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“Vote for your Bread and Butter”: Economic Intimidation of Voters in the Gilded Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2021

Gideon Cohn-Postar Open the ORCID record for Gideon Cohn-Postar [Opens in a new window]
Gideon Cohn-Postar*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
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*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The extent and intensity of electoral and voter fraud that took place during the U.S. Gilded Age is properly infamous. This paper explores a form of voter intimidation that has garnered comparatively little scholarly attention: economic coercion. Absent secrecy at the polls and security at work, bosses forced workingmen to choose between their job or their vote. Economic voter intimidation provoked both a real and rhetorical crisis in the 1870s and 1880s. In real terms, it disrupted hundreds of elections and damaged thousands of workers’ livelihoods. It became a nationwide crisis after 1873, however, because for the first time, employers were coercing white workingmen on a widespread basis. Reports of employers coercing their employees at the polls throughout the nation confirmed the worst fears of many labor leaders and politicians: white wage-workers were insecure possessors of the franchise whose precariousness might threaten democracy itself. Mining previously overlooked accounts of economic voter intimidation in contested congressional election case records, congressional investigations, corporate records, and newspapers, this article argues that employers’ politicized layoff threats and observation of workers at the polls undermined the political equality of even those men whose whiteness had seemingly secured their privilege.

Keywords

economicselectionslaborthe labor problemvoter intimidation
Type
Article
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 480 - 502
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 Sullivan v. Felton Contested Election Case Files, House of Representatives Committee on Elections, 50th Cong., 1887–89, RG HR50A-F.9.9, National Archives, Washington, DC (hereafter Sullivan v. Felton).

2 In his study of the act of voting in the mid-nineteenth century, political scientist Richard Bensel concluded that economic voter intimidation was such an insubstantial element of politics in the 1840s and 1850s that he explicitly excluded it from his analysis. Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 79. The digest of congressional contested election cases covering 1865–71 contains just four references to economic voter intimidation—three in the South, one in the North. The digest covering 1876–80 contains dozens of examples of bosses coercing employees in the North, South, and West. U.S. House of Representatives, 41st Cong., 2nd Sess., 1870, misc. doc. 152, in D. W. Bartlett, Digest of Election Cases: Cases of Contested Election in the House of Representatives from 1865 to 1871, Inclusive (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1870), 99, 201, 695, 728; U.S. House of Representatives, 47th Cong., 1st Sess., 1883, misc. doc. 57, in Ellsworth, J. H., Digest of Election Cases: Cases of Contested Elections in the House of Representatives, Forty-Fifth and Forty-Sixth Congresses, from 1876 to 1880 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1883)Google Scholar.

3 Coercion of African American voters by whites in the South was widespread but varied in effectiveness. Eric Foner argued that white supremacists resorted to violence in the 1870s and 1880s in part because “economic intimidation … proved ineffective” in driving Black voters from the polls. Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982): 82–100, esp. 89. See also Behrend, Justin, Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War, 1st ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 4 Google Scholar.

4 See Argersinger, Peter H, “New Perspectives on Election Fraud in the Gilded Age,” Political Science Quarterly 100 (Winter 1985): 669–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 673. Historians John Francis Reynolds and Mark Wahlgren Summers mentioned political intimidation of workers by factory owners only briefly. Summers noted that parties often chose factory owners as candidates because “a man who controlled so many people’s livelihoods could control their votes.” Mark Wahlgren Summers, Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 101. Reynolds’s study of New Jersey politics relied on newspaper reports, and although he found several references to employers “proselytizing among their employees,” he believed that he could not “substantiate occasional accusations of intimidation or coercion” based on such sources. Reynolds, John Francis, Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Progressive Reform in New Jersey, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 53 Google Scholar. For more on New Jersey politics, see Richard McCormick’s influential 1953 book, The History of Voting in New Jersey. Whereas McCormick devoted two chapters to bribery, he dismissed “the problem of the employed voter” in less than a paragraph. McCormick, Richard Patrick, The History of Voting in New Jersey: A Study of the Development of Election Machinery, 1664–1911 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 153 Google Scholar.

5 For more on the modern definition of intimidation, see Donsanto, Craig C and Simmons, Nancy L, Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, 7th ed. (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Public Integrity Section, 2007), 54 Google Scholar.

6 Of particular use in this study is the collected evidence of contested congressional election cases. Compared to partisan newspapers and personal accounts, contested election cases offer substantially more reliable descriptions of the conduct of elections in the late nineteenth century. While partisanship and the potential for witness tampering remained serious concerns, contested election cases were conducted under a relatively standardized set of procedures that political scientists Didi Kuo and Jan Teorell likened to the “outer characteristics of a judicial trial.” Contestants could call rebuttal witnesses and frequently relied on attorneys to conduct depositions and prepare their cases for submission to the House Committee on Elections. The committee itself had decades earlier established high standards of evidence, though committee members had little trouble setting those standards aside if doing so advanced the interests of their party. Didi Kuo and Jan Teorell, “Illicit Tactics as Substitutes: Election Fraud, Ballot Reform, and Contested Congressional Elections in the United States, 1860–1930,” Comparative Political Studies 50 (Apr. 2017): 665–96, esp. 672. For more on contested elections in this period, see Jeffery A. Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Elections in the House of Representatives, 1789–2002,” Studies in American Political Development 18 (Oct. 2004); and Matthew N. Green, “Race, Party, and Contested Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives,” Polity 39 (April 2007): 155–78. For details of these cases, see U.S. House of Representatives, 56th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1901, doc. 510, in Chester H. Rowell, A Historical and Legal Digest of all the Contested Elections in the House of Representatives of the United States from the First to the Fifty-Sixth Congress, 1789–1901 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901). For more on labor and democracy, see Fink, Leon, The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Jentz, John B and Schneirov, Richard, Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 James J. Connolly, An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America, 1st ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 16–18.

8 Rosanne Currarino, “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and the Idea of Economic Liberty in Industrial America,” Journal of American History 93 (June 2006): 17–36, esp. 17. See also O’Donnell, Edward T., Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Glickman, Lawrence B, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nicolas Barreyre, “The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10 (Oct. 2011): 403–23, esp. 403.

9 Connolly, Elusive Unity, 89.

10 Currarino, “Politics of ‘More,’” 17.

11 U.S. Senate, 46th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1880, report no. 497, in Senate Select Committee to Inquire into the Alleged Frauds in the Late Elections (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880), 5 (hereafter 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry).

12 Welke, Barbara Young, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States, New Histories of American Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 For more on the economic conditions of the era, see Eric J. Hobsbawm and Francis Newton, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 35; Barreyre, “Politics of Economic Crises,” 403; Richard Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873–1898,” Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (July 2006): 189–224; and Rendigs Fels, “The Long-Wave Depression, 1873–97,” Review of Economics and Statistics 31 (Feb. 1949): 69–73.

14 “A System of Coercion,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), Aug. 22, 1876, 4. For more testimony on discharges among African American voters in Mississippi in particular, see “Proceedings before the Investigating Committee,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 1875, 5.

15 Watson v. Black, Contested Election Case Files, House of Representatives Committee on Elections, 53rd Cong., 1893–95, RG HR53A-F.9.10, National Archives, Washington, DC.

16 L., “Letter to the Editor: Mild Forms of Intimidation: Employment Refused for Political Reasons—Instances in Louisiana,” New-York Tribune, Feb. 17, 1877, 4.

17 U.S. House of Representatives, 46th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1879, misc. doc. 5, in Investigation by a Select Committee of the House of Representatives Relative to the Causes of General Depression in Labor and Business; and as to Chinese Immigration (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1879), 141 (hereafter 1879 House Investigation—Labor, Business, and Chinese Immigration).

18 1879 House Investigation—Labor, Business, and Chinese Immigration, 148.

19 A well-regarded Union colonel during the Civil War, Blood later served as city auditor of St. Louis, MO, and married prominent suffragist Victoria Woodhull. U.S. Senate, 48th Cong., 1883–85, in Report of the Committee of the Senate upon the Relations between Labor and Capital, and Testimony Taken by the Committee, Volume 2—Testimony (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1885), 1387 (hereafter Senate Investigation—Labor and Capital).

20 U.S. Senate, 48th Cong., 1885, in Report of the Committee of the Senate upon the Relations between Labor and Capital, and Testimony Taken by the Committee, Volume 1—Testimony (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1885), 388 (italics in original).

21 George Frederic Parsons, “The Labor Question,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1886.

22 A communist uprising during the Prussian siege of Paris that briefly ran the city in opposition to the new French national government, the Paris Commune’s radicalism and momentary success inspired labor advocates and communist thinkers and terrified capitalists for decades. Theresa A. Case, “Blaming Martin Irons: Leadership and Popular Protest in the 1886 Southwest Strike,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (Jan. 2009): 51–81, esp. 53.

23 Isaac Cohen, an unemployed machinist and president of the Workingmen’s Relief Association of the District of Columbia, was one example. Cohen testified to a House committee on Dec. 11, 1878 that “The workingmen are told to assert their rights through the ballot-box. How, if they vote for a certain man and he is counted out? How, if they vote for a man they believe to be honest and he proves dishonest? How, if they are threatened to be discharged if they vote for a man of their choice?” U.S. House of Representatives, 45th Cong., 3rd Sess., 1879, misc. doc. 29, in Investigation by a Select Committee of the House of Representatives Relative to the Causes of the General Depression in Labor and Business, etc. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1879), 433 (hereafter 1879 House Investigation—Labor and Business). William Krech, a Minneapolis teacher, judge of election, and member of the Workingmen’s Union, was another example. During a Minnesota contested congressional election in 1878, Krech expressed his concern that “If one man is dependent on another can’t that other man take advantage of this man’s dependence on him?” Krech volunteered that “A class of hired workingmen I regard as a dangerous element of society, just as an army of hired soldiers.” U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Elections, 46th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1880, report no. 1791, in Report in the Case of Ignatius Donnelly v. William D. Washburn Contested Election (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880), 171–73 (hereafter Report—Donnelly v. Washburn).

24 The official Knights of Labor newspaper of Richmond, Virginia, The Labor Herald, editorialized constantly on corporations in politics, noting in 1886 that “if vigilance to preserve the liberties of a country was ever needed it is needed now. Let us not despair, but act. There are yet such things as votes and ballot-boxes in this country.” “Untitled,” Labor Herald (Richmond, VA), Apr. 24, 1886, 1.

25 Platform und Constitution der Soz. Arbeiter-Partei angenommen aud der 5ten. National-Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, am 5., 6., 7. und 8. Oct. 1885 (pamphlet), Socialistic Library no. 1, Jan. 1, 1886 (New York: National Executive Committee of the Socialistic Labor Party, 1886). Progressive economist Richard T. Ely explained that they wanted to fight for both economic and political equality, but before either could be accomplished, the party’s leadership believed that Americans would have to overcome the “fact that economic servitude renders political equality a deceit … since those who control the means of life control the votes.” Richard T. Ely, Recent American Socialism (Baltimore, 1884), 281.

26 Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 188.

27 Lum, “American Workingmen Are Called Upon to Arm Themselves,” Labor Herald, May 1, 1886, 1.

28 1879 House Investigation—Labor, Business, and Chinese Immigration, 82.

29 “Intimidation by Protected Manufacturers,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 1888, 4.

30 U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Elections, 47th Cong., 1st Sess., 1881, misc. doc. 13, in Testimony in the Contested Election Case of Samuel J. Anderson v. Thomas B. Reed (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1881), 102–51 (hereafter Testimony—Anderson v. Reed). Both parties received electoral benefits from worker coercion as companies often cared more for what a party could do for them than what policies the party stood for. An unemployed coal miner named James Hickey explained this phenomenon when he wrote to Congress about the practices of one of the largest employers in New York: “in strong Democratic districts the Erie Company was Democratic, in strong Republican districts Republican, and in doubtful districts both Democratic and Republican.” In the North, however, Republicans were more often accused of economic intimidation than were Democrats. 1879 House Investigation—Labor and Business, 391. A version of this quote is casually mentioned in an 1891 article in The Monist without any attribution, suggesting that it was a widely known or at least generally uncontroversial accusation. Thomas B. Preston, “American Politics,” The Monist, Jan. 1, 1891, 41.

31 1879 House Investigation—Labor, Business, and Chinese Immigration, 162.

32 “Irving M. Scott—Brief Sketch of the Eventful Career of a Successful Man,” San Francisco Alta Californian, July 20, 1888, 1, in Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Shipbuilding Division, San Francisco, records, HDC345, series 6, subseries 3, box 146, file 10, folder 8, Union Iron Works Collection, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Research Center, San Francisco, CA.

33 Though there is no conclusive evidence that the bosses at the Union Iron Works Shipyard acted with coercive intent, what records do exist are highly suggestive. Barely three weeks after Felton won the election, the shipyard—which had been in dire financial straits with the decline of its mining machinery contracts in the grinding economic downturn—won a competitive bid to build a new steel cruiser for the navy. The U.S.S. Charleston took around two years to build, just as the foreman had promised his men. When he was questioned about the difficult negotiation (during which, as a friendly newspaperman noted, “everything was arrayed against him”) Scott reluctantly admitted that “Felton did, to a certain extent, assist us.” “Irving M. Scott Speaks,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1887, 7.

34 McGerr, Michael E., The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 69–106 Google Scholar.

35 George Hoadly, “Methods of Ballot Reform,” Forum, Aug. 1889, 623.

36 Testimony—Anderson v. Reed, 370.

37 Testimony—Anderson v. Reed, 396.

38 Testimony—Anderson v. Reed, 396.

39 Senate Investigation—Labor and Capital, 1:341; U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Elections, 49th Cong., 1st Sess., 1886, report no. 1449, in Report in the Contested Election Case of Frank H. Hurd v. Jacob Romeis (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1886), 11–13 (hereafter Report—Hurd v. Romeis); “Bulldozing Their Employees,” Lancaster Daily Intelligencer (Lancaster, PA), Oct. 20, 1880, 2; “Intimidating Workmen,” New York Times, Nov. 4, 1884, 5; “Intimidation by Protected Manufacturers,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 1888, 4.

40 U.S. Senate, 48th Cong., 1st Sess., 1884, report no. 579, in Report from the Committee of the Committee on Privileges and Elections on the Alleged Massacre of Colored Men at Danville (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1884), 432.

41 U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Elections, 51st Cong., 1st Sess., 1890, report no. 1214, in Report in the Contested Election Case of Henry Bowen v. John A. Buchanan (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1890), 3.

42 Summers, Party Games, 101.

43 Testimony—Anderson v. Reed, 65.

44 Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 51. Parties often used campaign funds to hire wagons to take voters to the polls, sometimes walking the gray line between getting out the vote and coercing prospective voters. In 1896, Samuel F. Barr, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania then living in Maine, bragged to William McKinley that he had raised funds to transport voters to the polls “on the condition that they vote for you.” Samuel F. Barr to William McKinley, William McKinley Papers, series 1, General Correspondence and Related Items, 1847–1902, manuscript/mixed material, image 532, Sept. 13, 1896, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, https://www.loc.gov/item/mss322680001.

45 U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Elections, 46th Cong., 1st Sess., 1879, misc. doc. 23, in Sebastian Duffy v. Joseph Mason Papers and Documents for the Twenty-Fourth Congressional District of New York (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1879), 204 (hereafter Documents—Duffy v. Mason).

46 Documents—Duffy v. Mason, 218.

47 Report—Donnelly v. Washburn, 16–23.

48 Sullivan v. Felton.

49 U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Elections, 55th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1898, report no. 428, in Report in the Contested Election Case of R.T. Thorp v. Sydney P. Epes (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1898), 10–11.

50 Testimony—Anderson v. Reed, 6.

51 Documents—Duffy v. Mason, 217.

52 1879 House Investigation—Labor and Business, 390.

53 U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Elections, 50th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1888, report no. 3538, in Frank J. Sullivan v. Charles N. Felton Contested Election Case Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888), 32.

54 Voter turnout in western states like California during off-year elections was among the highest in the nation, averaging 69.1 percent between 1880 and 1898 and lagging only slightly behind New York. Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting, 17.

55 Sullivan v. Felton.

56 Sullivan v. Felton.

57 Sullivan v. Felton.

58 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry. The committee also investigated voting practices in Rhode Island, but the vast majority of the evidence came from Massachusetts.

59 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 120.

60 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 120.

61 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 17, 136.

62 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 4.

63 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 4–5.

64 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 116, 120.

65 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 274.

66 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 180.

67 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 275.

68 Senate Investigation—Labor and Capital, 1:341–42 (italics in original).

69 “Fraud in Montana,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York), Nov. 16, 1889, issue 259; “Multiple News Items,” Penny Press (Minneapolis, MN), Oct. 7, 1896, issue 263.

70 Report—Hurd v. Romeis, 11–13.

71 “Massachusetts Bull-Dozing,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 1878, 4.

72 “Massachusetts Bull-Dozing,” 4.

73 “New-England Bulldozing,” New York Times, Aug. 19, 1879, 4.

74 “New-England Bulldozing,” 4.

75 The Boston Herald is quoted extensively in 1880 Senate Fraud Inquiry, 240.

76 By 1896, 92 percent of Americans voted in secrecy. The holdouts were entirely southern states. William D. Harpine, From the Front Porch to the Front Page: McKinley and Bryan in the 1896 Presidential Campaign, 1st ed., Presidential Rhetoric Series, no. 13 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2005), 20.

77 “Where Crime Is Cured,” The Sun (New York), May 17, 1891, 27.