Episode 149: A crisis of confidence – America in 1876

00;00;00;00 – 00;00;22;11
Jeremi Suri
So I think the ghost of 1876 would look at the United States today and see a lot of things that are very familiar. a divided country. A country where economic and identity issues are closely fuzed. And a country also struggling to figure out, what its place in the world will now be as the world is changing around it.

00;00;22;14 – 00;00;40;05
Ben Wright
This is 15 Minute History, a podcast for educators, students, and anyone interested in history featuring the minds and voices of the University of Texas at Austin.

00;00;40;07 – 00;01;01;29
Ben Wright
Two years from now on July 4th, America will enter its 250th year as a nation. For some, it will be a day to celebrate without question, for others. It may be something of an anti-climax, or at least a chance to reflect upon the continuing gap between the promise and reality of the American project. These kind of anniversaries have always been to us.

00;01;02;02 – 00;01;29;04
Ben Wright
In 1976, America was dealing with stagflation in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. In 1826, America was still reeling from the so-called corrupt bargain. Today, I’m joined by UT professor Jeremi Suri to discuss the lay of the land. In 1876, America’s 100th birthday. That year witnessed another incredibly tight and contentious election, rife with accusations of voter fraud and corrupt bargains.

00;01;29;06 – 00;01;45;05
Ben Wright
Jeremi is the author of Civil War by other Means America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for democracy and the Impossible Presidency The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office. We’ll touch upon both of these brilliant books today. Professor Suri, welcome to 15 minute history.

00;01;45;06 – 00;01;46;14
Jeremi Suri
Great to be with you, Ben.

00;01;46;16 – 00;02;12;04
Ben Wright
As we all know, America will have a rather important birthday coming up in 2026. And no doubt, given the current moment we’re in, this will be a period of soul searching, of hand-wringing. There have been these moments in history before, one that you’ve written about in particular detail is 1876, the 100th year anniversary of, the Declaration of Independence, but a fraught moment in American history.

00;02;12;05 – 00;02;14;29
Ben Wright
Can you sort of set the scene for us of 1876?

00;02;15;07 – 00;02;43;23
Jeremi Suri
Sure. So 1876 was that moment where the last gasps of the Lincoln legacy were still being felt in the country, but where there was, almost a freight train worth of resistance and condemnation of Lincoln coming from all different directions. That condemnation was in the form of neo confederates who wanted to preserve, what they thought was a way of life that was under attack from the point of the Civil War forward.

00;02;43;25 – 00;03;11;29
Jeremi Suri
They had lost their control over their enslaved labor. They had often lost control over land and resources. And these were communities, in the South and other parts of the country that were trying to reestablish themselves and keep out, new power seekers, new profit makers, especially those who were African American, Jewish, Catholic and various other groups then within northern communities, communities that had supported Lincoln’s Union war effort.

00;03;12;06 – 00;03;35;16
Jeremi Suri
just a decade earlier, there was a fatigue, a fatigue with the efforts to rebuild the country, fatigue with a civil rights agenda that had not gone very far and had not achieved very much. And a desire, especially after a terrible economic downturn in the early 1870s, to husband resources for the purposes of more traditional communities. While all of this was happening.

00;03;35;24 – 00;04;10;25
Jeremi Suri
You had a very engaged politically active African-American population within the United States. the scholarship by many other historians over the last decade has really brought that out. And you had, of course, members of the then Republican Party who continued to sympathize and see the future of the country as a more multiracial, inclusive country. These visions, which were economic, political and social altogether, these different visions clashed in in what was, one of the most hard fought and still unresolved elections in American history.

00;04;10;25 – 00;04;36;06
Jeremi Suri
We still don’t know who won the 1876 election, in part because in three states, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, you had disputed votes, disputed votes that seemed to be, in some cases, votes by people who had voted multiple times. And then, of course, evidence of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who were prohibited and prevented from voting because they were African-American or or sympathizers.

00;04;36;08 – 00;04;46;11
Jeremi Suri
So this was an election that at the end of 1876, was still in dispute. The country was as divided as it had been on the eve of the Civil War.

00;04;46;13 – 00;04;57;21
Ben Wright
Obviously, lots of resonance in what you’re saying about closely fought elections and resolve counts. How does America move on in 1876?

00;04;57;24 – 00;05;19;20
Jeremi Suri
Well, the country moves on in two ways. The person who eventually becomes president, even though he clearly lost the popular vote. And, it’s not really clear whether he had really won the Electoral College vote or not. But the Republican, former governor of Ohio, Rutherford Bayes, he makes it part of his agenda to bring reconciliation to the country.

00;05;19;20 – 00;05;47;07
Jeremi Suri
And among other things, he spends a lot of time traveling through the country trying to encourage people on different sides to work together, trying to tamping down the violence. But that is accompanied by a set of compromises that he has to make, compromises that limit the ability of, reformers and African-Americans and others to move the country forward towards a multiracial future.

00;05;47;07 – 00;06;20;04
Jeremi Suri
You could basically see the decade after 1876 as a decade of, at best, stagnation on civil rights and at worst, backstabbing. And this backstabbing is largely because in order to come to an agreement on who the president will be, the Republican Party has to agree to the Democratic parties demand to withdraw what’s left for the most part of military force in the South to basically defang the Justice Department, which had been created, in the aftermath of the Civil War by Ulysses Grant, to defang the Justice Department.

00;06;20;04 – 00;06;48;23
Jeremi Suri
So it will not prosecute those who, steal land from African Americans, those who lynch African Americans in many ways. Hayes brings the country together on the surface, but I think is, most historians would argue from 1876 to the end of the 19th century, it’s brought together not as a country that’s as inclusive of those who should have been included, but actually a country that restores power in many ways to those who had ostensibly lost power after the Civil War.

00;06;48;26 – 00;06;51;01
Jeremi Suri
So it’s a step backward in many ways now.

00;06;51;01 – 00;07;03;29
Ben Wright
Is military power what’s holding together the post-Civil War push for civil rights in the South and then how should we think about Hayes? Is he a partaker in this corrupt bargain that you that you’ve mentioned?

00;07;04;00 – 00;07;32;09
Jeremi Suri
Yes. And that phrase, corrupt bargain is one associated with him for massive in Woodward, the great historian of the South and many, many others. So Rutherford B Hayes is actually a very good man, writing about him and reading his diary in his letters, as I did, I came to see a man who earnestly wanted to bring reconciliation. He was a legitimate Civil War hero, self-trained man, a teacher as well as a politician.

00;07;32;11 – 00;08;08;25
Jeremi Suri
But he was also not a civil rights activist. he was trying to find that happy compromise. I think it wasn’t the military alone that held the country together or held together a civil rights agenda. It was the sets of institutions that had been created, often largely by African-Americans, with support from the North, support through missionary societies and other institutions like schools, churches, property ownership, cooperatives that existed, various institutions like that, that emerged under the protection of the U.S. Army in the first years after the Civil War, but then had their own self standing.

00;08;08;25 – 00;08;34;12
Jeremi Suri
And this is the long beginning of Booker T Washington and the vision of Tuskegee, of self-help and self organized institutions. These institutions were providing a foundation for freedom, inclusion, prosperity for thousands of people, not for equality by any means, but for inclusion and prosperity. Exactly what Booker T Washington would write about to such an extent. And these institutions were doing a good job.

00;08;34;19 – 00;08;49;26
Jeremi Suri
The better they did, the more they threatened. In some cases, the more established institutions, the more established families, which in some cases were unable to keep up. And so that’s that’s a lot of what was lost after 1876, though it was not fully extinguished, obviously.

00;08;49;28 – 00;09;07;15
Ben Wright
So there’s this sense and I think, again, this resonates with how a lot of people feel today or have felt in the run up to the election as well, that things are moving backwards in American history currently. And that’s true. You know, Harris ran on the slogan, no going back. We’re not going back. A lot of Trump supporters feel that America has been in a period of regress.

00;09;07;21 – 00;09;16;05
Ben Wright
So you’ve got dueling ideas of progress, dueling ideas of decline. You’ve got that sense of things going backwards in 1876. What’s going forwards?

00;09;16;08 – 00;09;41;15
Jeremi Suri
Well, I think a number of things are going forward. first of all, the United States is quite literally going forward into Western settlement. And so this is the period that diplomatic historians, as I was trained, would refer to as continental ism, when what was, an emerging country becomes a true continental power. You could start to date that to the earlier war with Mexico and Texas joining the Union.

00;09;41;17 – 00;10;03;00
Jeremi Suri
But it’s really at this point in the decades after the Civil War, that through the institutions of the railway as well as the military, modern banking, the United States becomes a truly integrated continental economy. And from that point forward remains the largest integrated economy in the world. It still is today. And that’s the fundamental source of American power.

00;10;03;02 – 00;10;32;27
Jeremi Suri
And that’s what produces these enormous fortunes that you see in the gilded Age. Right? It’s the beginnings of the Gilded Age. Richard Wyatt, another historian, actually says he thinks the Gilded Age begins right during reconstruction for this reason. Right. And so it’s the creation of this modern economy that benefits an enormous number of people, including some African-Americans. But it’s mostly benefiting either urbanites, New York bankers and financiers and then others who are in positions of power in local communities.

00;10;32;28 – 00;10;54;13
Jeremi Suri
That’s one thing that’s going forward. There still is a civil rights agenda, in many pockets of the country. You do see communities that are beginning to thrive, that are beginning to build their own networks. so we are a large, complicated country, Ben. And, one of the reasons we see things moving in multiple directions is not simply because we have different ideological points of view.

00;10;54;16 – 00;10;59;07
Jeremi Suri
It’s also because people are experiencing the same history in different ways at the same moment.

00;10;59;10 – 00;11;11;16
Ben Wright
So Hayes is elected. We really should talk about Tilden for a moment. Then I have another question about Hayes, because Tilden is not sort of this southern slave owning guy. He’s a no. A New York Democrat.

00;11;11;17 – 00;11;29;22
Jeremi Suri
That’s right, that’s right. So Samuel Tilden was from upstate New York. So he’s not a New York City Democrat, but he’s a he’s from upstate New York. And there was a large part of the Democratic Party, the party of the Confederacy, that had a stronghold in that part of the country, that part of New York state, for those who have visited, is quite rural.

00;11;29;23 – 00;11;48;28
Jeremi Suri
First of all, it did not have slavery on the eve of the Civil War, but it had a history of slavery. And most significantly, it was an area that saw itself really anchored in a world of agriculture, in a world of free trade. We need to remember the Democrats were then the party of free trade, the Republicans were the party of tariffs.

00;11;48;28 – 00;12;14;00
Jeremi Suri
Lincoln and the Republicans liked tariffs because they protected industry. They allowed small scale manufacturing to compete with foreign competitors from England who were more efficient. But the agriculturalists in upstate New York and in South Carolina and Georgia and elsewhere, they wanted free trade because they wanted to be able to sell their agriculture, their cotton and other products to the English without there being restrictions on on their sales.

00;12;14;02 – 00;12;37;24
Jeremi Suri
So Tilden represents that element. And the Democratic Party, which was clearly in a weak position coming out of the Civil War, was looking for northern leadership that could give it legitimacy. again, but what is striking about Tilden is when he’s denied the presidency after winning the popular vote, and there’s a high likelihood that he actually had won the electoral vote, too.

00;12;37;24 – 00;13;03;11
Jeremi Suri
It’s so close and so disputed. He accepts the verdict in a sense, and accepts the deal that has been made because he believes that it is actually providing some of the benefits the Democratic Party is looking for. And it has to be said about Tilden that even though he thought highly of himself, he did not believe that being president was the only thing that mattered and that he would sacrifice the interests of the country for that.

00;13;03;14 – 00;13;13;23
Jeremi Suri
So this is not to make him a hero, but it is to say that he was in a tradition of American stepping aside when they have not been elected to the office that they sought.

00;13;13;26 – 00;13;27;07
Ben Wright
It’s a fool’s errand to talk about what if in history, though, it’s good fun. The obvious question here is what would a Tilden presidency have looked like? It seems to be one of the things you’re saying is it may not have looked that different from what happened because of the bargain made with Hayes.

00;13;27;08 – 00;13;55;22
Jeremi Suri
I think that’s right. I think that’s right. I think I think in some ways, Hayes was forced to give in time and again, the Posse Comitatus Act, which, he’s forced to agree to after Democrats shut down the government and don’t fund the military. It’s how he gets the military finally funded, and the Posse Comitatus Act, which now many of us think is a good idea, was seen as a bad idea then, because it prohibits the U.S. military from being used for law enforcement, at home.

00;13;55;24 – 00;14;15;08
Jeremi Suri
there were a number of things like that that Tilden, a Democratic president, might not have had to actually give in on. And so there’s a strange way in which, in fact, some of the issues might have been better served some of the civil rights issues with Tilden as president. We don’t know. it would have depended on what he personally prioritized.

00;14;15;11 – 00;14;40;14
Jeremi Suri
He was not a proponent of civil rights, but he was not an anti African American person either. He didn’t manifest what Andrew Johnson did, which was a clear, visceral hatred that Andrew Johnson, president who succeeded Lincoln, had toward African Americans. That’s not deal with Tilden either. So we don’t know. I mean, that’s that’s really one of those unknowable is but it would not have been necessarily much worse.

00;14;40;16 – 00;15;07;19
Ben Wright
So regardless of Hayes or Tilden winning, they’re coming after the monumental presidency, or at least the monumental person of Grant. And we’re back in a lot of ways to to to a series of presidents, really, all the way up to Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, that are not well regarded publicly, then, are not seen as a sort of JFK type savior figure or an Obama type, you know, beacon of hope.

00;15;07;20 – 00;15;12;09
Ben Wright
They’re they’re just sort of the guy in charge, and they’re all sort of seen as a motley crew by historians.

00;15;12;15 – 00;15;31;20
Jeremi Suri
And presidents as well. Yeah, but they’re often called, the dud presidents. And, you know, we might be entering that moment again. One of the lessons that many Americans take on both parties coming out of 1876, and really the whole period from Lincoln forward is you can’t and shouldn’t expect too much of presidents.

00;15;31;23 – 00;15;47;16
Ben Wright
So we’re in that period of the dead presidents. And then we we move into the 20th century where you where the pendulum swings the other way. And you’ve spoken about this in your book, The Impossible Presidency. How do we go from sort of dead presidents to dude presidents?

00;15;47;21 – 00;16;07;07
Jeremi Suri
Yeah, I love that. That’s a good book title, is there? Yeah, yeah, that’s great Ben. Well, I think it’s a self-conscious effort by Theodore Roosevelt. William McKinley does a little bit of this, but it’s really a self-conscious effort that Theodore Roosevelt has to bring back the Lincoln presidency. I have in my the book I wrote after the Impossible Presidency, The Civil War by other means.

00;16;07;07 – 00;16;37;10
Jeremi Suri
I have the photo, others have used it. It’s a very famous photo of a young Theodore Roosevelt in New York City. Watching from his window as Lincoln’s casket is brought through through the city, I think down Fifth Avenue. And I think the Roosevelt mansion was on Fifth Avenue, and they were watching this. Theodore Roosevelt is deeply troubled by the fact that the United States has a system and a set of individuals who are not able to act as strong leaders, as strong executives.

00;16;37;10 – 00;16;54;29
Jeremi Suri
And he believes the United States needs this to compete as a great power. And that’s an article of faith for him that the United States should be one of the great powers in the world, and also that we need to tame the frontier. That’s how he would talk about it. And that to do that, we need strong leadership there.

00;16;55;03 – 00;17;25;16
Jeremi Suri
And many have written how he’s, in a sense, overcompensating for his own sick body. When he was a child, he was a very sick child. And so this is a kind of overcompensation in his personality, but it’s also a geopolitical, observation on his part as someone who read a lot of history and thought deeply about this, that the United States was emerging, he believed, as a truly large power, as perhaps Jefferson’s empire of liberty, and that we needed that kind of leadership.

00;17;25;19 – 00;17;32;20
Jeremi Suri
And the leadership we had was built for a small agricultural nation, not a large industrial empire.

00;17;32;23 – 00;17;59;13
Ben Wright
This is so curious, because you’ve got this sort of desire for a strong presidency, a strongman presidency, a bully pulpit wielder, and yet you also have this belief in government as something that can work. Today. We’ve got these similar forces that we’ve talked about, but they’re matched up differently where you have a sense of a desire for a strongman by a large portion of Americans, and yet also an utter suspicion in government and its usefulness.

00;17;59;16 – 00;18;26;17
Jeremi Suri
Right. And I think that is because it’s a very good observation and accurate and accurate. I think the difference is, in Theodore Roosevelt’s day, one of the ways you defined yourself as being a strong man was by being a smart man, too, because strength was coded as access to knowledge. And I think strength is often coded a century later in our time as not being a prisoner of knowledge.

00;18;26;20 – 00;18;45;08
Ben Wright
Well, let’s see if we can tie this all together with with a strange question. What would the ghost of 1876. What sort of comfort would he have to someone who’s worried today? And what warning would I should say he or she have for someone who is, cheering loudly and feeling very good about where things are?

00;18;45;08 – 00;19;12;14
Jeremi Suri
Yeah. So I think the ghost of 1876 would look at the United States today and see a lot of things that are very familiar, a divided country, a country where economic and identity issues are closely fuzed, and a country also struggling to figure out what its place in the world will now be, as the world has changing around it a few sources of comfort, maybe from 1876.

00;19;12;16 – 00;19;37;09
Jeremi Suri
I think the ghost of 1876 would be proud to see that in spite of our differences, our institutions so far have held up, and that should give us some hope that they might be able to not in all cases, one of the great geniuses of the American system is that it is so infinitely complex that it is very hard when you manipulate one set of institutions not to deal with the other ones coming in and compensating.

00;19;37;09 – 00;19;55;04
Jeremi Suri
There’s a kind of amoeba effect, and so that doesn’t mean people aren’t hurt, but it means that our democracy is a set of things that sort of replace one another. 1876 was an election that was much more disputed than the election we’ve just been through, in fact, more disputed even than the than the 2020 election in some respects.

00;19;55;04 – 00;20;11;18
Jeremi Suri
Second, I think the ghost of 1876 would see that Americans as divided as we are, we have access to resources. We didn’t have that. And we’re very wealthy country, much wealthier than we were then. And that allows us to have a much larger margin of error.

00;20;11;20 – 00;20;18;26
Ben Wright
And for those very happy about the election result and where Trump presidency may go, what do you think a ghost friend might warn them?

00;20;18;29 – 00;20;39;23
Jeremi Suri
I think the ghost of 1876 should warn those who are doing a happy dance after this election that first of all, elections, usually a victory in elections, usually just sets you up for defeat. And it is after the Hayes election and then one more election that we see the return of the Democratic Party and Grover Cleveland in the 1880s.

00;20;39;25 – 00;21;04;18
Jeremi Suri
And Cleveland, by the way, was the last president before Trump to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms. Yeah, yeah. 1884 and 1892, and Benjamin Harrison in between. I think the ghost of 1876 would also warn those who are ecstatic about the outcome of this recent election, that winning an election now means you have to actually perform and serve the goals you’ve laid out.

00;21;04;18 – 00;21;29;13
Jeremi Suri
You cannot escape those. And one of the challenges that emerges after 1876, the aftermath of some difficult economic times, is decades of American economic dissatisfaction with things that are happening within our society, which leads to the rise of unions and leads to the rise of radical movements. It is the 1876 victory. That’s the beginning of radicalism in American society.

00;21;29;15 – 00;21;37;07
Ben Wright
Well, this has been a fascinating and at times very Dickensian conversation. thank you for joining us today, Jeremy.

00;21;37;08 – 00;21;38;28
Jeremi Suri
Thank you for your excellent questions, Beth.

00;21;38;29 – 00;21;45;15
Ben Wright
Absolutely.

00;21;45;17 – 00;22;04;12
Ben Wright
15 Minute history is produced at the University of Texas at Austin in partnership with Not Even Past and Hemispheres in the College of Liberal Arts. It is recorded at the latest development studio. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on social media and visit our website for more information and resources. See you all next week!