Conservative Historian

1894: The Midterm Election that Changed Everything

October 23, 2022 Bel Aves
Conservative Historian
1894: The Midterm Election that Changed Everything
Show Notes Transcript

Every election now comes prepackaged with hyperbole about its importance.  We look back to a time, the midterms of 1894, in which the scope of politics was changed.  

1894: The American Midterm Election that changed Everything

October 2022

 

As Forrest Gump would say, hyperbole and politics go together like peas and carrots. In marketing, we call this FUD factor – fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I marketed this way on occasion. For example, I would assemble studies to prove that my products could prevent the misidentification of medicine being administered to a patient, with the implication of said misidentification lurking in the decision-maker’s mind. But really, this technique, at least as I marketed it, was akin to pointing out a fire and noting my solution could douse the flames. 

 

In politics, not only does the candidate cast themselves in the role of a firefighter, but they claim the other guy actually was the arsonist. In business, I seldom marketed this way. For one, it took the decision maker away from the problem, and second, it provided the decision maker with a comparison when my claim was that ONLY my product could solve the problem. Why would I give my competitors legitimacy, by contrast? For its vaunted history, the Pepsi challenge was also a commercial for Coca-Cola. This ignoring of a competitor works well in business, but the “they are the arsonist” or simply “that guy sucks way worse than I do” school must work in politics because, at least here in our Republic, it goes back to the bitter election of Jefferson vs. Adams, and others, in 1796.  

 

Another tactic is to elevate the import of any election into an existential decision in which a poor choice will rivers will drain, mountains will crumble, and Netflix will put in ads. The horror! Therefore in this ethos, every election is the “most important of our lifetime.” Actually, this is a relatively recent occurrence. Progressives seem to miss that the more politics is introduced into more aspects of our lives, the more contentious it all becomes. I was old enough to vote in 1988 (a GOP win) and 1996 (a GOP loss), but I do not remember those elections being portrayed as existential to the survival of democracy and our Republic. 

 

This type of rhetoric began to gain momentum in 2000 with the contentious election of George W Bush vs. Al Gore. Not only did the Electoral College count come down to a few hundred votes in a few Florida counties, but Bush was the first president (not the last) to lose the popular vote and eventually win the presidency since Benjamin Harrison in 1888. 

 

Since then, every presidential election has been the “most important of our lifetime.” The latest wrinkle, beginning in 2010, is that midterms have taken on that hyperbolic moniker and in the pursuit of clicks, likes, views, subscribers, anything really in place of you know, real news, reporting and journalism we have MSNBC saying that “The 2022 midterms may actually be the most important elections of our lifetime, The November elections could well determine whether we have free and fair elections again. The stakes are no less than that. Eugene Robinson, long time liberal columnist for the Washington Post avers, “The 2022 midterms are the most important of my lifetime.” The Daily Kos, “The next two national elections will probably decide the fate of the American republic. And that means specifically whether our country continues to operate as a democracy dedicated to the preservation and expansion of human rights, or whether it descends into a quasi-fascist autocracy.” I always love this fear mongering coming from liberals in 2022 conveniently forgetting that Joe Biden will still be president come December and I am somewhat doubtful that whether November proves a red trickle, a wave, or Tsunami, that the GOP will get the 67 votes necessary to overturn Biden’s veto.  Alas, it is not just on the left. This from Sean Hannity, “I just want to take a step back and lay out exactly what is at stake. As I’ve been trying to say, this may be the most important and consequential midterm election of our lifetime.”  

I like that liberal Slate had writer Dan Pfeiffer in 2020 stating, “The Most Important Political Platitude of Our Lifetime,” and doing yeoman historical work such as this nugget, “During the 1996 Clinton-Dole campaign, Bernie Sanders declared it “the most important election in our lifetimes and an election in which the choices have never been clearer.” Really, Clinton Dole? Hard to look back at a Dole administration and think it would have ruined the American experiment.  Pfeiffer adds, “ In other words, politicians need to make today’s election about tomorrow—which means they need voters to believe that the future literally depends on their vote. “Some politicians have short-circuited that by saying it’s the most important election of our lifetime,” 

With such hyperbole it may be difficult to go all Nostradamus to know what will be the more important midterm election of our lifetime.  But dear listener your intrepid Conservative Historian will attempt to provide you the one from the past.

 

I would argue that the midterm election of 1894 was the real thing. It was far more critical than a host of presidential elections and, for the Americans of the late 19th century, the most important of their lifetimes. 

 

For most progressive historians, and since so many historians are and have been progressive, the history of America really began in the early 20th century with the advent of the progressive era. And for them, there was this sort of fallow period between the Civil War and the progressive era consisting of unscrupulous business interests running roughshod over the nation. Think of the two terms most associated with this period, the Gilded Age and the Robber Baron era. Gilded is defined as covered thinly with gold leaf or gold paint. The meaning is not subtle. Though the country became incredibly wealthy, it was all gilding, a façade of misery and decadence that could only be saved by the noble progressives of Roosevelt, Taft, and Woodrow Wilson. The Gilded Age is the more excellent term. Robber Barons, coined in the 1930s, at the height of the depression, implies a period of rapacious capitalists stealing from the workers and lining their own pockets at the expense of the people.  

 

The reality of late 19th-century America is a little different. This was the era when the United States grew to be the largest economy in the world. 

It was the time when the economic and industrial foundation was laid out. In all the new industries, from oil to steel to electricity and railroads, the United States became the global leader. All of the successes of the 20th century, from equipping and shipping a million-man army in World War I, to winning World II, on multiple fronts, to emerging as the victor in the Cold War, a direct creation of the so-called Gilded Age. We have a society so wealthy today that 42% of our population is overweight or obese. We employ millions who carry the term “activist,” which means they produce nothing but acrimony. We spend $75 billion on sports entertainment and $64 billion on pet care. The basis for this wealth began with the exploits of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Frick, and later Ford, Kaiser, Firestone, and Sloane. It was amidst the emergence of the United States as the preeminent economic powerhouse (a title we still hold) that occurred before and after the mid-term election of 1894. The so-called Gilded Age created John Steele Gordon’s Empire of Wealth, but it also sowed the seeds of a progressive era and a progressive mindset that first came to the fore in the election of 1894, in the wake of the Panic of 1893.  

 

That year, the House contained 356 total representatives, with 198 seats owned by the Democrats, 143 seats controlled by Republicans, 13 seats held by the Populist Party, and two additional seats held by independents. In the 1894 midterms, the Democrats lost an astounding number of seats. In total numbers or a percentage of total delegates, this represents the largest change in house seats in American history. In W. Hal Williams, Realigning America, McKinley, Bryan and the Remarkable Election of 1896, the author states, “In the largest transfer of congressional strength in American history, the Democrats lost 113 House seats, 57% of their total and the Republicans gained 117. For comparison, in the 2010 “wave” election, the shellacking as Barack Obama described the experience, was 24%. 

But it was not just the number of seats but the ideological change that was evoked. The Republicans lost a prodigious number of seats in 1874 and again in 1922, but it did not alter their political views. 

However, the Democratic Party, before 1894, represented two key positions. The first was an aversion to interventionist Government, and the second was a pro-business platform. Ruled by “bourbon” democrats, many from the South, the party, eschewed several aspects of populism. For example, it was Cleveland who, “in vetoing a bill in 1887 that would have appropriated $10,000 in aid for Texas farmers struggling through a drought, wrote:

“I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering, which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.”

Obviously, there was opposition to this type of thinking, but there was robust and prevailing support for it as well. No one on the left believes this today, but can one image from the most firebrand on the right uttering these words? Anyone from Josh Hawley to Mike Lee to Ted Cruz could not conceive of such a thing, much less talk about in terms of Social Security, Medicare, or even ethanol subsidies. 

 

After 1894, with the near elimination of the bourbons, the Democratic Party would emerge as the party of the little guy, the oppressed, and the forgotten. The Republicans, the party that freed the slaves, never fully recovered their perception and association with the poor. It would be 18 years from the election of 1894 and a Democrat in the White House. When that person arrived, it was not the austere, small government advocate Grover Cleveland, but Woodrow Wilson and his New Freedom platform that represented the first full wave of progressivism.  

 

A Democrat living in 2022 would not recognize his party in 1892. Consider the platform of  the democratic party at that time, “in National Convention assembled, do reaffirm their allegiance to the principles of the party, as formulated by Jefferson and exemplified by the long and illustrious line of his successors in Democratic leadership, from Madison to Cleveland.” One of the favored positions of Jefferson was the “When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” In commenting on the spending of the Harrison Administration, then in power, the 1892 platform goes onto to state, “but also to relentless opposition to the Republican policy of profligate expenditure, which, in the short space of two years, has squandered an enormous surplus and emptied an overflowing Treasury, after piling new burdens of taxation upon the already overtaxed labor of the country.” Also, regarding taxation, we recommend that the prohibitory 10 percent tax on State bank issues be repealed.” And on the subject of immigration, the Cleveland-led Democrats sound more akin to modern-day Trumpists, “We heartily approve all legitimate efforts to prevent the United States from being used as the dumping ground for the known criminals and professional paupers of Europe, and we demand the rigid enforcement of the laws against Chinese immigration and the importation of foreign workmen under contract, to degrade American labor and lessen its wages; but we condemn and denounce any attempts to restrict the immigration of the industrious and worthy of foreign lands.”  

 

Only in two areas, resisting high Tariffs and cheap money, would a 2022 democratic find ease within the 1892 version. But consider the change in the 1896 platform, just four short years later. 

On immigration, “We hold that the most efficient way of protecting American labor is to prevent the importation of foreign pauper labor to compete with it in the home market.” No more talk about criminality and no call out against any specific group, such as the Chinese. Regarding the concern about Trusts, “We demand the enlargement of the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission and such restriction and guarantees in the control of railroads as will protect the people from robbery and oppression.

  

The destruction of the bourbons also meant the rise of William Jennings Bryan. Though remembered for his Cross of Gold speech, Bryan is also historically significant for being nominated three times by his party and losing every time.  

 

“We say to you that you have made the definition of a businessman too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a businessman as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a businessman as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the cross-roads store is as much a businessman as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a businessman as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain.” The democrats had always been the party against business interests, but accommodations were made in the post-Bellum party, especially under Cleveland and the bourbons. But with the populist Bryan, given his opening by 1894, the Democratic Party had already begun its transition. Historians consistently note that between 1896 and 1932, the Republicans won every presidential contest save the split vote of 1912 and Wilson’s reelection. 

But the structure of the Democrats focused on silver, which was sown by the destruction wrought in 1894.  

 

1894 did not happen in a vacuum. The overriding cause, the Panic of 1893, was inextricably connected with the Election of 1894, which is true and oft-noted by historians. The key historical effect is that the presidential election of 1896 is inextricably linked with that of 1894. By 1896, the Panic was beginning to ebb. But the disastrous results of 1894 had so wounded prominent Democrats that a way was open to Bryan. Even Cleveland, the winner of three popular vote contests for president, was fishing at the time of the 1896 convention - political scientist Richard Bensel attributes Cleveland’s political inaction to the President’s loss of influence in his party.

Before the Panic of 1893, the country had experienced previous downturns in 1819, 1837, and 1873 but had always recovered in less than half a decade and emerged stronger than before. But by the election of 1896, this concept of non-intervention was gone. By the time of the panic of 1929 (now called crashes due to the intervention of the progressive historians), government intervention was the answer, even though the history of the New Deal, and the presence of the Fed, proved useless in solving the crisis. It was World War II that ended the depression of the 1930s, whose “Greatness” was caused, not solved, by FDR and the New Deal.  

By 1912, with Wilson’s New Freedom, the transformation from small Government, the Jeffersonian ideal, to big Government, Wilsonian extravagance, was complete. Looking back from 2022, the Republicans of the 1890s seem like today’s progressives. The Benjamin Harrison administration was a study of governmental intervention. The Bourbon Democrats under Cleveland seem more like today’s Republicans. This would be a misnomer. Not since the 1920s has any major United States political party remotely resembled the Bourbon Democrats. Certainly not the interventionist Hoover. Eisenhower was not even a Republican when he ran for office. 

Nixon built out the EPA and took the nation off the Gold Standard. George H.W. Bush raised taxes. And the aforementioned George W. Bush saw government intervention as the best course to manage the economic meltdown of 2008. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan, the consummate less government champion, did not dare touch entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. And governmental outlays, chiefly in the form of defense spending, increased under his watch.  

All of this can be traced back to 1894. Some might conjecture that it should be 1893, the year of the Panic, in which this fundamental perception of the role of national Government, from distant arbiter to fundamental intervener, changed. Yet, it was in 1894 that the election categorically transformed the role and focus of the Democratic Party without fully excising the interventionist impulse of the Republicans that began as far back as Lincoln. It was in 1894 that Grover Cleveland, the champion of a non-interventionist Government, was politically neutered. Others might say it was 1896, but by that point, the attitude had been changed, and the perception irrevocably altered.