Cleveland Press offered a dramatic interpretation of parties that held them to be little more than
the ideas of the men that composed them, untethered from organizational moorings: “political
parties never stand still. They are constantly moving one direction or another. . . . Political
discussion, like a Storm center, cannot be localized or anchored to any fixed moorings.”
Practical politicians observed a similar trend. If this were the case, then greater care would need
to be taken in defining these principles for voters.
Finally, the period witnessed an unprecedented associational explosion. In the late
nineteenth century American civic associations flourished.
In many cases, these associations
fraternized, like the Loyal Order of Moose; preached, like the Women’s Missionary Union; or
discussed professions, like the National Education Association. Others challenged the parties’
dominance of political life in America. In the 1870s Denis Kearney’s jingoism found a home in
the Workingmen’s Party in California and forced anti-Chinese legislation into national political
debate; Benjamin Butler’s ran for the presidency in 1884 and did not come close to winning, but
led the parties to believe that he could throw the election to one or the other of them; in 1886
Henry George ran for mayor of New York City as the nominee of the United Labor Party; and
also in 1886 a furnace worker in Cleveland, with help from the Knights of Labor, attempted to
take over the local Republican party to be used as a force for the laborer. The Grange, founded in
1867 by an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to teach farmers how to take care of
themselves produced the Farmers’ Alliance in 1876, which encouraged a more aggressive class
consciousness and beat the major parties in state and local elections in the West. By 1892 the
agrarian revolt exploded into the Populist candidacy of James B. Weaver, who received 22
electoral votes from the Republican West and exposed cracks in the Democratic South. In
northeastern cities elites carried the banner of free trade, the cause célébre of the academic
89
“At Issue: The Questions Face to Face,” Cleveland Press, (May 14, 1892), 2.
90
See, for instance, Theda Skocpol, et. al., “How Americans Became Civic,” in Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina,
eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy, (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 27-80.
29
Convention