Money and Politics

“To Make the Wheels Revolve We Must Have Grease”: Barrel Politics in the Gilded Age

MARK WAHLGREN SUMMERS “To Make the Wheels Revolve We Must Have Grease”: Barrel Politics in the Gilded Age It was a typical election year in Philadelphia. The nation’s freedom lay at peril, and everything depended on thousands of day laborers, up for sale at one to five dollars apiece on election day. That, at any rate, was what one observer warned Republicans in 1868. “Whichever party is the most plentifully supplied with the ‘root’ will command the vote of these honest ‘Bones and Sinews,’ in spite of fate!” he predicted. “The democracy for once, are in funds to repletion, & they intend to ‘win or die’!”1 As it turned out, the Democrats neither won nor died, but the impression is graven as deep in popular historians’ minds as it was in that Philadelphia Republican’s, that politics, in the late nineteenth century, was drowned in the slush funds of campaign finance. One image sums up the impression best: Joseph Keppler’s 1889 cartoon, “Bosses of the Senate.” Glowering from the galleries, towering over the puny solons riffling through their papers below, were the real powers of the day, the money-bags of corporate capitalism.2 It is a compelling picture, and in an age when PACs and soft money dominate the headlines, almost comforting in its assurance that once there was a time that was worse, far more beholden to big money than the ones that followed. There is just one problem with it: it is only partly true. To hear the party editors of Gilded Age America tell it, every election floated on a neap-tide of money, washing out every bulwark of fair, free democratic choice. Regularly, scare stories spread of war chests of several million dollars, and individual votes selling for thirty dollars apiece. No sum seemed too fabulous, no conspiracy too incredible , not to be tried. What could be more sensational than the “confession” of Ohio gubernatorial candidate George Hoadly, that BARREL POLITICS IN THE GILDED AGE 50 he had spent $50,000 winning the Cincinnati primary elections? (Hoadly’s “confession,” it turned out, was his failure to scotch a freefloating rumor). Somehow, the other side could raise fabulous sums, just to carry a single state in a presidential year: $258,000 to carry Maine in 1884, say, or $400,000 to wean Alabama from the Democracy in 1892.3 Parties had any number of good reasons for overstating what the enemy spent. Voters could only be stirred up by a sense of imminent peril, and the money-bag bogeyman joined that whole line of other terrors: “British gold,” “Rebel claims,” Knights of the Golden Circle, and the like.4 Putting one’s opponents in the wrong, by suggesting that their cause was too unjust to win on its own merits, certainly eased the process of arguing, especially if, on the issues, one’s own party had the weaker case. Figuring out the comparative advantages of specific and ad valorem duties baffled some voters and bored others. But anybody could understand the danger of cheap imports (bribe and ballot in hand) from Kentucky into Indiana just before the polls opened. The scaremongers were not just being cynical . If politicians’ private letters are any guide, they gulped down unbelievable reports with gusto. A month before Indiana’s 1868 election , a Republican operative in the south of the state was sure that the foe had put in $135,000 already. His “proof” came “not only in the appearance here and there of strange faces but in unaccountable change of Republicans of note and influence in almost every part of the state.” Level-headed congressmen warned that the other side had “unlimited means at its finger ends,” or was about to raise millions on millions.5 This was fairy-tale finance. Those in the know made more precise calculations of what their own side spent, and always their national committees made do on amounts that, compared to rumor, seemed trifling. One historian guessed that the Republican national committee spent about $200,000 in 1868. An itemized account from William E. Chandler of New Hampshire, a privileged insider in more than one party campaign, put it at a little over $63,000, with a few hundred dollars left over, though of course it had a partner organization in Chicago that raised $15,000 more, and other contributors were advised to help out local and congressional campaigns without going through the national organization. Expenses and collections certainly rose over time, the...