In Electoral Capitalism, Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer reappraises the controversy over wealth inequality, and why this period was so combustible. As ranks of the dispossessed swelled, an outpouring of claims transformed the old spoils system into relief for the politically connected poor. A vibrant but scorned culture of petty officeholding thus emerged. By the turn of the century, an upsurge of grassroots protest sought to dislodge political bosses from their apex by severing the link between party and capital.
Examining New York, and its outsized role in national affairs, Broxmeyer demonstrates that electoral capitalism was a category of entrepreneurship in which the capture of public office and the accumulation of wealth were mutually reinforcing. The book uncovers hidden economic ties that wove together presidents, senators, and mayors with business allies, spoilsmen, and voters. Today, great political fortunes have dramatically returned. As current public debates invite parallels with the Gilded Age, Broxmeyer offers historical and theoretical tools to make sense of how politics begets wealth.
In Electoral Capitalism, Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer reappraises the controversy over wealth inequality, and why this period was so combustible. As ranks of the dispossessed swelled, an outpouring of claims transformed the old spoils system into relief for the politically connected poor. A vibrant but scorned culture of petty officeholding thus emerged. By the turn of the century, an upsurge of grassroots protest sought to dislodge political bosses from their apex by severing the link between party and capital.
Examining New York, and its outsized role in national affairs, Broxmeyer demonstrates that electoral capitalism was a category of entrepreneurship in which the capture of public office and the accumulation of wealth were mutually reinforcing. The book uncovers hidden economic ties that wove together presidents, senators, and mayors with business allies, spoilsmen, and voters. Today, great political fortunes have dramatically returned. As current public debates invite parallels with the Gilded Age, Broxmeyer offers historical and theoretical tools to make sense of how politics begets wealth.
Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York's Gilded Age
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Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York's Gilded Age
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Overview
In Electoral Capitalism, Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer reappraises the controversy over wealth inequality, and why this period was so combustible. As ranks of the dispossessed swelled, an outpouring of claims transformed the old spoils system into relief for the politically connected poor. A vibrant but scorned culture of petty officeholding thus emerged. By the turn of the century, an upsurge of grassroots protest sought to dislodge political bosses from their apex by severing the link between party and capital.
Examining New York, and its outsized role in national affairs, Broxmeyer demonstrates that electoral capitalism was a category of entrepreneurship in which the capture of public office and the accumulation of wealth were mutually reinforcing. The book uncovers hidden economic ties that wove together presidents, senators, and mayors with business allies, spoilsmen, and voters. Today, great political fortunes have dramatically returned. As current public debates invite parallels with the Gilded Age, Broxmeyer offers historical and theoretical tools to make sense of how politics begets wealth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780812252361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/14/2020 |
| Series: | American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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. Newspapers also reported, belatedly, that the neighbor had paid no taxes on the city land for several years running. 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.
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." 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)." 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.
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. 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. 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. Donald Trump's co-management of business and presidential responsibilities keeps it there. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. Professionals who master the "dull and toilsome work of election politics" use that expertise as the productive means to accumulate rewards. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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." 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. 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 self-government 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."
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. 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. 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." 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.
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. 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. "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. Fernando Wood was notorious for selling the same nomination to more than one prospector.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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 property was redistributed downward to meet popular demands. The explosion of the market for patronage, one of the Gilded Age's defining features, is often treated as an oddity. Petty spoils took place within a larger context of party accumulation.
Gilded political practices, in turn, found their way into now-classic studies of modern democracy. The quizzical forms of popular democracy that manifested in New York captivated turn-of-the-century European social scientists. Many were writing comparative studies as implicit critiques of home countries and often—wrongly—extended local histories into generalizations about the nature of mass politics. By relying so heavily on elite reformers for personal advice and source material, early scholars downplayed or missed the business side of gilded party organizations. Instead, the reform legacy bequeathed social science with a disdain for the spoils system, which had benefited the politically connected poor. Fault lines of reform battles have thus continued to reverberate into subsequent generations. Social scientists like James Bryce and Max Weber adopted elite analyses without much circumspection about the biases that traveled with them. By contrast, grassroots critics of party regularity saw no lasting remedy without addressing the centralization of property into the hands of a few party leaders.
The Party Noir
Many scholars conflate the vibrancy of political parties with the health of democracy. This would be a mistake. Parties greatly exacerbated the Gilded Age's crisis of inequality between the rich and poor by fusing party competition to the accumulation of wealth. Parties, of course, are vital for electoral representation, which is why political scientists tend to celebrate them. By nominating individuals for office, parties sort voter preferences, structure participation, and provide a vehicle for coordinating on behalf of common goals. Theorists hold up "responsible" parties as the implicit standard, like those from the Gilded Age, which boasted society-encompassing participation and coherent agendas capable of censure at the ballot box. The presence of a party system, in which at least two parties compete, allows for a curated style of popular accountability. Yet, the party form casts a long shadow. Under certain historical circumstances, political parties have served the cause of disenfranchisement and rank violence; at other times, they showed the pathway to participatory inclusion and peacemaking. Although the political party has potential to serve as a leveling force in society, it rarely does. The default mode blesses those already favored with time, skills, education, self-confidence, and of course, money. Truly, any problem in democracy that party helps to create will require party to resolve. But even this reality is distorted by how party action requires a "conspiracy of silence" over central issues of the day to secure consensus. Why, then, do we hear little about the dark side of strong party government in American history?
We need to confront the Party Noir, my term for the pathological aspects of political parties in American political development. The task is urgent as we approach historic levels of inequality in our own time. For all the purported ability to act responsibly, in political science terms, gilded officeholders had impressive discretion at the top of party hierarchies to flout democratic constraints. Here, we are talking about party leaders, the representatives of representatives. Capital-acquiring leaders were able to engage in politics on their own terms by concentrating authority into party machines. The Wood brothers and William Tweed on the Democratic side, or Roscoe Conkling, Levi Morton, and Thomas Platt among Republicans, were hardly divorced from electoral pressures. Quite the contrary: fierce competition and the imperative to coordinate was what drove organizational innovations. Parties typically centralize decision-making when internal party consensus is high, as it was in the postbellum years. Mastery over the electoral circulation of capital gave leaders the ability to build personal followings, craft policy, and shape favored outcomes, thereby enhancing their autonomy. When it comes to the Gilded Age, at least, whoever says party, says oligarchy.
The wealth gap enlarged into a full-blown crisis of inequality, not because the representational capacity of parties was weak, but precisely because they were effective instruments. Oligarchy's most dramatic expression is found in how New York officeholders joined the nouveau riche—mansions, conspicuous consumption, and all—as constituents were increasingly impoverished. The Gilded Age was a period of rising strikes when wages for laborers fluctuated wildly. Employment was precarious. For many people, the standard of living declined, as Richard White has demonstrated by proxy measures of height and mortality. Artisanship and its republican traditions were degraded by industrial rationalization. After the Panic of 1873, misery was widely felt across the bottom of society. These conditions radicalized a generation of grassroots reformers. The journalist and editor John Swinton witnessed political leaders call out police to beat starving laborers assembled in Tompkins Square demanding work relief. During the 1880s, John Swinton's Paper would become a fulcrum of activity in favor of property redistribution and for overturning the stranglehold of party regulars. The paper's namesake played a key role in organizing Henry George's 1886 campaign for mayor of New York, the only serious challenge to the gilded party system.
The stories we tell ourselves in political science fall short in explaining this manner of democratic crisis. There is simply too little attention given to patterns of mercenary behavior in party development. The prevailing institutionalist view does not engage with the problem directly. However, the scholarship does imply that strong parties should limit behavior like baldfaced greed and self-dealing. If party were placed above any one individual, then the private gain of top leaders would be subservient to the collective good of election victory. Scandals alienate voters—or, at the very least, generate uncertainty. By serving as self-defeating arguments for party alternation, they offer easy grist for opponents to exploit arguments about breaches of public trust. We might then reasonably expect centralized parties to curtail members' behavior to prevent the avoidable fallout of election reversals. Yet, instead of mitigating greed, gilded party organizations moved aggressively to systematize the quest for profits. Why?
To answer, let us reappraise the oligarchical party, a theoretical tradition otherwise relegated to the "dustbin of history" in political science circles. Bureaucratization places leaders in a position to develop considerable autonomy vis-à-vis rank-and-file party members or the voting electorate, who enjoy no equivalent special knowledge of rules and procedures or incumbent resources. Midcentury mass parties were in constant need of funds to mobilize the electoral crowd. As private entities, they had to pay for ballots, plan the speaker circuit, publish and disseminate campaign tracts, and "treat" loyal voters on election day with cash, cigars, and shots of whiskey. Beyond expenses, political parties also had to meet the demand of entrepreneurs for upward social mobility. For much of the nineteenth century, bankers, merchants, landlords, and planters—elites who were already propertied—financed electioneering directly from their pocket. They were among the few in society with resources necessary to underwrite the heavy costs of sustained mobilization. So, their priorities set the terms of public debate. The age of mass politics ushered a demographic revolution in officeholding in which lower-middle-class and working-class aspirants began to displace the "gentlemen class" in positions of authority. Officeholders with a popular base wanted something different from their public service than predecessors—direct access to capital.
And yet, sophisticated histories characterize gilded officeholders as the instruments of rising industrial elites. Gilded Age political battles are portrayed as the mirror of business conflicts or as following in their wake. This is because officeholders who were not independently wealthy would need to go hat-in-hand to find a patron who might champion their career. A notorious example would be in the 1860s, when Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt hired opposing teams of politicos in the fight over control of the Erie Railroad. Boss Tweed worked for them both, at different times. Or, on the Republican side, how Roscoe Conkling transformed himself into the preferred retainer of Collis P. Huntington's Central Pacific Railroad in the U.S. Senate. Later working as a private lawyer, Conkling helped to sway the court's ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that the Fourteenth Amendment originally intended to protect the property of corporate "persons." What carried the argument was his reputation as a party titan and his testimonial as a former member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. And yet, the "hireling" explanation of political behavior is thin.
Gilded party leaders did more than service or manage the preexisting interests of business elites. They made themselves into significant investors in party activity. New control over property was the ambitious officeholder's source of relative autonomy from traditional democratic constraints like interest group demands or voter preferences. In the New York party system, this distinction separated leaders from the officeholding crowd. Those who led parties found ingenious ways to tap the public treasury, directly and indirectly, and ride a wave of public debt associated with quasi-public infrastructure projects and corporations. Leaders speculated in markets, established party-run ventures, and expanded tax collection ("assessments") from low-level appointees in the spoils system. Those who rose high in parties rendered themselves materially "interested" by creating market opportunities anew or by shifting established businesses in new directions. Max Weber famously drew a link between the routinization of income and the consolidation of politics as a vocation. His attention was narrowly focused on the growth of officeholders' salaries, which Weber noted allowed them the time to monopolize political expertise. Public salaries did increase during the Gilded Age, with periodic voter complaints about "salary grabs." But profits from electoral capitalism coordinated by party leaders far outpaced the relatively modest streams of official income.
The party leader's accumulation of capital was the visible hand guiding the period's "triumph of organizational politics." The dynamism of gilded parties lay in how they tapped directly into core functions of the American state to produce a surplus that could be widely shared. Electoral capitalism thrived by becoming indispensable, through electoral conquest, to the pursuit of public purposes. Becoming co-investors, officeholders helped to build railroads, conduct foreign policy, pay for wars, and shape national markets by facilitating commerce and communication across regions. When the Republican Party implemented agendas like westward expansion or sound money, or when Democrats promoted urban development or mass transit, they did so in ways that favored allies by generating organizational funds and personal windfalls. This fusion of private property with state functions through mass party organization is what made gilded experiments analytically distinct. There have always been a select few individuals who profited from holding office. Only during the Gilded Age, however, did accumulation and dispossession became the common experience of everyone from the party boss and the disgruntled reformer, to bewildered citizens like Michael H. Cashman.
Property and Alliances
Scholars disagree about party formation and what makes coalitions "sticky" over the long term. The reigning perspective, pioneered by John Aldrich, holds that parties are best understood as the creation of ambitious office seekers in their strategic quest for higher office, more power, and greater prestige. Parties exist or adapt insofar as officeholders have use of them. By contrast, an alternative approach by the coauthors of The Party Decides contends that "policy demanders" are the primary force aggregating party coalitions. According to the party-centric view, competition between organized groups is what structures the options available to officeholders. Both sides agree that party formation is a game of coordination. The divide falls where these theories stand on the age-old question of human agency versus social structure. The officeholder or the interest group: which is the chicken, and which is the egg? The debate is frustratingly circular.
Historically, the two perspectives were not mutually exclusive. Gilded party leaders constructed governing coalitions by uniting over electoral victory and the mutual accumulation of wealth. Property was the very glue reconciling the rough edges of individuals and organized interests together into effective collective action. Coalition building is risky because political actors operate with limited information amid uncertainty. Party organization, at the individual level, involves personal alliances forged among jealous rivals. Problems of deceit or genuine misunderstanding are frequently layered atop legitimate personal and policy differences, part of myriad contingencies arising from human behavior. Meanwhile, organized groups vie for influence within big-tent party structures as they pursue diverse and even contradictory agendas. In nineteenth-century parties, disagreements over the makeup of party tickets and control over committees and caucuses unfolded amid open-ended factional conflict. It was relatively easy for dissidents to bolt and promote competing tickets before Progressive Era state laws restricted ballot access. The pressure of ceaseless election cycles threatened to recalibrate the balance of power to reflect shifting real-world circumstances.
Faced with these organizational dilemmas, entrepreneurs discovered that electoral capitalism had practical partisan advantages. Going into business with each other and striving to make party allies not only powerful, but also rich, sought to enjoin political and economic fates over the long term. Pro-growth coalitions of diverse interests form precisely because positive-sum benefits may be widely distributed when the economic pie is expanding. On the other hand, winner-take-all elections create fixed tensions between victors and the losers who must by definition be excluded. In post-Civil War New York, groundswells from below pressed party leaders to address poverty. Parties did respond, not through universalistic social policy, but rather in ways that enhanced their own power. The patronage system expanded rapidly in New York to include those politically connected poor who found themselves at the bottom of the labor market with few alternatives. Political property, high and low, was a tool of party leaders to unite fates, reward friends, and convert enemies.
Gilded New York
New York's party system during the late nineteenth century offers an opportunity for rich empirical description of electoral capitalism. The purpose of a demonstrative case is to identify and explain how a sociopolitical process unfolds within a given context when those relations have not been analyzed systematically. Together with original archival work, historical narrative has the potential to challenge staid presumptions. Behavior like political wealth accumulation is obscured by power relations. The method is especially crucial when the goal is to look behind the curtain. Daniel Galvin puts it best when he maintains that "research can be theoretical without being causal" by incubating concepts with the potential for deployment in other terrain. My claims are born from a nuanced case study that is at once historically and geographically limited. Yet, the theoretical payout lies exactly in that promise of political development to identify patterns, sharpen explanations, and refine concepts. Democracy and capitalism have expanded around the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, suggesting a wider scope of applicability.
During the nineteenth-century "Golden Age of Capital," Democrats and Republicans in New York produced a bumper crop of officeholders who wielded economic capital by merit of their position within party government. The state's antebellum legacy of deploying public resources to spur the banking sector, canal building, and railroads meant that officeholding entrepreneurs already knew how to secure capital through political institutions. At midcentury, mass politics required bulkier coalitions with more internal contradictions to balance questions about political incorporation, along with struggles over collective consumption of transportation and housing. New York's imperial relationship with the American West and the country's rise to economic dominance in the world system magnified the scope and scale of the stakes.
Disunion also inadvertently accelerated the development of electoral capitalism. The Republican Party, victorious in the Civil War, was the wizard that conjured the modern administrative state. To win the bloody conflict and consolidate postwar gains, Republicans first interpellated and then aligned themselves with nationally backed investors dependent upon "sound money" principles. A similar tendency was at work locally, where Democrats inflated debt with municipal paper to buttress a financial sector run directly by Tammany Hall. New York's party system became an early locus of nationalization in party activity, along with Wall Street's position as the "central nervous system" of markets "licking up the cream of commerce and finance." Party bankers like August Belmont, a Democrat, and Levi P. Morton, a Republican, raised huge sums on behalf of their respective parties to spend on battleground states in presidential cycles and midterm elections.
Only within this context can we understand how party regulars transformed officeholding from an electoral end in itself into a mode of capital accumulation. Late nineteenth-century party leaders experimented with a wide array of practices such as real estate speculation, establishing media properties, chartering railroads, forming legal partnerships, and selling lottery tickets. Above all, political allies and the coalitions they formed were starved for credit. Officeholding entrepreneurs found ways to meet this demand by coordinating collective action in ways that innovated party organization.
The methods that party leaders employed to discreetly secure access to credit foreground how they pursued independence within the political system. Roscoe Conkling did not publicly campaign for the U.S. Senate on propelling Morton, Bliss and Company to the heights of international finance so that it would double as the bank for himself and the country's Republican elite. Instead, Conkling defended the marketing of government bonds—performed by close allies—and "sound money" policies supported by Wall Street. Similarly, poor immigrant backers of Tammany Hall could hardly have anticipated that the Tweed Ring would create a string of savings banks from its election triumphs after 1867. Before collapse in 1871, those banks supplied Boss Tweed with a source of working capital for his governing agenda.
Not all officeholders doubled as real estate developers, like Fernando Wood. Not every U.S. senator held corporate office, like Thomas Platt, who used a perch at the U.S. Express Company to award himself and his sons, Frank and Edward, no-interest loans. However, the political figures who developed these practices were the ones who gravitated to the heights of the party system. We can hardly trace any clear "will of the people" propelling this phenomenon. Did the voters of New York send Alonzo Cornell, son of the university founder, to Albany as governor in 1880 so that he could expand his personal fortune? There is no evidence to suggest they did. Electoral capitalism, as a process, nevertheless became so integral to gaining and keeping power that it was a normal part of turning the wheels of party government.
The Corruption Imbroglio
Let me be clear: this book is not an examination of corruption, strictly speaking. To this day, historians characterize the Gilded Age by the rapacity of officeholders and the degraded nature of public virtue. The "jobbery, pelf, and thievery" of Grantism, Tweedism, or the Great Barbecue are never far from descriptions of the period. The focus is highly problematic. Corruption is a populist category, not an analytical one, and is defined by a historical moment's prevailing politics of legality and morality. Everyone has a sense that politics is "corrupt." Few agree on what that means in practice. That includes scholars, too.
The dilemma becomes clear as the vocabulary of corruption leaves us flailing to understand developments today. The forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, owns a luxury hotel operating on a government lease down the street from the White House. Along with the Trump International Hotel, a hotspot for lobbyists both foreign and domestic, the president and his family own and manage a diversified global business portfolio that intersects with public policy at every turn. Today's Republican Party now spends heavily at Trump properties around the country, as do affinity groups and donors. Is this corrupt? Critics of the president must prove these profits fit into a legal definition of bribery where an official act is demonstrably traded in exchange for something of value. The Roberts Supreme Court has so narrowed the legal interpretation of corruption that it overturned the conviction of former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell, a Republican, and led to the mistrial of Robert Menendez, a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey. Under the current standard it would be easier for Trump International Hotel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the president to be convicted. Thus, most challenges to President Trump's business practices have retreated to a focus on "conflicts of interest," largely upheld by self-regulation, disclosure rules, and minor sanctions like fines. Trump's political behavior is better understood as a contemporary expression of electoral capitalism. Patrimonial wealth accumulation is his how he looks to solve classic problems of collective action.
By contrast, most lay people and even scholars deploy an overly capacious view of corruption. The World Bank definition is "the abuse of public office for private gain." Historically minded legal thinkers have located similar intentions during the early American national period. Zephyr Teachout, for instance, documents extensively how anticorruption measures written into the constitution sought to prevent abuse. The target was not simply individual acts of venality but also "dependence corruption," according to Lawrence Lessig, which meant systematic reliance of officeholders upon one person or group. Yet, the civic republican notion of undermining the public interest is vague in the extreme. It could arguably envelop not only a traffic cop taking bribes but a congressperson walking through the revolving door to work for a company whose policy interests he or she oversaw in committee.
Another weakness is how the World Bank's definition of corruption is rooted within ideological notions of market purity. Public officeholders are inherently suspected of "rent seeking," or preying on business assumed to otherwise have flourished without state intervention. To be sure, there are well-documented cases when officeholders acted like the "roving bandits" of Charles Tilly's famous essay on state building. Corporate titans referred to venal legislators as "strikers." Whereas common laborers were increasingly prone to stop work for higher wages, legislators were known to hold up legislation for payola. Central Pacific Railroad president Collis P. Huntington once complained that strikers were "very thick and hungry in Washington" and "seemed to be holding high carnival everywhere." But neoclassical theory is flawed because neither electoral politics nor political institutions are alien to markets. Quite the opposite: markets are socially embedded and politically constructed. Rent seeking's one-dimensionality fails to explain the full complexity of electoral wealth accumulation during the Gilded Age or today. Theories of rent seeking cannot tell us how Boss Tweed made himself into a banker in the 1870s or how Paul Manafort, a superlobbyist, founded a private equity firm through party connections in the early 2000s.
Instead, we need to come to terms with how officeholders become market makers in their own right. Those who engaged in electoral capitalism did not perceive themselves as thieves, parasites, or rent seekers but rather as clear-eyed businessmen raising capital for worthy endeavors. One hagiographic biographer said, without irony, of Fernando Wood: "Instead of waiting, like [Charles Dickens's] Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up, he himself turned something up; no matter what, he thought, so it were work, were industry, were resolute self-maintenance." Benjamin Wood, his brother, ran a lottery business with the same methods and capital that he used to manage Mozart Hall, the family's political faction. The so-called easy boss of the Republican Party, Thomas C. Platt, would not even consider an office unless he saw a way to extract more profit from it than his original investment. Platt's approach was common from midcentury until the 1880s. Officeholding entrepreneurs considered themselves squarely within mainstream norms of individual pluck and self-help, even if the public at large was more ambivalent.
Relying on the corruption approach is also deeply problematic because it normalizes behavior or condemns the abnormal before critical analysis has taken place. Today, Xi Jinping of China and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines purge rivals under guise of "anticorruption" campaigns. In American political development, the charge appears to mean little more than accusations of improper behavior. Eric Foner and Alexander Keyssar convincingly argue that postbellum charges of corruption were thinly veiled criticisms that the "wrong" kinds of people—former slaves in the Reconstructed South or immigrants in the North—were suddenly in charge of government priorities. Horace Greeley was blunt in his testimony to a Senate committee investigating corruption at the port of New York: "individuals who have no right to make money are making large sums." With Greeley, there was little subtlety. These unworthies happened to be political rivals who had rejected his own bid for the port's lucrative general-order business, valued by one old-line merchant as "cheap at $200,000 in gold."
Neither can we rely on legal standards. What constitutes the line of propriety is arbitrary (sometimes comically so) and ever shifting. James Terwilliger was a Whig and then Republican clerk in both chambers of the state legislature for nearly twenty years. In early 1872, scandal erupted over the 20 percent commission he received on official Senate printing jobs distributed to political friends, with the price of contracts greatly inflated. Terwilliger was genuinely surprised by the uproar over a "gratuity," based upon "a custom of many years" that was standard practice in the printing business. He denied wrongdoing at his resignation, declaring, "I perceive that a public feeling, now unusually sensitive, takes a view of my action different from what I have taken. I propose to recognize and obey that public sentiment . . . with the expression of sincere regret that I have in any way offended it." What changed? For months, the Democratic Party's Tweed Ring had come under assault for how it governed New York City. Tammany Hall's own practice of taking large percentages from government contracts was widely vilified as corruption incarnate, setting a new standard of public virtue.
Over the course of a career, officeholders routinely gather multiple sources of income and wealth: legal, illegal, or ambiguously in between. During the Crédit Mobilier scandal, Roscoe Conkling avoided investigation and expulsion from the U.S. Senate by accepting legal fees from railroads rather than stock. Who is tried and convicted is inherently a political process. There is no better example than Boss Tweed. None of the dozens of his Republican collaborators found themselves in comparable legal jeopardy; Tweed essentially received a de facto death sentence by miserable prison conditions while peers continued to govern. The labor reformer John Swinton was utterly convinced that charlatans ran Tammany Hall. He nevertheless doubted whether polities without mass suffrage—in Europe, for instance—were governed more wisely. Ultimately, charges of corruption tell us more about the historical balance of power and the outcomes of political struggles than about whether a political actor has engaged in self-aggrandizement, why he or she did so, and how the feat was accomplished.
Gilded contemporaries nevertheless viewed the gilded party as an instrument of upward social mobility. Plainly, it was. Virtually destitute until the 1850s—failing as a potato farmer, and at one point, pawning his watch to buy a Christmas present—Ulysses S. Grant was welcomed into a life of property by the war. A political career kept him there for a time, finally realizing his long ambition "to be entirely above the frowns of the world, pecuniarily." After his presidency, Grant worked party networks in an aspiration to become a railroad baron and financier. Plying allies for loans and business opportunities, he promoted grandiose plans, including Mexican railroads and a Nicaraguan canal that failed spectacularly, along with his son's investment firm. Grant's remarkable transformation from pauper to statesman (and back to pauper) was emblematic of an entire generation of Stalwart officeholders in New York, men whom he treated with and elevated through appointments. The ex-president was swindled out of his fortune by a con man, Ferdinand Ward, who built a pyramid scheme based on imaginary investments in fictitious government contracts—clandestinely secured, it was rumored—by Stalwarts and Half-Breeds. Neither was the yearning for social mobility limited to party leaders. Internal party markets for spoils were transformed by basic needs. Low-level appointment to a patronage position with a modest salary often signaled a meaningful social promotion or the rescue of family finances. Political property from top to bottom was possible because the gilded party was an organizational locus for the circulation of capital.
Plan of the Book
Each chapter opens with a vignette. These narratives are structured around particular historical moments to prime the reader for the empirical evidence and analysis that will be systematically unpacked. Chapters that follow explore how electoral capitalism organized the party system in Gilded Age New York. With fresh interpretations, I drive well-trodden subjects like party-business relations, factionalism, the spoils system, and political reform onto new ground. Chapter 1 describes how the Tweed Ring spawned a vibrant financial sector that was integral to its brief success. William "Boss" Tweed and his allies employed banks controlled or co-managed by Tammany politicians to embezzle funds, build political alliances, and invest in a wide array of business ventures. The capital of these savings and commercial banks—city money, deposits from Catholic charities, and the savings of immigrant laborers—was accumulated through political channels. During their operation between 1867 and 1871, politician-bankers engaged in a mix of patronage deals and profit-driven financial speculation. In effect, Tammany banks were ground zero for the Ring's conversion of political hegemony into a windfall of economic capital that fueled party activities and buoyed personal fortunes. Importantly, the anti-Ring mobilization by upper-class reformers was more than a revolt of wealthy taxpayers concerned with abstract goals of good government or rescuing city credit; it was also a reaction by old-line bankers in direct competition with Tammany upstarts. A dramatic bank run catalyzed by elite reformers in November 1871 drove them into bankruptcy, bringing this novel experiment in electoral capitalism to an end.
Chapter 2 details how Stalwart Republicans operated their party organization as a business. Led first by Roscoe Conkling and then by Thomas Platt, the Stalwarts were hegemonic in statewide public office for a decade after the fall of the Tweed Ring. Historians have long noted that Conkling's control of the state Republican Party was heavily reliant on control over federal patronage at the customhouse in the port of New York. Just as important was the faction's deep links to Morton, Bliss and Company, a financial brokerage firm, and the U.S. Express Company. The Stalwarts who ran these businesses used them for salaries, to extend credit to themselves and allies, and to make available new sources of sinecures. Corporate officeholding, especially, became a valuable institutional tool for navigating disputes between jealous rivals. As the firms extended the scope of their business, factional influence also grew in national party circles and presidential administrations.
Chapter 3 presents a bottom-up perspective on electoral capitalism with a social history of the spoils system. Part of the allure of party machines was how they democratized petty officeholding, spreading prestige and political property among the electoral crowd. Patronage networks, of course, had guided appointments since the 1830s. By the Gilded Age, spoils evolved into a de facto system of partisan social insurance. Laborers, immigrants, widows, the aged, Union veterans, and the poor all pressured the political system to make jobs readily available. In keeping with the Jacksonian tradition, partisan loyalty was the defining criteria for placement. However, party leaders seized upon their powers of appointment to help constituents escape low wages and downturns in the business cycle. The imperatives of coalition building drove both parties to shield a politically connected minority of supporters from the vicissitudes of industrialization.
Electoral capitalism had the effect of centralizing power in the hands of party leaders. Chapter 4 considers the sharp public reaction to that consolidation of power and wealth by drawing special attention to critics of regular party organization. Scholars of gilded political reform almost exclusively cover elites and tend to overemphasize the importance of civil service measures. Yet, poor people were reformers, too. Reform from below presented a host of alternatives to elite proposals that have largely gone unnoticed. This chapter focuses on the distinctive ideas and methods of grassroots actors. Social movements during the "Great Upheaval" of the 1880s had the effect of crystalizing long-standing popular grievances about the party system. Ranging from the fanciful to the practical, grassroots alternatives shared common features. They all flew under the banner of anti-monopoly. Proposals were foremost concerned with improving living conditions. And grassroots actors sought to fundamentally decommodify politics by restructuring the link between public office and property accumulation. Most of these efforts failed to gain support or be implemented. Nevertheless, critics from the margins help us to better understand the fusion of capital and public power that characterized the gilded party system.
The book concludes with a discussion of why we should pay closer attention to the diverse experiences of officeholding in American political development. During the Gilded Age, individuals high and low brought their own ideas about what it meant to serve the public and themselves. Public office, a species of property, was mobilized through the party system as an organizing feature of electoral competition. Consequently, political wealth became highly concentrated in the hands of a few party leaders, a trend that elicited protests from outsiders. Today we face similar questions about extreme inequality, popular accountability, and the role of money in democracy. A new wave of fortunes is sweeping the political class, raising cackles and shaking the bonds of trust between citizens and representatives. Our contemporary debates take place within a different historical context. Still, a clear-eyed understanding of the electoral species of capitalism, including its patterns and legacy, is crucial to appreciating the recurring challenges that confront democracy in America.
Table of Contents
IntroductionThe 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