By Peggy Carroll
They were called Mugwumps then.
They came out against their party’s own candidate for president.
Though they were Republicans, they declared they could not support the man their convention had nominated.
But their names were not Bush or Powell, Romney or Bloomberg, or Christine Todd Whitman.
More than 130 years before the contentious election of 2016, the selection of James G. Blaine to run against Grover Cleveland in the presidential race in 1884 threw the party into disarray.
Opting out were prominent GOP supporters– including Jeremy Petersen, president of the Union Pacific Railroad; author Henry Adams; Louis Brandeis, future Supreme Court Justice; Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard University; Josiah Willard Gibbs, professor of mathematical physics at Yale University; Carl Schurz, former senator from Missouri, Secretary of the Interior, and editor of the Saturday Evening Post; Moorfield Storey, lawyer and NAACP president; and Mark Twain, author.
There were so many that they had a name: The “Mugwumps.” It was an Algonquin word meaning chief or leader, but their opponents said it described their stance as fence-sitters: With their mug on one side of the fence and their wump on the other.
And among them, says Ryan Hyman, curator of collections at the Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, was the political cartoonist Thomas Nast.
Nast, fervent Republican and friend Ulysses S. Grant., for the first and only time, endorsed a Democrat.
And so did the publishers of his magazine, The Harper’s Weekly.
“He just didn’t like Blaine,” said Hyman, who looks after the museum’s large collection of Nast cartoons, the most extensive there is.
On paper, Blaine seemed to have a strong resume. He entered college at 13, at 18 taught students older than he was, was co-owner and editor of a newspaper in Maine, served in Congress and as Speaker of the House, was appointed to the Senate and was Secretary of State three times – the only person to hold that distinction. In his early career, he was dubbed “the plumed knight.”
But Nast and other Republicans viewed him as corrupt, guilty of giving a free break to railroads and probably getting some kind of kick-back in return.
It didn’t hurt that Cleveland, as governor of New York, had refused to give patronage to Tammany Hall, Nast’s old nemesis.
Nast’s cartoons had been instrumental in arousing public opposition in the early 1870s to the corruption of Tammany Hall, the city’s most prominent political machine, and its head, the notorious Boss William Tweed.
Tweed famously said that his followers might not be able to read, but they understood Nast’s cartoons. His hatred for Nast was one reason the cartoonist moved to Morristown: To get away from Tweed. Even after Tweed died in jail in 1878, Hyman said, Nast continued to use him as a symbol of evil.
“He even appeared a ghost on some of his cartoons,” Hyman laughed.
Nor was Nast fond of his successor, John Kelly, and depicted him as a venal spoilsman.
Cleveland did support the Democratic machines in Brooklyn and New York County. Yet, to Nast and other reformers, Cleveland’s repudiation of Tammany Hall and his firm commitment to honest and efficient government were sufficient.
That connection appeared in the full-page cover cartoon Nast did for Harper’s just days after Cleveland’s nomination. It shows the Democrat standing tall and erect, giving him the appearance of an honest and incorruptible politician, with backbone.
Nast spread above the image the words spoken by General Edward Bragg of Wisconsin in seconding Cleveland’s nomination: ‘We Love Him Most for the Enemies That He Has Made.”
It was, Hyman said, like the “enemies of our enemies are our friends.”
On the next page is an official endorsement in the lead editorial, written by editor George William Curtis. He said there were three reasons why he and other reformers opposed Blaine: 1) his involvement in scandal; 2) his imperialist foreign policy; and 3) his record as a spoilsman who resisted civil service reform and reform in general.
During the campaign, Nast drew the majority of the cartoons in Harper’s Weekly. For the most part, he attacked Blaine and his supporters. In one, for example, he shows Blaine trying to don the white shirt of “reform,” but he is wearing it upside down.
It was a nasty campaign that touched on every tabu subject, from sex to religion. (Sound familiar?)
Sex. The Republicans circulated a story that the then-unmarried Cleveland (he later married in the White House) had fathered an illegitimate child while he was a lawyer in Buffalo a decade before.
The story gave birth (excuse the pun) to a popular chant.
Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?
The response after the election –
Gone to the White House! Ha, ha, ha!
It is believed that Cleveland shared the woman’s favors with several friends and in those days before DNA did not know which man was the father. It is believed he assumed responsibility because he was then the only bachelor among them.
At the same time, Democratic operatives accused Blaine and his wife of not having been married when their eldest son, Stanwood, was born in 1851. Blaine denied it and apparently it did not create much of a fuss in the campaign.
Corruption. The major complaint of the anti-Blaine crowd was a scandal called the “Mulligan
letters.”
Blaine, then in Congress, had been a favorite for the 1876 presidential race and was considered a shoo-in for the nomination. But rumors began to circulate that he had been involved in a transaction with the Union Pacific Railroad in which the railroad had paid him $64,000 for some nearly worthless stock, purportedly as a bribe.
Blaine denied it but the House Democrats demanded a Congressional investigation. Then a man named James Mulligan, a Boston clerk formerly employed by Blaine’s brother-in-law, testified that the allegations were true, that he had arranged the transaction, and that he had letters to prove it. The letters ended with the ominous words, “Kindly burn this letter.”
According to some reports, Blaine met with Mulligan in his hotel room, left with the letters but refused to turn them over to the committee.
Blaine took his case to the House floor, proclaiming his innocence. The investigation waned when Blaine was appointed to the Senate.
But it led to another chant:
“Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine. Continental liar from the state of Maine.”
Religion. Blaine, whose mother was Irish Catholic, attempted to win Irish support. (He was a Presbyterian like his father.) Nast pictured him on his knees begging an Irish citizen to vote for him. It must be noted that Nast, who was born Catholic but converted to the Episcopal faith, was not precisely a fan of the Irish. (You can check out his cartoons.)
Just a week before the election, Blaine created a problem for himself. He attended a meeting in a Protestant church at which Dr. Samuel Burchard, a Presbyterian minister, scolded those who had left the Republican Party by stating, “We don’t propose to leave our party and identify with the party whose antecedents are rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”
Blaine sat quietly during the attack aimed at Catholics and Irish voters in particular.
The speech made the papers and it is thought that it cost Blaine New York City and ultimately the election.
AFTER THE ELECTION
Cleveland won handily in the Electoral College – 219 to 182.
He became the first Democrat elected since before the Civil War. He had several other distinctions.
He was the first president to marry in the White House to his ward Frances or as he called her, Frank. (She was only 21, 27 years younger than her husband and the youngest first lady ever). He was also the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms. He is both the 22nd and the 24th president.
Blaine became Secretary of State for Benjamin Harrison, who first defeated Cleveland and then lost to him.
For Thomas Nast, the campaign was a last hurrah.
The death of the Weekly’s publisher Fletcher Harper in 1877 resulted in a changed relationship between Nast and his editor George William Curtis.
His cartoons appeared less frequently, and he and Curtis differed on the role of cartoons in politics.
It is clear, Hyman noted, that if Curtis had not agreed with Nast on Cleveland, he would have been censored.
Nast’s grandson, Thomas Nast St. Hill, has been been quoted as saying that that Nast’s support won Cleveland the small margin by which he was elected. In this, his last national political campaign, Nast had, in fact, “made a president.”
Nast’s last work for Harper’s was a Christmas illustration in 1886.
Contemporary critics said that in leaving Harper’s, Nast lost his national platform – and Harper’s lost the man considered the most important political artist of his day.
As for the Mugwumps? Did they return to the Republican party?
It is hard to say. We have, you know, a secret ballot.
