America's Nightmare the Rise and Fall of the Federal Elections Bill

America’s Nightmare The Rise and Fall of the Federal Elections Bill and the Making of an American Ethos By Coda Danu-Asmara Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor Arts In the Department of History at Brown University Thesis Advisor: Richard Meckel April 6th, 2018 ii iii To my beloved. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements v Preface vi Introduction 1 Chapter One 13 Chapter Two 47 Conclusion 76 Bibliography 82 v Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Richard Meckel, for providing me with support, guidance, and jokes about my lazy generation over the year long process of writing a thesis. I would like to thank Professors Ethan Pollock and Naoko Shibusawa for running the prospectus and thesis classes, respectively. I would also like to thank Professors Linford Fisher, Francoise Hamlin, Stephen Kidd, Emily Owens, Lukas Rieppel, and Michael Vorenberg for providing me early feedback and resources when I was still writing a prospectus. I would like to thank all of my peers in History 1992, 1993, and 1994. It’s been a pleasure to see everybody’s ideas grow into something uniquely their own. In particular, I would like to thank my group members Zoë Gilbard, Sarah Novicoff, and Isabella Kres- Nash for their invaluable comments and critiques, and Barry Thrasher, for reading over a draft of my thesis and helping me structure into what it is now. I would also like to thank Henry Hauser for reading a draft and helping me think of a witty and pithy title. I would like to thank the Massachusetts Historical Society for letting me utilize their services to study their collection of letters written to George Frisbie Hoar and Henry Cabot Lodge. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support: my grandmother for letting me stay with her while I was researching in Boston; my mother for reading over my prospectus and thesis while giving her academic opinion; my father for providing the impetus for writing the thesis itself; and my sister for sharing choice amphibian pictures. vi Preface When any scholar produces a work of history, the question is always the same: why this now? Historians sometimes pretend that they, sitting in the dusty libraries, surrounded by forgotten grimoires, came to a realization of an objective truth that had to be shared with the world at large. Of course, all history is argumentative, and historians argue for a reason, whether to correct perceived flaws in historiography or to draw attention to an underdeveloped figment of the past that the author believes is relevant to the modern reader. In writing my thesis, I plan to do both. I believe that the Federal Elections Bill of 1890 has been misrepresented by American civil rights historians and that the circumstances surrounding that bill reflect upon our own current historical moment. Of course, I neither knew those facts nor explicitly set out to argue them when I first started writing my thesis in the winter of 2017. What drove me to seek out an obscure failed civil rights bill from more than a hundred years ago? The obvious reason, the elephant in the oval room so to speak, is the election of Donald Trump to the United States presidency. I remember the day after he was elected, I walked around Brown University’s campus, and I truly felt the weight and the scope of it as a tragedy. Students were wandering aimless around campus, hugging in circles on the main green, professors apologizing in class and taking time to discuss the recent event. I experienced all those things too. I talked to my family and friends about the event. My father, who grew up under a real fascist regime in Indonesia, Suharto’s Orde Baru, told me that hemming and hawing about the bullies lets the bullies win. “Don’t think about vii him,” he told me, “and instead be the best person you can be in the circumstances. Be the agent of your local change and then bring it outwards to the world later.” But as the indolent child that I am, I hemmed and hawed anyway for some time. It was the first true political defeat that I had experienced. Although I was semi- conscious enough to realize the consequences of George W. Bush’s elections, I was no means a precocious political activist in grade school. And while the Obama years were not perfect, I took his presidency as the beginning of inexorable change towards a more perfect union. As a historian, I should have known better: teleology is a fallacy (sorry Aristotle), and nothing ever goes how the historical actors think it will. Ultimately, I felt utterly rejected by my country: rejected as the child of immigrants, rejected as an intellectual, rejected as a human being. Of course, after the activism that has galvanized many people like me, I would realize that my first impression of total and complete rejection was ultimately incorrect. Yet that feeling lingered with me. I knew that the rejection I felt was not unique to me. Who else felt like I had? What was that feeling’s history? By writing this thesis, I hope to add a small reflective shard to history’s endless mirror. On its surface, my thesis looks at a failed civil rights bill. But it also looks at the people who saw hope in that bill. Certainly, the politicians who drafted it saw possibility within it. Henry Cabot Lodge saw a path to greatness and fame while George Frisbie Hoar saw the potential to fix the failures of Reconstruction. But scores of people outside the “great” white men of Congress believed the bill gave them new chances and convictions. White Republicans hoped to hold onto political power in the South. Black men saw that America’s white government may at last accept them as people in the viii eyes of the law and society. They rallied and fought for acceptance in a political system that had always rejected them. In the end, America rejected them again, and their fight continues to this day. America has often sat at a crossroads. Every time the government makes a choice, some people are left behind. Perhaps not permanently – America would make a successful attempt at voting rights legislation after passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – but people are always left behind to pick up the pieces. As we pick up the pieces in 2018, I want to remind everybody that an initial rejection is never the end. When unseen storms uproot our hope, it is not wrong to mourn – but we should never stop cultivating the seeds of hope that still remain. 1 Introduction On December 30th, 1890, Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, took the Senate floor to give one final plea for his cherished bill, the Federal Elections Bill of 1890. The bill, which authorized federal circuit courts to staff voting locations with supervisors if 50 or more people complained of voting irregularities, was in dire straits. Although it had passed the House of Representatives in May after a heavy campaign by the bill’s other sponsor, the young and ambitious Henry Cabot Lodge, it had stalled in the Senate for several months. The Democrats, who stood in fierce opposition to the bill, decried the bill as one that violently forced the South to bend to an unnecessarily punitive Northern regulation, which gave the bill its derisive yet popular nickname, the Force Bill. After significant internal party pressure during the summer session of Congress, Hoar agreed to table the bill until December. In the meantime, the Republicans suffered devastating midterm losses in the interim period, which lost them their majority in the House. The Democrats then, deciding to stall until the new Congress entered in March, began a long filibuster of the bill. While taking the floor, Hoar must have realized that his bill would not pass in the face of such immovable opposition. Rather than defending the contents of the Federal Elections Bill or the concept of voting rights more broadly, Hoar portrayed the bill as America’s last hope for a just society: The struggle for this bill is a struggle for the last step toward establishing a doctrine to which the American people are pledged by their history their Constitution, their opinion and their interests…[It is said] that these two races can not live together except on the terms that one shall command and the other obey. That proposition I deny…The error…of the South, in dealing with this problem, is in their assumption 2 that race hatred is the dominant passion of the human soul; that it is stronger than love of country, stronger than the principle of equality, stronger than Christianity, strong than justice…You have tried everything else, try justice.1 The multitude of references to the Constitution, race, racism, sectarian violence, Christianity, and justice in Hoar’s last stand reflects the complexity of factors that influenced the Federal Elections Bill. The battle over Federal Elections Bill was an enormous event, in which vast numbers of Americans of different creed, race, class, occupation and more fought for and against the bill. From supportive black Americans hosting rallies of hundreds in Faneuil Hall to white populists petitioning and protesting the bill in Alabama, the Federal Elections Bill prompted a country-wide debate. That debate, occurring at a crossroads for American society, was a debate about issues larger than voting rights. It was a clash between the Reconstruction Era Republicans, who wanted to punish the South for the Civil War, and Gilded Age Republicans, who preached reconciliation.

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