When a Party Was a Party

When a Party Was a Party: Indiana in the Heyday of Partisanship

By Nicholas von Hoffman

In the fall of 1888 Mary Lord Dimmick, Benjamin Harrison's niece, stood on his front porch in Indianapolis and looked on in wonder as no less than forty thousand traveling salesmen, or commercial travelers as they called them in that era, marched by to salute her uncle, the Republican candidate for president. She recalled, "They wore linen dusters, high hats and carried parasols made of red, white and blue handkerchiefs. . . . Cheers upon cheers went up continually until Uncle Ben spoke, and then, as always, you could have heard a pin drop."

During that long and ultimately victorious campaign, Harrison kept his derriere parked on his porch, and limiting his speeches to the banalities of the day, reviewed three hundred thousand or more people who got off the special trains and marched over to his place to give him a lusty hurrah. Harrison's biographer writes, "A discreet committee on arrangements (nucleus of today's Columbia Club) was hastily formed to handle all correspondence and to schedule all proposed visits. . . . Its marching band and entertainment sub-committee met each delegation at the Union Station. . . . Delegations came into town at the rate of two or three a day; on one occasion, however, Harrison was obliged to speak seven times." Nor was this outpouring confined to the white men who did virtually all the voting a hundred and eight years ago. There were little girls carrying red, white, and blue Japanese lanterns, small boys on ponies, and uniformed marching bands.

This was the heyday of partisanship, an era when campaigns were conducted more by party organizations than by candidates. It was also a time when people participated in politics on a scale and with an enthusiasm we moderns can hardly imagine. Although four years before, James G. Blaine, the losing Republican candidate, had exhausted himself stumping the country, most presidential candidates stayed put and let the tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of party zealots do the work. A generation later, parties had given over the central role in national elections to the candidates. By 1912 running for president took so much out of the body that Theodore Roosevelt campaigned with an oxygen tank and John W. Davis, a deservedly forgotten Democratic nominee, got into shape for the 1924 campaign by working out with a prize fighter.

But Harrison campaigned in an America that had not yet become dependent on ready-made, factory-made, and off-the-rack. Most people did for themselves, and that included their politics, which were handmade and homemade like their clothes, their food, and many of the daily objects of life. It was an activity which one took part in, not something other people did which one watched. There was no spectator politics.

The nation swarmed with political clubs and associations. Historian Michael E. McGerr writes, "During the campaign of 1880, New Haven, a city of 62,000 people living in thirteen wards, produced 42 clubs and 68 companies for the two major parties. Perhaps 5,000 out of 16,000 eligible voters signed club constitutions or marched in the city's campaign army. . . . New Haven was not unique: more than a fifth of Northern voters probably played an active part in the campaign organizations of each presidential contest during the 'seventies and 'eighties."

An entry in the journals of Calvin Fletcher, an Indianapolis lawyer and banker of the last century, gives us some sense of the excitement and popularity of politics in his time: "Wednesday Augt. 29 1860. The City been crouded since yesterday. . . The day was ushered in with canon. City began or rather was filled from sunrise as many were here on yesterday. All the young men of the state seem to be organized into what are called . . . Wide awakes Each has a glove cape small cap & staff & crop[?] attached to the end of the staff some 4 to 6 feet. All simple & does not cost more than $1 or 75 cents. They are organized into clubs. It seems to take the young much. To give a description of the number the largest I ever saw would be tedious."

In our own time politics has become a private activity akin to prayer or consultation with one's therapist. Occasionally we may talk about it with others but almost none of us take part in politics in any public way. About half of us vote and not 5 percent of us give money to a candidate or a party. Politics, the most social of pastimes which we, the most social of animals, can engage in, is now chiefly a private affair. The act of voting itself, done in a booth, not unlike a Roman Catholic confessional, is seen by many as a quasi-religious act carried out in gravest secrecy.

When Mary Lord Dimmick gazed at the marching thousands from her uncle's porch, there was no secret ballot. The political parties printed their own ballots, and voters made public affirmation of their politics by the act of choosing which ballot to take. It was only in the 1890s, after Harrison's election, that the Australian, or secret, ballot took hold in the United States. It was but one of a number of changes which betoken the shift of politics from a group or team endeavor to the solemn and solitary responsibility we moderns take it to be.

In Harrison's time it was next to impossible to vote anything but the straight ticket. Until the government started printing ballots, ballots only had the names of the candidates of one party on them, and there was no place for write-ins. Reformers, or Mugwumps as they were called by their opponents, changed that and many another practice to make politics the sober and joyless business it is in our own time. Public figures like Harrison, as conservative a standpatter as ever delivered an oration to a nineteenth-century American audience, had an intuitive grasp of what change would do to the texture and feel of politics. Speaking in 1887 at the National Republican Club's annual Lincoln Day dinner, he told an audience which doubtless agreed with him, "I know that our Mugwump friends think that they have a great deal of surplus reformative energy, but the trouble with those people is that they have put themselves up on the shelf like dried cakes of Fleischmann's compressed yeast, and they can have no power upon the mass that they should leaven because they have ceased to have contact with it."

In Harrison's day politics was one of the chief forms of popular entertainment. Music, oratory, parading, and dancing were the indispensable elements in conducting elections, which occupied a place in daily life vaguely comparable to that of professional sports in our era. Will Hays, a Hoosier who served as Republican National Committee Chairman from 1918-21, has left us this description of the fun they had, come election time: "In our county big glee clubs were organized by both parties, with the palm awarded in 1896 to the Republican clubs, both for size and quality. The Sullivan Republican Glee Club, composed of both young men and women and coached by a professional singing teacher, traveled around to the rallies in style. A huge wagon body extending out over the wheels, with a roof, curtains, flags, and bunting, was further decorated with a string of 'full dinner pails,' the slogan of the McKinley campaign. The wagon had a small organ, placed directly behind the driver's seat; chairs and benches were arranged to accommodate the forty or more singers. . . . At all the chief meetings there would be excellent speakers, big crowds, the raising of a campaign pole seventy-five to one hundred feet high, and a picnic dinner along with the raising. But a party pole had to be well guarded lest the opposing side cut it down in the dead of night."

Former Senator Vance Hartke, who was born in 1919 and who grew up in the tiny town of Stendal, recalls the importance of politics in the leisure and social life of a community without electricity and ten miles away from the nearest motion picture show. The summer picnics and winter Christmas socials put on by the Democrats and Republicans were major events. "You were a traitor," he says, "if you went to the other party's picnic." There were exceptions to such condemnations for people like Republican Walter Siebe, who played his horn for both parties because there weren't enough musicians to allow for partisan preference.

For a time Hartke's father, a Democratic postmaster and schoolteacher, was the owner of the only radio in the community, a battery-powered instrument which the neighbors came over to listen to when there was an important prizefight. But the rural isolation of the world Hartke was raised in preserved much of the cultural foundations of a disappeared political system. In Hartke's time, for instance, the winners of oratorical and elocution contests were as likely to be the local heroes as were the athletes. Public speaking was practiced by young men with the same dedication as basketball is today and, when they performed, there was a knowledgeable audience for them to talk to. As anyone familiar with the Lincoln-Douglas debates knows, orations of an hour or more were common. After the cows were milked and the kitchen put in order, folks looked forward to getting in the wagon and going to town for "the speaking," as it used to be called.

Decade by decade the play and pageantry has been taken out of politics. The marching bands with their colorful uniforms, the acrobatics and fireworks, the pole raisings and the ball rollings, once an inseparable part of popular democracy in our slice of North America, have succumbed to a graying out, a Calvinization of political values, which has turned politics, the most exciting and dramatic of activities, into something as dull as it often is dumb. The parades peeled off into the football stadiums where, on any autumn weekend afternoon, one can see all the spectacle which once upon a time was an essential part of our political processes.

With the Calvinization of politics, the joy and fun of the thing has vanished. As politics has come to be in the hands of scolds who nag everyone to "inform yourself about the issues," enthusiasm, interest, and participation has waned. There are, it would appear, only a finite number of us who will take part in politics when it is offered to us as a duty and only as a duty.

The last mass outpourings of people with political purpose were a generation ago when hundreds of thousands hit the streets in a seemingly endless series of protests against the war in Vietnam. One of the hallmarks of that political movement was, in the idiom of the times, sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. It was also colorful costumes, painted faces, street theater, and exuberant public manifestations which last century Americans would immediately recognize.

Not only have the games been taken away but so have the jobs and the little pieces of graft which members of the masses once got cut in on in return for working for the party. Reform, as it has rolled out across the twentieth century, has reserved patronage and the other tangible rewards for the upper classes.

Lawyers, professors, denizens of the think tanks, consultants, and such are still rewarded with patronage jobs. At the federal level the White House, Congress, the departments, and the agencies are crawling with high-level types enjoying political payoff positions. But the masses who once had a shot at government jobs in return for party work are shut out. Below a certain level it's all civil service, which in our time is not always considered an effective medium for efficient government operations, although the prevailing opinion was quite to the contrary during the decades that reformers were destroying or weakening party organization by outlawing patronage. Patronage jobs gave a sizable number of people a powerful motive for getting out the vote. Certainly, one factor in the decline in voter turnout is that there are no longer tens of thousands of people whose jobs depend on getting the rest of us to the polling place.

The patronage system, of course, was the complete antithesis of the civil service. Instead of lifetime tenure, a person's job was only as secure as the party's victory at the next election. This letter from the executive secretary of Indiana governor Paul V. McNutt provides us with a taste of what things were like for political jobholders back then:

August 30, 1933

Mrs. Mary K. Jones
615 W. 32nd Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

Dear Mrs. Jones:

This will acknowledge your letter of August 17th, asking why you were let out at the State School for the Deaf.

The reason for your dismissal was not because of your work, but because of the fact that you were a republican. We have some 47,000 loyal democrats that are looking for work at the present time, and if we were to leave republicans in their jobs we certainly could not expect their help in the campaigns to come. As a result, you were replaced by a democrat.

We are very sorry that we had to do this, but under the circumstances it was the only thing that we could do.

Very truly yours,
Pleas E. Greenlee,
Executive Secretary.

Patronage made it possible to finance political parties via what was called assessments. Job holders were required to pay the party 2 to 3 percent of their salaries, an act which is now called a kickback and will get a politician thrown in jail. Thus what was once standard practice is now criminal practice, but there is no doubt that the end of this informal system of public campaign finance has made the parties just that much more dependent on PACs and what we label as "special interests." There is also no doubt that patronage and the attendant assessment system gave working-class people a chance at the boodle now exclusively the preserve of credentialed professionals, grantees of every imaginable specialization, and politically connected contractors, comprising an array of organizations which run the gamut from military hardware suppliers and researchers to social service agencies.

Not that the old way was Valhalla. Even in an era of far smaller government, presidents and governors and even county commissioners lamented the large blocks of their time and attention given over to assigning patronage jobs. One of his last official acts before Franklin Roosevelt was struck with his fatal cerebral hemorrhage was signing patronage appointments for postmasterships. A return to even a modified patronage system is probably not practical. The elaborate local party organization needed to administer it has long since ceased to exist, along with the social system out of which it grew. Moreover, it countenanced practices which another age winked at, but which we would find abhorrent, as this incident concerning Pleas Greenlee illustrates. At some point Greenlee complained that the state highway department was harboring a pretty Republican secretary, but he was told, "We can't fire her. She's sleeping with one of the Statehouse reporters." To which the governor's patronage chief replied, "Hell! Get him a Democrat secretary to sleep with."

In Mary Lord Dimmick's time, theaters were called opera houses because acting was an immoral calling and entertainment was the next thing to prostitution. Actors and professional athletes are now our only heroes, and politics, once a labor-intensive business engaging tens of thousands of us, is a capital-intensive one where people are seldom seen and campaigns are run by a few men and women looking into computer screens.

Nicholas von Hoffman is a former columnist for the Washington Post and "Point-Counterpoint" commentator for CBS's 60 Minutes. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Capitalist Fools: Tales of American Business, from Carnegie to Forbes to the Milken Gang (1992).

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