Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York's Gilded Age

Electoral Capitalism

AMERICAN GOVERNANCE:

POLITICS, POLICY, AND PUBLIC LAW

Series Editors:

Richard Valelly, Pamela Brandwein,

Marie Gottschalk, Christopher Howard

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

ELECTORAL CAPITALISM

THE PARTY SYSTEM IN NEW YORK’S GILDED AGE

Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Broxmeyer, Jeffrey D., author.

Title: Electoral capitalism : the party system in New York’s Gilded Age / Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer.

Other titles: American governance.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: American governance : politics, policy, and public law | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019046246 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5236-1 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Political parties—New York (State)—History—19th century. | Political culture—New York (State)—History—19th century. | Capitalism—Political aspects—New York (State)—History—19th century. | Political corruption—New York (State)—History—19th century. | New York (State)—Politics and government—19th century.

Classification: LCC JK2295.N7 B76 2020 | DDC 324.2747009/034—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046246

For Fran, Bill, Ann, and Dave,

who gave us their New Yorks

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Tammany Bank Run of 1871

Chapter 1. Tammany Hall’s Lost Financial Sector

Dawn of the Conkling Machine

Chapter 2. Republican Party Business

Can’t You Help Me in Gettin the Vacant Place for Me

Chapter 3. Partisan Poor Relief

The Henry George Boom Fades

Chapter 4. Anti-Monopoly in the Age of Party Consolidation

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

THE BALLOON

In the late 1860s, an indignant landowner named Michael H. Cashman sought an audience with William Boss Tweed. Cashman owned four valuable plots on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that his neighbor had encircled with fences and gates, effectively cutting off access. Petitions to local government went unheeded. Adding insult to injury, a portion of the imperial neighbor’s land was technically owned by the city, which planned—at some unknown future date—to extend Bloomingdale, a major boulevard, through the estate. The city had handsomely compensated the lucky culprit with $25,000, or $408,428 today, for public works that never materialized.¹ Newspapers also reported, belatedly, that the neighbor had paid no taxes on the city land for several years running.² With other channels blocked, the aggrieved Cashman sought redress from Boss Tweed, a major political force who had a reputation for fixing problems. The petitioner was a constituent, of sorts. M. H. & D. Cashman, his harness manufactory, was located within the state senator’s downtown district.³

Tweed’s advice was sly upon learning that Cashman’s troublesome neighbor was none other than Fernando Wood. Perhaps, the Boss suggested, you should employ aeronautical methods and get into your land with a balloon.⁴ In short, nothing could be done. The transgressor was a former three-term mayor whose brother, Benjamin, was a state senator, lottery baron, and publisher of the Daily News, one of the city’s largest circulating newspapers. Fernando himself was a longtime fixture in political circles and a chief member of the opposition to Reconstruction in the House of Representatives. He was the face of the Democratic Party for a generation of New Yorkers.

The balloon tale provides a window into the unseen and public faces of electoral capitalism in the late nineteenth century as well as the cynicism it engendered among fellow citizens. Even if Tweed’s clever remark was apocryphal (we can’t be sure), it alludes to the very real way in which officeholders accumulated vast wealth from politics and how they rendered it exclusive. The story resonates because the official persona maintained by Fernando Wood was that of a prosperous and civic-minded merchant. In truth, he became a millionaire primarily through real estate speculation during his officeholding career, along with his brother Benjamin. The principal method was to purchase common lands cheaply, strategically increase their value with public works, and resell them. The Wood brothers’ ability to leverage officeholding for personal gain and, equally, their capacity to fend off critics, was made possible by nearly three decades as power brokers. With America undergoing industrial transformation after the Civil War, new fortunes appeared suddenly, as if from thin air. It was not always clear to the public how that wealth had been attained or at whose expense.

The balloon story is rich with irony because the aggrieved landowner sought out Boss Tweed for redress. Here was a cunning political entrepreneur who adopted the Wood brothers’ accumulating practices and expanded them with far-reaching vision into other sectors of the economy. The empire that Tweed built stretched from patronage positions in government (mocked as the Shiny Hat Brigade) to banks, distilleries, cigar manufacturing, steamboat lines, railroads, construction, printing, and mines. Tweed and Wood were bitter factional rivals, but they shared a similar profile. Both epitomized a new breed of officeholding capitalist that was revolutionizing what it meant to win elections and hold office.

Neither was our petitioner’s balloon problem confined to one party. Mary Lydig Daly, a keen observer of public affairs during the Civil War, was well aware that there were rogues [like Fernando Wood] on both sides, on the Republican side not as yet so well known (who had their fortunes yet to make and therefore are more dangerous).⁵ She was prescient. By the 1880s, the Republican organization in New York had minted its own coterie of wealthy officeholders from the ranks of middlebrow party operators. Under U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling’s supervision, the party cultivated a web of business and legal ventures that projected national influence well beyond the confines of traditional party committees. What Daly could not have anticipated was that the logic of capital accumulation would evolve from the marginal activity of rogues into a dominant means of organizing party government. Outsiders like Cashman, our hapless petitioner, were often left mystified about how to interpret this phenomenon and respond through traditional channels.

FIGURE 1. Woodlawn: The fenced estate of Fernando Wood, 77th and Broadway.

Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Leaders of political parties during the nineteenth century became some of the earliest millionaires in the United States. From the American Revolution to the 1840s, property owners followed the republican tradition of gentlemen-politicians who retired into public life as ratification of established status.⁶ By the 1850s, however, the political system itself emerged as a major source of fortunes. The conspicuous appearance of political wealth thrust questions into the public debate about democratic representation and the ambitions of office seekers. Newspaper editors, political rivals, and civic reformers wondered how political entrepreneurs, many of whom hailed from modest backgrounds, became so wealthy throughout their careers. This controversy was initially muted because generating personal wealth from political property was informally acknowledged as part of coalition building and mass party competition. Drama over slavery and union also temporarily overshadowed these concerns. Nevertheless, between the 1860s and 1880s, controversies large and small erupted in the nation’s capital and across the country. Nowhere was this truer than New York, a center of trade, finance, and industry, where officeholders’ fortunes were among the largest of the Gilded Age.

OVERVIEW

Now is the opportune moment to look with fresh eyes upon an old dilemma. How do struggles over unequal wealth shape democracy in America? Tensions between the push of equal voice and the pull of unequal property are inherent in democratic capitalism. But concentration of riches at the top of society is currently more extreme than at any other time since before the New Deal.⁷ Citizens are looking for meaningful points of reference to understand the main drift. Fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and Supreme Court rulings like Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) has revived the issue of money in politics for a new generation. An upsurge of protest, from the Tea Party’s attack on crony capitalism to Occupy Wall Street’s critique of the 1 percent, moved the issue to the center of public attention.⁸ Donald Trump’s co-management of business and presidential responsibilities keeps it there.⁹ The question of whether the United States is an oligarchy, or becoming one, is no longer confined to the radical fringes. It is hotly debated in the open.¹⁰

I approach the inequality dilemma from a historical perspective by focusing on the distinctive fusion of property and officeholding within the American state. Specifically, my study revisits the unprecedented concentration of power and wealth into the hands of a few party leaders that took place during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Political parties were at the peak of their relevance during the Gilded Age—corralling loyalists, driving agendas—precisely when the inequality crisis was at its worst. Yet, few scholars of American politics draw systematic links between the two phenomena.

In this book, I present an alternative view of party development in America’s first century. During the Gilded Age, electoral capitalism became constitutive of the party system, a process that I explore through an investigation of New York and its role in national politics. Political commodification fueled individual ambitions, factional negotiation, and partisan combat. To be sure, a host of burning issues was paramount in the public’s eye. Generations of historians have admirably documented how everything from Reconstruction, nativism, and the tariff to labor relations and monetary policy reflected deep social divisions that cleaved parties. My own concern is less about any particular issue like the bloody shirt or epochal ideology like Jeffersonianism. Instead, I seek to reevaluate the systemwide elements of political behavior that made this period distinctive.

Thus, I also seek to draw attention to the unique role of political institutions in the historical process of capital accumulation. Rising prominence of the New History of Capitalism as a coherent field has refocused attention on the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of capitalism in America, especially slavery’s vital contribution.¹¹ Yet no studies have examined how political parties, specifically, transform into circuits of accumulation. Surprisingly little is written in American political development on how coalition merchants constructed the machinery of partisan conflict.¹² By this I mean: what actual practices were involved? My contention is that late nineteenth-century party leaders grew powerful insofar as they managed to bring a modicum of order to chaotic party markets. Since the Cold War’s behavioral revolution, political scientists have borrowed the market concept from economics as a metaphor for political competition.¹³ I deploy the term literally.

The Gilded Age, after all, was a period when the United States moved from a society with patchwork markets into a capitalist society, a transformation that also involved the electoral sphere.¹⁴ However, Richard Bensel has shown that the practices of nineteenth-century political actors diverged significantly from textbook expectations of methodological individualism inherent in rational choice models.¹⁵ A fuller view of political behavior requires exploring the meaning of people’s strategies and calculations as they are enmeshed within layers of social context. Instead of predicting how people should behave in various circumstances, as do game theorists, my study elaborates how they have done so in actual historical practice.

Gilded Age officeholders who gained preeminence acquired valuable commodities and monopolized their allocation to peers, clients, and subordinates. The kinds of commodities in question were votes, nominations, appointments, charters, subsidies, franchises, and legal privileges—anything of value within the political arena that could be traded, bought, or sold. When Levi P. Morton, the future twenty-fourth vice president, was running for U.S. Senate in 1881, an emissary from a bloc of New York legislators approached his business partner to propose swinging a dozen votes his way in exchange for a large cash payment. Morton declined after some deliberation, or he was outbid (it remains unclear).¹⁶ His successful rival, Thomas C. Platt, went on to the U.S. Senate and later to lead both the state party and the U.S. Express Company. Most gilded election contests were not equally brazen auctions, of course, although the practice of treating voters with small symbolic payments was widespread.¹⁷ Still, Morton’s bartering points to a larger market tendency at work that subsumed political action.

Struggles over political items of value shaped how individuals competed for and won office, which internal party factions guided policy, who rewarded allies, and whether the interests of constituents were served, ignored, or provoked. While the period was characterized by extreme polarization in congressional voting, party rhetoric, and sectional passions, we should not lose sight of defining characteristics that made the Gilded Age a common experience.¹⁸ The practices that historical actors employed to accrue political power and wield it were strikingly similar. The business of politics made peers of rivals, and separated professionals from amateurs. Democracy, after all, is not just casting a vote, some building where deliberation takes place, or a notion. It is what people say and do to mold the collective future. Democracy is as democracy does, which is why governing looked so different in the early republic as opposed to the Gilded Age or today. In this way, as a series of actions within the party marketplace, electoral capitalism imprinted upon citizens’ imagination about how officeholders served the public and themselves.

WHY ELECTORAL CAPITALISM

Electoral capitalism is a category of entrepreneurship in which the capture of public office and the accumulation of private wealth are mutually reinforcing endeavors. We typically think of capitalism as the process by which money begets greater wealth within an economic sphere of employers, workers, commodities, and markets. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that in modern society, capital takes on many forms, including a political one. Each type of capital exists within semiautonomous fields organized by differing rules and histories, and populated by embodied agents who each have a capacity for structured improvisation. Within political institutions, capital moves through a property-based electoral logic, the realm of competition for the legitimate right to speak and act for the state.¹⁹ Professionals who master the dull and toilsome work of election politics use that expertise as the productive means to accumulate rewards.²⁰ Think of this surplus as the political increment. Under consideration, then, is capitalism of a particular species.

The formula for electoral capitalism is when politics begets wealth. The main actors who accumulate and invest are ambitious officeholders. Their basic inputs are levers of influence within a polity, whatever those may be depending on regime type, institutional matrix, historical legacy, and popular attitudes. Compared with peers, the United States has an entrepreneurial political system. Jens Borchert and Gary Copeland note this feature is emblematic in two main ways; first, with multiple pathways in a federal system for individual careers; and second, by the creative methods necessary to secure political resources.²¹ Adam Sheingate has cautioned against comparisons between economic and political entrepreneurship because it may not be clear what represents the search for monopoly profits in the political context.²² But any such qualification itself must be historically bounded. The Gilded Age was a time, by all accounts, when moneymaking was at the forefront of officeholders’ priorities. We can empirically identify those political profits by triangulating archival materials, government and corporate records, newspapers, and other primary sources, and by placing them in proper context.

The starting point is to examine governing institutions as a source of investment for an array of projects both political and personal. To capture surplus, officeholders’ most common points of entry are to access the people’s capital, or taxpayer money readily available; the alienated state, or debt financing; and crucially, the means to dictate the conditions of entry into markets. When politics create markets anew, as with transcontinental railroads or land enclosures, a feverish gold rush sweeps over legislatures, executive agencies, and lower offices. Bourdieu’s theory provides a starting point for understanding why. Officeholders are more than disinterested intermediaries who operate at the locus of governing. We see this time and again, from Fernando Wood’s land speculation and Tammany Hall’s financial sector, to Republican governor Alonzo Cornell’s blind pool and Thomas Murphy’s litany of uncollected debts from his tenure as collector of the port of New York. As Gilded Age officeholders formed pro-growth coalitions within parties, they sought ways to tap into and manage pools of capital.

Nineteenth-century American governance predominately mobilized private actors to implement public policy out of sight. Authorities did not directly manage public enterprises and recoup monopoly profits back into the high modern statism of the later twentieth century. Instead, the legacy of policy voluntarism relied on local notables, civic associations, and private businesses, invariably routing economic windfalls into private pockets.²³ Officeholding accumulation was not without controversy—especially when government decisions visibly benefited incumbents or family members. Nevertheless, reliance on private actors with electoral connections allowed for innovations in party-run business and the expansion of patronage armies into new realms. Thus, it is no coincidence that monopoly consolidated simultaneously in economic and party organization after the Civil War. The first companies of truly national scope, in railroads, telegraphs, and express services, operated with an ambiguous public-private legality. The gilded officeholding class joined the corporate strata because competition for capital took place within political institutions. Fundamentals of coalition building required it.²⁴

The circulation of capitalist value through political institutions will surely look and feel different from place to place and time to time. So, too, will its critics who are forced to respond. In the case of the Gilded Age, those who fell loosely under the banner of reform spanned from business competitors and trade unionists to middle-class professionals and party bolters. Each adversary cultivated unique rationales why party regulars were in violation of good government principles. The reaction of grassroots reformers is particularly instructive. Despite disagreements among Greenbackers, the Knights of Labor, and others, each group of dissenters attempted to sever the ties between party regulars and the accumulation of private property. We can learn a great deal about the officeholding species of capitalism by examining the failed campaigns against it.

BIRTH OF ELECTORAL CAPITALISM

Expansion of the franchise in the United States precipitated the circulation of electoral capital by expanding popular control over public resources. The comparatively early advent of mass suffrage was an unprecedented experiment in representative institutions and political organization. Leading gentlemen during the revolution and early republic viewed direct popular participation in public life as impractical and dangerous to disinterested lawmaking and the protection of property rights.²⁵ Formal expression of electoral choice was thus initially limited to wealthy merchants and planters through legal obstacles such as property and taxpayer qualifications. Nevertheless, governing elites failed to stem the expansion of the political content of the people.²⁶ From the 1790s to the 1850s, as the country grew by leaps and bounds in territory and population, there was a massive democratization in the right to vote for white men regardless of wealth.²⁷ The entrance of new publics into the electorate—yeoman farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, and eventually propertyless white men—transformed the practice and discourse of political competition. With generalized suffrage, the rigors of selfgovernment meant a vigorous quest for mass votes along with wider opportunities for public office. James Bryce noted the impact on professionalization: people do not say ‘politicians’ but ‘the politicians,’ because the word indicates a certain class with defined characteristics.²⁸

In practice, democratization of elected and appointed public office in America was made possible through its commodification. Venal office was a feature of the early modern European state that signaled the transition away from feudalism, both as a mechanism of state financing and by facilitating ascent of the bourgeoisie into administrative posts.²⁹ In the United States, democracy transformed this long-standing tradition by replacing control of kings over the allocation and sale of office with the people mediated by electoral institutions and party apparatuses. From the 1830s through its apogee by the turn of the century, anti-monopoly movements, party functionaries, voters, and opportunists all demanded, each for their own purposes, the redistribution of state-owned property through the spoils system. Networks of Andrew Jackson supporters organized the Democrats, the country’s first mass party, with resources acquired from preexisting executive departments.³⁰ In his 1829 State of the Union address, President Jackson announced rotation in office as a reform to dislodge the influence of a privileged few. Office is considered a species of property available only to an elite, he proclaimed, and should instead be turned over to the service of the people.³¹ Government jobs were transferred en masse to the victorious party, who filled those spots with partisans that tithed a portion of their salary back into party coffers, usually anywhere from 2 to 10 percent.³²

Federal, state, and local offices were bought and sold by operatives within party markets. Choosing how to appropriately distribute electoral rewards consumed a huge amount of time and energy because the fate of party unity relied upon it.³³ In assigning spoils, party leaders considered factors such as personal loyalty and party service. However, those in position to appoint or nominate party and government posts were utterly besieged by entreaties for consideration. Among the immense thrusting crowd of American political aspirants, as Alexis de Tocqueville described office seekers, a party leader or dominant party faction was well situated to hold bidding wars.³⁴ The actual sum of money to be paid for an office is as publicly named … as the price of dry goods are named between a dealer … and his customers, one newspaper editor recounted while traveling through the nation’s capital in the 1850s.³⁵ Fernando Wood was notorious for selling the same nomination to more than one prospector.³⁶

Democratic commerce therefore emerged in relation to universal white manhood suffrage, party bureaucratization, and the quest for spoils. Whereas the revolutionary generation of gentlemen politicians possessed reputation and property before they began public careers, the Jacksonian Democrats and their Whig and later Republican rivals were often men of modest means. Many stepped into office with little or no independent fortune and frequently had no more at their disposal than a combination of their ambition and the productive value of an elected or appointed office. Office seekers routinely went into debt purchasing party nominations, which incentivized them to innovate methods of electoral wealth accumulation once in office.³⁷ Despite frequent turnover and brief tenure, social climbers coveted elected and appointed office due to its capacity for generating wealth.

By midcentury, mass party coordination effectively created capital, a political surplus, to be invested and used for the purpose of gaining political advantage—winning elections, party-building, and rewarding constituents and allies. Public opinion harbored a measureless wealth of latent power, observed Walt Whitman.³⁸ Nearly the entire eligible electorate was mobilized between the 1840s and 1870s, with voter turnout as high as 70 and 80 percent. In the latter part of this period, simultaneous with the Tweed Ring, Walter Dean Burnham estimates turnout in New York City at 90 percent.³⁹ For parties, failing to win enough support meant losing the ability to auction public offices. For political entrepreneurs, it meant missing out on profitable ventures. In this context, with material stakes high and electoral competition fierce, popularity gained value as political currency. Candidates developed populist appeals based on social class, cultural boundaries, and civic pride. Parties offered policy commitments to attract and mobilize their political bases. As social historians have long noted of political mobilization in this period, theatricality and performativity during campaign season were central components of popular entertainment. The basis of political management by exciting the people, in the words of Martin Van Buren, was the touchstone for trading and exchanging a wide range of things of political worth: suffrages, elected or appointed office, favors, contracts, and government approval or public subvention.⁴⁰

New York in the Gilded Age was fertile ground for entrepreneurs to press the boundaries of democratic officeholding. Experiments were possible because the very nature of property ownership was in legal and cultural flux. During this period, human slavery was abolished, but corporations gained constitutional rights as people.⁴¹ Risk takers thrived by working the nether regions of the Yankee Leviathan’s embrace of capacious public action to preserve the Union. Political geography also mattered. New York was highly contested in elections and supplied a disproportionate number of national party leaders due to its weight in the Electoral College.⁴² Most crucially, the Empire State emerged as a center of the postbellum financial and the corporate order. Social trends like the gilded passion for speculation, for example, found expression within political careers. The desperate search for alternatives to low-wage employment, driven by industrialization, led to the growth of poor relief within the spoils system. Extended party networks become a de facto employer of last resort for the needy among the electoral crowd. If party leaders centralized wealth at the top, it is also important to see how some of that