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 Historical Society for letting me utilize their services to study their collection of letters written to 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 ; 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 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. 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, , 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 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. It was a clash between white Republicans sympathetic to black voting rights and Bourbon Democrats, who did all in their power to suppress that right. It was a clash between the mainstream Republicans and black Americans, who stood fast to represent their voice even in the face of political alienation. It was a clash between wealthy elites and white populists who rejected the party system. But more than anything, it was a debate over who should be allowed into mainstream American society and who should be marginalized.

1 Quoted from: Richard E. Welch. George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans. (Cambridge: Press, 1971), 156-157. 3

Background and Historical Context

After the Civil War, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended the practice of slavery and involuntary servitude in the , created a new population of black freedmen in the American South. Republicans, many hungry for new

Republican votes and some true champions of racial equality, sought to secure free and fair voting for Southern African-Americans, which was not yet guaranteed by law. In response, the federal government and the states ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave Congress the power to create laws so that "the right of citizens of the United

States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."2 Its passage through state legislatures was arduous; several Northeastern and Western states refused to ratify it due to fears that it would guarantee votes to Irish and Chinese immigrants, respectively.3 Unenforceable by itself, the amendment was followed by two

Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871. The former "forbade state officials [from] discriminat[ing] among voters on the basis of race" and the second, popularly known as the Act, threatened "military intervention" in states that failed to uphold equal protection and voting rights of citizens of all races.4 Ironically, the federal government would not seriously enforce Enforcement Acts for very long. In the months following the presidential election of 1876, the Republicans struck a backroom deal with the Democrats. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction by withdrawing federal

2 US Const. amend. XV § 1 3 William Gillette. The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1965), 151, 155 4 . Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 454-455 4 troops in the South by the end of that year in exchange for Democrats’ conceding a close presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes. The Compromise was a major turning point for America’s project of racial pluralism; civil rights historian C. Vann

Woodward called the Compromise "the abandonment of the Negro as a ward of the nation, the giving up of the attempt to guarantee the freedman his civil and political equality."5

While the Enforcement Acts remained officially on the books until early 20th century and the Fifteenth Amendment is unchanged to this day, the end of

Reconstruction and the Compromise of 1877 marked a ten year period of federal apathy vis-à-vis the South's racial discrimination. Free to manipulate elections without Northern interference, Southern governments began a widespread campaign of voter suppression, ranging from complicated registration processes, literacy tests, violence and fraudulent counts.6 However, Republican , after winning the presidency in 1888, decided to revive the issue of national voting rights. In his inaugural address, he proclaimed that an increase in the "general interest [is] now being manifested in the reform of our election laws."7 This pledge to institute election reform sparked new interest among Republicans in creating a new national voting rights law.8

Two major Massachusetts Republican legislators, Representative Henry Cabot Lodge and Senator George Frisbie Hoar, began drafting their proposals for the bill. Although the two worked independently on their proposals, on April 24th, 1890, they agreed to

5,C. Vann Woodward. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 6 6 Alexander Keyssar. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 107 7 Quoted from: Charles W Calhoun. Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869-1900. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 233. 8 Xi Wang. The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage & Northern Republicans, 1860-1910. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 259 5 combine their proposals into one Federal Elections Bill.9 When the bill passed in the

House in late July, the prospects for passage of the Federal Elections Bill seemed high.

The two legislators, despite sharing a political party and a state, came from different backgrounds and saw the bill very differently. Hoar was much older and had been active during Radical Reconstruction. He was an idealist and a well-known former abolitionist. For example, the “colored citizens of Tennessee’s tenth Congressional district” called Hoar "a recognized friend of the people" who "shield[s] those who are rendered helpless and powerless to defend themselves."10 Lodge approached the bill very differently. Most famous for his feud with and his passionate rebuke of the in 1919 in his later years, Lodge was more interested in domestic affairs as a young politician. Ambitious and hungry for power, Lodge worshipped the famous abolitionist as a beacon of Republican ideals and champion of reform.11 Lodge viewed Harrison's and the Republicans' call for a

Federal Elections Bill as both an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of his hero and to curry presidential and party favor.12

Although the Federal Elections Bill passed in the House in May, 1890, it never passed in the Senate. After a few weeks of fervent debate in the upper house, the two

Republican Senators from Pennsylvania, Matthew S. Quay and J. Donald Cameron, proposed a resolution that would table the contentious Federal Elections Bill in favor of the McKinley Tariff. The Tariff, written by future president William McKinley, raised the

9 Welch, Richard E. Jr. "The Federal Elections Bill of 1890: Postscripts and Prelude" The Journal of American History, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Dec., 1965), 513 10 Washington, D. W. et al. "Colored citizens of the Tenth Congressional District to George Frisbie Hoar." 23 June 1890. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society 11 Wang, 233. 12 Dotson, David Wendell. Henry Cabot Lodge: A Political Biography, 1887-1901. (Norman, Dissertation for University of Oklahoma, 1980), 121 6 average rate on imports to about fifty percent across the board. Quay and Cameron believed it would secure the Republicans a victory in the midterm elections due to its benefits to American manufacturers.13 Hoar, while initially outraged, eventually received written confirmation from nearly every Republican that they would vote for the Federal

Elections Bill in the next session, which assuaged his concerns.14 Unfortunately, the

Tariff was immensely unpopular. It caused a noticeable increase in the cost of goods and services throughout the country, which impacted all echelons of society. The

Democrats used the McKinley Tariff as a major talking point against the Republicans, which led to sweeping losses in Congress that caused the Republicans to lose control of the House.15 When the final session of the 51st Congress convened, Democrats realized all they needed to do was to stall for the incoming Democratic House, as the bill would have to be reapproved by the House after passing through the Senate before becoming law. The Democratic Senators then began a month-long filibuster of the bill, which ranged from ad hominem attacks against the Republicans to simply refusing to answer the roll call to prevent a quorum. By January, the Western Republicans, who had suffered the brunt of the defeats in the 1890 midterms, had grown weary of the bill.

William Steward of Nevada, defending himself against claims of prejudice by proclaiming himself "'a friend of the negro,'" nevertheless withdrew his support for the bill and suggested that the Senate instead debate a silver coinage bill.16 Despite Hoar's protests, the Senate voted to end the debate on the Federal Elections Bill.17 Moreover,

13 Calhoun, 248 14 George Frisbie Hoar. Autobiography of Seventy Years Volume II. (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1906), 155-156 15 Wang, 243 16 Wang, 246 17 Wang, 248 7 although Senate did debate the bill once more on January 26th, 1890, it was once again put aside at the behest of the Western Republicans, this time for good.18 Lodge continued to campaign for the bill behind the scenes, even going so far as to petition

President Harrison for support. While sympathetic to the bill, Harrison was too politically weak and ineffectual to change Congress's decision.19 Both Lodge and Hoar gave up their campaigns for the bill after its second failure to pass in the Senate. As a consequence, states in the South had free reign to enact further voting restrictions, like poll taxes and literacy tests.20 The Federal Government would not attempt to pass another voting rights act until the Johnson administration pushed through the Voting

Rights Act of 1965 seventy-five years later. By all accounts, the Federal Elections Bill was a failure.

Literature Review

The majority of the historical literature discussing the Federal Elections Bill focuses almost entirely on the bill’s life and death in the Senate. Many narratives of the bill, most notably Alexander Keyssar’s The Right to Vote and Xi Wang’s The Trial of

Democracy, tend to feature Congress in a vacuum and ignore popular reaction to and influence on the bill. 21 22 In addition, by doing so, the authors inevitably present a narrative of the bill featuring entirely elite white men. People of color, if mentioned, lie on the periphery. For example, Wang focuses entirely on white intra-Senate impetus for

18 Welch Jr. "The Federal Elections,” 521-522. 19 Dotson, 134 20 Keyssar. 111 21 Keyssar, 109-111 22 Wang, 232-252 8 civil rights, citing pressures from the older Radical Republican faction of the Senate on the party platform of 1888.23 Furthermore, these authors argue that the white elites’ support of civil right bills presupposes their support for civil rights and racial equality.

Keyssar asserts that “Lodge…aspired to Charles Sumner’s Senate seat and had long imbibed abolitionist and radical sentiments” and paints the Republicans as a whole as

“appalled by what was occurring in the South.”24 However, as I will show, supporting a civil rights bill did not mean that one supported civil rights as well.

While scholars do note the bill’s failure as a turning point in the inclusiveness of

American democracy, such as when Keyssar states that “the federal government was not prepared to act energetically to guarantee the voting rights of blacks,” they do not look beyond Washington’s policies and beyond voting rights itself.25 While it is true that those Congressmen had the final vote on the bill, they were far from the only force acting on the bill. People outside the normalized elite white male political process contributed significantly to the bill’s rise and to its fall. Without the support of black men, the bill would have faltered during its early stages. Without the opposition of the white populists, the bill would have passed the Senate. Furthermore, scholars paint the two camps for and against the bill as completely unified under the banners of Republican and Democrats until Steward’s final betrayal. Republicans are often portrayed as the heroic saviors who attempted to save a republic in crisis from voting irregularities. In his book Conceiving a New Republic, Charles Calhoun paints the party with broad strokes and asserts that “most [Republicans] understand that they must either seize the

23 Wang, 230. 24 Keyssar, 109. 25 Keyssar, 110. 9 opportunity to complete their reinvention of the Republican or reconcile themselves to a polity not truly republican.”26 The Democrats, on the other hand, have been portrayed as a group of pernicious racists who blocked the bill in order to maintain power in the

South. Keyssar describes the Democrats as causing an “epidemic of fraud and violence” while Calhoun paints the Democrats as wrongly fearful of revolution and as a party of white supremacy.27 28

While the standard description of the two parties holds true generally, the truth on the ground was a bit more complicated. While support in Congress was split almost entirely along party lines, the reasons for support and opposition were more complicated than simply a referendum on voting rights. Some older Reconstruction

Republicans wanted to punish the South for the Civil War while some younger Gilded

Age Republicans, like Lodge himself, wanted to use the bill to attack the Irish political machine and weaken the immigrant voting block more broadly. While most Democrats in Congress did oppose the bill on the basis of racism or the desire to maintain power in the South, many Republicans wanted to use the bill to expand their own political power.

Finally, two of the biggest supporters outside of Congress, African-Americans and white populists, belonged to neither party structure. If a historical actor supports a voting rights bill, it does not mean he or she supports voting rights as a whole. In that sense, this is the importance of the Federal Elections Bill. It occurred at a very particular political moment: the transition from a Reconstruction mindset to that of the Gilded Age.

Furthermore, it occurred, not starting in the halls of Congress, but in the cities of the

26 Calhoun, 235. 27 Keyssar, 111. 28 Calhoun, 243. 10

Northeast and the farms of the Midwest. The Federal Elections Bill represented a country in an identity crisis. At the end of the struggle, the American government and society began to accept white populism and rejected racial pluralism and tolerance. But above all, the failure of the Federal Elections Bill tells us what “voting rights” actually are and why we should care about them. Rather than a simple participation in the voting process, voting rights are important because they indicate whom society has embraced and whom it has pushed to the margins. The Federal Elections Bill came at a time when

American society could have embraced pluralism and a multiethnic ideology, but it ultimately eschewed that for whiteness and sameness. In my thesis, I will trace the creation of and the aversion to a new national identity through the lens of the various factions who fought for and against the Federal Elections Bill; in addition, I will show that creation of a national identity and ethos comes not from the center of government but from the people all throughout the country.

Project Description

In my first chapter, I discuss the three main factions who supported the Federal

Elections Bill: older Reconstructionist Republicans, younger Gilded Age Republicans, and African-American men. I show that while the three groups seemed to create a unified front of support, in reality their alliance was tenuous and based on their own personal desires. I begin with the symbolic head of each group: George Frisbie Hoar,

Henry Cabot Lodge, and , respectively. After discussing their motivations, I move to the populace aligned with each. I discuss how both the factions of Hoar and Lodge, despite supporting a bill that would political enfranchise African- 11

Americans throughout the country, did not necessarily support the bill with that intention.

Despite the influence of African-American men on helping bolster the bill, they never received significant help from the political establishment. I show how they managed to create a network of support despite their exclusion from the main political network of change, American democracy.

In my second chapter, I show how the coalition for the Federal Elections Bill crumbled in the face of white populism. I begin the chapter discussing the emergence of

Confederate nostalgic sentiments and how they influenced the opposition to the bill.

Following that, I discuss the opposition of the Bourbon Democrats in Congress who had an ideological divide similar to that of the Republicans, although they managed to maintain a unified front. I then dedicate the bulk of the chapter to white populism and why it was so opposed to the Federal Elections Bill. I close the section by discussing a significant exception to the white populist, Robert M. La Follette, and detail the link between white populism and Steward’s rejection and fatal blow to the Federal Elections

Bill.

A Note on Sources

In this thesis, I have used a variety of sources to craft my narrative, ranging from extensive archival work that I undertook in the Massachusetts Historical Society, to newspaper articles, to a litany of secondary sources. All quotes from letters written to either George Frisbie Hoar or Henry Cabot Lodge are taken from my own transcriptions of the physical letters held by the Massachusetts Historical Society. In order to find relevant letters, I looked through the months that the two worked on the Federal 12

Elections Bill (from around April 1880 to about April 1881) to find any on the topic. If I had more time and resources, I would have also looked at the papers of John Spooner of Wisconsin, who also had a major hand in crafting the bill as well as the papers of

William Steward of Nevada, who had a major hand in defeating the bill.

I collected about one hundred letters written to both Hoar and Lodge pertaining to the Federal Elections Bill. I transcribed all of the handwritten letters, but unfortunately, not all letters survived in full. The passage of time, often coupled with poor penmanship, rendered large sections of some letters illegible. However, nearly all letters contained the Hoar and Lodge collections survived fully enough so that I could grasp the gist of their contents. Their topics ranged from declarations of unconditional support for the bill, suggestions for amendments, petitions against the bill, and scathing ad hominem attacks aimed at both politicians. While I ultimately integrated only a fraction of the letters that I transcribed into the body of my thesis, they provided a glimpse into the popular thoughts of politically active men of various races, creeds, and classes. Even though only a small portion of those politically active people wrote to Hoar and Lodge, those whose words are represented are very diverse. Everybody from the most elite members of the Massachusetts gentry to an illiterate slave who had to dictate his letter appear in the source base. The wide scope of people represented in the letters show that the bill was truly national yet still local. Therefore, by using these letters as one of my primary sources, I hope to rectify the exclusiveness of current historiography and show that politics extends further than the wealthy white men who sign the bill.

13

Chapter 1

“The Voice of a People When Demanding a Right Is All Powerful”

The Strange Coalition of Support for the Federal Elections Bill

On June 26th, 1890, right at the beginning of the eight-month struggle in

Congress to pass the Federal Elections Bill that aimed to reform American elections by dispatching federal troops at any polling station receiving enough complaints,

Massachusetts Representative Henry Cabot Lodge took to the House floor. Defending his fledgling bill in front of crowds of his supporters, who filled the galleries of the House despite the sweltering summer heat, Lodge claimed that the bill attempted to fix elections not only in the South, but all over the United States:

This bill is a national bill, intended to guard congressional elections in every part of the country. I have heard it freely charged that it is not national but sectional, yet when I have observed the heat of the persons and of the newspapers who make the assertion, their vehemence leads one to remember “that suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.”1

On August 20th, in a quiet session of Congress, Senator George Frisbie Hoar, the other drafter of the bill, took the stand in the Senate to defend the bill against the same charges of sectarianism. His speech however started with a much different tone than that of Lodge:

Every Senator, when he enters upon his office, takes an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and to defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic…The failure so to use it, on fit occasion, from timidity, from selfish ambition, for personal advantage or for personal ease, is as ignoble for me as a

1 Quoted from: “Lodge’s Great Speech.” Boston Daily Advertiser, (Boston, Massachusetts), 26 June 1890. 14

like failure of the soldier in the hour of battle. The bill undertakes to defend the Constitution of the United States against an attempt to overthrow it…”2

On August 4th in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, in front of a full crowd of African-American supporters, Julius Caesar Chappelle, one of the first black members of the

Massachusetts State Legislature and a former slave, gave the keynote speech at a rally supporting the Federal Elections Bill. His defense and reason for supporting the bill had yet another tone:

In the days of slavery, they [mainstream newspapers] were opposed to freedom and are now opposed to our obtaining our rights. This bill should have passed 25 years ago. We would not then have been subjected to the treatment received now. The North and South have always had trouble and will continue so to do until every man has his rights. The vote of the Negro must be counted with as much honesty in as any white man’s in Massachusetts.”3

The differences between how the three public servants characterize the bill are stark. Lodge painted the bill as a great unifying force, useful in every part of the country.

He characterized the bill’s opponents as harmful to governmental order. His speech prominently features a quote by the infamous backstabber, Richard III, from

Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III; indeed, just after Richard III speaks that line, he kills the tragic King Henry. In Lodge’s view, those who charge the bill as sectarian were scheming traitors who wished to undermine his and the Republicans’ attempt at unity through the bill. Hoar took an opposite stance: one in support of sectarianism. While he never explicitly named Southern Democrats in his casus belli-like speech, his evocation of the senatorial oath brought to memory the country’s most recent domestic enemy: the

Confederacy. Hoar implied that a kind of Civil War was still ongoing, one where covert

2 George Frisbie Hoar, speaking on H.R. 9416, on Aug 20, 1890, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Congressional Record 17, pt. 2:8842 3 Quoted from: William C. Neil “At the Cradle of Liberty.” The New York Age (New York, New York), Aug 4 1890. 15 agents, implicitly in the South, were attempting to overthrow the Constitution.

Conversely, Chappelle focused his support on how the bill would help the African-

American community. He placed himself in opposition to the white mainstream media, which he characterized as wholly hostile to black civil rights. Like Hoar and Lodge, he too addressed the question of unity in America. While Lodge asked for white unity and

Hoar for Southern sanctions, Chappelle asserted that enfranchising the African-

American male would fix America’s divisions.

Chappelle also stood apart from Hoar and Lodge, both white elites, due to his race. Although a politician, Chappelle was not part of the elite black class of New

England that claimed people such as W.E.B. DuBois who were born into freedom.

Instead, Chappelle was a freedman. Born in South Carolina in 1852 to an enslaved mother and a white father, he was in bondage until the age of thirteen, at which point the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. Like many other freed slaves, Chappelle migrated north soon after the end of the Civil War. He worked as a janitor for nearly thirteen years before being elected to the Massachusetts state legislature.4 His background was a far cry from those of Hoar and Lodge. Both were members of the entrenched Massachusetts white wealthy ruling class, descendants of the original

Puritan families, and both received a full education at Harvard.5 6 While Chappelle was unusually privileged to rise from slavery to a political career, he was very much an outsider of the American political system, which by its nature excluded almost all people

4 “An Ex-Legislator Dead.” The Cleveland Gazette, (Cleveland, Ohio), 13 Feb 1904. 5 Richard E. Welch Jr.. George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 6 6 Karl Schriftgiesser. The Gentleman from Massachusetts: Henry Cabot Lodge. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company: 1944), 16-17 16 of color due to the failure of Reconstruction voting reforms that the Federal Elections Bill hoped to rectify.7 Chappelle was a member of the Republican Party, as were many black American men, but unlike white support for the bill, which dividedly neatly along party lines, party affiliation (or lack thereof) did not affect African-Americans’ support.

Chappelle and his allies were racial and political outsiders, but they still worked within a hostile system in order to enact change.

The positions and backgrounds of Lodge, Hoar, and Chappelle were symbols for the supporters of the bill as a whole. Just as the three differed on the bill’s purpose, so did the general public. There was no unified position among supporters of the bill. There were, however, three general bases of support for the bill. The first was an older white generation who like Hoar had fought in or lived through the Civil War and tended to support the bill as a punitive measure against the South. This group of supporters was mostly the remnants of the Radical Reconstructionist faction of the Republican party.

During Reconstruction, they had favored punitive measures against former Confederate

States as vengeance for a costly war over an evil issue, slavery.8 While Hoar himself strongly supported the bill as a means of political enfranchisement for black men, much his group were interested in punishment for punishment’s sake; those who benefited, like African-Americans, were a secondary concern. The second base of support came from a younger white generation born during or after the Civil War like Lodge. They

7 The at the time of the Federal Elections Bill had only one African-American member, Henry Cheatham, who declined to comment on the bill. Only four more would be elected to public office, after which the South would firmly entrench , which led to no Southern African-Americans serving in federal public office until Bill Clay from Missouri in 1969. See: Office of History and Preservation, Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007. Ed. Robert Brady. (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 2008), 152- 170. 8 Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 229 17 tended to support the bill as a measure for political unity as well as a method to control immigrant political activity, especially the Irish political machines. Lodge’s faction represented the late Gilded Age Republicans, known for their laxness on financial regulations and apathy to racial, gender, and social issues.9 Their interest in the bill as a reformation of the moral fabric of the government preempted Progressive Era politics.10

Ultimately, their support tended to be the weakest of the three groups. Indeed, their support for the bill rang especially hollow after Lodge himself disowned the bill soon after its defeat.11 The final faction consisted of African-Americans of all ages, creeds, and parties, who were generally very strongly in favor of the bill as a way to regain political freedoms and powers eroded by prejudiced Black Codes in the South. In this chapter, I will explore how the differences in age, class, race and cultural background affected the support of the three allying factions, and how a bill could be used to unify and to divide, to enfranchise and to disenfranchise, and to combat racism and to entrench it.

Furthermore, this chapter will push back against the common narrative that the bill was framed entirely by elite white men in Congress. Rather than entirely created in the Senate and the House, the bill’s life and support necessitated outside support not only from the upper white Northeastern elite, but also the black male population of all socioeconomic statuses. These black men were not periphery contributors to the bill’s initial success, but vital actors who, working in a system hostile to them, exerted political pressure and power on Congress through a series of public rallies, protests and

9 Worth Robert Miller. “The Lost World of Gilded Age Politics.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), 53-60 10 Miller, 66-67 11 “What Mr. Lodge Thinks.” (New York, New York), 15 May 1891. 18 petitions. In addition, support for the bill did not prevent much of the Republican party, and Lodge in particular, from harboring deeply ingrained racist sentiments. The three different factions walked a fine line of compromise that crumbled alongside the bill. Only in this single historical moment, awkwardly lodged between the fervor of Reconstruction and the renewed government interest in civil rights of the 1960s, when the Radical

Republicans and the new Gilded Age Republicans vied for control over a civil rights bill, when the hope of Congressional action roused the political power of African-Americans, could the three groups coalesce into a coalition of support.

“Open War:” Civil War Narratives and the Older Generation

Among Hoar’s generation, the common narrative was one of a second Civil War and a second rebellion. For many of his generation, especially those in the upper echelons of power, the Civil War was a wholly just war against a tyrannical and traitorous government. Those who fought on the side of the Confederacy were not seen as cogs in the great machinery, but as active agents fighting to undermine the United

States. For example, on the 25th anniversary of Gettysburg in 1888, General J. P. S.

Gobin, addressing the Grand Army of the Republic, the premier Union veteran organization, boldly claimed that “I want it to be distinctly understood, now and for all time, that the men who wore the gray were everlastingly and eternally wrong.”12

Prominent veteran Northern writers, like Ambrose Bierce and John W. De Forest

12 Gobin, J. P. S. Quoted from Janney, Caroline E. Remember the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013, 176. 19 depicted the war as brutal, savage, and not to be celebrated.13 In his part short story, part memoir “What I Saw of Shiloh,” Bierce goes as far to mock Civil War nostalgia, claiming that “Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes?”14 Another short story, “An Occurrence at Owl

Creek Bridge,” depicts an unsympathetic cowardly, draft-dodging Southern “well-to-do planter” who is hanged for abetting racism and violence of the Confederacy.15 Like

Gobin, Bierce depicts all members of the Confederacy, even participants through inaction, as flawed, racist, and deserving of punishment. In the years following the failure of the Federal Elections Bill, Bierce, like many former Union soldiers, would reconcile with Confederate veterans, but only in order to renounce his culpability for the war; indeed, he still viewed the conflict with a sense of anti-nostalgia.16 At the time of the Federal Elections Bill, however, Union veterans still mostly considered themselves heroes and all Confederate veterans villains, although a shift in thought towards reconciliation was already occurring. 17 18 It is no surprise, then, that in such a culture of dichotomy, support for the Federal Elections Bill among the older generation focused on punitive measures against the South while also championing the virtues of the North.

Such ties between support for the bill and a desire for vengeance against the

South were not made explicit only by Hoar. In a speech to the House, Representative D.

B. Henderson of Iowa, angrily characterized the Southern opposition to the bill as

13 McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 168 14 Bierce, Ambrose. “What I Saw of Shiloh.” From Civil War Stories. (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 17 15 Bierce, Ambrose. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” From Civil War Stories. 33-40. 16 David W. Blight. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 250-251 17 Janney, 183 18 See chapter 2 for more detail in the shift in white thought and its effects on the opposition to the Federal Elections Bill. 20

“dangerous as armed rebellion.”19 He asserted that no electoral fraud existed in his

“district…nor in Iowa” as a whole.20 He defied reconciliation and attacked Southern support of racism, slavery, and disenfranchisement by claiming he would never forget and forgive their “defiance of law and the perpetration of wrongs and crimes.”21 In his speech, Henderson hit on all three of the major talking points about the Federal

Elections Bill by the former Radical Reconstructionist Republicans and Union veterans.

Firstly, he painted the South as wayward, traitorous, and rebellious due to its systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans. Secondly, he claimed that the North (in this case, Iowa in particular), had not had the same level of systematic voter fraud and targeted discrimination against a single group that the South had. In Henderson’s eyes, the Federal Elections Bill was not a bill for the entire country, but instead a measure only for the South. Thirdly, he believed that the bill acted to punish whites in power first and foremost and to enfranchise African-Americans second. In his speech, he still called Southern African-Americans no better than “your [white Democrats] chattels, your horse or your ox.”22 The fact that the bill gave African-Americans more political rights was a secondary concern; rather, Henderson supported the bill because it would weaken the elite white Democratic power base in the South.

Similar arguments, focusing on attacking the South through legislation, appeared both in partisan newspapers and personal correspondences to Hoar. The Bangor Daily

Whig and Courier, a Republican partisan press from Maine, joyfully celebrated the bill’s

19 D.B. Henderson “The Speech of Hon. D.B. Henderson of Iowa.” June 28th, 1890. (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Publishing Office, 1890). 7. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 20 Henderson, 5 21 Henderson, 6 22 Henderson 6 21 ability to send “the Bourbon manipulators to the rear.”23 The Boston Daily Advertiser took a similar stance, condemning the “threat of resisting the law of the land to the point of bloodshed [as] the arrogant attitude assumed by Southern leaders in ante bellum days, and seems to suggest additional proof that the proposed law is needed.”24 The press celebrated the bill for punishing Southern treachery rather than enfranchising the politically downtrodden. O.N. Platt, a self-proclaimed founding member of the

Republican Party, condemned the Southern disenfranchisement of political actors:

As a phase of the Southern rebellion, the first was waged to perpetuate the dominance of slavery forever by destroying the American state, [the second] to accomplish the same result by destroying the ballot box in the South…25

Like the others, Platt had little interest in those actually being disenfranchised, especially those of color. He did note that “there is a large hitherto inactive Republican white element in the South” who are afraid to vote because “they know their votes if cast will not be counted.”26 This is not sympathy for the inactive white voter; the focus is not on the people themselves, but rather how the Republican Congressmen can give political power to the Republicans, thereby stripping power away from the Democrats.

Platt framed poor whites only in terms of how they could benefit the party structure and not as individual actors. Secondly, Platt added the word “white” with a caret after the fact. Therefore, he very clearly wanted Hoar to know that he was only concerned with the white vote in the South; any benefits that African-Americans might receive from the bill were irrelevant. A similar sentiment appears in a letter to Hoar by G.B. Williams, a

23 “The Election Law.” Bangor Daily Whig and Courier (Bangor, Maine), 29 April 1890. 24 “The Senate Election Bill.” Boston Daily Advertiser (Boston, Massachusetts), 26 April 1890. 25 O.N. Platt “O.N. Platt to George Frisbie Hoar.” 14 July 1890. Seneca Falls. George Frisbie Hoar Collection, Carton 45. Massachusetts Historical Society. 26 Platt. 22

Civil War veteran. He asked his veteran friends about the bill, and “they seemed to feel as if that [the contents of the bill] was the principal thing established by the war, and the cost of enforcing that right, in men or money, was not to be considered.”27 For Williams, the Federal Elections Bill was an extension of the Civil War between the North and

South, and therefore Congress should pass it unconditionally so that the Civil War could end with a final Northern victory.

Although arguably racist in practice, like almost all of his peers Hoar believed in equality under the law for all people regardless of race. As seen in the quote where he accused Southern politicians of being “domestic enemies,” Hoar still used charged Civil

War language to promote the bill on the Senate floor.28 Unlike many of his counterparts, who wanted to punish the South for punishment’s sake, his desire to pass the bill came in part due to an earnest desire to elevate the socio-political status of African-American men. For example, in his early political career, he understood that the weak political and economic position of African-Americans stemmed from systematic disenfranchisement by a racist, elite white ruling class. In a letter to the Young Men’s Independent

Republican Club written during Reconstruction, he opined that the political and social equality “will never be secured until institution of universal learning [i.e. desegregated schools] shall be established throughout the entire country.”29 In his autobiography, discussing Southern electoral frauds, he noted “they [white Southerners] can always make their own rules…if the negro be ignorant, you may define ignorance and

27 G.B. Williams. “G.B. Williams to George Frisbie Hoar.” Boston, Massachusetts. 20 August 1890. Carton 46. Massachusetts Historical Society. 28 George Frisbie Hoar, speaking on H.R. 9416. Cong rec 2:8842. 29 Hoar, George Frisbie. “Hoar to Young Men’s Independent Republican Club of Melrose, Massachusetts,” 19 January 1878, Hoar Papers. Quoted from: Welch, Richard E. Jr. George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 81 23 disfranchise that.”30 Hoar, while a proponent of civil rights, still believed in a racial hierarchy. Although he believed that people should be treated equally, he nevertheless accepted as fact a cultural and racial inferiority of all other people to the white Anglo-

Saxon Protestant Christian.31 The failure of his personal project, the Federal Elections

Bill, rendered him sullen and depressed; in a letter, Hoar advocated that black

Americans “cultivate the virtues of integrity, industry, frugality, [and] chastity” rather than continue to fight for political equality.32 While Hoar continued to denounce the systematic discrimination and structural racism inherent in the American political system, calling Jim Crow laws a “practical re-establishment of slavery in everything but name,” he would never attempt to pass another civil rights bill.33

Hoar’s intentions aside, his generation of white, Civil War-era politicians and veterans strongly supported the bill due to its punitive power against the South. Hoar would not have been the only white supporter due to the bill’s potential to enfranchise

African-Americans politically, but the general rhetoric of older supporters focused on the bill’s potential to hurt the South, rather than its ability to help the black community.

An Unhyphenated America: Lodge, the Irish Machine, and his Allies

Henry Cabot Lodge was born in 1850 and thus did not come of age until after the

Civil War. His family, wealthy elites living in Massachusetts, supported the Union

30 Hoar, George Frisbie. Autobiography, 161 31 “Indian has been a savage ; the Negro has been a savage ; the lower order of Chinamen have been gross and sometimes bestial” etc. Hoar, Autobiography, 161 32 Hoar, George Frisbie. “Georgie Frisbie Hoar to Albert Clark, 5 December.” Quoted in Welch, Republicans, 162 33 Hoar, George Frisbie. “Party Government in the United States.” International Monthly, II (September 1900), 425-427. Quoted in Welch, 162. 24 financially during the Civil War.34 One major event of the Civil War heavily influenced

Lodge’s beliefs: the New York Draft Riots of 1863. Described as the “Irish Civil War” by

Toby Joyce, Irish immigrants, initially expressing anger at the draft, attacked and murdered approximately 150 black New Yorkers and Republican party officials.35

Ultimately, the firmly entrenched Irish political machine used its vast political influence to prevent the majority of rioters from being arrested and prosecuted.36 37 The teenaged

Lodge reacted to these riots with a disgust so strong that it instilled in him a lifelong hatred of the Irish; in 1913, he described the rioters as “utterly disloyal and deserv[ing] to be spoken of in history…as among the worst foes of the country.”38

This portrait of Lodge does not sound like one of somebody particularly inclined to support a civil rights bill, let alone write the last major civil rights bill in America for seventy years. Why then did Lodge write such a bill? Some scholars, like Mark

Schneider, have argued that, at the time, “Lodge’s advocacy of this measure was heartfelt and genuine,” and only after the failure of the bill, did Lodge turn to racist politics.39 There is some evidence for this claim. Lodge nearly worshipped Charles

Sumner, the radical Republican who fought bitterly for racial justice before and after the civil war.40 41 42 Nevertheless, I dispute this claim for several reasons. Firstly, as shown

34 Schriftgiesser, 22 35 Joyce, Toby. “The New York Draft Riots of 1863: An Irish Civil War?” History Ireland, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), 23-25 36 The Irish political machines, were Democratic institutions run by Irish immigrants and their descendants that gave limited financial support to new immigrants in exchange for voting for the preferred Democratic candidates. Keyssar, 157 37 Joyce, 26 38 Schriftgiesser, 23. 39 Schneider, Mark. Boston Confronts Jim Crow: 1890-1920. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 34, 51 40 Schneider, 34 41 Schriftgiesser, 19 42 “The first public man I ever saw, when I was a mere child in my father's house, was Charles Sumner. The first voice I ever heard speak on public affairs was his, and he was pleading the rights of humanity. 25 above, Lodge had already begun to harbor hateful and racist sentiments since he was a teenager. Secondly, while Lodge did greatly idolize Sumner, he did not idolize him for his abolitionist sentiments. In fact, as Widenor argues, Lodge purposefully downplayed the role of abolitionists in the Civil War.43 He credited the abolition of slavery, which to him was a “great result,” to the politicians “who through compromises, reticences, reserves, hesitations gradually gathered the people behind them,” i.e. political moderates, not radical abolitionists like Hoar or Sumner.44 Rather, he modeled himself after the only character of Sumner instead of adopting his beliefs.45 Thirdly, there are hints of his prejudice before the failure of the Federal Elections Bill. At a toast at the dinner of the Society of Brooklyn in 1888, Lodge discussed American ethnic identity:

But let us have done with British-Americans and Irish-Americans and German- Americans, and so on, and all be Americans, — nothing more and nothing less. If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description. 46

While this is a far cry from his overt racism of later years, the implication remains the same: one cannot have an ethnicity and be American. Identity qualifications and foreign cultures that create hyphenated Americans hurt American society. He continued by asserting that “the general flow of immigration should be wisely and judiciously checked” due an influence of criminals and radical beliefs.47 Although Lodge did not

Even a child could understand that.” Henry Cabot Lodge. Speeches and Addresses: 1884-1909. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), 263-264 43 Widenor, William C. Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 19 44 Lodge to Chapman, May 17, 193, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Quoted from Widenor, 19 45 Widenor, 19 46 Lodge. Speeches, 46 47 Lodge. Speeches, 47 26 explicitly call foreign culture inferior as he would later in life, it is clear that he still believed that immigration, and therefore, immigrants themselves, were harmful to the

American way of life. Finally, Lodge’s reaction, or lack thereof, after the bill’s defeat spoke volumes. In an interview with the New York Times, Lodge denied the possibility of a new elections bill “with a smile.”48 Comparatively, Hoar wrote a tearful ten page eulogy of the bill that ended by hoping that “in 1892, a new appeal shall be made to the conscience and understanding of the American people [who] will put forth strength enough to throw off the nightmare which oppresses them.”49 Although neither man would ever attempt to legislate civil rights again, their parting sentiments reflect on their character and concern with the bill. Therefore, it is clear, then, that Lodge was never very attached to the principles of equal rights that guided Hoar to draft the bill.

Why then did Lodge write the Federal Elections Bill, if not to support the rights of all men to vote nor to punish the South for disobedience? Lodge’s motives originated from his political ambition and his hatred for the Irish and the Irish political machine.

Firstly, the fact that Lodge was power-hungry was a secret to nobody. In 1888,

Benjamin Harrison ran on a platform of civil service and electoral reform.50 Lodge likely saw this mandate by his party as a chance to write a bill to increase his prestige.

Contemporary accounts suspected that this was Lodge’s goal in writing the bill. In a letter to Lodge, Sigourney Butler, a local Massachusetts Democrat, admits that he assumed that Lodge supported the bill “measure by reason of hopes of personal or

48 “What Mr. Lodge Thinks.” 49 George Frisbie Hoar. “The Fate of the Election Bill.” Forum. (Apr 1891): 127 50 Wang, 259 27 political aggrandizement” or “as a party measure.”51 Even people outside the political mainstream suspected Lodge’s support for the bill as mere political ambition than real conviction. One can also infer Lodge’s lust for power from a letter written to him by

Curtis Guild Jr., who would later be the governor of Massachusetts and a stalwart ally of

Lodge. In the letter ominously marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” Guild reports on a scheme to use a postmaster bill to increase Lodge’s popularity:

I supposed you saw that the Mass Civil Service etc. had endorsed the “Lodge” bill for postmasters. You [Lodge] have been robbed of so much credit justly yours that I made him amend the reading and really they needed no urging. The trouble is that these fellows “don’t know” and let themselves be led by the nose by a lot of narrow minded idiots. They aren’t unreasonable when the thing is squarely presented.52

Here, Guild related how he rewrote a speech endorsing a postmaster bill given by the

Massachusetts Civil Service to include more mentions of Lodge.53 Guild does not explicitly say that he did it under Lodge’s orders, but the sincerity and candidness of the letter implies that he had at least tacit approved from Lodge. Even more interestingly, in the next paragraph, Guild revealed that the “narrow minded idiots” were due to the

“Hoar influence,” which he described as “tottering failure of Massachusetts

Republicanism.”54 Guild saw Lodge as the true mastermind and talent behind the bill, compared to the “idiot” Hoar. While it is not clear whether Lodge agreed with Guild’s assertion about Hoar, Lodge remained very good friends with Guild for his entire life.

Indeed, Guild would later found the Young Massachusetts Republicans to help promote

51 Sigourney Butler. “Sigourney Butler to Henry Cabot Lodge.” Boston. 25 Nov 1890. Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Reel 4. Massachusetts Historical Society. 52 Curtis Guild Jr. “Curtis Guild Jr. to Henry Cabot Lodge.” Boston 13 Dec 1890. Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Reel 4. Massachusetts Historical Society. 53 “Lodge” Bill here refers not to the Federal Elections bill as it normally does, but to a postmaster bill crafted by Lodge. 54 Guild. 28

Lodge’s career.55 Lodge clearly did not find Guild’s publicizing nor his insults to Hoar and the Republican vanguard damaging to their friendship. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that Lodge saw the bill as a method to stand out from and as a challenge to the established political ruling class in order to gain fame and influence.

There is also significant evidence that Lodge wrote the bill as a way to curtail

Irish and other immigrant influence in America. Firstly, the rise of the Irish machines represented an existential threat to the Republican Party in general and to Lodge in particular. In many Northeastern cities, immigrants and children of immigrants had quickly begun to outnumber native born white Protestants like Lodge. Worse, those immigrants exercised their right to vote by means of the Irish political machine. These machines, which would register thousands of immigrant voters, often fraudulently, in exchange for basic safety nets and easier employment opportunities.56 After winning their loyalty, the machine leaders often imposed mandatory full Democratic ticket voting on its members.57 These machines were highly successful in mobilizing votes for the

Democrats in traditionally Republican dominated states, like New York, Illinois or Hoar’s and Lodge’s own Massachusetts. Between 1864 to 1884, forty-two of the fifty-two men who represented Massachusetts in Congress were Republicans; in 1890, a majority of

Massachusetts Congressmen would be Democrats, along with the governor and mayor of Boston.58 Furthermore, previous attempts by Massachusetts Republicans to put in place voting restrictions had not been successful. Poll taxes were paid by machine

55 Richard Abrams. Conservatism in a Progressive Era: Massachusetts Politics 1900-1912. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 40 56 Keyssar, 157. 57 Edward H. Miller.” They Vote Only for the Spoils: Massachusetts Reformers, Suffrage, Restriction, and the 1884 Civil Service Law.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Jul., 2009), 345 58 Miller, 348-351. 29 bosses, mandatory literacy tests were applied sparingly in practice, and immigrants were naturalized and registered to vote en masse. 59 For Massachusetts Republicans, weakening the Irish machines was a matter of political life or death. Both Hoar and

Lodge were acutely aware of the dangers of the Irish machine to the Republican party.

In 1883, long before the Federal Elections Bill and the total ascendancy of the Irish machine in Massachusetts politics, Hoar sent a letter to the fledging Representative

Lodge warning that “unless we can break this compact foreign vote we are gone and the grand chapter of old Massachusetts history is closed.”60 Thus, it comes as no surprise that Lodge and the Republicans wanted to utilize the Federal Elections Bill to curtail immigrant political power, as his own seat and party were at stake.

Lodge would not make public his deep-seated prejudices against the Irish, other immigrants, and people of color until after the Federal Elections Bill failed. In a speech to Congress in 1896 calling for strict and near total immigration restriction, he affirmed his belief in the inherent superiority of Anglo-Saxon Protestant:

"The dominant qualities of [the Anglo-Saxon's] mental constitution are, from the standpoint of character, a will power which scarcely any people except perhaps the Romans have possessed, an unconquerable energy, a very great initiative, an absolute empire over self, a sentiment of independence pushed even to excessive un sociability, a puissant activity, very keen religious sentiments, a very fixed morality, a very clear idea of duty."61

His argument against unrestricted immigration asserted that government should not let people of other creeds, races, and ethnicities immigrate to the United States, not due to economic or political reasons, but due to the fact that those people were simply inferior to white Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent. In addition to the New York Draft Riots,

59 Miller, 348 60 Hoar, to Lodge, March 18, 1993, Lodge Papers. Quoted in Widenor, 19 61 Lodge. Speeches, 263-264 30

Lodge’s family history likely supplemented his beliefs. He was a direct descendent of the original white Puritan settlers of Massachusetts, many of whom were wealthy,

Harvard educated merchants.62 His family’s socio-economic status contrasted sharply with that of the Boston Irish, who lived in slums in the inner city. Lodge also never gave up a long standing and immature grudge against Irish children, whom he referred to as

“muckers,” for throwing snowballs at him when he visited Boston Common.63 In Lodge’s mind, the contrast of economic status between his wealthy and educated family and the slum-dwelling “muckers,” was not due to the circumstances of birth but to the inferiority of the Irish. Indeed, Lodge never expressed anything but praise for his family, which made its fortune in the triangle slave trade by selling rum and cider at a premium during the American Revolution.64 In Lodge’s mind, it stood to reason that the Irish (and

Southern Europeans and African-Americans) were poor because they were inferior while it stands to reason that Anglo-Americans like Lodge were wealthy because they were superior.

Furthermore, Lodge clearly ascribed to the most prominent social theory of the time: . In the same speech, Lodge argued that “men of each race possess an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors.”65 Lodge believed that people of an inferior race could never cease to be inferior due to intrinsic cultural genes passed down through generations. In this speech, Lodge was building off the ideas of recent scientists such as Herbert Spencer and Joseph LeConte, who took Darwin’s theories of

62 Schriftgiesser, 5-8 63 Schriftgiesser, 18 64 Schriftgiesser, 6 65 Lodge. Speeches, 262. 31 evolution and applied them to the social sphere. Such philosophies were used to justify the poverty of many immigrants and people of color. Rather than realizing that impoverished economic conditions are usually due to either current or past systematic discrimination, Social Darwinists ascribed race to economic success. Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” and advocated for legislation prioritizing those deemed the “fittest” in society.66 LeConte took those ideas further and claimed that systemic and heritable cultural ideas stood apart from environment. He stressed that “man contrary to all else in nature is transformed, not in shape by external environment, but in character by his own ideals.”67 This tenet, that customs are heritable, quickly leads to implications that certain races’ customs are inherently and eternally inferior.

While the technical details of this debate probably escaped Lodge, these ideas were so incredibly pervasive in late 19th century thought that he was almost certainly influenced by them. Social Darwinism and behavior heritability ingrained Lodge’s racist beliefs: if people other than white Anglo-Saxon Protestants became too prevalent or too politically powerful, they would threaten his superior culture with their inferior genes.

The speech at New England Society of Brooklyn in 1888, ends with a solemn plea by

Lodge that “true Americanism demands that the ballot box everywhere shall be inviolate.”68 While he could be talking about the electoral frauds perpetrated by

Southern white gentry through the black codes, the context of the speech, which details

Lodge’s firm belief in immigration reform, implies that Lodge was referring to the new block of immigrant voters bolstered by the Irish machine. Lodge’s hatred of the Irish has

66 Robert C Bannister. Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 66-67 67 Bannister, 140 68 Lodge. Speeches, 48 32 already been established, and the bill would be an easy way to curtail their power.

Lodge alluded to this during his speech on the House floor defending the bill. In that speech, the same where he declared the bill “a national bill,” he immediately launched into an attack on the Irish political machine:

The cold figures [show] the enormous frauds committed in the city of New York…New York, however, is not the only large city in the United States, nor is it the only city where at times the elections have been tainted with fraud and corruption: such districts unfortunately exist elsewhere. They are plagues and pests which should be promptly cured.”69

Note how Lodge focused on the corruption of cities in this section of the speech. As only cities had the Irish political machines, he was not referring to the South, which was rural and agricultural. Lodge used very harsh and bitter language to describe the machines, calling them “plagues and pests.”70 While in his speech Lodge did eventually attack the

South for their own electoral frauds, his tone was much more conciliatory. Empathizing with the South and their “negro question,” Lodge noted that “we shall never deal with it

[the negro question] successfully by raging over it and calling each other hard names.”71

It seems that Lodge kept the hard names for the Irish and the Irish alone.

Some of Lodge’s peers, especially those who were as young or as inexperienced as he, had similar reasons for supporting the bill. A. A. Taylor, a first term Congressmen from Tennessee who was forty-one years old at the time of the Bill’s debate in the

House, complained not of Democrat intimidation in the South, but rather of “ballot-box thieves, bribe-givers and bribe-takers throughout the land.”72 The language of stealing,

69 Quoted from: “Lodge’s Great Speech.” 70 “Lodge’s Great Speech.” 71 “Lodge’s Great Speech.” 72 A.A. Taylor. “The Speech of Hon. A.A. Taylor of Iowa.” 2 July 1890. (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Publishing Office, 1890), 5. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 33 as well as the emphasis of the frauds occurring in the entire country, implies that Taylor believed that the Irish machines were the true goal of the bill. Charles Russel, a 38 year old second term Congressman from , attempted reconciliation with the

South, praised the “growth of a new and peaceful South on the line of business development and an intelligent application of resources and enterprise,” and asserted that the Federal Elections Bill would “stimulat[e]…the fullness of this growth and the perfection of this development.”73 Like Lodge, Russel used words of reconciliation with the South. They could understand and sympathize with the whites of the South. The

Irish received no such sympathy.

Similarly, The New York Times and the German language press, both fervent opponents of the Irish machine, supported the bill in its early days. 74 75 Even opponents noted the bill’s application to Northern Irish political machines. Former Speaker of the

House, John G. Carlisle of Kentucky, noted that the bill attempted to control “the machinery of elections for representatives for Congress the Southern Congressional districts and from a few Northern districts”; by discussing those “few Northern districts,”

Carlisle was almost certainly referencing the Irish and Democratic controlled sections of the North.76 The Boston Globe, then a mouthpiece of the Irish machine and “a

73 Charles Russel. “The Speech of Hon. Charles Russel.” 30 June 1890. (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Publishing Office, 1890), 5. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 74 Dotson, David Wendell. Henry Cabot Lodge: A Political Biography, 1887-1901. (Norman, Dissertation for University of Oklahoma, 1980), 130. 75 Interestingly, the New York Times would eventually oppose the bill as the debate wore on in Congress. The reasons for doing so are not entirely clear. The New York Times was in dire financial straits in 1890 (cf. History of the New York Times by Elmer Davis pg. 166), and it is possible that the editors thought that a sensationalist campaign about the Federal Elections Bill, copying the more successful yellow journals of the time. Generally speaking, Times articles argued that claiming that it would heavily disrupt the social order in the South for little gain or reason. In addition, many of the negative articles focus on the negative effects on the whites on the South; therefore, it is also likely that the editors took offense with the bill’s ability to enfranchise Southern African-Americans. 76 “Ex-Speaker Carlisle’s Views. “The Daily Inter Ocean. Chicago. 23 March 1890. 34 vociferous Lodge opponent,” claimed that the bill attempted to make up for “losing New

England” by capturing votes in the North and South.77 78

While much of the narrative around the bill was characterized by a discussion of

Southern electoral frauds, it is clear that Lodge and others also painted the bill as one that would not just enfranchise Southern blacks but also would disenfranchise the Irish, weaken the Irish political machinery, and remove the Democrats from power in the

North. Unfortunately, Lodge’s support for the bill deeply hurt him in the 1890 election.

Although he ran against a paper candidate, , who had never held political office and ran a weak campaign, Lodge only won the election by 14,558 votes to

Everett’s 13,562.79 In comparison, Lodge won his previous election by 5,000 votes.80

Lodge’s narrow victory likely contributed to his swift abandonment of civil rights and his disowning of the Federal Elections Bill that had made him so famous around the country. In the coming years, instead of attacking naturalized immigrants, he turned his focus to immigration restriction; he was one of the first mainstream politicians to come out in favor of literacy tests barring Eastern and Southern Europeans from entering the country.81 As Lodge and his allies show, to support and write a civil rights bill does not make one a supporter of civil rights. In addition, what may seem like a bill to enfranchise a portion of the population can also be used in exactly the same way to disenfranchise a different portion of the population.

77 Schneider, 35 78 Boston Globe quoted from: “The Election Law.” Bangor Daily Whig & Courier. 29 April 1890. 79 Schneider, 50. 80 Schneider, 49. 81 Schneider, 51. 35

“Rights Guaranteed”: African-Americans and the Federal Elections Bill

The witnesses of Chappelle’s rally, which affirmed support for the bill while still criticizing Republican establishment’s heretofore inaction, declared it an overwhelming success. The New York Age, a highly influential black newspaper that employed activists such as W.E.B. du Bois and Gertrude Bustill Mossel, celebrated the rally as a gathering of “liberty-loving people of Boston [who] manifested much enthusiasm and gave vent to their feelings in hearty applause.”82 Hoar, while not in attendance, received a letter from R.P. Hallowell, who was the only white speaker at the event. He asserted that the event was “a very good meeting and entirely creditable to the men who were responsible for it.”83 Hallowell continually emphasized the agency of the organizers throughout his letter, that the meeting was created by the community for the community, and that opposition papers had grossly mischaracterized the event.84 Opposition papers, like The New York Times, portrayed the event as a “shrewdly-managed affair by

Republican politicians who knew how to play upon the colored voter.”85 By painting the

African-American community as child-like and controlled by the Republican party,

Democratic partisan newspapers and independent opponents like the Times wanted to discredit the legitimacy and personal activism of the African-American speakers at the event.

82 Neil. 83 , R.P. Hallowell. “R.P. Hallowell to George Frisbie Hoar.” 5 Aug 1890. Carton 168 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 84 “Certainly white people were not excluded but the call was limited to colored people.” Hallowell. 85 “Force Bill Needing Help.” The New York Times (New York, New York), 2 Aug 1890. 36

Ultimately, while the Republican Party may have helped in part to set up the event, the African-Americans who organized the event and other similar events, did so under their own volition without party predilections. The Faneuil Hall meeting prominently featured Edwin G. Walker, the leading black Democrat in Massachusetts, who endorsed the bill and, inspired by the Republicans’ attempt at civil rights, avowed not to “censure the whole party…because there are in that party men who are dishonest.”86 Furthermore, Chappelle’s meeting was only one of many non-partisan meetings held throughout the country by prominent African-American businessmen, politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders, and journalists. In Newport, Rhode Island,

George T. Downing, a known critic of the Republican establishment, led a group of

African-American men who convened in front of the State House to affirm their support of the bill.87 88 Thomas Fortune, editor in chief of the New York Age and another critic of the Republican Party, sponsored two National Afro-American League conventions, one in January 1890 in Chicago and another in February in Washington D.C., both of which endorsed the bill. Chappelle was a chair at the second meeting and played a major role in drafting the resolution in support of the bill, and he took what he had learned in

Washington to Boston later that year.89 A few days after the meeting in Faneuil Hall,

Washington D.C. hosted the only transracial convention in favor of the bill, which was sponsored by the National Equal Rights Association. Speakers included Frederick

86 Walker, Edwin G. Quoted from Schneider, 38. 87 “In Favor of the .” The New York Age. 5 Aug 1890. 88 Downing was a local civil rights activist and a close ally of . Downing felt that the Republican Party had abandoned the African-American community after nominating James Blane, whom he considered an “unfortunate candidate” riddled with scandals. Thus, although remaining a political independent maverick, he spent the rest of his life allied with the Democrats. Washington, S. A. M., and George Thomas Downing. Sketch of His Life and Times: A Biography of George Thomas Downing. (Newport: The Milne Printery, 1910), 18-19 89 Schneider, 37. 37

Douglass, C.W. Anderson, president of the Young Men’s colored Republican Club, civil war veterans, and tens of white politicians. Like the previous convention, they drafted a resolution supporting the bill and sent it to Congress.90 Outside of these large conventions, politicians convened to send in their own resolutions of support for the bill to Congress. In a resolution from the Colored Convention of Tennessee, Edward Shane wrote that “the wholesale suppression of the colored vote of the South is a menace to the prosperity and perpetuity of this government.”91 Similarly, several prominent local politicians in the 10th district of Tennessee declared that “we ask only for the rights guaranteed by our federal constitution.”92

Black political activism, therefore, was not a puppet of the white Republican party machine. Rather, African-American men earnestly supported and fought for the Federal

Elections Bill within the constraints of a white political party establishment hostile to them. Their support was so public and impactful that opponents of the bill were forced to reckon with it while trying to discount it. For example, the Times article about

Chappelle’s rally could not deny the existence or scale of the event; instead, the writer tried to discredit the event by painting it as a partisan affair.93 Therefore, African-

American activism around the Federal Elections Bill was prevalent, notable, and effective enough to make a serious impact on public opinion of the bill despite the challenges of working in a racialized and racist government and party system.

90 Thornton, E.L. “Endorsing the Lodge Bill.” The New York Age (New York, New York), 16 Aug 1890. 91 Shane, Edward. “Colored Conv. of Tenn. to George Frisbie Hoar.” 29 July 1890. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 92 Washington , D.W. et al. “D.W. Washington et al. to George Frisbie Hoar.” 23 July 1890. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 93 “Force Bill Needing Help.” 38

A multitude of African-American men from all over the country wrote to Lodge and Hoar in support of the bill. These letters showed who was allowed to participate in the white political process, who was not afraid of violence or societal repercussions, and how they acted vis-à-vis the white establishment. Those who wrote letters were mostly either newspaper editors or other highly educated professionals. While some former slaves did write letters and attend the various transregional conferences, only the white educated, like Chappelle, played prominent roles. The content and the style of the letters written to Lodge and Hoar display a phenomenon that Evelyn Brooks

Higginbothan defines as the “politics of respectability.” In her book, Righteous

Discontent, which details the woman’s movement in the Black Baptist Church at the turn of the century, she notes that, in the framework of the politics of respectability, “the

Baptist women emphasized manners and morals while simultaneously asserting traditional forms of protest.”94 While politics of respectability does contain an implicit criticism of “negative practices and attitudes among their own people,” the community’s use of the politics of respectability was neither “an accommodationist stance towards racism,” “a compensatory ideology in the face of powerlessness,” nor “a mindless mimicry of white behavior.”95 They did fight against social injustice, but they also remained “situated within he larger structural framework of America.”96

The handwriting and the style of the letters display the politics of respectability.

The letters are all typed or written with very clean handwriting, as compared to the unkempt style usually used by white Americans. This is likely the case due to the

94 Evelyn Brooks Higginbothan. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880-1920. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 187 95 Higginbothan, 187 96 Higginbothan, 187. 39 assumption of higher, unfair and racist standards placed upon black Americans, where poor handwriting could be seen as a symbol of poor education and play into established racial stereotypes. Evidence for this theory can be seen in two letters. In the closing of his letter to Hoar by J.E. Bruce, the Vice President of the Associated Correspondents of

Race Newspapers in Cleveland, apologized for his “imperfect letter” and states that he is only “a graduate of the University of Adversity.”97 Such humility was completely unwarranted; his letter is written in a clean, easy to read style and contains no spelling errors (see figure 1). A second example can be seen in a letter by Henry F. Downing of the Washington D.C. based Afro-American News Company. In it, Downing asked for funds to help support a campaign to publicize the bill across the South. He ended his letter by asserting that “the members of our firm are all gentlemen who are known to be men of standing and of good reputation.”98 No other such assurance appears in any other letter to either Lodge or Hoar, which implies that Downing was preempting white criticisms about the trustworthiness of African-Americans. Secondly, many defended the bill from charges of inciting racial violence and emphasized the good and honest nature of all African-Americans. The reason for this defense is likely similar to that of the cleaner handwriting. Black writers, knowing the intense prejudice against their race, had to first reckon and dismiss the baseless and racist stereotypes that could discredit them from the start. For example, in the letter to Hoar, J.E. Bruce asserted that “the impression that the negroes of the south will endeavor to dominate over the white

97 J.E. Bruce. “J.E. Bruce to George Frisbie Hoar.” 8 Aug 1890. Carton 168 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 98 Henry F. Downing. “Henry F. Downing to Henry Cabot Lodge.” 2 Sept 1890. Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Reel 4. Massachusetts Historical Society. 40 people…[is a] cowardly, malicious and mendacious statement.”99 Nevertheless, this rhetorical humility is coupled with sharp criticisms of the white establishment and the political establishment. Bruce attacked the Democrats in the Senate for acting not “in good faith and with a clear conscience” and warns that “the great God above…will punish the world for their evil and the wicked for their iniquity.”100 Downing attacked the apathy of the white government, noting that “the voice of a people when demanding a right is all-powerful, and will be, and must be recognized by those who by pleasure of the people are their elected lawmakers.”101 Although both Bruce and Downing wrote in a style according to the politics of respectability to talk to the white power figures, they did not compromise their message and opposition to the white political structure.

During my research, I could find no prominent credible accounts of contemporary

African-Americans rejecting the bill. The New York Times did report on a couple of supposed resolutions passed by African-Americans against the Elections Bill, but I find them both non-credible. The first describes a convention of black Ohio Democrats that rejected the Federal Elections Bill due to the fact that it will be “most potently productive of woe in the revival of race antagonisms…which our people are not prepared to endure.”102 The Times’ source for this story seems to be an article published four days before in The Atlanta Constitution, a Bourbon Democratic partisan journal published in the South. 103 Partisan journals often distorted stories to fit preconceived party narratives, and The Atlanta Constitution was obviously not published in Ohio where the

99 Bruce, J.E. 100 Bruce, J.E. 101 Downing. 102 “The Force Bill Denounced.” The New York Times (New York, New York), 28 Aug 1890. 103 “Negro Democrats in Ohio.” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, Georgia), 24 August 1890. 41 event allegedly happened. Since I can find no other origin for this story, it is likely that it is either a fictional account or greatly exaggerated. The Times also reports on a meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, where a “mass meeting of negroes” asserted that the bill’s

“passage would do more than anything else to destroy the friendly relations between the races of the South [where] the weaker race (colored) would be the sufferers.”104 Putting aside the absurdity of the statement about “friendly relations,” the Times noted the source of the article is Alabama Democratic Senator Morgan, who, suffice to say, was not a credible speaker for the African-American community.105 This is not to say that there were not those who opposed it; without a doubt, there were likely thousands, if not more, who did. However, they were a minority who did not make significant waves in the historical record.

Regardless, black supporters still often suggested changes to the bill when they felt their perspective was absent from it. For example, in a letter to Hoar, George

Lattimore, head of the Afro-American League of , criticized a statute in the bill. Noting that federal supervision will not take effect until 50 men have complained to the government, he asserted that “in the south, if 50 or 100 men were to make a request of this kind and they lived through that election, it would be miraculous,”

Lattimore suggests striking that section from the bill and making it apply to every polling station countrywide.106 The only three black members of Congress, all Republicans

Representatives from the South, all endorsed the bill, but did so with reservations.

104 “A Protest from the Negro.” The New York Times (New York, New York), 16 Aug 1890. 105 During a defense of the Jim Crow laws enacted in the wake of the failure of the Federal Elections Bill, Morgan stated “In physical, mental, social, inventive, religious, and ruling power the African race holds the lowest place, as it has since the world has had a history, and it is no idle boast that the white race holds the highest place.” Quoted in Calhoun, 285. 106 George W. Lattimore. “George W. Lattimore to George Frisbe Hoar.” 9 Aug 1890. Carton 168 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 42

Although Henry Cheatham did not comment on the bill, the other two members, Thomas

Miller and John Langston, implicitly criticized the Republican establishment in their affirmations of support. Langston noted that even “under our amended Constitution” blacks did not even come close to sharing the rights as whites while Miller critiqued the establishments’ obsession with voting by asserting that “what we need in this land is not so many [political] offices…we need protection.”107 While the majority of African-

American men did support the bill, they did not do so unconditionally.

Unlike white support, which occurred almost only among Republicans and

Northerners, black support for the bill transcended party, age, and region. A letter from the Office of the People’s Advocate noted that “we know no South or North, East or

West…We are identified with a race which has participated in every war that has been fought for the glory.”108 Prominent black allies of the bill included Frederick Douglass, a

Southern, former slave, a loyal Republican and an old man at the time of the bill’s debate; Julius Caesar Chappelle, a thirty eight year old former slave and career politician; and Edward Walker, a Democrat and native Bostonian. In addition, unlike the factions of Hoar and Lodge, who supported the bill as a punitive measure against the

South and as a civil service reform to hurt Irish political machines, respectively, all black supporters supported the bill for the same reason: it promised to enfranchise African-

Americans politically throughout the country and attempted to enforce the then toothless

Fifteenth Amendment. In the bill, the black community throughout the country saw a chance the political enfranchisement promised and then forgotten by the white ruling

107 Quoted in: Brady, 166. 108 Office of the People’s Advocate. “Office of the People’s Advocate to George Frisbie Hoar.” 24 July 1890. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 43 class during Reconstruction. The African-Americans in the South felt the anger that

Chappelle did, that “the bill should have passed 25 years ago,” but its lateness did not preclude support.109 Those in the North both felt solidarity to those oppressed and murdered in the South and saw the bill as a call to arms to assert their presence in the

North; W. W. Doherty, a speaker at Chappelle’s rally, proclaimed that “the voice of the

North should be heard…the time is fast approaching when these young men will not be quite so submissive as their ancestors.”110 Together, they formed a unified front of support that made itself present throughout the United States.

After the final defeat of the Federal Elections Bill in the Senate, the African-

American community rightfully felt betrayed again by the Republican Party. In 1891,

Bostonian African-Americans proposed that the party run a local black politician as a gesture of goodwill and forgiveness. They chose William H. Dupree, a former chairman of the Equal Rights Association and a local black politician, as candidate for state auditor. The Republican party instead chose a white man, William O. Armstrong. This final insult, added to the failure of the Elections Bill, led to a rise in political independence among the black Massachusetts community; many thought neither party was willing to advocate civil rights strongly enough for their satisfaction.111

Despite the abandonment of the white establishment, African-Americans never stopped fighting for their equal rights throughout the country.112 In April, long after the defeat of the Elections Bill in January, Benjamin Lyde, a member of the Colored

109 Quoted in Nell. “At the Cradle of Liberty.” 110 Note the criticism of members of the community, which evokes politics of respectability. Quoted in Nell. “At the Cradle of Liberty.” 111 Schneider, 53-54. 112 Schneider, 54. 44

National League, wrote a short letter to George Frisbie Hoar. In that letter, which asked

Hoar for advice, Lyde claimed that despite the bill’s defeat, the League would continue to persist in its mission.113 The fight for equal rights only ended for the white majority, whose status allowed them to end that fight. Black Americans, who had worked within the party’s framework to enact change during the debate on the Federal Elections Bill, would not stop.

Conclusion

Although the factions represented by Hoar, Lodge and Chappelle all supported the Federal Elections Bill, they all did so for different reasons: whether to punish the

South, to regulate the Irish machine, or to fight oppression in an oppressive system. As

Lodge and Hoar show, supporting a civil rights bill does not make a person support civil rights. As Chappelle shows, supporting the product of the establishment does not make a person support the establishment. The three factions were part of the zeitgeist of

1890, which created a unique coalition that could only exist in that moment of transition, before the old radical abolitionists died off, before younger white America abandoned civil rights for white populism, and before betrayal and apathy alienated black America from the Republican Party. The Federal Elections Bill thus represented a clash between the era of Reconstruction and the era of the Gilded Age. Its defeat and the subsequent breakup of its supporters ended the viability of civil rights in the eyes of the white majority and politically validated the wholesale discrimination of black Americans throughout the country in exchange for a governmental embracing of pan-white

113Benjamin W. Lyde. “Benjamin W. Lyde to George Frisbie Hoar. Boston. April 4th, 1891. Carton 170 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 45

American identity. This pan-white American identity would be emblemized by the main opposition group to the bill: white populists. Their growing influence would be a major impetus for ambitious young politicians like Lodge and his allies to abandon the bill after its failure. That white populism, whose opposition to the Federal Elections Bill manifested in part through sweeping defeats for the Republican party throughout the country, forced the younger Republicans to reevaluate their political positions and eventually to abandon civil rights completely.

46

Figure 1. An excerpt of J.E Bruce’s letter to George Frisbie Hoar. Note the clean handwriting, atypical of letters sent to Hoar. Bruce, J.E. “J.E. Bruce to George Frisbie Hoar.” 8 Aug 1890. Carton 168 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society.

47

Chapter 2

“Array Race Against Race:” The Rise of White Protestant Populism

and the Fall of the Federal Elections Bill

The 29th of May, 1890: Memorial Day. It was the weekend before Henry Cabot

Lodge would introduce Federal Elections Bill for formal debate in the House of

Representatives. One hundred miles away from Washington D.C., in Richmond,

Virginia, the former capital of the Confederate States of America, a parade of thousands of Southerners marched west out of the city. They started at Franklin Street and passed houses brightly decorated for the occasion. One resident even spent a sum of 300 dollars to mark the occasion. They were led by the Governor of Virginia himself,

Fitzhugh Lee. Their destination: the newly unveiled monument to the head of the Lost

Cause: Confederate General Robert E. Lee.1

Critics watched on bitterly as the South celebrated and cemented the idea of the

Lost Cause, which portrayed the Civil War as a heroic struggle to protect Southern culture from Northern aggression. Some older white Northerners, especially those who fought for the Union, strongly protested the monument. The Secretary of the Navy,

Benjamin F. Tracy, disavowed the monument and ordered the Marine Band not to attend.2 In a letter to George Hoar on August 20th, G.B. Williams, a veteran from

Massachusetts who attended the ceremonies with his son, who had recently moved to the South, was horrified at the unveiling; he pleaded to Hoar to do “what is wise and

1 “The Lee Statue Unveiled.” The New York Times (New York, New York), 29 May 1890. 2 Caroline E. Janney. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 182 48 right” by passing the Federal Elections Bill as soon as possible.3 In addition to white

Northerners, several local African-Americans denounced the monument. All three black members of the Richmond City Council voted against the Lee monument, and John

Mitchell, a local newspaper editor, angrily wrote “he [the Negro] put up the Lee

Monument and should the time come, will be there to take it down.” 4 5

In the dedication of the Robert E. Lee Monument, orator Archer Anderson boldly proclaimed to thousands waving American and Confederate flags and proudly displaying portraits of George Washington and Robert E. Lee side by side, that the monument stood not as “a record of civil strife, but as a perpetual protest against whatever is low and sordid in our public and private objects.”6 While the Lee Monument was one of the most prominent, it was by no means the first major Confederate monument that attempted to reconstruct the narrative of the war in the South. In 1878, twelve years earlier, when a Confederate monument was unveiled in Augusta, Georgia,

Charles Colcock Jones Jr. asserted that the South fought for “liberty [and] freedom…[Southerners] are, in a moral point of view, unaffected by the result of the contest.”7 After the Augusta Monument, David Blight argues “Confederate memories no longer dwelled as much on mourning or explaining defeat; they offered a set of

3 Williams, G.B. “G.B. Williams to George Frisbie Hoar.” Boston, Massachusetts. 20 August 1890. 4 Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, 269 5 Quoted in Blight, 269 6 Quoted from Blight, 269 7 Quoted from Blight, 265 49 conservative traditions by which the entire country could gird itself against radical, political and industrial disorder.”8 9

At the same time that former Union soldiers condemned the establishment of the

Lee Monument, as Stuart McConnell asserts, “white Northerners and white Southerners were engaged in a veritable love feast [sic] of reconciliation [and] reunions.”10 Opinions on Confederates and Confederate symbols softened; in 1881, the Northern publication the National Tribune exalted Confederate symbols “as exponents of manly daring, fortitude, and devotion to an idea (although a wrong one).”11 For many whites, the

Federal Elections Bill was reopening a wound between North and South that had begun to heal. Yet the reigniting of Civil War era tensions does not wholly explain the fervent opposition to Federal Elections Bill; rather, it was a symptom of South’s changing conception of itself. Just as support for the bill split into three discrete factions, the opposition too split into three factions. Similar to how Northern support differed generationally, Southern opposition was divided between those who had fought in the war and those who had not. While the two different groups based their criticism on a similar premise, that Northern meddling in Southern affairs would upset the balance and natural hierarchy of races, the veterans felt no need to cage their criticism in economic or social terms. Rather, they explicitly asserted that the Federal Elections Bill would harm the white ruling class due by elevating Southern African-Americans politically.

8 Blight, 266. 9 However, it is true that after the dedication of the Lee Monument in 1890 and the popular response therein that the number of Confederate Monuments built in the South exploded. See Figure 1 at the end of the section. 10 Stuart McConnell. Glorious Contentment. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 190. 11 Quoted in McConnell, 191. 50

However, white populists, the third faction of opposition, had a completely different rationale for opposing the bill. Richard Hofstadter defines late 19th century white populism as “a kind of popular impulse that is endemic in American political culture…a trend of thought…that expressed the discontents of a great many farmers and businessmen with the economic changes of the late nineteenth century.”12 Their rise mirrored and existed alongside that of Confederate nostalgia. Both embraced an anti-establishment ethos and the superiority of the white man. However, white populists celebrated the hard and honest white yeoman farmer while Bourbon Democrats and former Confederates glorified rich elite men like Lee. Like African-American men, white populists also existed outside the political mainstream. Unlike African-American men who collaborated with the white elites within Washington as well as created their own networks of support, white populists were as a whole hostile to all white elites,

Republican and Democrat. White populists rejected the party framework and created their own party, the Populist Party. Their victories in the Midwest shocked the two major parties. White populists, who were compromised mainly of Protestant farmers, were in theory benefited by the bill, as voter discrimination targeted literacy and wealth rather than race, yet, but for the notable exception of Robert M. La Follette, they were almost entirely opposed to the bill. Their opposition stemmed from three main reasons: an anti- authoritarian ethos, economic concerns, and racism against African-Americans. La

Follette was the only major populist who supported the bill, and he likely did so due to a combination of political ambition and genuine concern for his base. However, his subsequent defeat in the midterm elections and political clash with Lodge led him to

12Richard Hofstadter. The Age of Reform. (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 4 51 distance himself from the bill. La Follette’s later career would align more closely with the white populist and progressive norm.

In this chapter, I propose that white populism’s opposition to the Federal

Elections Bill was a primary contributor to the bill’s failure. Unlike most scholars who point to the interior political betrayal of Western Republican Senators who postponed the bill to discuss the silver coinage issue, I argue that the rise of white populism influenced the Western Senators’ decision to reject and ultimately defeat the bill. White populism had taken hold in the American West and politicians had realized that. Thus, in order to represent their constituents’ beliefs and get reelected, those Western

Republicans Senators embraced ideals of white populism, which necessitated a rejection of the Federal Elections Bill.

“Natural Superiority:” The Bourbon Southern Gentry and the Federal Elections Bill

For the white Southern gentry, the Federal Elections Bill was the final Union insult. Just as the changing Southern identity explains some of the arguments that played before hundreds of thousands in Richmond, so does it explain the arguments made in front of a crowd of a few hundred in Congress. While the majority of

Southerners decried the North’s meddling in what they considered wholly Southern affairs, the thrust of their argument split distinctly along generational lines, just as arguments in support did for the older Reconstruction Republicans and the younger

Gilded Age Republicans. Those who had lived through or fought in the Civil War made no pretenses about their reasons for disliking the bill: it would extend suffrage to a race of wholly inferior people. Indeed, politicians did not even attempt to hide their racist 52 views when making speeches in Congress, which indicates that these politicians felt complete political and electoral security to appeal to arguments based on racial superiority and inferiority.

During the debates over the Federal Elections Bill in Congress, Southern congressman after congressman who had served in the war took the stand and framed the bill as an attack on the rightful position of the white man. Representative Hilary

Hebert of Alabama, a second lieutenant of the Confederate Army, claimed, that given the existence of black suffrage, the suppression of the black vote was necessary because “under these circumstances what was left for the white man to do but unite

[and] assert his natural superiority?”13 Representative James B. McCreary, a major in the 11th Kentucky Cavalry Division, asserted that “divinity and time will solve the race problem,” and that Northern attempts to reduce prejudice would only hamper it.14

Senator Alfred Colquitt, a Confederate Officer, attacked the bill as intending “to take possession of the Southern States and subject them…to negro ascendancy and party despotism.”15 The Tennessee State Legislature drafted a declaration proclaiming the

“Force Bill by the Federal Congress as a declaration of war on the social and financial interests of the South.”16 All these quotations harp on a shared theme: that the South alone should deal with Southern problems while any Northern interference would subvert Southern values, i.e. the supremacy of the white gentry class and dominance over all other peoples, especially those of color.

13 Hilary Herbert. “The Speech of Hon. Hilary A. Herbert.” June 28th, 1890. Washington D.C., 1890, 5. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 14 “Speech of Hon. James B. McCreary of Kentucky.” June 28th, 1890. Washington D.C., 1890. Pg. 7. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 15 Charles W. Calhoun. Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869-1900. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 254 16 “A Protest from Tennessee.” The New York Times (New York, New York), 21 Jan 1891. 53

Southerners who were too young to fight in the Civil War tended to focus on the letter of the law rather than explicitly discuss racial tensions. Representative Thomas C.

McRae, who was 39 at the time of the debate, complained that the bill “is unnecessary and expensive and seeks to surround the election precincts with political hirelings of the

Republican party for the purpose of obtaining party victories”17 Young or old, all the

Southern congressmen complained of subversion of Southern white law by Northern carpetbaggers. Whether they used the older polemical language of “war” or couched it in entirely economic terms, prominent Southerners opposed the bill on the grounds that it would weaken white (and usually Democratic) home rule.

This fear of race war by white Southerners could and did cross political party lines and hinted at the coming political force of white populism, which would harness that fear into a political movement. This position was recognized by contemporary

Southerners. For example, in a New York Times interview, former Confederate Colonel

James A. Hamilton stated “there is no use talking…the people of the South, irrespective of politics, will never submit to being ruled by the negro element.”18 In other words, no white Southerner would dare lose one bit of political power to an African-American, and the Federal Elections Bill represented a potential loss of power to all white Southerners.

A. W. Shaffer, a Republican and the Chief Federal Supervisor of Elections in North

Carolina, groused that the Southern Republican party is “composed largely - two-thirds - of a confessedly inferior, despised and contemned race, barely a quarter of a century

17 Thomas C. McRae. “The Speech of Hon. Thomas C. McRae.” June 30th, 1890. Washington D.C., 1890, 3. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 18 “A Southerner on the Force Bill.” The New York Times (New York, New York), 24 Aug 1890. 54 out of barbarism.”19 Vulgar statements such as these were repeated by Northerners who moved South for employment during Reconstruction. Hoar received a petition from a group of working class Republican whites who had moved South after the war.

Despite being Northern transplants, they strongly identified with the familiar Southern white polemic. In their petition, they asserted that the Federal Elections Bill would “array race against race” and “render the Republican party odious to the intelligence, virtuous, and tax-paying people thereof.” In other words, they asserted that the bill would be toxic to all white Southerners. 20

Older Republicans such as Hoar either ignored or disparaged this ideology while younger Republicans were more likely to embrace white identity politics. In a speech defending the bill on the Senate floor, Hoar completely dismissed the fear of white replacement. In fact, he argued the exact opposite point: he decried the lack of access to proper suffrage by black voters, describing it as "the domination of a white man's minority…that we are called upon by a just regard to our own rights and for constitutional liberty to consider.”21 The younger generation of Republicans acknowledged and attempted to assuage that white fear. Representative H.F. Finley of

Kentucky, who was the son of slave-owners, argued that the true purpose of the bill was that “a white constituency [can] believe…that his vote ought to count in this Government just as much as the vote of any other man.”22 In other words, Finley was trying to assuage his white working class constituency by blaming the former Confederates

19 Shaffer, A.W. “A Southern Republican on the Lodge Bill.” The North American Review, Vol. 151, No. 408 (Nov., 1890): 603 20 M. Y. Wilson et al. “Remittance of citizens of Anniston, Alabama, against the passage of the Federal Elections Bill.” 2 Aug 1890. 21 George Frisbie Hoar, speaking on H.R. 9416, on Aug 20, 1890, 51st Congress, 1st Session, Congressional Record 17, pt. 2:8846. 22 McRae. 55

Democrats, not black Americans, for their economic woes and asserting that the

Federal Elections Bill would remedy that discrimination rather than weaken their position. Lodge attempted to spin the Elections Bill as more supportive of white voting rights than black. In a September interview with the North American Review, Lodge claimed that after the bill passed, that instead of “negro rule”, there would instead be

“the rise of a Republican party in every Southern State, led by and in good part composed of white men, native to the ground, whose votes are now suppressed under the pretence [sic] of maintaining race supremacy as against the negro.”23 Lodge clearly already understood that much of white America was undergoing a political demographic shift from strict partisan affiliation due to cultural heritage to a new conception of political thought: white populism.

White Populism: America’s Third Party

The 1890 election was a disaster for the Republicans. With the party set to lose control of the Houses to the Democrats when the new Congress convened in April, the passage of the Federal Election was in jeopardy. The Republicans suffered devastating losses in the West. However, to both parties’ surprise, Republicans lost seats not only to the Democrats. A new political force captured a Senator from Kansas, the state legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska and made significant gains in both North and

South Dakota: the American People’s Party, also known as the Populist Party.24 Two years later, in the 1892 Presidential election, the Populist Party would have a serious

23 Henry Cabot Lodge and T.V. Powderly. “The Federal Elections Bill.” The North American Review, Vol. 151, No. 406 (Sep., 1890): 265 24 Richard White. It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 373 56 showing: the ticket of James Weaver, a Representative from Iowa, and James Field, the former Attorney General of Virginia, would carry five Western states and win more than one million votes. Only four years later, however, the Populist Party would be folded into the Democratic coalition: famed orator, lawyer, and Westerner emerged as a compromise candidate between the traditional Bourbon Democrats and the new white populists.25 In other words, the debate on the Federal Elections Bill occurred at a unique time in American history: the crossroads of a party shift. The unpopularity of the Federal Elections Bill for white populists not only contributed to the bill’s defeat, but also to an exodus of the white farming class from the Republican party.

Why then were white populists generally so opposed to the bill? The aforementioned arguments by Lodge and Finley show that there were attempts to market the bill to the white working class. In addition, Lodge and Finley were not lying: the bill would have helped the white Protestant working class, the main demographic of the white populist party, by removing restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests that also affected whites. The first , which would exempt people from paying the poll taxes or taking the literacy tests, would not appear until 1890 in Virginia, the year that the Federal Elections Bill was under debate. Furthermore, because such grandfather clauses only exempted the potential voter if his grandfather was eligible to vote, they did not apply to many poor whites due to historical property and education requirements. 26 To understand why white populists were the bill’s most fervent opponents, the shape of populism in 1890 needs to be defined.

25 White, 375 26 Alexander Keyssar. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 112-114 57

In 1890, populism was almost wholly comprised of white men from the agrarian class who, due to the rapid and sudden industrialization of America, felt economically neglected by the American government.27 They rejected immigrants as competitors who undermined the livelihood of American farmers. Populists argued that immigrants lowered wages and brought down the moral fabric of the country.28 In 1890, populists did not necessarily identify with either party, as they had created their own third party, the People’s Party. Populism was far more widespread in the South and the West than in the Northeast due to the higher concentration of white yeoman farmers. In the

Northeast, populism never made much of a political impact. The majority of people in the Northeast lived in cities and worked industrialized jobs. The Northeast was also the area with the highest concentration of immigrants besides southern California. Even

Northeastern farmers found populism unattractive since they considered themselves in competition with Southern and Western farmers. Many thought that the populists would run counter to their economic interests, although they may have sympathized with some of movement’s tenets.29 While populism began as a reaction against the wealthy elites and the party structure, the two parties struggled for control over the new electorate for a few years until the Democratic party absorbed them with the nomination of Williams

Jennings Bryant for president in 1896. Ultimately, the populists rejected the Federal

Elections Bill due to a combination of their characteristics: their outsider mentality, economic concerns, and coupled with racism.

27 Hofstadter, 7 28 Hofstadter, 178 29 Hofstadter, 99 58

The first reason for the populists’ opposition to the bill came from their lack of party affiliation along with general sense of nonconformity. They were rebels who no longer wished to listen to the government or adhere to the party system. Populists drew from both parties, although from different places. The leaders of the movement, like La

Follette and Tom Watson, were generally former Republicans, but many former

Democrats were in the rank-and-file. Indeed, the Democratic Party lost more than a quarter of its 1888 votes to Populist candidates in 1890.30 In addition, the overwhelming victory of the Populists in Kansas surprised both parties. As D. Scott Barton asserts,

“Republican leaders thought party loyalty would win out over economic interests,” and the Democrats hoped that the Populists “would split the Republican vote.”31

Interestingly, after the rise of the Populists, most criticism came from Democratic outlets. The Augusta Chronicle angrily attacked Populists for “aiding the Republicans in their nefarious schemes.”32 Some Democrats even attacked the movement for sowing

“anarchy and communism” in the South.33 Republicans, meanwhile, often attempted to stay quiet in hopes that old party loyalty would reintegrate the white working class back into their base. This strategy backfired and was one of the major reasons for the

Republicans’ inability to reclaim the electorate; by not changing their message to cater towards white populists, Republicans alienated the fickle group.34

Populism’s rebellious ethos no doubt attracted many white Southerners to populism. Even though the war was long over, the late 19th century was characterized

30 D. Scott Barton. “Party Switching and Kansas Populism.” The Historian, Vol. 52, No. 3 (MAY 1990): 461 31 Barton, 458 32 Quoted from C. Vann Woodward. Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. (Rinehart and Company, New York, 1938), 222 33 Woodward, 223 34 Barton, 466 59 by the building of several Confederate monuments and a reembracing of Confederate identity. Furthermore, Reconstruction and the resulting tax burden therein made the government synonymous with Northern meddling and excess.35 It is no surprise that white populists saw the Federal Elections Bill as a continuation of Northerner meddling in Southern affairs. However, it was not only the Southerners who saw the Federal

Elections Bill as an encroachment on their territory by a malevolent government. T. V.

Powderly, the leader of the Knights of Labor, the first major labor union in America, called the bill a way for every federal official to become “’king with a sceptre’ [sic] at once,”36 likening the federal government to the out of touch King George. Sigourney

Butler, a thirty-year-old white Massachusetts Democrat turned silver populist, complained that the bill was an “annihilation of the few threads of States Rights still hanging on the frame-work of our Constitution” and gives opportunity to “unscrupulous men to place themselves in Federal power.” 37 38 Even though Butler lived far from the white populists of the South and the West, he still shared that same distrust of federal power and solidarity of the local man against federal power.

The second reason for the white populist opposition to the bill was an economic one. Populism had two battle cries during this period: “Free Silver and Free .”39

“Free Silver” referred to the silver standard, which had been abandoned when United

States government passed the Coinage Act of 1873, which made gold the sole backing of currency. The economic woes of the 1870s and the 1890s were probably not linked

35 Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 365. 36 Lodge and Powderly. 267. 37 Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume X: Transactions 1904-1906. (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1907). 184-185 38 Sigourney Butler. Sigourney Butler to Henry Cabot Lodge. 25 November 1890. Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Reel 4. 39 Hofstadter, 90 60 to that act, but populists often pointed to silver as a fix-all solution for the economy.40

The Federal Elections Bill was seen as an economic distraction from the real issue: silver coinage. In addition, as seen in the second cry, “Free Cuba,” silver coinage was inextricably tied up with jingoism and racism, two ideologies that ran counter to Federal

Elections Bill’s promise of voting equality. In 1890, Cuba was ruled by Spain as a colonial subject. White populists supported an intervention and conquest of Cuba. On the surface, they claimed that it was barbaric for the American government to stand by while the Spanish committed human rights atrocities in Cuba.41 In reality, white populists were more afraid of nebulous fears of foreign bank rule. White populists claimed that

Spanish and English banks, backed by the gold standard, manipulated and depreciated

American currency.42 William Steward of Nevada, the same senator who would table the Federal Elections Bill, declared that “War would be a good thing even if we got whipped, for it would rid us of English bank rule.” 43

Furthermore, white populism’s paranoia of economic manipulation was not limited to overseas bankers. In her 1887 book Seven Financial Conspiracies which have

Enslaved the American People, Sarah E. V. Emery calls the Coinage Act a ploy by “the money kings of Wall Street” to rob the white working class of their due.44 Another early populist text, “Coin” Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School, depicts “a map of the world dominated by the tentacles of an octopus…labeled: “Rothschilds,” the enormously wealthy Jewish banking family (figure 2).45 As populism grew, its prejudice became

40 Hofstadter, 104 41 Hofstadter, 89 42 Hofstadter, 89 43 Quoted in Hofstadter, 89 44 Quoted in Hofstadter, 75 45 Quoted in Hofstadter, 78 61 more explicit. Fueled by fears of Jewish bankers manipulating currency to undercut the white working class, populist activists turned on all Jews. Suspicion of a Jewish conspiracy was echoed in Mary E. Lease’s text The Problem of Civilization Solved, where she accuses as “the agent of Jewish bankers and British gold.”46 Anti-Papal fears also ran rampant among White Protestant populists. For example, a rambling letter from W.E. Lucker to George Frisbie Hoar warned that crypto-

Catholics in the government are “selling the dearest interests of our Country for an office who [they are] so unfit to fill.”47 Even though Lucker ultimately felt positive about the Federal Elections Bill, his fear of a Catholic conspiracy would likely have rung true for many populists and would explain some of the hostility towards the Federal Elections

Bill. One of the major tenets of the bill allowed the federal government to deploy troops to polling stations if fifty or more voters complained of voter fraud. Fears of misuse of troops by the federal government, corrupted by Jewish, Catholic or foreign influence, would follow naturally.

If passed, the Federal Elections Bill would require a heavy price tag due to the sweeping provisions of the bill, which could station federal troops in thousands of polling stations across the country. Opponents of the 51st Congress had already slandered it as the “Billion Dollar Congress” due to perceived excesses, and the Federal Elections Bill only added to the spending. White populists were already heavily attuned to governmental spending and decried any that did not alleviate their own tenuous economic situation as a waste, many of whom already felt betrayed by governmental

46 Quoted in Hofstadter, 79 47 W.E. Lucker. W.E. Lucker to George Frisbie Hoar. Beverly, Mass. 30 Jan 1891. George Frisbie Hoar Papers Carton 48. 62 programs due to the failures of the Homestead Act.48 It comes as no surprise that white populists found the Federal Elections Bill, which mandated further governmental spending on issues unrelated to farmers or silver.

The third reason for the Federal Elections Bill’s unpopularity among white

Protestant populists was ultimately race. Anti-Semitism was not the only element of prejudice in white populism, nor were racial fears constrained only to European Catholic groups, like the Irish or Italians, who were not fully integrated as white Americans, but rather as inferior ethnic groups.49 Populism was inherently jingoistic, nationalistic, and anti-intellectual, but not initially racist. Ultimately, however, populism in the late 19th century did become deeply rooted in racism, despite early attempts at outreach to people of color. For example, not long before the debates on the 1890 election bill, there were attempts in the South to create a “Negro Populist Alliance.”50 One white

Texan populist claimed that black Americans “‘are in the ditch just like we are.’”51 Tom

Watson, an early populist leader and eventual Vice Presidential nominee for the

People’s Party in 1896, called for unity among the races:

Now the People’s Party says to these two men [of different races]: ‘You are kept apart that you may be separate fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.52

48 The Homestead Act, which in theory provided yeoman farmers with government supplied land at no cost. In practice, however, railroad speculators quickly snatched up much of the land, forcing farmers to pay a premium on supposedly free land. Hofstadter, 56. 49 Peter Kolchin. “Whiteness Studies.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes. Vol. 95, No. 1 (2009), 119, 146 50 C. Vann Woodward. Origins of the New South 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951, 256 51 Woodward, Origins. 257 52 Quoted from Woodward. Tom Watson. 63

The early strands of American populism were primarily economic. Certainly, there was still an us-versus-them mentality inherent in the discourse, but it was a duality of “rich versus poor” rather than a “poor white farmer versus everybody else.” For a brief moment, American populism could have folded in people of color into the “us,” as

Watson tried to do. By painting the upper class as purposefully sowing racial dissent to keep the lower classes down, he called for solidarity between the races.

Yet a racially unified populism ultimately fell flat for both black and white Americans for several reasons. Inherent jingoism and nationalism could not successfully transcend race. Populism maintained an us-versus-them mentality. Although poor white and black farmers shared an economic background, the omnipresent difference of race made it difficult for either group to accept the other as part of a collective. Ultimately, since white populists were the vast majority in the group, they pushed out black farmers and grouped them as competitors rather than allies. Furthermore, black Americans were suspicious of white populists, especially since white populists never treated black

Americans as equals in their movement.53 Watson, although an idealist, ultimately thought African-Americans were inferior, claiming that “it is to the interest of a colored man to vote with the white man, and he will do it.”54 As his dream of a unified populism slipped away, so did Watson’s façade of racial harmony. Later in life, he published a weekly Populist journal in Georgia called the Jeffersonian. In a notorious case, he underhandedly called for the public lynching of Leo M. Frank, a Jew falsely accused of raping and killing a fourteen year old girl, writing “the next Jew who does what Frank

53 Woodward. Origins, 255, 258 54 quoted in Woodward, Origins, 257. 64 did, is going to get exactly the same thing that we give to Negro rapists.”55 After a group of twenty five armed men broke into the state penitentiary and hanged him, Watson celebrated with an eight page dedication to the importance of lynching in America.56

Indeed, one of the largest barriers to a unified populism was the continual hideous and unforgivable violence and murder instigated by white populists against African-

Americans in the South. A study by Sarah A. Soule shows that lynching rates were reduced in the early 1890s in areas with heavy membership of the Populist Party, but ultimately reduction does not equal absence.57 Georgia was in a depression in the early

1890s. Soule blames economic competition between people of different races as the reason for the surge of hate crimes. However, since lynching was tacitly approved by the state government, those economic insecurities were likely a pretext by white supremacists to sow racial discord among the poorer classes, thus weakening their ability to galvanize under the populist banner and overthrow the ruling Bourbon

Democrats. 58

Indeed, several observers noted that the increase of lynching in the American South was in fact a direct response to increased African-American political autonomy and not economic issues. Edward Shane, editor of the black newspaper the Nashville Tribune, emphasized the “intimidations at the ballot box” by white Democrats.59 D.W.

Washington, along with nine other prominent black citizens of the tenth district of

Tennessee, begged Hoar “we entreat you to lend your voice in shielding those who are

55 Woodward, Tom Watson, 443. 56 Woodward, Tom Watson, 445 57 Sarah A. Soule. “Populism and Black Lynching in Georgia, 1890-1900.” Social Forces, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Dec., 1992): 445 58 Soule, 434 59 Edward Shane. “Edward Shane to George Frisbie Hoar.” Nashville, Tennessee. 29 July 1890. From George Frisbie Hoar Collection, Carton 45. Massachusetts Historical Society. 65 rendered helpless and powerless to defend themselves” against racial violence.60 They believed that by writing to Hoar, the passage of the Federal Elections Bill would prevent racial violence; in other words, lynching was purely politically motivated. However, the most telling observation comes from George Gillman Alexander, a former Confederate rifleman and city treasurer of Camden, South Carolina, who lamented the rise in lynching in the American South:

They (the Democrats) will scruple at nothing to carry their fraud; and if all other means fail, they resort to the last remedy - assassination - knowing that while they have the “fitting” of the jury they can acquit any man, no matter what the evidence may be against him…The colored people are now really in a worse condition than they were as slaves. They now have no protection whatever for life or Property. (parentheses and underlines his) 61 62

Alexander directly correlated the increase of black political power to lynching, which he called “assassination,” and made no mention of economic issues. Indeed, when he said that “the colored people are now really in a worse condition than they were as slaves,” he implied that their newfound ability to vote threatened white Southerners’ political order since slaves could not vote. He also noted that the Bourbon Democrats had completely rigged the court system to acquit any lynch mob. In other words, exercising political power by black Americans directly led to racial violence by the ruling class who attempted to suppress their voice through violence.

There is evidence that white reaction to the Federal Elections Bill also directly undermined trans-racial populism in non-violent ways. The leadership of the Colored

60 D.W. Washington et al. “Colored Citizens of the 10th Congressional District of Tennessee to George Frisbie Hoar.” 61 Shelby B. Pittman. “Confederate Obituaries.” Camden Genealogical Society. 29 Sep 2000. http://www.researchonline.net/cemetery/archive/conf_obits_pg1.pdf. 62 George G. Alexander. “G.G. Alexander to Henry Cabot Lodge.” 6 May 1890. Henry Cabot Lodge Collection, Reel 4. Massachusetts Historical Society. 66

Farmers’ Alliance, an offshoot of the Farmers’ Alliance, an early populist organization, officially disavowed the Federal Elections Bill.63 Notably, however, that leadership was entirely white, despite the organization having only black members.64 This led to a direct repudiation of the leadership in December, when black members of the Colored

Farmers’ Alliance convened in Ocala, Florida in support of the bill.65 The organization subsequently dissolved almost immediately after this break in leadership and membership.66 Certainly, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance was held together by a weak thread if such an event could end the group altogether, but it is clear that the Federal

Elections Bill had a significant effect on racial relations of some early populist groups.

For the three aforementioned reasons, white populists rejected the Federal Elections

Bill despite its potential to help their cause. Their rebellious spirit made them distrustful of the Federal Government, their economic focus rejected the bill as a costly distraction from silver coinage, and their racism made them inherently hostile to a bill that enfranchised African-Americans. This rejection trickled up to Congress and was the ultimate deathblow to the bill in January, when seven Western Senators led by William

Steward of Nevada, citing grievances with the gold standard, tabled the bill for a silver coinage bill. In his autobiography, Hoar characterized them as traitors who “deceived themselves by a casuistic reasoning which would not convince them at other times.”67

However, Hoar did not realize that he, a paragon of racial equality and civil rights, had become a relic of Reconstruction in white America. There was no betrayal in the

63 Floyd J. Miller. “Black Protest and White Leadership: A Note on the Colored Farmers' Alliance.” Phylon (1960-), Vol. 33, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1972). 171 64 Miller, 172 65 Miller, 173 66 Miller, 174 67 George Frisbie Hoar. Autobiography of Seventy Years Vol 2. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903), 156 67

Senate: rather, Steward’s choice was an adaptation to changing times. White America had embraced jingoism, ethnic nationalism, , and prejudice. While the major players in the struggle for equality would never give up, mainstream Protestant

America and its government would abandon them until the Johnson administration in the 1960s.

The Populist Exception: Robert La Follette

White populists stood in almost uniform opposition to the Federal Elections Bill save for one notable exception: Robert La Follette, the then three term Representative from Wisconsin’s third district. Later the Wisconsin governor and a maverick Senator,

La Follette was the American populist and progressive par excellence, famous for passing bills helping the white farmworker and campaigning for women’s suffrage statewide. David Thelen calls La Follette the “preeminent exemplar of the difficulties

Americans encountered as they faced the problems of the future toward which they reluctantly moved.”68 Yet, although La Follette exemplified the reactionary nature of the white populist in many ways, La Follette still supported the Federal Elections Bill, strongly enough to not only vote for the bill when it was debated in the House, but also to give a lengthy speech defending it. Why would La Follette defend the Federal

Elections Bill when most other white populists and early progressives opposed it?

La Follette’s speech itself holds some clues. La Follette began with a pure constitutional defense of the bill. He asserted that “no lawyer seriously questions its constitutionality,” and then went through a step by step catalogue of all its provisions,

68 David P. Thelen, Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit. Ed. Oscar Handlin. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), vi. 68 emphasizing again and again that the bill designated any tampering with votes a crime.

69 70 This is as tepid a defense of the bill as he could possibly give; merely asserting the bill is legal and that its provisions are useful represents the bare minimum of support for the bill that La Follette could begrudgingly give in his speech. Surprisingly, though, the next three pages of his speech discuss the effect of the bill on Southern African-

Americans, a far cry from his constituency of white Wisconsin farmers. While La Follette did use very strong language in this section, shaming Southerners for believing “that color was the mark of inferiority set on them [African-Americans] by the Omnipotent to seal them to slavery,” it is clear from a close reading that La Follette’s sympathies remained entirely with white Protestants and only paid lip service to the African-

American community. 71 He mocked Southerners for believing in the “possibility of national negro domination…as race representation goes the Congress of the United

States would…still be white fifteen to one.”72 By saying that “negro domination” would not happen, rather than defending African-Americans as equal citizens, La Follette reaffirmed the social and political inferiority of all African-Americans. In addition, as La

Follette likely knew that convincing Bourbon Democrats was impossible, he was assuaging his own constituency that the bill would not cause their own white rule to be subverted. Indeed, he ended with his speech with a rallying cry to the poor white populists. He declared that he hoped for a world with “each man acting on his own conviction, exerting for himself such influence and power as he properly may, and each,

69 Robert La Follette. Speech of Hon. Robert M. La Follette, of Wisconsin, in the House of Representatives, 2 July 1890, 1. Carton 167 of the George Frisbie Hoar Collection. Massachusetts Historical Society. 70 La Follette, Speech, 2 71 La Follette, Speech, 4 72 La Follette., Speech 5 69 in the end, master at least of his own action.”73 When La Follette discussed “each man,” he did not mean Southern African-Americans, else he would have said so, as he did in every other instance in his speech. Rather, he implicitly claimed that this bill would help white farmers assert their political power to take their destiny into their own hands. In his weak support for the bill, La Follette attempted to sell the bill to poor whites who, as shown, were in opposition.

Of course, this does not explain why La Follette decided to support the bill at all, especially with a public speech on the House floor. Most likely, La Follette was an ambitious young politician who saw an opportunity to make an impression on the public through passionate oration in defense of the party’s biggest bill for that year. In that way, his motivations were very similar to those of Lodge himself. However, this line of thinking is just a supposition, as La Follette clearly thought that the bill was a blemish on his record and thus declined to mention it in his autobiography. He hints at it several times but never mentions his role in debating and supporting the bill. In a note to the often contemptuous debates around the bill, he characterizes the “Reed Congress of

1889 to 1891” as “the most tumultuous and exciting session of Congress in all our history.”74 In addition, he discusses the Democratic tactic of filibuster, which is a clear allusion to the month-long filibuster performed by the Democrats that killed the Federal

Elections Bill in the winter of 1891.75 Both contemporaneous and retrospective biographies of La Follette also make no mention of his support of the bill.76 The silence

73 La Follette, Speech, 5 74 Robert M La Follette. La Follette’s Autobiography. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 41. 75 La Follette, Autobiography, 43 76 Such biographies being Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit by David Thelen, La Follette and the Rise of Progressives in Wisconsin by Robert Maxwell, Robert Marion La Follette by Fred Greenbaum, and Robert M. La Follette by his wife Belle Case La Follette and his daughter Fola La Follette. 70 is odd; merely voting for a bill that runs counter to his later reputation does not merit such treatment, especially since La Follette spends a large portion of his autobiography defended the unpopular McKinley Tariff.77

The cause was likely twofold. Firstly, Lodge and La Follette clashed in a bitter rivalry later in life. Despite their similar positions on imperialism and America’s role on the world stage, their relationship worsened over the course of their careers. By the time he wrote his autobiography, La Follette was already jealous of Lodge, who received more campaigning, support, and funds from the Republican party in their respective campaigns of 1912.78 In the years after, La Follette would begrudge Lodge for publicly supporting his expulsion from the Senate on charges of disunity due to his opposition to

World War I.79 It is no surprise, therefore, that La Follette would hide his support for

Lodge’s first significant bill. Secondly, La Follette would lose his reelection to the House in 1890. Scholars point to his prominent role in drafting McKinley Tariff, one of the major talking points used by Democrats against Republicans during the election, his support of a mandated public school taught in English, which alienated his German and

Norwegian base, and a poor campaign that offended local political leaders.80 81 82

However, I propose that his public support for the Federal Elections Bill also significantly hurt his reelection campaign. Since La Follette only lost by 1,000 votes, his support, however lukewarm, for the Federal Elections Bill, which was highly unpopular among

77 La Follette. Autobiography, 40. 78 Fred Greenbaum. Robert Marion La Follette. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), 99 79 Belle Case La Follette and Fola La Follette. Robert M. La Follette Vol. 2. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953), 792 80 Greenbaum, 33 81 Thelen, 14 82 Wyman, Roger E. “Wisconsin Ethnic Groups and the Election of 1890.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Summer, 1968): 291 71 white populist farmers, La Follette’s main constituency, likely helped to tip the scales against him. 83 The bill’s role in his loss, coupled with its unpopularity among his core base and his own personal dislike of Lodge, likely led to its omission in his autobiography.

La Follette, then, found himself at the crossroads of American populism and race.

When given the opportunity to combine economic white populism with civil rights, La

Follette took the opportunity and was punished for it. Just as La Follette would reemerge a decade later as a prominent voice for the white working class at the expense of all others, the United States and its politicians, in rejecting the Lodge Bill, embraced trans-regional whiteness as a national ethos over racial equality.

“Caustic Reasoning:” The Fall of the Federal Elections Bill and Conclusion

The failure of the Federal Elections Bill legitimized white populists as a political force and bolstered the political power of the Democrats. The Populists coalesced into their own political party, which challenged the established parties for the presidency in

1892 and even won a smattering of states. The Southern Democrats responded to the bill’s defeat by enacting Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and imposing literacy tests in polling stations throughout the American South in order to further weaken black voting rights.84

Scholars differ on why exactly the bill failed. Calhoun attacks "businessmen who had put their selfish interests ahead of principle."85 Wang blames the "deterioration of the party's political conscience and moral commitment."86 Welch Jr. points to a "continued

83 Wyman, 292 84 Keyssar, 111 85 Calhoun, 258 86 Wang, 250 72 disunity within the ranks of the Republican party."87 Hoar himself blamed the Western

Republicans, who, although signing a document promising to vote for the bill, tabled the bill for a silver coinage bill.88

Yet both scholars (as well as Hoar) place too much emphasis on the inner workings of the Senate. They paint the government and its agents as completely separate from the populace, actors whose choices to support or oppose the bill came from pure self-contained rationality. Factually, the bill did fail because Western Senators tabled it for a silver coinage bill, but that failure ties into the wider trend of rising white populism. As shown in this chapter, white populism was inexorably linked to silver coinage and xenophobia. Furthermore, white populism significantly grew in popularity in

1890 in those same Western states that opposed the bill like Nevada, Idaho and the

Dakotas. Two years later, in 1892, James Weaver, running under the People’s Party platform, would win the states of Idaho, Nevada, and North Dakota, cementing the power of white populism in those states. Senators like William Steward of Nevada, the man who ended the discussion on the Federal Elections Bill, would have been aware of the changing electorate in their countries. In 1890, white populists still could have rejoined either party. Although they would eventually choose the Democrats and Bryant, there was no guarantee that would be the case. Steward and his allies must have realized the power of the demographic, and so by rejecting the Federal Elections Bill in

87 Welch, Richard E. Jr. "The Federal Elections Bill of 1890: Postscripts and Prelude" The Journal of American History, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Dec., 1965), 525 88 “Here was a motion to lay aside the Election Bill which was adopted by a bare majority— the Democrats voting for it and several of the Silver Republican Senators, so-called. All but one of these had signed their names to the promise I have printed. I never have known by what process of reasoning they reconciled their action with their word. But I know that in heated political strife men of honor, even men of ability, sometimes deceive themselves by a casuistic reasoning which would not convince them at other times.” Hoar. Autobiography, 156 73 favor of the silver coinage bill, they hoped to bring white populists back to the

Republican fold. Lodge too understood the importance of white populism, as seen by his hasty renunciation of the bill that bore his name. While white populism and the

Federal Elections Bill never intersected directly, white populism was one of the driving forces behind the bill’s defeat. Just as the bill rose on the backs of people outside the political system, African-American men, the bill fell to another outsider group, white populists. This rise and fall paralleled the shift of the American governmental focus away from civil rights and towards progressivism.

74

Figure 1: Dedication of Confederate Monuments in the from 1861 until the present. From: Holpuch, Amanda and Chalabi, Mona. “Changing history'? No – 32 Confederate monuments dedicated in past 17 years” The Guardian. 16 August 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/confederate-monuments-civil- war-history-trump

75

Figure 2: The Rothschilds Octopus from “Coin” Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School. 76

Conclusion

“Nothing Is Settled That Is Not Right”

The rise and fall of the Federal Elections Bill shows how tangled the web of history can be. Rather than a simple tale of elite white men hunched over dusty documents, the full story of Federal Elections Bill was heavily influenced by people outside the political mainstream. While politicians in Congress had the final vote on what passed and what did not, they did not make those choices in a vacuum; they were heavily influenced by events on the ground, ranging from Julius Caesar Chappelle’s rally in Boston to Alabaman Republicans’ petition against the bill. In addition, the defeat of the bill signaled a change in the direction of American culture. The defeat of the

Federal Elections Bill legitimized white populism as a mainstream political force in

America. It also gave tacit approval to state governments in the South to solidify unreasonable barriers against black voting such as literacy tests and poll taxes. The white mainstream gave up the cause of African-American civil rights, but black activists have never stopped, up to and including today.

While I have included the stories of many of those on the periphery of the normative narrative of the bill’s defeat, there are still many more related stories that remain untold. In the West, Asian immigrants fought for citizenship and voting rights denied by their race. Did fears that Asians would receive voting rights from the bill play into Steward’s and Western Republican’s eventual rejection of the bill? Throughout the country, another war for suffrage was being fought: women’s suffrage. Astute readers may have noted that my thesis only mentions women in passing. Rebecca Edwards 77 explains this female absence in two ways. Firstly, white Republicans and newly enfranchised black men quickly limited black women’s political involvement. Edwards argues that female black power would undermine the “‘full manhood rights’” of black men and white “Republican definitions of Christian womanhood.”1 Most white

Republican women, on the other hand, were more interested in the issue of temperance and their own suffrage rather than the suffrage of Southern African-Americans.2 I simply did not find any evidence of any women campaigning for or against the Federal

Elections Bill in any of the letters, newspapers, publications, or secondary sources that I have read. This does not necessarily mean such campaigning did not happen. Women obviously had an opinion on the bill, even it does not appear significantly in the historical evidence. Further scholarship could tease this story out from between the lines and bring it to the forefront in dialogue with the Federal Elections Bill. Did the rejection of the

Federal Elections Bill make the cause of women’s suffrage more difficult? Or did it bolster white women’s campaigns as the country shifted towards embracing whiteness as a fundamental identity?

As for the Federal Elections Bill itself, its final defeat came in 1891 after which the federal government moved away from promoting any kind of Civil Rights legislation.

The Republican party embraced the isolationism of Henry Cabot Lodge and the

Progressive policies of while the Democrats, led thrice under the failed banner of William Jennings Bryant, embraced white populism and racialized politics. There seemed to be no more room for voting rights or people of color in the

American mainstream political government. Instead, the country embraced a white

1 Rebecca Edwards. Angels in the Machinery. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 37 2 Edwards, 98, 133 78 identity. After the failure of the Federal Elections Bill, to be American was to be a white man. After the unveiling of the Robert E. Lee Confederate Monument in 1890, hundreds of similar monuments followed at an alarming rate all over the South. Woodrow Wilson praised and circulated D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a film that portrays the Ku

Klux Klan as a heroic force that helped shape American identity. After viewing the film privately with Wilson and his cabinet, Griffith recounted that Wilson highly approved of the film and had stated it was “like writing history with lightning.”3 Anti-immigrant fervor, driven by Lodge and his allies, eventually caused America to heavily restrict its borders to nearly every immigrant group in the early 20th century. Only a few months before

Lodge’s death in 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which banned all

Asian and Arab immigration and severely limited African as well as Southern and

Eastern European immigration. The defeat of the Federal Elections Bill was a tacit defeat for the project of a pluralistic American nation. The legislation passed during the following thirty years was a triumphant reassertion of a white hegemony in the United

States.

Yet George Frisbie Hoar’s eulogy on the Federal Elections Bill remained surprisingly prescient. In it, he asserted that “the question [of voting rights] will not down.

Nothing is settled that is not right.”4 Seventy years after the defeat of the Federal

Elections Bill, Lyndon B. Johnson presented to Congress a modified version of the bill, retitled the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The main opponent of the bill, of

South Carolina, lobbed criticisms similar to those that the Bourbon Democrats had

3 Mark E. Benbow. ”Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing History with Lightning.’” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 9, No. 4, (October 2010): 527 4 Hoar, George Frisbie. “The Fate of the Election Bill.” Forum. (Apr 1891): 127. 79 leveled against the Federal Elections Bill generations earlier. Thurmond charged that the bill was a partisan attack against the South, noting that voting suppression of black

Southerners was “a presumption which has no logical or legal connection with the facts.”5 Furthermore, he asserted that since the bill targeted only the South, it actually caused discrimination against white Southerners rather than fight discrimination against black Southerners.6 Thurmond’s attempts to stop the bill were ultimately in vain, and

Johnson and the Democrats managed to score a victory that had been denied in 1890.

Ultimately, however, the Voting Rights Act only remained in effect in its entirety for less than fifty years. In 2013, in the landmark Supreme Court case Shelby County v.

Holder, the court ruled 5-4 to strike down section 4(b) of the act, which determines which states and local governments are subject to federal oversight to stop racially discriminatory voting practices.7 Chief Justice John G. Roberts noted in the majority opinion that while “voting discrimination still exists…our country has changed…Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”8 As of 2018, Congress has passed no such legislation that replaces section 4(b). In response, similar events have occurred in several states in the America South. States like Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee, Arkansas and

Texas, which were previously prevented from passing restrictive voting laws, passed voter I.D. laws that prevent voting without government issued identification. Before the decision on Shelby County v. Holder, only four states required identification to vote; in

5 Nadine Cohodas. Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 375 6 Cohodas. 375 7 Adam Liptak. “Supreme Court Invalidates Key Part of Voting Rights Act.” The New York Times (New York), 25 June 2013. 8 Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 2 (2013). 80

2016, only three years later, thirty-two states did.9 Such laws, according to the ACLU, discriminate against low income voters in general and voters of color in particular; they assert that people of color are less likely to have a photo ID and such laws are enforced in a discriminatory manner.10 Furthermore, the election of Donald Trump has caused white populism to reemerge in the public sphere. The Unite the Right rally, held on

August 11th, 2017 to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, led to the murder of a counter-protestor, Heather Heyer. Alt-Right leaders like have become household names. The American government is apathetic towards civil rights at best and supportive of white supremacy at worst.

Is then there nothing to be done in a political environment hostile to equality?

Hoar himself completely gave up on civil rights after the defeat of his dream project, but he still ended his eulogy with an optimistic rallying cry:

It is to be hoped that when…a new appeal shall be made to the conscience and understand of the American people, they will put forth strength enough to throw off the nightmare which oppresses them, and that it will still be in their power to vindicate in peaceful ways the rights which otherwise will surely be asserted through convulsion and in blood.

In my thesis, I have shown that people can fight and enact change in a political system hostile to them. Both sides of the debate had political outsiders form the core supporters: black men for the support and white populists for the opposition. Although the white populists “won” the debate and were integrated into the political mainstream after the nomination of William Jennings Bryant for president, the struggle for racial equality never ended. Julius Caesar Chappelle, the main figure of the black support for

9 Jasmine C. Lee. “How States Moved Toward Stricter Voter ID Laws. The New York Times (New York), 3 Nov 2016. 10 “Oppose Voter ID Legislation - Fact Sheet.” ACLU. https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id- legislation-fact-sheet 81 the bill, continued to support civil rights. In 1895, he successfully petitioned the Boston government to grant first class licenses such as liquor licenses to black businesses.11

Ultimately, black men and women like Chappelle continued to fight for equality even though they lost support from the government because, unlike George Frisbie Hoar, whose wealth and race allowed him to sigh and admit defeat, systematic discrimination forced black Americans never to stop fighting for their own rights, even under the constraints that society placed them.

The story of the Federal Elections Bill, and civil rights in America more generally, does not sit in the marble halls of Washington DC, where two parties, both filled with wealthy white men, face off over arcane details of enforcement, but in crowded Boston rallies of Chappelle and in the farmyard pulpit of Tom Watson. While the final decision on what becomes law rests on the shoulders of the Congress, I have shown that the influence of the general populace should never be discounted in enacting change in

America. Although the Federal Elections Bill failed in 1890, we have the right and ability to avert failure in 2018. Many of us are like George Frisbie Hoar; we might sympathize deeply with the cause, but we have privilege from our education, class, race, gender, sexual orientation and more to sit back and shrug our shoulders. However, there are far too many in America who cannot. For those and more, one must remember that, although politics is and has always been dirty and dismal affair, it is still one that we the people can move in a better direction.

11 “Want a First Class Show: Colored Men Say Police Board Refuse License on Ground of Color.” Boston Daily Globe (Boston, Massachusetts), 15 Aug 1895. 82

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