Tariff and politics CHAPTER IX THE MUGWUMP CAMPAIGN, 1884 JOHN G. CARLISLE, a Democratic Congressman elected from Kentucky in 1876, was chosen Speaker of the House of Representatives when the Forty-Eighth Congress assembled in December, 1883. His election followed a controversy within the Democratic Party in which the rising issue of the protective tariff played the chief part. His leading opponent, Samuel J. Randall, was a protectionist from Pennsylvania, and had been Speaker of the Democratic Congresses of the preceding decade, when the tariff issue had been quiescent. The discussions begun in 1880 continued in the tariff legislation of 1883, and, stimulated by the surplus in the National Treasury, revived in Southern Democrats their old antipathy to a protective tariff. The fact that many Republicans desired tariff reform added to the advantage of organizing a new Congress on this basis. Randall was defeated for reëlection, and with Carlisle in the chair the South came back into control of the Democratic Party. It was impossible to pass a Democratic tariff with Arthur as President, but the threat of one increased the determination of Northern manufacturers to secure the nomination of a candidate in 1884 who could be counted upon to defend the existing system. Benjamin Before either of the large national conventions was held, Benjamin F. Butler had been nominated by two of the minor parties. The fusion of the greenback and labor elements attempted in 1878 was not successful in bringing the reformers together or in establishing an important national party. A growing opposition to monopoly revived the hopes of a third-party protest based upon the failure of the Democratic and Republican organizations to take necessary action. On May 14, 1884, an anti-monopoly convention met at Chicago and two weeks later the remnants of the National Greenback-Labor Party convened at Indianapolis. The political poverty of the movement was shown by the nomination of Butler by both organizations. "Ben" Butler aroused much stormy difference of opinion throughout his political career. A prominent Democratic lawyer in Boston before the Civil War, he became a political major-general, whose service in command of troops in Virginia was regarded as grossly incompetent. His career at New Orleans established order there, but was notorious. Doubts as to his honesty were widespread and were strengthened by a brusqueness in his manner and the cynical opinions constantly attributed to him. As a member of Congress he expressed an open contempt for measures of reform, and when the better elements of society turned against him, he declared himself the friend of the workingman. He struggled repeatedly for the governorship of Massachusetts, and was victorious in the election of 1882, in which the Republican Party was disrupted everywhere. As governor of Massachusetts his notoriety was increased by the refusal of Harvard College to confer upon him the honorary degree that it usually bestowed upon governors of the State. Having left the Republican Party on the charge that it was faithless to the common citizen, and having suffered indignity from the intellectuals of his own State, he entered the canvass for the Democratic nomination as President on the issue of reform. He had earlier expressed his attitude upon the way to seek office: not as a maiden coyly and reluctantly, but as a widow who knows her own mind; and as "the widow" in politics Butler figured in the cartoons of his day. He invited the early nominations that he received from the smaller parties, but withheld acceptance of them, hoping to secure their endorsement from the Democratic Party. The strongest Republican candidate for the nomination was James G. Blaine, who had a wider influ- James G. ence than any other leader of his party, and who Blaine was not opposed by any personality of great importance. President Arthur desired renomination and had support from the professional office-holding class; and deserved still more because of the character of his administration. John Sherman was still hopeful of receiving the distinction, but neither of these possessed the magnetism of Blaine, nor the power to interest Americans en masse. In his twenty years of political life Blaine had identified himself with the major issues that his party supported, without originating them. He entered Congress at the beginning of the Civil War, and established a power of parliamentary leadership that made him Speaker and kept him in that post for six years. His charm of manner made him personal friends and he cultivated the politician's gift of recognizing them on sight. Always an eloquent speaker, he was most successful upon themes arising from the Civil War. His short service as Secretary of State under Garfield was long enough for him to show a deliberate policy, jingoistic in part, but including the constructive notion of coöperation among the Americas. After 1881 he lived generally in Washington, working upon his Twenty Years of Congress (1884) and strengthening his hold upon the Republican Party as one who could bring back the glories of the past. The Irish vote Among the special qualifications of Blaine was the fact that he had many friends and followers in a racial group that was usually Democratic the Irish voters. The Irish came into America in sufficient numbers to affect the balance of parties during the Mexican War and later. Their tendency to settle in the cities brought them within reach of the overtures of city bosses who controlled the local Democratic machines, and their natural gift for party manipulation made them active workers from the start. A generation after the first wave of the Irish came, a second emigration was started, stimulated by the agricultural depression that prevailed in England and Ireland about 1879. The new Irish immigrants like the older filled the Eastern cities and brought to the United States a vigorous dislike for their mother country. In all the Irish immigration poverty and suffering at home acted as a stimulus. Non-resident ownership of their farms by English landlords was a constant provocative of misunderstanding and hard feeling. In 1879 the Irish Land League was organized by Michael Davitt, Charles Stewart Parnell, and their associates to fight the absentee landlord in the interest of an Irish ownership of Ireland. The movement aroused bitterness in England and fear among those whose property was threatened, but in the United States it was welcomed by Irish-Americans many of whom were both able and willing to help the cause. Parnell was in the United States in 1880 raising funds for the Land League, and was welcomed not only by the Irish, but also by American politicians who either sympathized with the Irish protest or desired the Irish vote. Blaine was one of the few Republican leaders to attract the Irish. The fact that his mother was an Irish Catholic was widely advertised. As Secretary of State he was sufficiently anti-British to interest the Irish, and he gave them special grounds for support by his vigor in working to get out of jail in Ireland those Irish-Americans who had returned to the old country to agitate in favor of the Land League. "The feeling is gaining ground in this country that Ireland is one of the United States," said the New York Tribune in 1882. The Chicago Inter-Ocean had already remarked that "this is the political bummers' chance." After the passage of the Coercion Act in March, 1881, the Irish Land League was broken up in Ireland, and the aim of the movement was shifted to home rule. The murder of Cavendish and Burke in the following year, and the prominence of the dynamiters among the Irish, advertised the movement still further. In April, 1883, a great convention was held in Philadelphia on the call of the Irish National League. Patrick Egan, of Dublin, former treasurer of the Land League, who had been spirited out of Ireland, made his first American appearance on this occasion, and Democratic leaders welcomed the opportunity to address the body. The organization attained by the Irish-Americans for their own sentimental and reminiscent purposes was a continuous temptation to American politicians to seize it for party purposes; and Blaine's special hold upon the Irish might have secured his nomination without any opposition had it not been for the objection of a group of independent Republicans desirous of reform, but distrusting him as its agent. The letters Twice before 1884 Blaine had almost had his fingers upon the coveted nomination. In 1876, while he was a leading candidate, rumors were heard in Washington Mulligan that damaging letters existed that would destroy his character if published. On April 24 he denounced certain of the charges that connected him with the improper ownership of railroad bonds, and his friends believed that he had silenced them; but the stories continued, and it became known that a man named Mulligan had come into possession of incriminating letters. Blaine visited Mulligan at his hotel, took the letters from him, and on June 5 read them in the House, interpreting as he went along. His spirit and courage won for him an immediate parliamentary victory over the forces of detraction, but five days later he was overcome by a sunstroke, and when the Republican Convention met he was in no physical condition to be nominated for the presidency. Much of the opposition to Blaine in 1880 was founded upon the belief that the Mulligan letters revealed misconduct on his part. Blaine confessed they revealed poverty and an attempt to eke out his income by a sale of railroad securities on a commission basis. The charge that was most difficult to explain away was that Blaine, while Speaker in 1869, and presiding over a debate upon a land grant for the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, had shown the promoters of that land grant how to save their measure from defeat in Congress. The Congressional Globe and the testimony presented established the fact of this assistance. A few days later, as one of the Mulligan letters revealed, Blaine was writing to one Fisher, who was interested in this |