Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (50 page)
Authors: Conrad Black
The main issue in Garfield’s presidency was the continuing struggle with the stalwarts. Garfield appointed Blaine secretary of state, and then affronted Conkling by appointing a Conkling opponent, William Robertson, as port collector in New York. Conkling and his fellow stalwart New York senator, Thomas Platt, blocked the appointment until May and then resigned as senators, but were not reelected by the New York legislature. This was a considerable victory for Garfield, who had spoken supportively of civil service reform in his inaugural address. Garfield had begun well, but was shot by a disgruntled office seeker, Charles J. Guiteau, on July 2 at the Washington railway station, and died on September 19.
Chester A. Arthur became president amid national misgivings that he would be a stalwart front for renewed corruption, but he determined to govern differently to what had been forecast. Most of Garfield’s cabinet retired, including Blaine, and former senator from New Jersey Frederick T Frelinghuysen became secretary of state. Both Blaine and Frelinghuysen were in the tradition of party barons who brought some domestic political influence, rather than any demonstrated foreign policy expertise, to the office. Robert Lincoln, the late president’s son, continued to serve, as he had Garfield, as secretary of war. Most of Arthur’s other appointees were not identifiable stalwarts either. Arthur appointed a Tariff Commission and successfully championed its support of tariff reductions; pushed through Garfield’s civil service reform, in the Pendleton Act of 1883, which required civil service examinations and apportionment of offices according to the populations of states; made a strenuous effort to separate civil service appointments from the flow of campaign funds; and supported the building of a modern, steel-hulled United States Navy, starting with three modern heavy cruisers.
It continued to be a quiet time in foreign affairs; Blaine had made various unsuccessful efforts to mediate disputes between Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, between Costa Rica and Colombia, and between Mexico and Guatemala, and his invitations to a peace conference were canceled by his successor. Arthur had a full exchange of embassies with Korea in 1882, and the United States signed the Geneva Convention on the treatment of the wounded. The U.S. agreed with the establishment of the Meridian at Greenwich in East London and with the abolition of the slave trade in the Congo in international conferences on those subjects in 1884. Pax Britannica quieted the whole world and America’s corner of the world was preternaturally quiet.
Arthur was suffering from Bright’s disease and was not well, but signified his desire to be renominated in 1884. He was passed over in favor of Blaine, but left office widely respected, even by such skeptics as Mark Twain, as an honest and capable leader. He died less than two years later, aged 56. Blaine took as his running mate a former Illinois senator, General John A. Logan (making this the 10th consecutive election and 15th of the last 16, and 21st of the 25 in the country’s history, in which a senior military officer would receive electoral votes for national office).
The Democrats met in Chicago a month after the Republicans and nominated New York governor and former Buffalo mayor Stephen Grover Cleveland for president, and former governor and senator Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana for vice president. The ensuing campaign was one of the most unsavory and irresponsible in American history. The Democrats claimed that correspondence they flourished about proved Blaine’s corrupt arrangements with railway lobbyists while Speaker of the House. The Republicans accused Cleveland of having, while a bachelor, fathered an illegitimate child, which he acknowledged. Reform Republicans led by Edwin L. Godkin of the New York Post, Carl Schurz, leader of the German Americans of Missouri and a former U.S. senator, and Charles Francis Adams Jr. defected from Blaine to Cleveland. Tammany leader and New York boss John Kelly deserted Cleveland, but Samuel D. Burchard, a leading New York Protestant clergyman, called upon Blaine and denounced the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” This stampeded New York’s Irish and Italian communities back toward Cleveland, who carried his home state of New York by 1,149 votes out of 1,125,000 cast in the state, and won the election, 4.91 million votes to 4.85 million for Blaine, and 219 electoral votes to 182. New York swung the election, even more dramatically than Van Buren’s spoiler vote against General Lewis Cass had done in 1848.
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Vice President Hendricks died in November 1885, and two months later presidential succession was changed to go, in the event of the vacancy of the presidency and vice presidency, to cabinet members in the order of the creation of the departments, starting with the secretary of state. For that post Cleveland had selected longtime Delaware senator and former antiwar Democrat Thomas F. Bayard. He had had little foreign policy background, but again, there was little foreign policy to be formulated. Taxes levied to pay for the Civil War continued in place and generated large budget surpluses. Cleveland proposed tariff reductions but was rebuffed by Congress. Cleveland did accelerate the naval construction program and within 15 years the United States had the third navy in the world, after Britain and Germany. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 addressed problems of exploitation by railways of monopolies and regulated price schedules, with reasonable latitude to railway companies. Cleveland vetoed army pensions that were just pay-offs to the veterans’ lobby, subsidized state agricultural scientific research, and repealed the Tenure of Office Act, which had been the basis of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Cleveland initially approved the return of captured Confederate battle flags to the Confederacy, but then rescinded approval, an issue the Republicans, ever ready to seize on any pretext for reviving the now tired glories of the Civil War, amplified in a completely irresponsible manner. By treaty with Hawaii, the U.S. gained the right to a fortified naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1887, and frictions with Britain and Germany over Samoa continued, with Britain aligning itself alternately with the other two, and all three retaining a naval presence there. Disputes with Canada over fishing in the Bering Sea and elsewhere led to some friction, and the Bayard-Chamberlain Treaty of 1888, though rejected by the Republican-led Senate, gave the Americans some rights in Canadian ports that had been ceded by the British, who retained control over most Canadian foreign relations.
In June 1888, Cleveland was renominated at St. Louis, and chose the 74-year-old former Ohio senator Allen Thurman as his running mate. Two weeks later, the Republicans, meeting in Chicago, chose former Indiana senator Benjamin Harrison, grandson of the ninth president, as their presidential candidate, and the wealthy former congressman and minister to France Levi P. Morton for vice president. (Morton had declined the vice presidency in 1880, thus passing on the succession to Garfield, but Garfield’s assassin, Guiteau, was allegedly miffed that Morton had been named minister to France in preference to him.) The sole substantive issue in the election was the tariff, which Cleveland wished to reduce. The Republicans were massively financed and did their best with promises of increased veterans’ (of the Union Army) pensions, and the nonsense about the Confederate flags. The British minister, Sir Lionel Sackville-West, unwisely answered a letter falsely claiming to be from a naturalized Englishman seeking advice on how to vote, with the insinuation that Cleveland would be better for British interests. The Republicans pulled this canard out of the hat on October 24 and the minister was expelled from the country the same day, but the Republicans made a good deal of hay out of it. For the third time in four elections, the Democrats won the popular vote, 5.54 million for Cleveland to 5.44 million for Harrison, and also for the third time in four elections the Republicans won anyway, 233 electoral votes to 168, as Harrison surprisingly won Cleveland’s home state of New York by 14,373 votes out of 1.32 million cast, taking its 36 electoral votes. Once again, as in 1848, 1880, and 1884, New York state swung the election.
Cleveland had been another good president and he was not through yet. Nor was the Plumed Knight, James Gillespie Blaine, back again as secretary of state as the United States continued its serene ramble toward world power on the wings of rails and steel (assisted by naval construction), adding 7 percent annual economic growth and half a million new immigrants a year. Its population, at 62 million, had almost doubled in the 24 years since the end of the Civil War; in the lifetime of the narrowly defeated vice presidential candidate, Allen Thurman, it had multiplied eight-fold. It was all happening exactly as Franklin had foretold to his British friends a century before. The vertical rise of America was seen by all astute observers, including Europe’s two greatest statesmen, Germany’s Chancellor Bismarck and Britain’s Prime Minister Salisbury, as the preeminent geopolitical phenomenon of the world. In London and Berlin and elsewhere, the comparative strength of the country moved appreciably according to the expertise of government policy. The ascent of America, like the system itself, was from the bottom up, like a volcano; the identity of the leaders, since the end of the great crisis of the Union, was almost incidental, and no one knew what mighty power remained unseen, constantly accumulating, below and within this amazing country.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A New Great Power in the World, 1889–1914
The presidency of Benjamin Harrison was one of the least eventful in the country’s history. The administration attempted to deliver for its constituencies and against its opponents. It produced another Force Bill, which would enable federal invalidation of measures designed by white southern Democrats to prevent the emancipated slaves and other African Americans from voting. The bill cleared the House but the southern Democrats already had enough votes in the Senate to prevent its passage there.
What Abraham Lincoln called “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil” was to be replaced by a century of segregation, an interim regime of separation and inequality, subordinacy but not slavery, in the South and much of the North. As the reassertion of white control in the South occurred (and not by antebellum patricians like Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, rather the gritty southern petty bourgeoisie and soon-to-be-infamous “white trash” of southern life, the elements most fearful of black emancipation and equality), large numbers of southern African Americans began to move to the great cities of the North and Midwest. They weren’t well-received or instantly successful there either, but segregation was less severe and there was no hint of a deprived proprietary interest in the attitude of whites, but increasingly one of suspicion and disrespect. The route up from slavery, despite the bloodbaths already endured, would be slow and steep, long into the future.
The administration had greater success with its payoff of the “old soldier” vote. The Dependent Pension Act of June 1890 assured the pension to anyone who served 90 days in the Union armed forces who was disabled, mentally or physically, in combat or after, regardless of the reason, as well as to minor children, dependent parents, and working widows. In this presidential term, the annual cost of pensions rose over 60 percent, from $81 million to $135 million, and the number of pension recipients increased by 1895, contra-intuitively, given that the Civil War had then been over for 30 years, from 676,000 to 970,000. The veterans’ associations of the Grand Army of the Republic were, in fact, a well-paid front organization for the Republican Party. It was the tangible response to Lincoln’s call “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan,” and it began the service pension, whose legitimacy in the United States would not be questioned again.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of July 1890 was a gesture to placate concerns about outright monopolies being created in various industries and charging what the traffic would bear to an exploited American public, while often applying wanton economic muscle to the management side of labor relations. The act declared to be illegal “Every combination . . . trust . . . or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states” or internationally. The federal government was authorized to move legally to dissolve trusts (monopolies), which now controlled the oil, whiskey, sugar, and lead industries, among others. This act mirrored similar initiatives in many of the states and responded to well-founded public concern about the dangers of exploitation of customers and employees. But there was no definition in the act of any of its key terms, and until the practice was established of pursuing authentic concerns, it bore the character more of tokenism than of reform. From 1890 to 1901 only 18 suits were launched under the act, and four of those were against labor unions. Showing their customary ingenuity, American industrialists and corporate lawyers quickened their pursuit of monopoly control of whole industries with holding companies, pooling agreements, informal price-fixing or geographic demarcations, or, as in the glass and aluminum industries, concentration of patent rights.
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