — became the main prize of politics, and presidents of the era wielded relatively little independent power.

President Ulysses S. Grant, a great general but a poor judge of character, presided over one of the most scandal-ridden administrations in American history, even though he personally profited from none of it.

In the Crédit Mobilier scandal (exposed 1872), Union Pacific insiders formed a construction company that overcharged the railroad for its own benefit, then bribed congressmen with discounted stock to avoid investigation. The Whiskey Ring (1875) revealed a conspiracy of distillers and Treasury officials — including Grant's own private secretary — who cheated the government out of millions in liquor tax revenue.

Overbuilding of railroads and shaky banking practices triggered the Panic of 1873, plunging the nation into a severe depression that fed the debtor class's demand for cheap money and gave rise to the short-lived Greenback Party.

The disputed election of 1876 between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden was settled by the Compromise of 1877: Hayes received the presidency in exchange for withdrawing the last federal troops from the South, formally ending Reconstruction and abandoning African Americans in the South to disenfranchisement and Jim Crow rule.

Republican James A. Garfield won the presidency in 1880 with Stalwart Chester A. Arthur as his running mate, an attempt to balance the party's warring factions. Only months into his term, Garfield was shot in a Washington railroad station by Charles Guiteau, a mentally disturbed and disappointed office seeker who reportedly shouted that he was a "Stalwart" and that Arthur would now be president.

Garfield died of his wounds in September 1881. The shocking assassination — carried out by a man crazed by the very spoils system politicians had long defended — galvanized public opinion behind civil service reform.

To the surprise of many, President Chester A. Arthur — long a beneficiary of the spoils system himself — embraced reform once in office. In 1883 he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which created a Civil Service Commission and required that a growing share of federal jobs be filled through competitive examinations rather than political favoritism.

The Pendleton Act marked a crucial first step away from patronage, though it also had an unintended effect: as fewer jobs remained available to hand out, politicians and parties turned increasingly to wealthy corporations for campaign funds, deepening the political influence of big business.

The mudslinging election of 1884 pitted Republican James G. Blaine, tainted by corruption allegations, against Democrat Grover Cleveland, whose personal honesty won over reform-minded Mugwumps even though he was a Democrat. Cleveland narrowly won, becoming the first Democrat elected president since before the Civil War.

Cleveland's signature crusade was against the high protective tariff, which he blamed for a growing and wasteful federal surplus. His bold 1887 tariff message, calling for lower rates, cost him political support among northern manufacturers and contributed to his narrow defeat for reelection in 1888 by Republican Benjamin Harrison, even though Cleveland won the popular vote.

Under President Benjamin Harrison, the Republican-controlled Congress of 1890 — dubbed the "Billion-Dollar Congress" for its record spending — passed the McKinley Tariff, raising duties to their highest levels yet, and the Sherman Antitrust Act, the first federal law aimed at curbing monopolistic trusts (though it proved weak and rarely enforced in its early years).

The same Congress passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, a nod to inflation-hungry farmers and silver miners that required the Treasury to buy more silver, foreshadowing the money debates that would soon dominate national politics.

Battered by falling crop prices, crushing debt, and exploitative railroad rates, farmers across the South and West organized into the Farmers' Alliance, which grew into a genuine political movement. In 1892 the Alliance helped launch the Populist (People's) Party, which demanded the free and unlimited coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, government ownership of railroads, and other sweeping reforms to aid the "producing classes."

Voters, weary of high tariffs and hard times, returned Grover Cleveland to the White House in 1892 for a historic non-consecutive second term — but the deepening agrarian revolt signaled that the era's placid political equilibrium was about to be shattered.