A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (92 page)

If the cities of the late 1800s fulfilled Jefferson’s worst nightmares, they might have been worse had the crime and graft not been constrained by a new religious awakening.

Intellectuals, Reform, and the Foundations of Progressivism

The “age of reform,” as historian Richard Hofstadter put it, bloomed at the turn of the century, but it owed its heritage to the intellectuals of the 1880s reform movements. These reformers embodied a worldview that saw man as inherently perfectible. Only his environment, especially the roles cast on him by society, prevented him (or her) from obtaining that perfect state.
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Whereas many of the intellectuals of the late nineteenth century came from mainstream Christian religions, few—if any—traced their roots to the more fundamentalist doctrines of the Baptists or traditional Methodists. Instead, they were the intellectual heirs of Emerson and Unitarianism, but with a decidedly secular bent. Reformer Jane Addams, for example, had a Quaker background, but absorbed little Christianity. “Christ don’t help me in the least…,” she claimed.
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After her father died and she fell into a horrendous depression, Addams gained no support from Christianity: “When I am needing something more, I find myself approaching a crisis, & look rather wistfully to my friends for help.”
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Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose series of
Atlantic Monthly
articles in 1881 made him the original muckraker, was born to a Dutch Reformed minister-turned-bookseller. Lloyd himself was religious, though well educated (at Columbia). Like most of the early reformers, he had received a first-class education.

Indeed, the reformers almost always came from families of wealthy means, and were people who seldom experienced hardship firsthand. Mabel Dodge Luhan, the daughter of a Buffalo banker, attended all the best schools before coming to the conclusion that she could not trust her thoughts, only her senses. Lincoln Steffens’s father was an affluent merchant who could afford to send his son to universities in Europe, where he “acquired a taste for expensive clothes” and “dabbled in philosophy and aesthetics.”
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Upton Sinclair and Jack London proved exceptions to this rule. Sinclair’s family came from wealth on his mother’s side, but Sinclair’s father, a ruined former Southern aristocrat, had descended into alcoholism and supported the family by selling liquor, then hats. Unlike most of the other reformer intellectuals, Sinclair actually worked, selling dime novels to put himself through Columbia University before turning out the muckraker’s call to arms,
The Jungle
. London, a socialist, adventurer, sailor, gold seeker, and famous novelist whose
Call of the Wild
became a classic, had grown up poor, and had as a youth worked a wide range of jobs. More typical than either of these writers was Ida Tarbell, considered the original muckraker, whose father, Franklin, had a thriving oil tank-building business, providing her with a first-class education at the Sorbonne.

Another aspect of the social gospelers is worth mentioning here: with some two to three million fathers absent from the home during the Civil War and hundreds of thousands of fathers dead, literally millions of young boys were raised in households of women. Rather than learning masculine behaviors, they had “been raised by mothers who taught nurturing and caring,” in the process turning “to the ways of their mothers and took Christianity out of the home to save the world.”
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It is not a stretch to suggest that the casualty lists of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville produced a feminized, Progressive worldview among the emerging generation of reformers.

Best known for his association with the phrase “social Darwinism,” Sumner’s views were slightly more complicated. Writing in the
Independent
in 1887, Sumner identified the central threat to the nation as “plutocracy,” which was controlled by the wealthy who had the bourgeois tastes of the middle class. Embracing Malthusian views of overpopulation, Sumner expressed concern for the negative impact of charity and government policy, arguing in his “Forgotten Man” character introduced in his 1884 book,
What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other.
The danger, was as follows:

 

The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C’s interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man.
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Benevolence, he argued, stole resources from those who would actually use funds to improve the lot of all in society. “Every bit of capital,” he argued, “which is given to a shiftless and inefficient member of society, who makes no return for it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but if it was put into reproductive use, it would have to be granted in wages to an efficient and productive laborer.”
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What the social classes “owed to each other” was to not create new impediments to the natural laws and laissez-faire capitalism that already functioned well.

Critics latched on to Sumner’s phrases, such as the “competition for life” and “struggle” to apply the natural science ideas of natural selection advanced by Charles Darwin. Yet Sumner had specifically warned against plutocracy and acquisition for its own sake. To Sumner, social classes best helped each other by performing their tasks with efficiency, honed by competition. That did not stop Sinclair from claiming that Sumner took “ghoulish delight” in “glorifying commercialism,” or prevent historian Richard Hofstadter from calling Sumner a “Social Darwinist” in his 1944 book,
Social Darwinism in American Thought
.
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Like other intellectuals and academics, Sumner ultimately relied on a scientific view of human behavior to explain (and defend) policy. And, like other intellectuals and academics, who at one time had as their central purpose the search for truth, Sumner had (at least in part) taken on the new vocation of social moralist.
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The emergence of this class was a phenomenon made possible only by the fantastic productive capabilities of capitalism, which provided the time and goods to allow people, essentially, to think for a living.

Grover Cleveland, Presidential Giant

Perhaps because his terms were separated by the administration of the opposing party under Benjamin Harrison, or perhaps because he simply refrained from the massive types of executive intervention that so attract modern big-government-oriented scholars, Grover Cleveland has been pushed well down the list of greatness in American presidents as measured by most modern surveys (although in older polls of historians he routinely ranked in the top ten). Republicans have ignored him because he was a Democrat; Democrats downplayed his administration because he governed like a modern Republican. Uncle Jumbo, as his nephews called him, had served as mayor of Buffalo, New York, in 1881, and the following year won election as governor of the state. Cleveland’s rise to prominence was nothing short of meteoric: he claimed the mayorship of Buffalo, the governorship of New York, and the presidency within a four-year period.

Cleveland’s image has enjoyed a revival in the late twentieth century because of new interest by conservative and libertarian scholars who see in him one of the few presidents whose every action seemed to be genuinely dictated by Constitutional principle. He was the last president to answer the White House door himself or to write the checks to pay the White House bills. Displaying a willingness to completely disregard either public opinion or Congressional influence to do what he thought morally and Constitutionally right, Cleveland supported the Dawes Severalty Act—which turned out to be disastrous—and alienated many in his own party through his loyalty to the gold standard. A man whose personal character, like that of his friendly New York rival, Theodore Roosevelt, stood above all other considerations, Cleveland repeatedly squelched attempts by outsiders to influence his policies for political favors.

Above all, Cleveland saw himself as the guardian of the people’s money. He fought to reduce the tariff and to whittle down the pension system that had bloated government balance sheets. Cultivating a reputation in New York as “the veto governor,” Cleveland peppered every veto, whether to the legislators in Albany or, later, to their counterparts in Washington, with principled reasons for not acting based on a Beardian class-based reading of the Constitution. It must be remembered, however, that the federal government of Cleveland’s era, leaving aside the pensioners and the Post Office, was tiny by modern comparisons. Congress did not have even a single clerk in 1856, and fifteen years later Grant operated the executive branch of government with a staff of three assistants. The total federal bureaucracy, even including the Post Office and customs inspectors, numbered only about fifty thousand.
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In the election of 1884, Cleveland won a narrow victory over Republican James G. Blaine of Maine (219 to 182 electoral votes and 4.875 million to 4.852 million in the popular vote). A mere 600 votes in crucial New York would have given the election to Blaine. The campaign had been one of the dirtiest in American history: Blaine supporters accused Cleveland of coming from the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” (referring to the perceived affinity between immigrants and alcohol, the Catholicism of many Democratic voters, and the Confederacy). The charges backfired on the Republicans by propelling Irish and Italians to the polls in large numbers. Blaine’s troops also sought to tar Cleveland with the charge that he had fathered an illegitimate child, generating the slogan, “Ma, Ma, Where’s my pa?” This related to a child named Oscar born to Maria Halpin, who she said belonged to Cleveland. The governor had never denied possibly fathering the child, but the woman’s record of promiscuity allowed for any of several men to be the father. At any rate, Cleveland agreed to provide for the boy, and eventually arranged for the child’s adoption after the mother drifted into drunkenness and insanity. He never maintained contact with the boy, or even met him again after the adoption. In any event, the charges had failed to gain traction with the voters.

Blaine, a notorious spoilsman, “wallowed in spoils like a rhinoceros at a pool,” complained New York
Evening Post
editor Lawrence Godkin.
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In contrast, when a man approached the Cleveland camp about purchasing documents that proved Blaine had had an affair, Cleveland bought the documents—then promptly destroyed them in front of the man, who nevertheless tried to peddle the story to the papers. Cleveland was not perfect. Like Rockefeller, he had purchased a substitute during the Civil War, making him the first draft-dodger president, no matter the legality of the purchase. Nevertheless, draft evasion never seemed to damage Cleveland.

Once in office, Cleveland announced he would enforce the Pendleton Act scrupulously, finding allies in the new reform wing of the Republican Party. If anyone appreciated Henry Adams’s criticisms of legislators—“You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!”—it was Cleveland.
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When he assumed office, he found a system corrupt to the core. Temporary employees were shifted from job to job within the administration in what was called rotation, rather than eliminate unneeded positions. (This put a completely new twist on the Jacksonian concept of rotation in office!) Customs collectors, postal officials, and other federal bureaucrats recycled thousands of people through the system in this manner: when one clerk making $1,800 was released, three more temporary employees making $600 each were hired, while the original employee went into a queue to be rehired.

What made his reforms stick was the fact that Cleveland imposed the same standards on his own party as on the Republicans, who had just been kicked out of office. Only once did a delegation of Democrats approach Cleveland about tossing a capable Republican from a position in order to fill it with a member of their own party, and the president dismissed them.

No battle demonstrated more clearly Cleveland’s determination to combat corruption in government than the fight over pensions, in which he took on a key part of the Republican voting bloc, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Founded by B. F. Stephenson in 1866, this veterans’ organization had quickly become the most powerful special interest lobbying group in the United States. Membership was limited to those who had served during the Civil War, and although the GAR had built soldiers’ homes and managed to have Memorial Day declared a national holiday, the organization’s main raison d’être consisted of increasing the value of pensions and expanding the number of those eligible for Civil War pensions.
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Although eligibility for the pensions was supposedly restricted to those suffering from disabilities in military service, congressmen encouraged fraud by introducing private pension bills for constituents.

Presidents, not wishing to alienate voters, simply signed off on the legislation—until Cleveland, who not only inspected the claims but also rejected three out of four. One claimant had broken his leg picking dandelions, yet wanted a government pension; another had a heart problem fourteen years after the war’s end; and another wanted recompense for injuries received twenty-three years
before
the war from the explosion of a Fourth of July cannon. Still others had deserted or mustered out with no evidence of disability until long after the war, when Congress opened the federal Treasury.

By confronting the pension question head on, Cleveland addressed an outrageous scandal, but one cloaked in the rhetoric of the war. In 1866 just over 125,000 veterans received pensions accounting for an annual total of $13.5 million from the Treasury. But seven years later the numbers had
risen
to 238,411, despite the fact that many of the pensioners were getting older and should have been dying off!
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Supported by—indeed, agitated by—the GAR, pensioners lobbied Congress for ever-widening definitions of who was a veteran, and to make provisions for widows, orphans, and ultimately even
Confederate
veterans. When the pension numbers finally began to decline (which should have occurred in the 1870s), Congress introduced the Arrears of Pensions Act, which allowed claimants to discover wounds or diseases, then file retroactively for pension benefits that had been granted when they served. “Men who suffered an attack of fever while on active duty became ‘convinced’ the fever was in fact the root cause of every ill they suffered since separation from the service,” observed Cleveland’s biographer.
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New claims shot up from 19,000 per year to 19,000 per
month.