The Progressive Era

1. The Road to Democratic Triumph

1892 was the great year of resurgent Democratic triumph. It was the first time since the Civil War that the Democratic Party controlled the presidency as well as both Houses of Congress. The 3% difference in the popular vote (Democrats 46%, Republicans 43%, and minor parties 11%) was by far the largest gap in the totals since the Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden swept the popular vote in 1876. In the Middle West, the Republicans had carried all six states (Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa) in 1888; now the Democrats won three (Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin), and almost tied in Ohio.

The great shift in Democratic fortunes, however, had come two years earlier, in the Congressional elections of 1890. Before 1890, the House of Representatives was 51.1% Republican; after 1890, it was no less than 71% Democratic. The Democrats controlled nearly every large state. In the Middle West, the Democratic peak in the House came in 1890, with slippage taking place in the 1892 elections. Put another way, the Middle West in 1888 was a Republican stronghold: of the six states (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin), the Republicans had six governors and the majority of five Congressional delegations. Only Indiana was a doubtful state. Yet, by 1889–1890, a spectacular reversal had taken place: nearly all the governors and all the Congressional delegations were Democratic.

One partial explanation was the slight but steady decline in Republican fortunes, and improvement in Democratic status, throughout this period. This relative shift cannot be ascribed to shifts in the urban and rural electorate. It is true that the urban proportion of the electorate in the Middle West rose from 1870 to 1890, but the pattern of slight decline in Republican fortunes occurred similarly in both urban and rural areas. The key to the changing fortunes was, as we have indicated, ethno-religious. The main key, as we shall see below, was the liquor question, and the conflicting views on the issue held by pietists and by liturgicals.1

In Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, for example, over the twenty year period there was a marked decline in the Baptist and Methodist proportion of the electorate and a marked rise in Catholics and Lutherans, and among the Lutherans it was the Germans who were growing the most rapidly. By 1890, the Catholics were the largest single religious group in the region. Part of the reason was a higher birth rate among Catholics, both Irish and German; more important was the heavy immigration during the 1870s and 1880s — an immigration in which the largest role was played by the Irish and German Catholics and Lutherans. This and other such Catholic immigration, such as the Poles and Bohemians, far outstripped the immigration of Scandinavian Lutherans.

At its inception in the 1850s, the Republican Party, centering on opposition to the expansion of slavery, was in that sense a moralistic party. It therefore attracted other crusading groups, including Prohibitionists, strict Sabbatarians, German anticlericals, and Know-Nothings who wished to curtail or eliminate foreign immigration.2 In short, it was pietism in politics, and hence, outside of the South, the Republican Party attracted the Methodists, Presbyterians, Norwegian Lutherans and Dutch Reformers. On the other hand, the Democratic Party, as the traditional party of laissez-faire, attracted the immigrant Catholics and German Lutherans.

After the war, it seemed clear to knowledgeable politicians that the German Lutherans were the swing vote, since the other religious groups were firm in one party or the other. By their quixotic choice in 1872 of the New York Republican reformer and prohibitionist Horace Greeley for president — the epitome of the pietistic crusader — the Democrats totally alienated the German Lutherans and went down to a crushing defeat.3 As a result, the Democratic resurgence was postponed for another four years.

Ohio and Wisconsin were conquered by the Republicans in 1872, but the party promptly threw away its winning momentum. For in both states, the Republicans quickly enacted prohibition statutes under the pressure of the Women’s Prayer Crusade against alcohol. The reaction of the German Lutherans to this hated prohibition was intense, as the Republicans lost both states in the elections of the following year (in Wisconsin, the Republican vote fell from 55% to 45% the following year, while in Ohio the Republican poll fell from 53% to 48%).

The Republican politicos then began the process of separating themselves from the bulk of their constituency in order to woo the German Lutheran swing vote. The risk was that their militancy would be angered and fall away from the cause or shift to minor parties. The maneuver was to woo the German Lutherans by playing down Prohibition and Sunday blue laws, while stressing anti-Catholicism and opposition to subsidizing Catholic parochial schools with tax-supported funds. Thus, future president Rutherford B. Hayes won the Ohio gubernatorial race in 1875 by at one and the same time bitterly attacking the Catholic “menace” to the public schools and, although denouncing liquor, also coming out against government-mandated prohibition.4 Similarly, Harrison Luddington, Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin in 1875, stridently denounced the Catholics and public funds for parochial Catholic schools; at the same time, he scored heavily with the Lutherans for being the Mayor of Milwaukee who refused to enforce that city’s prohibition law.

On the other hand, part of the steady Republican decline during these decades may be attributed to the steady alienation of the ultra-pietist Republicans by the leaders’ moderation on prohibition and Sabbath laws. We have seen that the Republican decline in the 1870s and 1880s was greater than the Democratic increase — the difference consisted of third-party defections from the Republican ranks, to such parties as the Greenbackers in the 1870s and later the Prohibitionists. Apart from the ex-Southerners, the Greenbackers — crusaders for inflationary paper money — in the Midwest were ex-Republicans; in any case, they were almost all pietists: Methodists, Baptists, and Norwegian and Swedish Lutherans. There was hardly a Catholic or a German Lutheran amongst them.5

During the 1880s, the Prohibitionist voters were almost all defecting Republicans, including the Scandinavian Lutherans but above all the Methodists, Native, Welsh and Cornish.

Despite these defections, the Republican leaders, seeing the rapid growth of German Lutherans among the electorate, increasingly committed themselves to the policy of moderation on prohibition and Sabbatarian legislation. In Ohio, the Republican Party was torn between the moderate policy of John Sherman and William McKinley, and the strident prohibitionism of Joseph Foraker. It became increasingly clear during the 1880s that Foraker succeeded in his races for governor only when he moderated his prohibitionism and confined his pietist appeals to denouncing the Catholics for undermining the public schools. In Detroit, too, the  Republican businessmen formed the Michigan Club in 1884 and came to dominate Republican politics in the city. The Michigan Club turned sharply away from Old Stock pietism and turned toward appealing to the immigrant German Lutherans. As a result, in 1890, the Republicans nominated an urban wet for governor of Michigan after the Democrats, in a remarkable and ominous hint for the future, had nominated an Old Stock pietistic dry.

We come, then, to the question: why the great shift toward the Democrats in 1890? In Ohio and Wisconsin, the reason was a massive shift of German Lutherans from the Republicans to the Democrats so much so as to carry Wisconsin for Grover Cleveland. Michigan, which will be discussed more in depth below, was an unusual case; here the 1890 shift toward the Democrats took place among native Protestants in southern Michigan, while Catholics strengthened their support for the Democrats in the Upper Peninsula. The native Protestants were attracted by the unusual Democratic nomination for governor of a pietistic dry. Two years later, however, the Democrats returned to their traditional nominating pattern; the native pietists went back to the Republicans, while the former Democrats returned to their old party.6

Orthodox historians explain the massive rise in Democratic fortunes in 1890 to reaction against the high McKinley Tariff of that year. But, for one thing, the Ohio shift came the year before, in 1889, and it has not been explained why the German Lutherans should suddenly get so upset about the protective tariff. Neither can the rise of the Populist Party in 1892 be said to have affected this shift between the two major parties. Overall, the Populists attracted about as many Democrats as Republicans, and they attracted far more Prohibitionists than either of the major parties. The inflationary and strongly pro-statist Populists were basically a farmer party of native, British, Norwegian, and Swedish pietists. As a rural pietist party, it is no wonder that the bulk of its voters had been Prohibitionists.

To explain the great Democratic rise in 1890, we must examine the situation in various special states. Ohio, as we have seen, shifted strongly Democratic first, in 1889, largely because of the change in the German Lutheran vote. The explanation for this change is clear: an upsurge in prohibitionism.

Ohio had never gone prohibitionist, thanks to the voting strength of the Cincinnati Germans. The Republican drys had submitted a constitutional amendment to outlaw liquor in 1883, but the voters had defeated the proposal. Failing to get a whole loaf, the prohibitionists decided on half: strict and expensive licensing laws, particularly on saloons. In 1885, the Ohio legislature imposed a stiff tax on liquor, and it followed in 1888 by raising the tax and by prohibiting the sale of alcohol on Sunday. The Ohio officials sagely failed to enforce the law in German areas. As a result, in the following year, the Cincinnati Law and Order Association (known locally as the “Evangelical Stranglers”) petitioned Governor Foraker to enforce the law prohibiting the sale of liquor on Sunday.

Foraker now harkened to his old prohibitionist faith. He accepted the petition, and he summarily removed the Cincinnati police board and appointed a new one to enforce the law. This action precipitated the “Saloon-Keepers’ Rebellion.” Saloon-keepers and liquor dealers organized a League for the Preservation of Citizen’s Rights to combat the law. 300 German saloon-keepers resolved to stay open on Sundays in defiance of the law. Not only in Cincinnati, but throughout the state, Law and Order Associations sprang up. They also supported Governor Foraker’s request for a constitutional amendment to allow the state to control election boards in cities and thereby to eliminate “corruption” — that is, victories by urban machine Democrats.

In the fall elections in Ohio in 1889, the Democrats were silent on the liquor laws for fear of alienating their Southern Baptist and Disciples of Christ supporters. They did call, however, for Home Rule for the Ohio cities, which would have meant non-enforcement of the law in German areas. The League for the Preservation of Citizen’s Rights called for the repudiation of Governor Foraker, who was seeking a third term. All this was enough to induce a massive swing of German Lutherans into the Democratic camp, and Democratic Representative James Campbell won the election for governor.

In the presidential election of 1892, in which the Democrats almost tied the Republicans, the Democrats were able to keep some of the German Lutherans who had defected three years earlier. The remainder of the gain over 1888 came from a defection of many Republican pietists to the Prohibitionist ranks, a defection spurred by the current dominance of the moderate McKinley faction in the Republican Party of Ohio. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, for example, the McKinley group had dropped the idea of enforcing the Sunday closing law.

It is instructive to see how the Democrats, led in the press by the Cincinnati Enquirer, were able to argue for the libertarian Democratic positions in the presidential race in 1892 by linking them up to the struggle over prohibition three years earlier. Thus, the major national issues were the Democratic attack on the protective McKinley Tariff, and on the Republican Force Bill, a final attempt to bring back Reconstruction and impose Federal supervision of Congressional elections in the South. On the tariff, the Democrats linked the governmental paternalism of the tariff to the paternalism of prohibition. On the Force Bill, the Democrats could link it with prohibition by denouncing in both cases the Republican assault on home rule and local government, by attempting in both cases to centralize power in the hands of “Republican fanatics,” and to suppress individual liberty. In both cases, the issue was liberty against Puritan meddling and paternalism.For their part, the Republicans, while countering with their habitual stance as the “party of morality,” raised a more moderate note by attacking the defectors to the Prohibition Party and other minor parties as “cranks” and “meddling prohibitionists.” It was in this unwonted tone of attack upon moral crusading that the Republicans anticipated their momentous shift of policy four years later.

Even the seemingly well entrenched Representative William McKinley had been narrowly beaten in the Democratic landslide by German defectors. Rapidly moderating his stand on prohibition, McKinley was able to buck the Democratic tide by defeating Governor Campbell in 1891, sweeping in a Republican legislature as well. Not only was McKinley the long-time leader of the moderates on pietistic issues, but he was also shrewd enough to reverse his previous pro-inflation and pro-silver stand — in short, to adopt the sort of pro “sound money” and gold standard position previously associated with the Democratic Party. This was particularly effective against Governor Campbell, who had come out for free silver. As a result, Ohio was almost the only major state where the Republicans did well in 1891.

1889 was also an ominous year for the Republicans in Indiana. In Indianapolis, in the fall of that year, a group of wealthy Republicans and pietistic ministers organized the High-License League of Indianapolis, dedicated to raising the annual license fee for saloons. In response, the Republican administration raised the fee from $100 to $250. As a result, the Democrats swept Indianapolis in a triumphant coalition including businessmen opposed high taxes, classical liberals, and anti-prohibitionist Germans.7

In Wisconsin too, the Democrats swept the state in 1890, due largely to a massive shift of German Lutherans from the Republican ranks. Two years later, the Democrats retained enough of these defectors to enable them to carry Wisconsin for the presidency.

Wisconsin, with the exception of two years, had been controlled by the Republicans ever since the Civil War. The exception was 1872–73, when a stiff saloon licensing law, put through by the Republicans, shifted enough Germans out of the Republican ranks to carry the state for the Democrats. The Republicans, under the shrewd leadership of “Boss” Elisha Keyes and Philetus Sawyer, then refused to enforce the licensing laws and thereby were swept back into power.

The critical issue in Wisconsin, however, turned out to be not prohibition but another pietist-liturgical conflict: the status of parochial schools. After the Republicans had absorbed the lesson in moderation for many years, the new Republican governor in 1889, William Dempster Hoard, recommended the enforcement of a dead letter compulsory education law requiring the language of all schools, public or private, to be in English.

In response, the Wisconsin legislature, in the spring of 1889, passed the notorious Bennett Law, which (1) imposed compulsory attendance for children in school, and (2) decreed that the language of such a school, whether public or private, could only be in English. This meant, in the concrete, that any German-language schools would henceforth be illegal. The Bennett Law hit hard not only at the German Catholic parochial schools, but also at the German-language parochial schools operated by the Lutheran churches. The Wisconsin Synod, which ran 164 parochial schools in the state, one-third of which used only English, denounced the law as “oppressive and tyrannical” and attacked its encroachment on “parental rights and family life.” The Missouri Synod, which ran 136 German-language parochial schools, attacked the law for violating the “natural rights of parents” and their liberty of conscience.

At the end of December, the German Lutherans set up a state committee to combat the Bennett Law. In February, 19 Lutheran congregations in Milwaukee made repeal of the Bennett Law the crucial political issue. The three Catholic bishops of Wisconsin, all Germans, also attacked the law as interfering “with the rights of the Church and of the parent.” The German-language press linked the law to nativism and prohibitionism, and the Lutherans and Catholics were angered still further by the fact that some of the hated German anticlerical liberals — along with the German pietist groups — favored the despotic law.

As a consequence, in the Milwaukee municipal election of 1890, an election that took place before the passage of the protectionist McKinley Tariff, the Democrats overthrew the Republican mayor. The cause of this landslide in the first real Democratic victory in Milwaukee in fifteen years was a massive defection to the Democrats in the German Lutheran wards, aided by a further strengthening of Democratic support in German Catholic areas. In consequence, the Republican vote in Milwaukee, which had been 47% in 1888, now fell drastically to 30%. The Democratic nominee, the affable Yankee humorist George Peck, had denounced the Bennett Law in no uncertain terms as unjust, and infringing on the natural liberty of conscience and the natural right of parental control.

In May, a group of leading Wisconsin Lutherans called a state-wide anti-Bennett Law convention for June. The convention was addressed by George Peck, the new Democratic mayor of Milwaukee. Scores of Anti-Bennett Law Clubs burgeoned throughout Wisconsin. The Missouri Synod and allied Lutherans organized systematically in every parish against the law. The German Catholics were equally bitter; Archbishop Katzen of Green Bay declared that “as Bishop of this Diocese [I] should consider anyone who did not vote for repeal of the [Bennett] law a traitor to the Catholic Church.”8

In August, the Democratic state platform denounced the Bennett Law, and intelligently linked it to other examples of Republican paternalism, state and federal: to the sumptuary laws, high spending, the protective tariff, the Force Bill, and centralization of power. The Democrats were also aided in public opinion by the fact that the Prohibitionist Party, thoroughly hated by all German Catholics and Lutherans, endorsed the Bennett Law in its 1890 platform.

In the Republican Party, two conflicting groups appeared. The dominant faction, headed by Governor William Dempster Hoard, ardently favored the Bennett Law. The Hoard faction, which included Representatives Nils Haugen and Robert M. La Follette, demanded a part declaration in support of the law, in the name of adherence to “principle.” The Hoard faction had its way at the state convention and won the re-nomination of Governor Hoard. The Hoard group were responding to local pietist pressures, to anti-Catholicism, and to a drive by the Wisconsin Dairymen’s Association, of which Hoard was a member, to teach more English to the state’s farmers. Haugen, a Norwegian immigrant, represented a highly pietistic region in the west and northwest of the state, consisting mainly of Norwegians and Swedes. La Follette also came from a heavily pietistic area.

The minority moderates, headed by State Chairman Henry C. Payne and U.S. Senator John C. Spooner, tried in vain to dump Governor Hoard and to call openly for repeal of the Bennett Law. They were responding to the massive defection underway from Republican ranks by the German Lutherans. Governor Hoard, an intensely pietistic newspaper owner and an amateur in politics, did not ease matters by bitterly denouncing German parents and pastors and endorsing the Bennett Law to the hilt.

In the November, 1890 elections, the German Lutherans reacted by shifting en masse to the Democratic camp; the Republicans were crushed by what was called at the time the “Lutheran Landslide.” Even the faithfully Republican and slightly liturgical Norwegian Synod Lutherans deserted the Republican camp, not by voting for the hated Democrats but by staying away from the polls. The Norwegian Synod had established Norwegian-language parochial schools, and even the pietistic Norwegians and Swedes — especially the recent immigrants — were embittered by the attack on their home tongues.

As a result, Governor Hoard was smashed by the Democrat George Peck. To the Hoard campaign slogan, “The Little Schoolhouse, STAND BY IT!” the Democrats had countered, “Peck and ALL the Schools!” The Bennett Law was promptly repealed, with half of the Republican legislators joining the Democrats in the vote. By 1892, while many German Lutherans returned to the Republican ranks, enough stayed Democratic to carry the state for Cleveland.9

The Bennett Law was modelled after the Edwards Law passed in Illinois in 1889, and pushed through by the State Superintendent of public instruction, Richard Edwards. The reaction in Illinois was very similar. The Germans, even including the anticlerical liberals, rallied to defend the right of instruction in the German language. The Republican Party came out strongly for the public schools, as well as for prohibition, and they re-nominated Edwards for superintendent. The Democrats, in contrast, called for repeal of the Edwards law, as violating the natural rights of parents. With the Edwards law as well as prohibition and Sunday closing laws as the crucial issues in Illinois, the Democrats were able to win the state, to capture Cook County, and to recapture the city of Chicago. The hated Edwards was defeated handily by the Democratic candidate Henry Raab.

In 1892, the Democratic momentum continued. Grover Cleveland was the first Democrat since the Civil War to carry the state of Illinois, sweeping Cook County by 33,000 votes and carrying in the Democratic candidate for governor.10

In Michigan, the voting pattern in 1890 was unusual. In the Upper Peninsula, the Democrats gained strength among Catholics and lost votes among Protestants. The reason was that, culturally, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was really an extension of northeastern Wisconsin, and so the educational agitation for and against the Bennett Law deeply affected opinion there. In particular, French Canadian Catholics strengthened their devotion to the Democrats, while English Canadian Protestants became even more Republican. The conflict over the Bennett Law in Wisconsin had polarized the Upper Peninsula even more than before.

The political situation in southern Michigan was particularly odd. The Republican moderates, coming to dominate politics in the state, as we have seen, decided to reject a typical pietist farmer for governor and instead nominated an urban wet, James M. Turner, mayor of Lansing. In response, the Michigan Democracy nominated for governor Edwin B. Winans, a prohibitionist Old Stock farmer. The result was that in southern Michigan many Catholics defected to the Republicans, while many more angry Republican pietists failed to vote or supported the Prohibitionist Party. The result was a large defection from Republican ranks and a Democratic victory in the state.

Two years later, however, the parties reverted to type: the Democrats returned to their traditional nominating pattern, the defecting Catholics returned, and the large number of defecting pietists returned to Republican ranks. This meant that Michigan reverted, in 1892, to its pre-1890 status as a solid Republican state.11

Iowa was another state in which the Republicans were overturned by the prohibition issue. Iowa had always been totally controlled by the Republican Party. In 1855, the pietistic Whigs had passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The Republicans, concentrating on slavery as the major issue, promptly exempted beer and wine from the ban, permitted local option, and didn’t enforce the law in counties opposed to it.

After the Civil War, the Republicans began to succumb to intense pressure by the prohibitionists. The W.C.T.U., the Sons of Temperance, and the Order of Good Templars spread the dry gospel, and the Prohibitionist Party was formed, with the Methodists leading the pietistic sects in the new crusade. In Iowa, the dry political pressure was led by the Iowa State Temperance Alliance.

Throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s, the drys were able to pass ever more stringent licensing and local option laws. At the Republican convention of 1875, a coalition of dry and inflationist pietists almost gained the gubernatorial nomination for their leader, General James B. Weaver, later to be a Populist presidential candidate. Four years later, the drys finally captured the Republican Party in Iowa, which voted to push for an amendment to the state constitution which would join Maine and Kansas as the only totally prohibitionist states in the Union. The Prohibitionist Party in the state collapsed, for its members hastened to join the Republicans.

The climax came in June 1882, when the Iowa public voted on a prohibition amendment after it was twice recommended by a Republican dominated legislature. The Temperance Alliance mobilized men and women in every part of the state, calling for prohibition in the name of Christian morality and American civilization.

The Democrats denounced the prohibitionists as “puritanical fanatics” trying to impose sumptuary laws and aggressing the liberty of the individual. The Democrats colorfully denounced the Republicans as “the tool of fanatical preachers,” and as heading a “Holy Alliance of ... abolitionists, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Sunday and Cold Water Fanatics.”12

But the opposition was in vain. The prohibition amendment passed by 55% to 45%, by a margin of 30,000 votes. One immediate and lasting result of the vote was the enraging of the German population of Iowa. Before 1882, the fourteen most-heavily German counties of Iowa habitually voted 55% Republican. After voting 39% for the dry referendum, the Republican percentage in these German counties fell permanently to the 36–44% range.

The same defection of German Catholics can be seen in the changed voting patterns of the heavily Catholic city of Dubuque. 50% Republican in 1881, Dubuque dropped to 28% Republican in the fall 1882 reelections (after voting 15% dry in the referendum) and picked up to only 38% in 1885. Particularly striking were two German wards: Ward 3, which fell from 51% Republican in 1881 to 23% the following year (after voting 10% dry), and Ward 5, which dropped from 63% to 22% Republican (after voting 6% dry).

The next winter, however, the Iowa Supreme Court invalidated the amendment on a procedural error. The Republicans, seeing the firestorm of opposition, did not dare to resubmit the amendment. To mollify the pietists, the Republicans continued to widen the scope of prohibition by statute. In 1884, the Republicans rammed through one of the stiffest prohibition laws in the country. In towns and villages where sentiment was dry, saloons were forced to close. But in the larger towns and cities, the law was openly flouted.

At first, the laws were poorly enforced in wet areas. But in 1887 and 1888, Governor William Larrabee decided to enforce the law to the hilt and more restrictive laws were passed. Informers were given bonuses for revealing the existence of illicit liquor. The officials conducted raids on people suspected of harboring illegal alcohol.

The furor over prohibition reached a peak in Iowa during 1889. A massive flouting of the prohibition laws had polarized sentiment in the state between repeal of prohibition and inflicting ever harsher punishments in order to enforce the law. At the Republican state convention, control was seized from the professionals by the eager ultra-pietist amateurs, who had packed county conventions with radical prohibitionists. Joseph Hutchinson, an amateur politician and wholesale grocer, was nominated for governor; he delivered a paean to prohibition, calling it a “struggle for morality, for the reduction of corruption ... for the true elevation of the human race.”13 Hutchinson made it clear that the fundamental choice before the voter was between modern civilization on the one hand, and that “cursed barracuda,” the saloon, on the other.

The prohibitionists and pietists enthusiastically backed Hutchinson, particularly the W.C.T.U., the Good Templars, and the Methodist Church, which demanded the unconditional surrender of liquor, as well as the repudiation of such halfway measures as licensing and local option. The Methodists also called for the outlawing of all desecration of the Sabbath, including ball games, the publishing of newspapers, and railroad service.

For their part, the Democrats shrewdly selected for governor Horace Boies, a former Republican, a personal teetotaler, and even a member of the Good Templars, but who staunchly opposed prohibition, centralized power, and paternalistic government. Boies, however, did favor local option and high license fees for saloons.

Horace Boies became the first Democrat ever to become governor of Iowa since the Civil War, obtaining 50% of the vote to Hutchinson’s 48%. The following year, the Democrats gained the majority of the Iowa Congressional delegation.

Analyzing the composition of the drop in the Republican vote, from 52% in 1888 to 48% the following year, it becomes clear that the major transformation came in the cities. In 1888, out of nine cities in Iowa with 14,000 or more population, the Democrats carried four, with an overall total of 52% of the urban vote. But the following year, Horace Boies swept all nine, with a massive 64% of the vote.

Breaking down the vote by religion, while Old Stock towns and counties, Norwegian, Swedish, and Bohemian townships slightly lowered the proportion of the Republican vote; the biggest Republican losses were in the nine German urban wards, the vote falling from 28% to 15%.

The drys also exercised control over the 1891 Republican convention, calling for total prohibition, and shouting down the possibility of local option. The Democratic slate, however, continuing to attack prohibition, swept to victory in a remarkably high voter turnout; and Governor Boies won reelection, handing the Republicans their worst defeat in the history of Iowa.

The Republicans had learned their lesson. Two years later, in the 1893 convention, the Republican pros were able to take back their party from the enthusiastic amateur drys. The successful comeback was headed by former Senator James Harlan, the founder and Grand Old Man of the Iowa Republican Party, and himself a devout Methodist and temperance man. The professional forces managed to carry repeal of the 12-year Republican commitment to total prohibition and to bury the compulsory education issue as well. Instead, local option and high license fees for liquor were installed in the platform. To win back the German voters, staunch opponents of cheap money and inflation, the Iowa Republicans even abandoned their cheap money plank and adopted an anti-inflation stance. Armed with their new-found moderation, the Republicans were able to recapture the governorship that year on behalf of the moderate Frank Jackson.14

2. The Republicans Regroup

A. The Retreat from Prohibition

As the Republicans slipped into becoming the minority party in state after state in the early 1890s, it became increasingly clear to their political leaders that something drastic would have to be done; notably, radically pietist measures would have to be soft-pedalled so as not to aggravate the German Lutherans and other liturgical voters. We have seen how in response to Democratic victories, the Republicans in Ohio and Iowa moved quickly to soften or jettison their prohibitionist platform; in both states, furthermore, the Republicans began to shift from their previous inflationist and pro-silver stance toward the advocacy of the gold standard and sound money. In Wisconsin, they were willing to backtrack on the Bennett Law and its assault on German parochial schooling.

In this move toward jettisoning their pietist doctrines, the lead was taken by the Ohio Republican leadership of Governor William McKinley, and his mentor and party boss, chairman of the Ohio and later the national Republican Party, the industrialist Marcus Alonzo Hanna. In his term as governor, from 1892 to 1896, McKinley succeeded in suppressing the pietists in the Ohio party. And then, when Joseph Foraker returned to control the party that year, the prohibitionists found to their chagrin that their old champion had learned his lesson too, and that Foraker was now a determined wet.

In Wisconsin, former Governor Hoard tried a comeback by promoting such ardent pietists and prohibitionists as Representative Nils Haugen and then Representative Robert La Follette as governor. The Republican professional, however, finally beat out Haugen and La Follette in the 1890s, and eliminated the old Republican lust for moral crusading. In Michigan, the leading Republican pietist was the mayor of Detroit, Hazen Pingree. During the 1890s, the state Republican machinery, led by Senator James McMillan, maneuvered hard to limit or eliminate Pingree’s influence, finally succeeding in saving the GOP in Michigan from reacquiring a strongly pietist image. In Illinois and Indiana, in the meantime, the Republican moderates were able to defeat the pietists with comparative ease.

The Republicans were thus retreating en masse from prohibitionist and pietist concerns during the early 1890s. No major Republican newspaper endorsed total prohibition; the furthest they would go was regulation, high license fees, and local option. The Republican politicians increasingly avoided the vexed issue altogether, calling it a purely local matter. The veteran Ohio Republican Senator John Sherman went so far as to assert that matters of religion, morality, and temperance should not be political issues. A far cry from the old “party of great moral ideas.” Another disillusioning situation for the prohibitionists is that the great bulk of Republican politicians themselves imbibed alcohol. How then could they be trusted?

The tension between the Republicans and their pietist constituents was also growing to the bursting point because, while the Republicans were becoming more moderate, the prohibitionists were becoming increasingly fanatical. Originally, the prohibitionists had habitually referred to themselves as temperate, as men of temperance. By the 1880s and 1890s, however, this was no longer true: the prohibitionists now spoke of themselves as “radicals.” It was no longer enough to attack hard liquor; denunciations of beer were now stepped up. The saloon came in for increasing vilification, violent raids were conducted on them, and Law and Order Legions in large cities acted to stamp out illegal sales of liquor. By 1885, there were 500 such local leagues throughout the country, with 60,000 members.

Not only that: the youth were becoming more pietistic and more militant prohibitionists than their elders. The pietist youth exuded a deep hatred for the saloons, expressed through Young People’s Christian Societies and interdenominational Sunday school programs. The W.C.T.U., partly through its highly successful mandatory temperance hygiene classes in the public schools, were able to enlist 200,000 youngsters in their youth affiliate, the Loyal Temperance Legion.

The success in radicalizing middle-class pietist youth is shown by the fact that 2/3 of all college students in the Midwest were enrolled in pietist denominations, and that most of them joined the highly moralistic Young Men’s Christian Association. The faculty and students at Iowa State University endorsed prohibition. Particularly remarkable was a presidential preference poll of undergraduates at the University of Chicago in 1892. The eventual winner, Democrat Grover Cleveland, obtained 52 votes, while incumbent Republican President Benjamin Harrison received 151 votes, and the Populist James B. Weaver obtained 3. But the astounding fact is that the winner of the poll was the Prohibitionist Party candidate, John Bidwell, who received 164 votes.

But what was an increasingly militant prohibitionist constituency going to do politically in the face of growing Republican reluctance and a declining Prohibitionist Party? The Prohibitionist Party foundered on the question of a single issue on alcohol versus a broad-range pietist, genuine third-party organization. A similar split led to the collapse of the anti-Catholic American Protective Association, which could not decide in 1896 whether to endorse McKinley for president or to establish a third political party of its own. The upshot was the gradual disappearance of the Prohibitionist movement as a group of enthusiastic amateurs and its replacement by an extremely effective and professional single-issue lobby, the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893. The Anti-Saloon League, willing to concentrate first on local option laws and to build up steadily from there, rewarded or punished politicians purely on the single issue of alcohol. Its tactic was to triumph in a quarter-century.15

B. Restricting Immigration16

The Republicans were fully aware that the secular demographic trend, fueled by the arrival of Catholic and other liturgical immigrants, was against them. During the 1880s, while British and Scandinavian immigration had reached new highs, they were surpassed by German and Irish immigration, the latter being the highest since the famous influx of the late 1840s and early 1850s. During the same decade, the “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe, especially Catholics from Italy, began to make its mark.

Their defeat in the presidential election of 1892 intensified the hatred of Catholics and Catholic immigrants in the Republican Party. The predecessors of the Republicans, the Whigs, had been strongly nativist and anti-Catholic, and the short-lived Know-Nothings, from whose ranks many Republicans had emerged in the mid-1850s, flourished on an exclusively anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic program. Now the embittered Republicans turned to a policy of immigration restriction. If the Catholics could not constitutionally be deported, they could at least be prevented from tipping the balance further.

The first break in the American tradition of free and unrestricted immigration came in the act of 1882, when the federal government assumed at least formal control over immigration (previously regulated by the states, principally New York).17 The United States, instead of the several states, was to tax each entrant a modest fifty cents to accumulate an immigrant welfare fund, and ex-convicts or other people likely to become a public charge were to be denied admission.

In the late 1880s, working class activists, concerned with restricting the supply of incoming labor, obtained legislation in several states barring aliens from various types of employment. In particular, aliens were prohibited from employment on public works. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in 1886 banning “nondeclarant” aliens (those who had not yet declared their intentions of becoming U.S. citizens) from employment on public works. When the Senate failed to pass the bill, Illinois, Wyoming, and Idaho proceeded to bar such aliens from state or municipal works projects.

More sweepingly, in 1885, the Knights of Labor and other working class groups persuaded the Congress to outlaw contract labor, the system under which a European immigrant was assured of a specific job in the U.S. before he arrived. The outlawing of contract labor, of course, tended to increase those immigrants likely to become a public charge and thereby added further to the restriction on immigration.18

In addition to workers attempting to restrict immigrant competition, the pietists and prohibitionists centered on the Catholic immigrants as their major foe. Thus, the Presbyterian Synod of 1887 declared:

The ranks of the drinking men are constantly recruited by the influx of bibulous and intemperate foreigners. The great majority of these alien immigrants, now over a half million annually, are addicted to the case of strong drinks, as well as steeped in ignorance and vice.

And the Reverend T.W. Cuyler, president of the National Temperance Society, put it even more strongly in the summer of 1891: “How much longer [will] the Republic ... consent to have her soil a dumping ground for all Hungarian ruffians, Bohemian bruisers, and Italian cutthroats of every description?”19

Immigration restrictions were sought by the Independent Presbyterians, the National Temperance Convention in 1891, and the Prohibition Party in 1892. The late 1880s saw a blossoming of nativist and anti-Catholic organizations agitating to restrict immigration. The large Civil War veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, long associated with the Republican Party and now reaching its peak membership of 400,000, began to denounce immigrants who were allying themselves politically with “copperheads and ex-rebels,” i.e., with Southerners in the Democratic Party.20

Patriotic secret societies, nativist and anti-Catholic, led by the newly burgeoning Junior Order of United American Mechanics, with 60,000 members in 1889 and 160,000 in the 1890s, began to flourish in the late 1880s. Other such fraternal orders, all founded in Pennsylvania, were the Order of United American Mechanics and the Patriotic Order Sons of America.

Also newly active was a group of secret anti-Catholic societies, including the United Order of Deputies, with fifteen thousand working-class members, who demanded that employers discharge all Catholics. By far the leading anti-Catholic organization was the American Protective Association, founded in Clinton, Iowa in 1887 by attorney Henry F. Bowers. A.P.A. members took secret oaths never to vote for a Catholic or to employ one if a Protestant were available.

The A.P.A. grew steadily across the upper Mississippi Valley, especially in large towns and cities where Catholics were prevalent. The A.P.A. helped the Republicans sweep the ordinarily Democratic city of Omaha in 1891, and the following year it elected a Congressman from Saginaw, Michigan. Acquiring 70,000 members by 1893, the A.P.A. suddenly burgeoned to a mammoth half a million members the following year, centering in the Midwest but also stretching eastward through the Great Lakes area.

The A.P.A. was almost exclusively Republican. It aided McKinley’s reelection as Ohio governor in 1893, and in Michigan, Kentucky, and Nebraska, the organization was close to the Republican Party leadership.

Thus, the Republican Party had considerable incentive to push for immigration restriction in the late 1880s and early 1890s: both in response to the pietism of its constituents and in reaction to the growing demographic dominance of the immigrant-sustained Democratic Party. But there was also another powerful reason: the Republicans might moderate most of their formerly cherished pietism, but there was one overriding plank to which they were deeply committed: the protective tariff. The pro-tariff manufacturers decided that to gain the support of the working classes against the powerful Democratic assault on the tariff as a special privilege, the Republicans should offer the native workers a quid pro quo: protection of their foreign competitors, the immigrants. In that way, the manufacturers’ privileges and cartels sustained by the tariff would be sweetened by cartelization of the labor force to restrict entry into the work force.21 The idea of such a bargain in mutual special privilege was particularly pushed by James M. Swank, general manager of the American Iron and Steel Association. It is no coincidence that the inefficient iron and steel industry had led the drive for a protective tariff from its earliest days, after the War of 1812, until the end of the century.

By the late 1880s, the Republicans stepped up their agitation for the restriction of immigration. Republican conventions in Pennsylvania and Ohio in 1887, as well as in California the following year, came out for restriction. Senator Justin Morrill, Republican of Vermont, a veteran protectionist and advocate of federal intervention in education, introduced a bill for immigration restriction in 1887. Three years later, Congress moved toward legislative action. Senator William E. Chandler, Republican of New Hampshire, became chairman of the Senate’s first standing committee on immigration in 1890 and thereby assumed the lead of the restrictionist movement. The following year, Congress assumed sole jurisdiction over immigration and put teeth in existing restrictions on entry by compelling steamship companies to carry back all immigrants rejected by U.S. inspectors. This law had a chilling effect on the willingness of steamship companies to carry immigrants to the U.S. The act of 1891 also provided, for the first time, for deporting illegal aliens within one year of entry, or for deporting aliens who might become public charges “from causes existing prior to his landing.” The act also added to the categories of the excluded polygamists and those with a “loathsome and dangerous” contagious disease. The ban on contract labor was also broadened by adding those immigrants encouraged to arrive by employer advertisements.

The restrictionists in Congress, led by Chandler’s committee, attempted to take advantage of a cholera scare in the fall of 1892, to pass a moratorium on all immigration for an entire year. They were not successful in stampeding Congress, however.

Failing the suspension, the restrictionists, led by Chandler and by Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, drove toward a literacy test for all immigrants. The restrictionists’ hand was strengthened by the fall elections in 1894, which installed Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. At the same time, the Immigration Restriction League was founded in Boston by a half-dozen young Brahmins. The League spread a nationwide propaganda and Washington lobbying critical of the new immigration from southern and eastern Europe, which allegedly contained a host of illiterates and criminals.

In the winter of 1895, the Immigration Restriction League’s bill was introduced and spearheaded by now-Senator Lodge and by Representative Walker McCall of Massachusetts. The bill provided for the exclusion of all men and women over the age of 14 who could not read and write. Lodge and McCall stressed racial arguments against the Italians and other southern Europeans. The literacy bill passed the House overwhelmingly during 1896, and the Senate in December. But President Cleveland, in one of his last acts in office, vetoed the bill, and the Senate failed to override.

In addition to restricting entry, the nativists could do something about the voting rights of immigrants already in the United States. Restrictionists urged a lengthening of the waiting period for naturalization. Moreover, eighteen southern and western states allowed aliens to vote on a simple declaration of intent to become a citizen. The nativists began a trend back to the original American prohibition of alien suffrage, but by the end of the century 11 states still allowed aliens to vote.22

C. Pietism and Women’s Suffrage23

Voting need not only be restricted; it could also be expanded, provided that pietists would hope to benefit more than proportionately. Specifically, women could be granted the vote, in the knowledge that immigrant Catholic women would not be likely to vote in as great proportions as native-born WASPs. As Professor Grimes concludes:

I am ... arguing that the evidence indicates that to a large extent, at least in the West, the constituency granting woman suffrage was composed of those who also supported prohibition and immigration restriction and felt woman suffrage would further their enactment.24

Like most reform movements, such as prohibition, the women’s suffrage movement was heavily pietist from the very beginning. The strongly pietist third parties, such as the Prohibition Party and the Greenback Party, supported women’s suffrage throughout, and the Populists tended in that direction before their amalgamation into the Democracy in 1896. Later, the Progressive Party of 1912 was the first major national convention to permit women delegates and to select a woman elector. Of the two major parties, the Democrats paid no attention to the women suffrage question, while the Republicans made vague noises in a favorable direction. The suffragettes saw as their major enemies the party bosses of the Republican and especially the Democratic parties, and in particular the liquor interests, who, in the words of the philippic by Susan B. Anthony and Ida H. Harper, were “positively, unanimously, and unalterably opposed to woman suffrage.”25

Perhaps one reason for this determined opposition was the great prominence in the suffragette movement of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, upon the pledge: “I hereby solemnly promise, God helping me, to abstain from all distilled, fermented and malt liquors, including wine, beer and cider, and to employ all proper means to discourage the use of and traffic in the same.” The W.C.T.U., led by Frances E. Willard, had, by 1900, established chapters in 10,000 towns and cities across the country and enjoyed a membership of 300,000. Of all women’s organizations mentioned in Anthony and Harper’s History of Woman Suffrage, the W.C.T.U. received the greatest amount of space. That they were also involved in curfew, anti-gambling, anti-smoking, and anti-sex laws — actions lauded by the woman suffrage movements — is clear from the following passage in Anthony and Harper:

[The W.C.T.U.] has been a chief factor in State campaigns for statutory prohibition, constitutional amendment, reform laws in general and those for the protection of women and children in particular, and in securing anti-gambling and anti-cigarette laws. It has been instrumental in raising the “age of protection” for girls in many States, and in obtaining curfew laws in 400 towns and cities. ... The association protests against the legalization of all crimes, especially those of prostitution and liquor selling.26

Not only did Susan B. Anthony begin her career as a professional prohibitionist, but her two successors as president of the leading suffragette organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, were also ardent prohibitionists. Her immediate successor, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, also began as a prohibitionist, while the next president, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, began her career as a lecturer for the W.C.T.U.27

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union crystallized out of an anti-liquor “Women’s Prayer Crusade” that began in Hillsboro, Ohio in 1874, and swept the nation. As Eleanor Flexner put it: “Bands of singing, praying women held meetings, not only in churches but on street corners, penetrating into the saloons themselves and closing them by the thousands.”28 When the effort fizzled, a permanent organization the W.C.T.U. was established in Cleveland to carry on the anti-liquor crusade on a systematic basis.

The W.C.T.U.’s leading spirit, Frances E. Willard, was protypically born of New England stock parents who had moved westward to study at Oberlin College, the nation’s center of aggressive, evangelical pietism, and later to settle in Wisconsin. Miss Willard began as corresponding secretary of the W.C.T.U. and, in two years she unseated the previous president and led the organization to the espousal of woman suffrage. Guided by Miss Willard, the W.C.T.U. began its pro-suffrage activities by demanding that women vote in local option referenda on prohibition. As Miss Willard put it: the W.C.T.U. wanted women to vote on this issue because “majorities of women are against the liquor traffic ...”29

Opposition to liquor and to the saloon cut against immigrant and liturgical culture, which not only sanctioned drinking, but where the neighborhood saloon was the major social and political institution. The saloon was an all-male institution, and hence was on a collision course with woman suffrage as well as prohibition.

Similarly, whenever there was a voter’s referendum on woman suffrage, the foreign-born, responding to immigrant culture and reacting against the feminist support of prohibition, voted consistently against woman suffrage. In Iowa, the Germans voted against such suffrage; in California, the Chinese were opposed; and in South Dakota, where a referendum on woman suffrage was defeated in 1890 by the massive margin of 55,000 to 22,000, Susan B. Anthony and Ida Harper wrote bitterly that “there were 30,000 Russians, Poles, Scandinavians and other foreigners in the State, most of whom opposed woman suffrage.”

Testifying for woman suffrage before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 1880, Susan B. Anthony expressed the nativism and racism of much of the feminist movement, in explaining the voter’s defeat of woman suffrage in a Colorado referendum in 1877:

In Colorado, ... 6,666 men voted “Yes.” Now, I am going to describe the men who voted “Yes.” They were native-born white men, temperance men, cultivated, broad, generous, just men, men who think. On the other hand, 16,007 voted “No.” Now, I am going to describe that class of voters. In the southern part of that State there are Mexicans, who speak the Spanish language. ... The vast population of Colorado is made up of that class of people. I was sent out to speak in a voting precinct having 200 voters; 150 of those voters were Mexican greasers, 40 of them foreign-born citizens, and just 10 of them were born in this country ...30

The cities, where “sin,” alcohol, immigrants, and Catholics abounded, were the centers of opposition to woman suffrage, while the WASP rural areas tended to favor it. The Oregon referendum of 1900, for example, lost largely because of opposition in the “slums” of Portland and Astoria. In 1896, the woman suffrage referendum in California was heavily supported by the bitterly anti-Catholic American Protective Association.31 The amendment lost by 137,000 to 110,000 votes, and the Anthony and Harper volume expresses great disappointment about the heavy loss in Alameda County, “a most unpleasant surprise, as the voters were principally Republicans and Populists, both of whom were pledged in the strongest possible manner in their county conventions to support the amendment…” As Grimes writes, “The implication here, and frequently throughout the various volumes of the History, was that the Republican Party should provide the natural home for the woman suffrage movement.”32

The pietist/liturgical split on the woman suffrage question is seen in a report by a Colorado feminist explaining the defeat in the 1877 referendum: the Methodists (most strongly pietistic) were “for us,” the less pietistic Presbyterians and Episcopalians “fairly so,” and while the Roman Catholics “were not all against us,” clearly they were expected to be.33

It is evident from their writings that much of the drive for woman suffrage came from middle- and upper-class WASP women who deeply resented the fact that their social inferiors, lower-class immigrants and “foreigners,” were allowed to vote while they were not.34 Thus, as Anthony and Harper put it:

... a real democracy has not as yet existed, but ... the dangerous experiment has been made of enfranchising the vast proportion of crime, intemperance, immorality and dishonesty, and barring absolutely from the suffrage the great proportion of temperance, morality, religion and conscientiousness; that, in other words, the worst elements have been put into the ballot box and the best elements kept out. This fatal mistake is even now beginning to dawn upon the minds of those who have cherished an ideal of the grandeur of a republic, and they dimly see that in woman lies the highest promise of its fulfillment. Those who fear the foreign vote will learn eventually that there are more American-born women in the United States than foreign-born men and women; and those who dread the ignorant vote will study the statistics and see that the percentage of illiteracy is much smaller among women than among men.35

Four western states adopted woman suffrage in the early and mid-1890s. Two, Wyoming and Utah, were simply repeating a practice as new states that they had adopted much earlier as territories: Wyoming in 1869 and Utah in 1870. Utah adopted woman suffrage as a conscious policy by the Mormons to weight political control in favor of their polygamous members, in contrast to the Gentiles, largely miners and settlers who were either single men or who had left their wives in the East. Idaho, which was dominated both by Populists and by Mormons in the southern part of the state, adopted woman suffrage in a referendum in 1896. Wyoming, the first territory to adopt woman suffrage, did so in an effort to increase the political power of its settled householders, in contrast to the transient, mobile, and often lawless single men who peopled that frontier region. The measure was also expected to attract more of the sober kind of migrants into Wyoming.

No sooner had Wyoming Territory adopted woman suffrage than it became evident that the change had benefited the Republicans, particularly since women had mobilized against Democratic attempts to repeal Wyoming’s Sunday prohibition law. In 1871, both houses of the Wyoming legislature, led by its Democratic members, voted to repeal woman suffrage, but the bill was vetoed by the Republican territorial governor, John A. Campbell, who had been appointed by President Grant.

Another state adopting woman suffrage in the 1890s was Colorado, which passed it by a referendum in 1893. The reason was the dominance in Colorado politics of the pro-inflation and pietistic Populists, then at the peak of their popularity in that state. In the referendum, the Populist counties gave a majority of 6,800 on behalf of woman suffrage; while the Republican and Democratic counties voted a majority of 500 against the measure. Moreover, in the state legislature which submitted the woman suffrage amendment to the voters in 1893, the party breakdown of voting was as follows: Republicans, 19 for woman suffrage and 25 against; Democrats, 1 in favor and 8 against; Populists, 34 in favor and 4 against.

It may be thought paradoxical that a movement born and centered in the East should have had its first victories in the remote frontier states of the Mountain West. But the paradox clears when we realize the pietist-WASP nature of the frontiersmen, many of them hailing originally from the birthplace of American pietism, New England. As the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, that celebrant of pietist frontier ideals, lyrically observed:

In the arid West these pioneers [from New England] have halted and have turned to perceive an altered nation and changed social ideals. ... If we follow back the line of march of the Puritan farmer, we shall see how responsive he has always been to isms. ... He is the prophet of the “higher law” in Kansas before the Civil War. He is the Prohibitionist of Iowa and Wisconsin, crying out against German customs as an invasion of his traditional ideals. He is the Granger of Wisconsin, passing restrictive railroad legislation. He is the Abolitionist, the Anti-mason, the Millerite, the Woman Suffragist, the Spiritualist, the Mormon, of Western New York.36

• 1[Editor’s footnote] Kleppner, Cross of Culture, pp. 130–36.
• 2[Editor’s footnote] The Know-Nothing, or the American Party, was an anti-immigration and anti-Catholic party in the 1850s.
• 3[Editor’s footnote] Horace Greeley also was a supporter of the protectionist tariff, anathema to the traditional members of the Democracy, and so a group of the more classical liberal members, later called the Bourbon Democrats, nominated Charles O’Conor on the Straight-Out Democrat ticket for president in 1872, although he did not officially accept the nomination. See Rothbard, “Bureaucracy and the Civil Service in the United States,” pp. 58–59.
• 4[Editor’s footnote] Hayes was from the pro-reformer group of Republicans described earlier and he was also ardently pro-hard money, which further helped him win over the Germans. His Democratic rival, Governor William Allen, supported soft money policies. See ibid., p. 62.
• 5[Editor’s footnote] Kleppner argues that the fact that many pietist leaders actually attacked Greenbackism was implicit recognition that the philosophy had large appeal among the rank and file Yankee pietists. See Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, p. 293.
• 6[Editor’s footnote] Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, pp. 95–143.
• 7[Editor’s footnote] Ibid., pp. 144–47, 154–55; Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, pp. 115–18, 154–57.
• 8Quoted in Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, p. 132.
• 9[Editor’s footnote] Ibid., pp. 122–48.
• 10[Editor’s footnote] Ibid., pp. 118–19, 134–35, 148, 161.
• 11[Editor’s footnote] Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, pp. 172–77.
• 12[Editor’s footnote] Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, p. 92.
• 13[Editor’s footnote] Ibid., p. 105.
• 14[Editor’s footnote] Ibid., pp. 91–115, 200–03, 215–16.
• 15[Editor’s footnote] Ibid., pp. 194–208.
• 16[Editor’s footnote] For more on pietism and immigration restriction, especially in relation to the public school movement, see Chapter 10 below, pp. 299–308. For a general history of compulsory public education in the United States, see Murray Rothbard, “Compulsory Education in the United States,” in Education, Free & Compulsory (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 1999 [1971]).
• 17[Editor’s footnote] Although the much more well-known Chinese Exclusion Act was also passed in 1882, it bore little relation to the immigration restrictions on Europeans, both ideologically and politically. See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), p. 167.
• 18[Editor’s footnote] Ibid., pp. 44–49.
• 19Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest, pp. 187–89.
• 20Whereas President Cleveland vetoed Republican-passed veterans’ pensions and aid to veterans’ bills and refused to attend the G.A.R. convention in 1887, Benjamin Harrison favored veteran pensions. In 1882, nearly half of the Republican appointees in Washington were Union veterans, whereas Democratic appointees of the Senate were largely Confederate veterans. In the Iowa Legislature of 1893, 70% of the Republicans eligible to have served were Civil War veterans, whereas only 39% of the eligible Democrats were veterans. In 1888, a poll of disabled veterans at the Ohio Soldiers and Sailors Home voted 3:1 for Harrison over Cleveland. [Editor’s remarks] Ibid., pp. 22–25.
       In an unpublished manuscript, Rothbard wrote in depth on the origins of Civil War pensions and their relation to the rise of the future welfare state. Pensions to Union soldiers were strongly supported by the Republicans, and they became a favorite way to spend the Treasury’s surplus to appeal to a new burgeoning interest group. During the Harrison administration the Dependent and Disability Pension Act was passed in 1890, sharply increasing veterans’ payments and contributing to the Republican “Billion Dollar Congress.” See Murray Rothbard, “Beginning the Welfare State: Civil War Veterans’ Pensions” (n.d.).
• 21Another example of joint business-worker restrictionism sponsored by the Republicans was the drive to outlaw the sale of the products of prison labor. Thus, New York State, in its Constitutional Convention of 1894, passed an amendment prohibiting the sale of products of prison labor. The amendment was supported by labor unions as well as by those businesses who were competing against the output of convict labor, in particular the manufacturers of brooms and brushes and other manufacturers whose labor was a large part of production costs. The Republican sponsor of the amendment at the Convention pointed out that it was simply a logical extension of the Republican Party’s long-standing commitment to the protection of both the manufacturer and the laborer from “unfair” competition. The opponents correctly but vainly charged that the amendment was “class legislation,” and that prisons could no longer be self-sustaining and would become a far greater burden on the taxpayer.
• 22[Editor’s footnote] Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp. 56–105.
• 23[Editor’s footnote] For more on the relationship between progressivism, pietism, and women’s suffrage, see Chapters 10 and 11 below, pp. 309–14, 332–33, 340–41. For their involvement in World War I, see Chapter 13 below, pp. 408–13. For the published version of this section, see Chapter 10 below.
• 24Alan P. Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. xii.
• 25Susan B. Anthony and Ida H. Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1902), vol. 4, p. xiii; cited in Grimes, The Puritan Ethic, p. 84.
• 26Anthony and Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, pp. 1046–47; cited in Grimes, Puritan Ethic, p. 85.
• 27See Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 11–13. Also see ibid., pp. 58–61.
• 28Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (New York, Atheneum, 1970), p. 182.
• 29Ibid., p. 183.
• 30Grimes, The Puritan Ethic, pp. 87–88.
• 31In Massachusetts, where women had had the vote in school board elections since 1879, large numbers of Protestant women turned out in 1888 to drive Catholics off the school board. In contrast, Catholic women scarcely voted, “thereby validating the nativist tendencies of suffragists who believed that extension of full suffrage to women would provide a barrier against further Catholic influence.” Jane Jerome Camhi, “Women Against Women: American Antisuffragism 1880–1920” (unpublished doctoral dissertation in history, Tufts University, 1973), p. 198. Also see ibid., p. 104, and James J. Kenneally, “Catholicism and Woman Suffrage in Massachusetts,” Catholic Historical Review (April, 1967): 253.
• 32Grimes, The Puritan Ethic, p. 90.
• 33Ibid., p. 92. Camhi states that, in the last two decades of the 19th century, “the more hierarchical the church organization and the more formal its ritual, the greater was its opposition to woman suffrage, while the democratically organized churches with little dogma tended to be more receptive.” Camhi, “Women Against Women,” p. 200.
• 34Where women were given the vote in Chicago, before the general adoption of woman suffrage, the highest percentage of women voters appeared in the middle- rather than the working-class wards. Ibid., p. 331.
• 35Anthony and Harper, A History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, p. xxvi; cited in Grimes, The Puritan Ethic, p. 94. See also ibid., p. 91.
• 36Cited in Grimes, The Puritan Ethic, pp. 97–98.