Party Games: The Art of Stealing Elections in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States

Mark Wahlgren Summers

"It is the religious duty of Democrats to rob Populists and Republicans of their votes whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself," a Louisiana daily announced in the mid-1890s. Overlooking any chance to do so would violate "Democratic teaching. . . . Rob them! You bet! What are we here for?" Such frankness was rare in the Gilded Age United States, but at times, to contemporaries, partisan forbearance seemed rarer still. As any Democrat, Republican, Populist, or Greenbacker knew to his own bitter cost, double-dealing, sharp practice, and outright stealing and cheating were parts of the election day game. Often the rigging of results could be done perfectly legally, and much of it was so ingrained in the workings of politics that the rival organizations took manipulation of the process as one of the privileges of incumbency.1	1
Certainly real issues were at stake. Even those who did the manipulating often believed that they did so with every moral right and to further just ends. Indeed, the very sense that the fate of the Republic hung on party victory only added to each side's willingness to use every means within the law to carry the day—and to think no worse of itself than did the howling claqueurs and attorneys brimful of righteousness who turned Florida's postelection disputes into a vicious circus in 2000. Then, as now, the real story may have lain, not in the thousands of discredited votes, but in how closely the electorate as a whole was divided in its choices, with a closeness that made cheating worthwhile, since so little effort could so dramatically affect the result. Then, perhaps more than now, the close division was rooted in ideological disagreement, narrow in its range and limited in its topics, but intensely felt. As will become clear, party loyalty and the broad political participation characteristic of the age also drew strength from passions familiar to observers of the 2000 election: a sense of moral outrage and a hunger for vindication. Those passions were enough to dull partisans' resentment of sharp practices on their own side and to convince them that any method used was fair return for injuries received. Whether the partisanship was truly felt or inspired by a search for pelf or personal advantage, whether founded on indignation or ideology, for most Americans, to vote outside of one's own party was unthinkable. All the same, however far partisanship and belief defined why people voted as they did and how elections turned out, the broad range of party tricks obscured the people's will, occasionally thwarted it, and cast a moral cloud over the winner's title.	2
Examples of such tricks abounded in 1888, in the last presidential election for well over a century in which the winner carried the Electoral College and lost the popular vote. After a campaign of torchlights, parades, kazoos, educational literature, and the usual roorbacks—those last-minute "revelations" thrown into a campaign too late for the victim to repair the damage—the set-to between President Grover Cleveland and Sen. Benjamin Harrison of Indiana turned on the outcome in their home states. New York's returns gave Harrison a close if decisive lead, though Democrats accused the state's governor, David Bennett Hill, of double-crossing the head of his party ticket to win Republican votes for his own reelection.2 In Indiana there was a sensation a little over a week before election day when the former federal pension commissioner W. W. Dudley, whose vote-buying proficiency had earned him the sobriquet Two-Dollar Dudley, issued a letter encouraging county chairmen to bring out the full "floating vote" of marketable electors for Harrison's election. "Divide the floaters into blocks of five and put a trusted man with necessary funds in charge of these five and make them responsible that none get away and that all vote our ticket," he wrote. The letter's publication may well have thwarted the scheme, and reports from the polling places suggested that Democrats as usual applied their own share of boodle in the "fight . . . for the 'floats,'" but Democrats would blame their defeat on the theft of Indiana and treachery in New York.3	. . .