Electoral Capitalism: The Party System in New York’s Gilded Age

Abstract

It is heartening to welcome new work that takes Gilded Age American politics seriously. Progressive-Era political scientists and historians wrote the first draft of the history of the period’s politics. Their interpretation—heavy on sham partisan battles, the absence of principles, and corruption—providing the before to the after of Progressive-Era redemption, has had remarkable staying power.Broxmeyer does not minimize self-dealing, patronage, office seeking, and other sordid features that were the sum of Gilded Age politics in the Progressive caricature. Rather than decrying corruption (indeed, he asks good questions about what the term means) or, like an earlier literature on machine politics, finding it merely functional in cities with great need but no welfare state, he turns it into a key piece of a transformation in American political development. During the Gilded Age, covering roughly 1870 through the early 1890s, electoral capitalism—the fusion of private property, government, and parties—took shape. Politicians were not the toadies of big businessmen. They were in business—real estate and transportation especially, since these enterprises directly involved government—and many became rich in the process. Their business was turning votes into capital.The book uses New York’s state Republican machine and New York City’s Tammany Hall to demonstrate the links between property, officeholding, and policy. Four chapters present case studies within the larger case study. They cover Tammany, the Republican machine (fed by the supremely important New York Customs House) under Senator Roscoe Conkling, party-provided “poor relief,” the Henry George 1886 mayoral campaign, and anti-monopoly. Historians of New York politics are not likely to find much new in his account; the literature about Tammany, including its members’ business dealings, was already wide and deep, as is that on the state Republican Party. Indeed, historians might find the absence of references to those literatures frustrating. Broxmeyer’s treatment of parties, patronage, and the money to be made in politics before the Gilded Age is also thin. Although the scale of the economy and government in the late nineteenth century certainly made for enhanced economic opportunities, political professionals before that period knew how to take advantage of inside information to speculate in real estate and how to field both entitled and desperate appeals for office. Further precision about what changed later in the nineteenth century would have been welcome. Political scientists might also have appreciated a stronger statement about the book’s place in the literature about American political development and in older analyses of party development. Broxmeyer’s method, historical and archival, might leave those of a more economic and analytical bent wishing for a more abstract treatment of politics and capital.That said, bypassing the well-worn paths, Broxmeyer is able to offer a series of fascinating observations. In one of the few attentive readings of what comprises the bulk of the papers of nineteenth-century politicians and their associates (letters asking for jobs or financial assistance), he finds a public poor-relief system. In an original twist, he builds on that claim to argue that civil-service reform was of a piece with budgetary austerity measures championed by well-heeled anti-party independents. Notwithstanding that both historians and political scientists have conferred considerable attention on labor politics in the Gilded Age, Broxmeyer focuses less on the ins and outs of labor parties than on the peculiar appeal of anti-monopoly to upper-class reformers as well as to labor reformers who lost trust in the party system and, lacking the access that wealth offered, had to develop alternative tactics. The boycott of the New York Tribune once it made a hard turn toward respectability after Horace Greeley’s death is a case in point.Electoral Capitalism will provide historians and political scientists the erudition and inspiration to re-think the re-organization of party politics after the Civil War.