8 - Reform and reaction
Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit
How Capitalists Rule/ Part 8
The Republocrats:
Part 8
Reform and reaction
By Vince Copeland
The reactionary masquerade in the 1876 election, which ended in the betrayal of Black Freedom, was played out against the background of an ostensibly virtuous fight against corruption in government. Corruption was all anybody heard about--in the North, especially.
It seemed to 99 percent of the people there that only the cleanup of government could rectify the rocky course the ship of state was taking.
The Democratic multimillionaire candidate Samuel Tilden had made his money in big railroad mergers and the like, often using the corrupt services of the famous New York Democratic Tammany leader "Boss Tweed" before being compelled to dump him. But this didn't stop Tilden from running a campaign of reform in government.
Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican winner, made an equally fervent appeal to end corruption. Hayes was slightly less effective, since the people he had to talk about were members of his own party.
While the actual amounts of money involved in the government scandals were generally much less than those in the more deodorized steals of today, they were gigantic for those days. And political corruption scandals were fairly new, at least in form.
In the early days of the republic there had been constant robberies of the public lands, but nothing like the swooping depredations of the big railroads during and after the Civil War. The pre-Civil War government bureaucracy hadn't had as much opportunity to carry out robberies on a massive scale.
For one thing, the tight control of the new government by the new Republican Party gave that organization a kind of semi-independence from the ruling class it served politically. And it used that independence to the hilt.
The big capitalists, after getting their way with the South and after increasing and consolidating their fortunes as well, began to support the reformers in the Republican Party. They sometimes got behind those in the Democratic Party even more enthusiastically, partly in order to bring the Republicans into line. (The "Liberal Republicans," however, disappeared as a party.)
Internal Republican struggle
This was not done without struggle, of course. In fact, the corruption issue took center stage even as the reactionary forces opposing the great class struggle of the Civil War were growing stronger--at first and most obviously in the South and second in the attitude of people in the North. It had been the bloodiest war ever fought by the United States, even up to the present. In the minds of a lot of white people, its net result was the tremendous enrichment of a few robber barons and their stooges in government.
As always, the people in government were the ones the newspapers and media attacked the most, and some suffered the consequences. But the private interests who did the bribing and biggest profiteering got off largely scot free, becoming the "respectable" founders of family fortunes.
It was easy for the majority of Northerners to congratulate themselves that the slaves were now "free." Nearly the whole suffering Black population was geographically removed from them.
Lynch law was not imposed in a single moment, although the removal of the last federal troops from the South in 1877 opened the gates. The struggles of the African Americans and their white allies in the South continued to have an impact for some time. But the die had been cast.
"God and Garfield"
What probably gave the greatest publicity to the fight against corruption in government was the internal struggle in the Republican Party itself.
Nevertheless, in 1880 the party got itself together long enough to oil up the patronage machine. It got much of its campaign fund by assessing government workers to whom it had given lucrative jobs. It also put the bite on the biggest capitalist profiteers for a total of $1,100,000. The Democrats raised only $355,000. (Figures from the New York World newspaper, via Ferdinand Lundberg's "60 Families.")
Earlier, in 1876, the majority of big business must have decided that the Democrats should be elected. So at that time the respective campaign funds were $950,000 for the Republicans and $900,000 for the Democrats, even though at least a third of the Republican funds were provided by office holders.
Significantly, in later presidential victories of Democrats--Grover Cleveland in 1884 and 1892, Woodrow Wilson in 1912--their campaign chests were substantially larger than those of their Republican opponents.
The tarnished knight
Unhappily, James Garfield, the White Knight of the Republican reform campaign in 1880, was somewhat tarnished himself. Garfield had been a Union general, a governor of Ohio and a member of Congress as well as a preacher of the Lord. But he got himself involved in some of the ubiquitous crooked capers of Washington--and then wrote some inconvenient letters about them which turned up in the election year.
These were all cleaned up for the occasion, however. And under the slogan of "God and Garfield," supplied by the famous divine, Henry Ward Beecher, this political preacher won the presidency.
He had snared himself in so many promises to the different factions, however, that he couldn't put his Cabinet together or make other important appointments without terrible repercussions and personal agony.
His most merciless opponent was Roscoe Conkling, leader of the New York State Republican machine and organizer of the still remaining Black Republicans of the South, who by this time were mostly Black people. (It is hard to tell whether he really supported the idea of Black Freedom or merely used Black Freedom to support himself, so much had the political and social picture changed by this time.)
At any rate, the Black Southern Republicans' main power now lay only within the party as delegates to conventions and so on. Conkling's New York machine was admittedly the most venal, although it was relatively weak in Wall Street itself. And Garfield was indebted to Conkling for votes. Without the crucial vote of New York State, Garfield would have lost the presidency.
Chauncey Depew, political agent of the Vanderbilts and later of the Morgans, embraced Garfield's cause. Levi Morton, the second biggest banker in New York (J.P. Morgan was the biggest), organized most of Wall Street in Garfield's behalf, causing the ex-preacher, so the story goes, to weep for joy.
The assassination
Within a few months of taking office, Garfield was shot and killed by a crazed member of Conkling's New York machine. This led within three or four years to Conkling's extinction on the political arena.
Garfield's vice president, Chester A. Arthur, had been the New York City Republican leader, at first answering only to Conkling. He had been told by Conkling not to accept the vice presidency. He was supposed to hold out for the patronage-lucrative Treasury post.
He did accept the vice presidency, however. This as well as his subsequent course showed intimate and direct collaboration with Wall Street over the head of his party chieftain.
While no one could have predicted this particular assassination, it proved to be an essential part of the drive for reform and, more importantly, of the drive of big capital to discipline the Republican Party and shape it into a more pliable instrument for "getting things done."
Physiognomy of the "bosses"
To this day, the news media speak sneeringly of the political "bosses." They are not nearly so intolerant of the bosses in the factories, mines, mills, offices, etc. Is this only because of corruption? Hardly. It is also because these political "bosses" sometimes acquire a little independence from their real masters--and the real masters own the newspapers, TV and other media.
The big Republican "bosses" during this period were usually U.S. senators, who at that time were not elected by popular vote but by the state legislatures. The Senate has a very special power: that of ratifying many presidential appointments.
Matthew Josephson, author of "The Robber Barons," explains how it stood with the political bosses just before Garfield became president:
"When the boss arrived in the national Capital, for he was often crowned as United States Senator, his power in the central government could scarcely be calculated, especially if he came from a popular and `strategic' state.
"Three heads of the party Organization from three or four such important states, together with the weaker satellite states which were usually attached to each, could easily summon the strength to block or control national conventions, eliminate or choose Presidents and dominate legislation in Congress.
"What single man, were he a great soldier or President, a Supreme Court Justice, could hold out against them? If one searched for the true center, the real fountainhead of national government authority itself, one need look no further than the dominant cabal of Senator-bosses heading the Organization of New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania. It was to the combined power of these men that Ulysses Grant in 1869 had given virtually his own unconditional surrender." ("The Politicos," p. 98-99)
We have already shown that Grant was chosen by big business and only later succumbed to the Radicals Republicans, and with the grudging consent of big business at that. Josephson leaves out the deeper significance of the Grant period.
True as his remarks are and powerful as the senators in question were, it is first necessary to say where their power came from. It came from the victorious capitalist revolution, which was combined with a revolution of the oppressed, distorted and incomplete though it was. And these senators, especially after the decline of Radicalism in the House of Representatives, cynically expropriated the political power from the revolution without entirely turning it over to the capitalists.
It only remained for the real masters, the big capitalists, to get these "bosses" into the position where they, too, could be expropriated, and more willing servants could be found to replace them. But this was a rather long process.
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(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@cdp!igc.org".)
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