June 26, 2024
A TALE OF 1888, 1892, 1896: IS TRUMP A CLEVELAND OR BRYAN?
History repeats itself and those who do not learn from lessons it teaches are doomed to repeat them. With the U.S. presidential election just over 4 months away the best precursor of the Nov. 5 Trump-Biden outcome can be found in 1892, with lead-ins of 1884 and 1888 and lead-outs of 1896, 1900 and 1908 as corollaries.
The 2024 election and the election of 1892 has striking similarities: An ex-president who won a plurality of the 1888 vote but lost re-election was running for re-election in 1892 against an incumbent president whose incompetence was glaring, his popularity minuscule and whose stewardship of the economy was abysmal. Is there not a lesson here?
The salient 1892 issues were tariffs and bimetallism, which allegedly caused the economic woes, plus massive immigration of White Europeans, particularly Irish and Black voter suppression by Democrats in the South.
It may come as a great revelation to those alive today, but it was the Democrats who were the RACIST party in the pre-Civil War, Civil War, Reconstruction, and post Reconstruction eras. I know, shocker.
During Benjamin Harrison’s 1889-92 term he and the congressional Republicans actually sponsored the Force Act which would have mandated the U.S. Attorney General to monitor all Southern congressional elections and send federal marshals to ensure Black voting rights and suppress KKK intimidation.
The bill went nowhere. Democrats won a U.S. House majority in 1890 amidst a Depression and
Harrison got beat by Grover Cleveland (D) in 1892. After the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal schools case Republicans moved on, allying themselves with conservative Southern Democrats and abandoning civil rights issues. But it was resurrected by the Democrats in the 1960s as the Voting Rights Act. History repeats itself. But let’s not infer great virtue. Republicans wanted Black votes for them in the South, where Blacks were then an overwhelming population majority, outnumbering Whites 2-to-1. And Democrats and LBJ in the ‘60s wanted to cement Blacks into their national voter base.
But the seminal election for 1892 was 1884. Republicans had won the presidency for 6 consecutive elections from 1860 to 1880. The Spoils System was rampant; the incumbent party controlled close to 10,000 jobs, including postmasters, and the lucrative Port of New York, where shippers paid bribes to the appointed collector to dock, unload and store their ships’ cargo. The incumbent president, Chester A. Arthur, who was vice-president when James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, was the NYC collector.
The 1884 Republican nominee was James Blaine, a former Speaker and Secretary of State renowned for his corruption, with his wealth coming from insider railroad deals. Arthur was dumped. But Blaine was a silver-tongued lovable rogue (much like a certain former president) and 1884 was HIS TURN.
Democrats chose NY governor Grover Cleveland, who promised “civil service reform,” albeit AFTER he put Democrats in all those federal jobs. The campaign was suffused with invective, with Blaine accused of corruption and Cleveland accused of fathering a child out-of-wedlock, which was a big scandal back then.
The outcome was decided by 4 words “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” Some Protestant minister uttered those words at a Blaine event regarding the Democrats and Blaine didn’t repudiate them. That utterance quickly spread among Irish Catholic residents in NYC – who were definitely pro-Rum, as in anti-Prohibition, and Blaine lost NY by 1,149 votes, and its 36 electoral votes and the election.
As set forth in the vote chart, Cleveland won the EVs by 219-182; had NY’s 36 gone to Blaine it would have been a 218-183 Blaine win.
Compare this to the Biden Administration’s “operational control” of the border and “reduction of inflation” claims.
So Cleveland won 4,919,482-4,856,908, with 48.8 percent, and became president, presiding over an un-noteworthy 4-year term. His biggest controversy was his refusal to grant pension hikes to Civil War veterans, a core Republican voting bloc. For Republicans back then, pension boosts were like today’s student loan forgiveness.
In 1888 Harrison got the Republican nomination because Blaine thought Cleveland couldn’t be beat. Dull and plodding, Harrison was an ex-Indiana senator and aging Civil War general. But Harrison proved able to do in 1888 what Blaine could not in 1884: He won NY and IN, and thus the Electoral College by 233-168 even though out-polled 5,534,588 to 5,443,892.
Sort of like 2016, when Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump 65,853,614-62,989,828 but lost the EV 304-227. Harrison’s presidency was disastrous. Republicans passed the McKinley Tariff, which was supposed to tax and make foreign imports more expensive than American products, but instead just protected the manufacturers in the East. That crippled both agricultural and industrial exports. The Sherman Act reinforced mono-metalism, which was specie backed by gold and squelched bimetallism, which was currency backed by silver, which was in abundant supply in the West. Silver coinage would have de-valued the dollar by half, making debt repayment less onerous. And the Force Act threatened Democratic power in the South.
And politicians did what they do: Made a deal for their own self-interest. Southerners sided with the Republicans on the tariffs and the westerners on bimetallism, and the payback was the death of the Force Bill. The ensuing Depression eviscerated Republicans in the 1890 election, losing 86 House seats, including McKinley’s.
By 1892 a Democratic comeback was inevitable. Cleveland decided to run for a third time (like Trump in 2024), and no Republican – like Blaine or OH governor William McKinley – wanted to challenge him and then run on his record and lose.
2024 is different: A lot of Democrats want to replace Biden, but he won’t step aside. Cleveland won 5,556,916-5,176,108 with a stunning 1,014,028 for Silverite populist James Weaver. The EV was 272-145-22 with Weaver winning 5 western states. Clearly there was agrarian discontent and Weaver was backed by The Grange (farmers and ranchers) and the Knights of Labor (an early-day AFL-CIO). This was a revolt of the Populists against the Elites – much like now
Farmers were being strangled by the East Coast Big Railroad Trusts, which charged exorbitant fees to get products market, and by currency connected to the Gold Standard. But Cleveland blew it, siding with the Gold Standard elites. Then came the “Panic of 1893” and a Depression caused by the collapse of numerous Wall Street brokerage houses and subsequent failure of 600 banks and 16,000 businesses, resulting in 20 percent unemployment. A major ideological realignment ensued.
In 1896 a Republican comeback seemed inevitable until populist William Jennings Bryan burst onto the scene. Bryan’s “not crucify on a cross-of-gold” speech exhilarated farmers and workers and terrified the elites and power brokers. The media of the time unleashed vicious invective, calling Bryan a demagogic neurotic paranoid narcissistic deranged megalomanic who was a threat to democracy and the capitalistic system. Sounds familiar, no?
The result was predictable: East Coast money poured into William McKinley’s campaign and he won 7,112,138-6,510,807, with an EV of 271-126, but the percentage was just 51-46.7. Clearly Bryan had an outsider base. But the media barrage took a toll. Bryan was incrementally transformed into a clown and a fool. He lost for president in 1900 with 45.5 percent and in 1908 with 43.1.
So is Trump in 2024 more like Cleveland or Bryan? His 2016/2020 vote rose from 62,989,828 to 74,223,975, his percent inched-up from 46.1 to 46.8, but the anti-Trump vote exploded from 65,859,614 to 81,293,501. That’s 16 million voters. So the better question is whether Biden is more like Harrison? If 2024 is a referendum, like in 1892, Biden loses. If 2024 is a choice, like in 1896, Trump loses. Either way, they are both too old for this … well, you know how that saying goes.
Read more Analysis & Opinion from Russ Stewart at Russstewart.com
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