The Politics of War

[Sara S]

from delancyplace.com:

In today's excerpt - one legacy of the Civil War was that America was cemented into
a two-party system as never before, with the Republican Party dominating in the
afterglow of victory and the legacy of Lincoln. The Republican Party of the 1870s
and 1880s, however, was different than that of today, since it concerned itself
primarily with enacting protective tariffs for business, promoting big government
initiatives for internal improvements such as railroads, and doling out the self-serving
spoils of power. It was a period of unprecedented growth and the very period in
which America's industrial might led it to world ascendancy. Yet in 1890, on the
heels of increasing tariffs yet again, an uneasy electorate overturned the Republican
hegemony with landslide victories for the Democratic Party:

"The self-serving cynicism of the Republican leaders, however, had far stronger
roots than mere cynicism. Ultimately it rested on a belief shared by all Republicans
of note that the Republican Party was not merely superior to the Democrats but that
it alone was entitled to rule the Union it had formerly saved. The capacity of the
Republican Party for sustained, active, and insolent self-serving stemmed in great
measure from that belief and precisely because it was not entirely hypocritical.
In the long political history of mankind the moments of glory have been few. Fewer
still are the moments of glory for which a political party can claim credit. The
Republican Party, the party that had raised to the presidency one of the noblest
figures in history, which had saved a sundered Republic, which had emancipated a
nation's slaves and established them, if only briefly, on a footing of political
equality with their former masters, had written one truly glorious chapter in the
political history of mankind. Legitimated by the party's historic glory, the Republicans'
belief in their title to rule America was readily understandable. ...

"This passionate attachment to party, little known before the Civil War, had been
forged by the Civil War itself. If was as if, in the cauldron of civil strife, every
American had been melted down into one or the other of two elementary political
particles, one Republican, the other Democrat. To its massed and devoted partisans
the party was a church, whose creeds and slogans supplied men with their political
principles, whose celebrations supplied them with their holiday outings. To its
massed and devoted partisans the party was also a standing army perpetually arrayed
for battle, an army whose orders men gladly obeyed, whose rudest tricks its partisans
cheered, as patriots will cheer the night raids and ambushes of the nation's fighting
men. Identifying themselves with a party, Americans looked on their chosen party
as a kind of end in itself; its victories were their victories, its prosperity
their prosperity. For themselves they asked little, for the identification with
party was strong and passionate. In the Middle West in the 1880s, 'the Republican
Party,' recalled the urban reformer Brand Whitlock, 'was not a faction, not a group,
not a wing, it was an institution ... a synonym for patriotism, another name for
the nation. One became, in Urbana and in Ohio for many years, a Republican just
as the Eskimo dons fur clothes.' If the Democrats' supporters did not harbor such
grandiose sentiments, their attachment to the Democracy was nonetheless deep, in
part because the self-vaunting Republicans treated their party rivals with arrogant
contempt.

"Because the party was a church, questioning one's party's creed was looked upon
as heresy. Because the party was a standing army, rebellion within a party stood
condemned as base treachery and was almost unknown. ... Independent voters aligned
to neither party were looked upon either as boodlers -'floaters' who voted for the
party that offered the larger election-day bribe - or self-important cranks. ...

"For the post-Civil War party leaders the advantages of what Whitlock called 'those
days of silly partisanship' were many. The electorate's fidelity to party enabled
the leaders to pursue on the state and local levels corrupt and self-serving policies
in the certain knowledge that exceedingly few of their supporters could stomach
the prospect of voting for the rival party. It enabled them to overawe independent-minded
politicians with crushing assaults on their disloyalty to the party that had chosen
to advance them. Most important, it allowed the two national parties, for almost
a generation, to keep significant economic issues out of the political arena -
issues that might split a party organization and weaken its hold on the voters'
elected representatives, As long as men adhered to their party on the basis of Civil
War passions, as long as they 'voted as they shot,' the two major parties could
refight the Civil War in their election campaigns and leave the electorate reasonably
appeased. Since both parties benefited by keeping Civil War passions alive, both
parties cooperated in doing so. ...

"[Yet] the voters in 1890 [rose] up in wrath against the Republicans' vaunted instrument
for promoting industrial expansion, the protective tariff. The public anger was
understandable. Throughout the 1880s it had become increasingly clear that the
prevailing high duties on imports had completely lost their original purpose, protecting
'infant' American industries from destructive overseas competition. By 1890 America's
industries had not only ceased to be infants, they had become so efficient that
American manufacturers were prepared to undercut their European rivals in the markets
of the world. The Republicans' best vote-getting argument for protection, namely
that it protected the American wage earner, was losing its factual basis. If American
industrialists could pay so-called 'American wages' and still compete abroad,
then obviously they could do so at home without any need for high tariff walls.
The only just and sensible tariff policy was a reduction in the prevailing rates,
since every unnecessary penny of duty meant unearned windfall profits for the protected
manufacturer."

Author: Walter Karp

Title: The Politics of War

Publisher: Franklin Square Press

Date: Copyright 1979 by Walter Karp

Pages: 10, 5-6, 8

Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life
of the American Republic
by Walter Karp by Franklin Square Press
Paperback