Gilded Age Statecraft

Now more than a century in the past, the Gilded Age still has blurred historiographical boundaries, albeit ones being remapped quarterly, since 2001, in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. This reviewer wrestled with the distinction between Mugwumps and Gilded Age liberals while completing Political Moderation in America’s First Two Centuries. Evidence indicated that historic moderation in America coalesced during 1913, the first year of the Wilson presidency, only to dissipate in 1914 as Progressives demanded from Wilson more assertive leadership. But a wider consideration of the politics of industrialization from the late-1880s to 1917 suggested that Wilson’s carefully crafted moderate agenda of 1913 was simultaneously visionary and antique.¹

As a volume in the new University Press of Kansas series on historic presidential elections, this book credits Benjamin Harrison, rather than Grover Cleveland, with “setting the stage for the creation of the modern presidency” (p. 190) under McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft. Moreover, Calhoun carefully searches records of the 1888 campaign for self-inflicted wounds that would come back to haunt the Harrison administration in 1892 when Cleveland won re-election on his second try—postponing for four turbulent years the transformative electoral showdown of 1896.

That said, Calhoun also shows that the political culture of the Gilded Age was no less fluid and volatile in the late-1880s than it would become in the mid-1890s. “The delicate balance of the national political equilibrium,” he posits, “required each party to be both intense and circumspect” (p. 3). The constricted social space between intensity and circumspection was a legacy of the Compromise of 1877. As Calhoun himself demonstrated in his magisterial book on The Republican Party and the Southern Question,² the drafting of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution placed Congress in a paradoxical quandary. In the view of New Jersey Republican Frederick Frelinghuysen, Democrats “who claim for themselves devotion to the principles of democracy, which is a government nearer to the people, . . . oppose an amendment which will give the power of manifesting sovereignty to four million native born, arms-bearing citizens of the United States.” Yet Frelinghuysen’s own Republican Party was torn between two rationales for the Fifteenth Amendment: conservatism (a simple declaration of the right to vote that did not further alter the federal principle) and republicanism (recognizing, in the words of Florida carpetbag Senator Adonijah Welch, that “intelligence and virtue,” while integral to voting, “are not peculiar to any race” and “not monopolized by nor wholly excluded from any people on the round earth.” Though satisfied that both houses of Congress had steered safely between this Scilla and Carybidis, Calhoun discerns that the Fifteenth Amendment had still been a harrowing passage to navigate because the debate had “limned the outer limits of the party’s notions of republicanism” while avoiding “fundamental damage to the principle of federalism.”

The constitutional logic that Congressional Republicans employed in 1875 was that a high threshold for Congressional enactment and state ratification of amendments (two-thirds and three-quarters respectively) meant that amendments to the Constitution should alter the original document and its amendments as little as possible. The Fifteenth Amendment lacked teeth not only because a straightforward statement of republican principle was all the Congressional Republicans could muster but, more importantly, because statements of principle mattered as good faith gestures toward states that might in the future be persuaded to protect voting rights as part of the constitutional settlement of Civil War issues. Moreover, the Fourteenth Amendment was widely understood to be a high-water mark of constitutional change, undercutting the Tenth Amendment’s bolstering of states’ rights, firming up new prohibitions on the power of states to deny rights and immunities, due process, and equal protection, as well as banning states from defining for themselves either state or national citizenship. Implicit in the high-water-mark interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment was an understanding that a...