In our age of hyper partisanship and escalating political violence, so many observers see the figurative (if not literal) end of the world. It is so easy for the loudest voices to declare that this is all unprecedented.

Yes, the current state of our union is perilous and we do need to undertake serious course corrections. And no, this is not the first time that’s been the case. Furthermore, the disunion of the Civil War is not the only point from our history we should consider when seeking parallels.

A historian of political history writes that we would do well to consider the time after the war by looking at the fifty year era from 1865 to 1915. Those five decades demonstrate that we have seen both extreme ugliness and bold reform when it comes to our democracy.

The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865—1915 (2021) by Jon Grinspan considers the economic and technological disruptions following the end of the Civil War and dives deeply into the aggressive tribal partisanship that grew to be a defining feature of that era. As Grinspan details, national elections were often decided by one or two percentage points. Control of Congress changed hands regularly. Elections were stolen and two presidents were elected after losing the popular vote. There was one presidential impeachment. Political violence was everywhere, including the assassination of three presidents. Large groups of rowdy men in special uniforms—essentially partisan street gangs—gathered for torchlit marches through cities and towns to support one of the two political parties. Fights on election day, including stabbings and shootings, were common. And yet voter turnout was off-the-charts, often reaching 75-80% of the eligible population.

Democracy was seen to be in crisis, especially by upper classes who looked on in horror as new immigrant groups from Europe and newly enfranchised Black Americans exercised their right to vote. The resulting story of what it cost to cool our republic has lessons both positive and negative for today’s period of political crisis.

Grinspan anchors this tale in the lives of a remarkable father-daughter political dynasty that is not well-known today: radical Pennsylvania Congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his fiery Socialist-turned-Progressive daughter Florence “Florie” Kelley. Between them they covered a wide swath of American history. Pig Iron Kelley shook hands with Andrew Jackson, provided political advice to Abraham Lincoln, was a long-time advocate for workers and African Americans, and became known as a staunch supporter of tariffs. Kelley was an honest man who struggled to be heard in the heated, highly partisan, two-party era of the Gilded Age. His brilliant daughter Florie moved to Zurich where she regularly attended Swiss socialist meetings. Among her regular correspondents was Friedrich Engels, who became the world’s best-known socialist following the death of Karl Marx. Back in the U.S. she was a long-time and fierce opponent of child labor, working closely with Jane Addams at Chicago’s Hull House settlement. Florie played important roles in attaining women’s suffrage and establishing Social Security.

Most people today, Grinspan notes, don’t think about the politics of the late 1800s. But immediately after the Civil War, “pure democracy” seemed possible. Slavery was dead. The old oligarchy of slave owners was vanquished. Four million formerly enslaved people were looking for new rights, and one way to get those was at the ballot box. The U.S. at this time became one of the first governments in the world to give decisive political power to people without wealth, land or title. With that gift came deep immersion and heated passions. Grinspan describes election day as “a communal, combative, boozy bacchanal.”

Fearful for the future of democracy, the elites pushed back. No one thing led the change from the 19th century’s noisy, violent, partisanship to the rather calm—some might say abnormal—politics of much of the 20th century. But a number of factors came together. Suppression of lower class voters—by Jim Crow laws in the South and by tightened literacy tests nationwide—played a big role. Private voting on a machine took much of the theatre out of Election Day. Before that invention voters were handed a colored ballot by the party and cast their votes in front of others in their tribe (or others trying to persuade them to change sides). A war against saloons, which was a piece of the larger push for national prohibition, took away these “poor men’s clubs” which had offered “a crucial institution to workingmen (and ‘disreputable’ women).” They had played a key role in the election process and by 1900 there were over 250,000 in America—“more saloons per capita than there are Starbucks today.” With all these changes, voting rates dropped to below 50% on a regular basis in the 20th century. It was quieter, but many would say there was less government by the people.

We may look at our politics today and say that all we see around us is abnormal. Some argue that we’ve never, for instance, had a political party trying to establish a police state, or one that regularly uses shows of force to build fear, or one that takes money away from children to enrich a small number of wealthy Americans. But that only holds up for examination if you disregard the perspective of Blacks in the Jim Crow South. Or the perspective of Japanese Americans held in internment camps not to mention Native Americans herded into reservations and Indian Schools. Or the perspective of immigrant and other children of the poor working long hours seven days a week in crowded, hot tenement factories.

“The deep history of American electoral politics [writes Grinspan] can seem static and flat—a succession of dull, inconsequential presidents with gray beards and silly names—punctuated by the single crisis of the Civil War. This makes it feel as if any conflict means impending collapse, that the only two options for our democracy are doldrums or disunion. But our political system is not nearly so brittle. There is incredible variability in how we have used our democracy, with plenty of room for ugliness without apocalypse, and for reform without utopia. The lesson of the Age of Acrimony in American politics is that the range of normal feelings is far broader than the detached calm insisted on for much of the twentieth century.”

We are on a winding road. “This is Not Normal” notes Grinspan, might as well be our national motto. History shows us that there is a great deal of capacity for change lying dormant in American democracy. Today, as in the past, the capacity for positive or negative change lies with the American people ourselves.

More to come . . .

DJB

Image: “Grand Procession of Wide Awakes at dusk on the evening of October 3, 1860.” Harpers Weekly, October 13, 1860, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute